Bitter Orange Read online

  The walls were brick and windowless, but Peter found a pole to open the louvres in the roof and let in more murky green through a skylight.

  Cara inched along a narrow pathway between the towering pieces of furniture and the cabinets placed against the walls. I followed. One contained hundreds of pieces of carved ivory—puzzle balls and dragons; another, small fossils—ammonites and trilobites; while in a third, tiny heads lay in rows, their eyelids sewn closed, their skin wizened and brown, and their hair long. Cara opened the cabinet and removed a head—an oversized walnut in her palm—and exclaimed at the lifelike features, until Peter, squeezing past us, said that it was real. She shuddered as she replaced it.

  “What did you mean?” I whispered. “It isn’t possible to have a baby without . . .” I was prudish, didn’t know what word I should use.

  “Isn’t it?” she mocked. “I thought even the Church of England believed in the virgin birth?”

  “But that’s different. You and Peter . . . Maybe you’re mistaken,” I finished lamely.

  “How is it different? I hadn’t had sex.”

  She opened the lid of a tiny box inlaid with ivory or mother-of-pearl and a waltz played. Inside was a ring, black with gold symbols around the edge and a dull diamond set in the middle. She slipped it onto the finger where her wedding band had sat, and tilted her hand one way and the other. “Look at this.” She held it up to me. “Isn’t it amazing?” I couldn’t look at the ring; I could only stare at her, trying to work out what kind of woman she was. A liar or a saint?

  “Oh Fran, I’m sorry,” she said, when she saw my face. She closed the box and the music stopped. “I just need you to believe me. Peter won’t let me talk about it. Or what happened afterwards. It’s as if the baby never existed. You know what he’s like.”

  “What have you two found?” Peter was back, excited. “Isn’t it incredible?”

  I let them move on together, opening more cabinets and drawers.

  I unlatched the doors to a cupboard and saw shelves of medical jars filled with yellow-tinged liquid. Samples preserved and labelled: Bos taurus, Prionus, Buprestis. I picked up each one and examined it without taking in what I was looking at, trying to understand how what Cara had told me might be possible. Perhaps there was another man she hadn’t mentioned. Homo, the next label said, and I caught a glimpse of soft creamy flesh pressed against the glass before I shoved it back and pushed the cupboard doors closed.

  Peter and Cara were pulling out Chinese vases from packing cases stuffed with straw, a sculpture of a man I recognised as Hercules holding three apples behind his back, a quantity of curved swords. Glass domes stood on top of the cabinets, filled with stuffed animals: hundreds of tiny birds motionless and yet flying in terror from an eagle which forever hovered above them. None of them would be caught, and yet they were already dead. There were squirrels and fish, a pair of exotic lizards with their frilled neck plates raised and their mouths open mid-hiss. An adult grizzly bear reared up on its hind legs with its canines exposed. I patted it as I went past. “It’s all right, boy,” I whispered. “We won’t disturb you for long.” On and on, the room was filled with a collector’s trophies and a family’s possessions. I opened a small leather case to find pots of dried-up cream and a silver-backed hairbrush with strands of long grey hair still entangled in the bristles. I shut it quickly.

  Peter whistled. “This is worth a pretty penny,” he said. He held a sculpture of a cat sitting upright on a wooden base, its tail curled around its paws and its ears back. He weighed it in his hands. “Bronze. Egyptian, could be Twenty-Sixth Dynasty.”

  “Mr. Liebermann will be delighted,” I said, making my way towards him. Cara was at the other end of the room.

  Peter looked at me. “Surely you wouldn’t want all of this to be shipped over to America? I thought you were against that? And besides, none of this is on the inventory, Fran. Not on mine. And, I believe, not on yours either.” He put the cat on a chest of drawers and it observed us, imperious.

  That might have been the moment I could have said none of it belonged to us, that it belonged to Mr. Liebermann or the heirs of Dorothea Lynton if Victor could trace them, but I said nothing.

  At my feet was a flat case. I crouched and opened it so I wouldn’t have to see Peter’s face and acquiesce in what he was thinking, as though by avoiding his eye I could avoid complicity. The inside was covered with purple velvet and indented, holding the separated pieces of what might have been a musical instrument. It smelled of wood and resin. I lifted out one of the sections—a black tube. I wasn’t paying attention, didn’t register that it wasn’t part of a clarinet or an oboe. I was wondering how I could ask Peter about what Cara had told me.

  He took the object from my hands. “A telescope,” he said, just as I blanched. “How marvellous.” He expanded the three tubes and focussed the eyepiece on the end of the room where Cara was opening drawers inside a large wardrobe. “Excellent.” It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to Cara or the quality of the instrument. “Here.” He held it out.

  “No . . . thanks.” I didn’t want to put my eye to the lens in front of Peter, fearing that in some way the action might reveal how I gazed on him and Cara through a similar tube.

  “Go on. It’s exceptionally well made.”

  “I can’t close one eye,” I said. “I can’t wink.”

  “Really? How curious.”

  He moved behind me and his hand came up to cover my left eye. I took the telescope and held it to my right, recognising the familiar feel of the cold metal. Together we stood in an awkward backwards embrace and I had no choice but to look through the lens.

  “Now turn it to focus,” he said.

  “Like this?” I said, twisting it, knowing of course how it worked, until Cara’s beautiful face, shaped into a Gothic pointed arch by her hair, sharpened within the circle. Peter knelt again in front of the case. “Look,” he said, and I lowered myself beside him. I could hear the beat of blood in my ears, feel a blush rising from my throat. We were hidden behind a sofa, our heads close enough for me to smell his aftershave, hear the grate of his afternoon bristles as he rubbed his hand across his cheek. He slotted the telescope back into its space and I went to shut the lid. “Wait,” he said. “There’s one missing.” His fingers went to an empty hole. “Was it here when you opened it?” He searched around the floor as if I had dropped it. “The smallest.”

  “It might have been. I’m not certain.” I stood up too fast and my head spun. There wasn’t enough air in the room. I couldn’t tell him that I knew where it was.

  “The set’s of no value if one’s missing.” He scouted around the floor again. “Damn.” He looked up as I swayed. “Fran, are you all right?” He stood and took my elbow but I pulled away. Cara had stopped rummaging through the drawers and was looking at us. The room was darkening at the edges.

  “Fran?” he repeated.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just need some air.”

  I stumbled my way out of the Museum and ran through the orangery without knowing where I was going. The original structure of the garden was still visible from the top windows of the house, but at ground level the towering and unruly box hedging, ten or twelve feet high, obscured the pattern. I dipped my head and shoved my way forward, burrowing between the stems and leaves of the box until they closed behind me. I pushed through them, moving against a tide, and when they thinned I emerged on the other side to the secret centre: a circular pond. I heard Peter call my name from the terrace but I huddled under the hedge, worried he would go into the house and search for me upstairs. Had I replaced the floorboard in the bathroom? Of course I had. But now I imagined him stepping across my bathroom floor and noticing it was loose. He lifted up the board and saw the missing telescope. But what if I hadn’t put the board back, should I go upstairs and check? Would I make it there before him? I stood up, undecided. Again, I heard Peter call my name, and again I pressed myself into the stalks of the box hedge and di
dn’t move until several silent minutes had passed, and then I pushed my way back through the foliage.

  I ran into the house, up the grand staircase, and through the baize door. There was no one in my bathroom and of course the board was still in place. I pulled the bathroom door shut and grabbed my handbag from my bedroom. One floor down, I crept along Cara and Peter’s hallway and pressed my ear to their door; there was no sound. I went into their sitting room, found a pen and a scrap of paper, and left them a note on their makeshift table:

  Gone to London. Not sure when I’ll be back.

  THIRTEEN

  I caught a bus going north-west from Waterloo and got off at Dollis Hill. I could have used the Underground, but Mother and I had usually taken the bus in London once we could no longer afford taxis. If there was an accident, she said, she wanted to be able to see her head rolling away instead of having to scrabble around for it in the dark.

  I had been gone for only two weeks but already London seemed foreign, or else it was I who was the foreigner.

  I stood outside 24 Forrest Road in the creeping dusk and considered the two women who had shared the upstairs rooms for almost thirty years. My mother had been brought up with certain expectations—a couple of servants, a nice house, a loving husband, a child or two. She had believed she would have all of this when she became engaged to Luther Jellico, a distant and wealthier cousin. But Luther delayed the wedding for two years, and then longer, making her wait until he had returned from Gallipoli. When I was ten, the marriage ended; the entertaining in the grand house in Notting Hill, the tailor-made clothes, the fine dinners, all of them over. My father moved me and Mother to a few rooms in north London.

  Mother used to call the place we lived in an apartment, but 24 Forrest Road hadn’t been properly converted. We shared the front door with our downstairs neighbour, Mrs. Lee, as well as the boiler and the plumbing. A bath with a lid, which doubled as a table, stood in the kitchen. Filling it used a boiler’s worth of hot water, as Mrs. Lee liked to shout up the stairs. Mother and I had shared the bedroom and the bed at the front of the house since the second bedroom was full of furniture and clothes that she had brought with us from Notting Hill.

  I walked up the path and peeped through the letter box, but all I could see was a slice of the bannister and the light coming in through Mrs. Lee’s kitchen window. I had been hoping for a feeling of homecoming or nostalgia, but I could have been peering into a stranger’s house, and I knew I no longer belonged there.

  I caught the bus back into town, staring at the families in the lit windows of the houses—a man reading a newspaper with his slippers on, a child kneeling on a sofa with her nose pressed to the glass, waiting for her father to come home from work, a young woman on an upright chair, the light from a television flickering over her face. Ordinary lives.

  When I got off the bus in Fitzrovia I walked until I came across a small hotel that appeared suitable: probably not expensive but with recently washed net curtains, three steps up to the front door which were free of street dust, the exterior nothing like the boarding house I had stayed in before I’d left London after Mother died.

  The landlady seemed pleasant. She showed me a room on the first floor, around a corner and along a floral-carpeted hallway lit at the end by an arched window. She held the bedroom door open to show me the single bed pressed into a corner, the wardrobe too narrow for a rail and hangers. When she said the price, I said that would be fine, and then she told me I had to stay two nights because it was August, and again I said that would be fine and yes, I would like dinner in the dining room on both nights and breakfast on both mornings. She demonstrated the corridor light switch, pressing in a button which a timer released tick by tick until it popped and the light was extinguished, and she showed me the bathroom, back towards the staircase. All of it neat and clean.

  When I went downstairs, the dining room at the front of the house was empty, although I had heard people coming and going through the front door and up the stairs. The food was poor but I ate all three courses: a liver pâté that crumbled on the knife, a bland chicken fricassee, and a bowl of ice cream with a wafer that was soft. I pictured Cara cooking dinner at Lyntons and then the two of them, without me, sitting on the portico steps in the dark with some wine in the tin cups, talking about the Museum and everything they had found. I had already convinced myself that there was nothing to link me to the missing telescope, that there was no more reason now for them to know it was under the floor than there had been previously. And I had also resolved to rip it out as soon as I returned. I imagined them lighting their cigarettes and discussing what to do about the things in the Museum. Surely Cara would have convinced Peter to telegraph Mr. Liebermann. When I focussed again on my dismal surroundings, I was engulfed by homesickness and I left the dining room in a hurry. Upstairs I undressed and hung my clothes on the pegs inside the wardrobe, then placed my shoes heel to toe in the gap between the bed and the wall. Other guests returned and I heard snatches of conversation, but I must have been tired because I slept right through until breakfast was almost over and all I saw were the empty cups and dirty plates of the guests who had eaten before me.

  I recognised the woman behind the desk of the British Museum Library. I smiled when I showed her my pass and said, “How are you today?” hoping she would greet me by name. She nodded her head to let me through, and I could tell she didn’t remember me. I walked on to the circular reading room.

  I gazed up at the beautiful domed roof as I’d seen tourists do, trying to be excited by the thought of all the books as I used to be, all the heads bowed in study, hoping to find comfort in the familiar throat-clearings and sniffs. The desks were laid out like the spokes of a wheel, each stretching from the central hub to the shelves at the circumference. My usual spoke pointed to three o’clock, where I would sit in the penultimate chair. The light was on over my blotter, a man hunched over my desk. I found an empty chair near the entrance where the outside noise and a draught leaked in.

  On the customary forms I requested in pencil the same books I’d studied after I’d received the first letter from Mr. Liebermann. I thought I might have missed some mention of the bridge or its architect. While I was waiting, I enquired about back issues of Irish newspapers. I told myself I was simply curious about Cara’s story, it wasn’t that I was checking. The man at the desk told me they were stored at a different location—Colindale, but that it was closed for maintenance. With his help I was able to confirm that the Beatles had played in Dublin in November 1963, but I didn’t get to see the picture of a young Cara with mascara running down her cheeks.

  When my books arrived there was nothing I had missed, no architect mentioned that I hadn’t made a note of and already cross-referenced. But in one book I examined more closely a photograph of Lyntons that I had passed over last time: a woman in Edwardian dress sat at a small iron table under the portico where Cara, Peter, and I ate our breakfasts. A dog lay on her lap and her face wore that sullen expression shared by all people in early photographs as they sit still for the camera. On the table was a cup and saucer and teapot. The picture was black-and-white of course, and I couldn’t quite make out the pattern on the china. I wondered if the woman was Dorothea.

  I opened another book and pretended to read, at the same time placing my handbag on my lap and slipping the first book into its open mouth. It wouldn’t close, and the top of the book poked out, but I picked up the bag and walked away from my desk. I wanted a hand to land on my shoulder as confirmation that I had been seen, that I existed, but I wasn’t noticed, no one stopped me.

  That evening, I was the only guest in the hotel dining room when the soup was served, but as I began to eat at my small table set for one, a couple arrived, noisy and apologetic, making jokes with the landlady, who let them sit at the table in the window although it had been laid for four. The woman was blowsy, big-chested, with a ring on every finger, while the man was slight, with sunken cheeks and hooded eyes.

&nbs
p; “Have you just arrived?” the woman said, and it took me a moment, soup spoon halted at my mouth, to realise she was talking to me.

  “Just visiting,” I said, putting my face back down to my bowl.

  “Are you going to be staying long?” she asked. “It’s a pleasant little hotel, isn’t it, George?”

  “Very pleasant,” he said.

  “Quiet and yet convenient. There are lots of things to see right outside the front door. We could direct you to some if you’d like.”

  “I’m only staying one more night,” I said. “But thank you.”

  “Sometimes it’s difficult for ladies,” the woman said. “Travelling alone.”

  The man looked at the woman too long and I thought there must be another meaning hidden in what she was saying that I wasn’t able to comprehend.

  “I’m quite happy in my own company,” I said.

  “It can be lonely spending time on your own. I would know.”

  The man didn’t meet her eye.

  The landlady brought in their soup on a tray and put the bowls in front of them.

  “Joanna,” the woman said. “Your other dinner guest is going to join us at our table. It’s not right for a lady to be eating alone.”

  “What a nice idea,” Joanna said, coming over.

  “No, no,” I said, holding on to my spoon. “Really, I’m fine.”

  Joanna put my bowl on her tray and carried it to their table. I had no choice but to follow, bringing my spoon with me.

  “Lillian.” The woman held out her hand. “And this is George.”