Bitter Orange Read online

  We shook. “Frances,” I said, reluctantly.

  “What room are you in?” Lillian asked.

  “Number ten.”

  “Do you hear that, George?” Lillian’s bosom leaned across her soup. “Right opposite yours.”

  While I was trying to work out what their relationship was if they weren’t husband and wife as I had assumed, George said under his breath, “Excellent.” He finished his soup, and Joanna, who must have been hovering in the corridor, came to the table. George smiled and I saw how his gums had withdrawn from his teeth such a distance that they could at any second have come loose and dropped into his empty bowl with a clatter. Was it too late to change hotels?

  We chewed through some dry chops while Lillian told me about St. Paul’s and the National Gallery, and how I must be certain to see Venus and Mars.

  “Love conquers war,” George said in a bored voice and without looking up.

  I got through the rest of the evening by imagining Peter and Cara on the terrace smoking and watching the bats fly in and out of the mulberry tree.

  I managed to escape the table before dessert was served. In the hallway Joanna told me I would be charged for the pudding even though I hadn’t eaten it.

  When I reached my bedroom, I thought I might have a cigarette, but it seemed pointless without Peter and Cara to smoke one with me. I used the bathroom before Lillian and George or any other guests came upstairs. I scrubbed at my teeth with my fingertip and splashed cold water on my face, patting it dry with three squares of toilet paper.

  The bed was soft compared to the camp bed I had become used to at Lyntons, and the sheets clean. I lay under the top one and stared at the ceiling. The thin curtains in front of the window which overlooked the road let in a sickly yellow from a street light. I got out of bed and pulled them open. I’d forgotten how glaring London was at night and longed for the wooded darkness of the hangers. I opened the window to get some air, tugged the curtains closed, and went back to bed. There were noises in the street, high heels and boots going past, a man talking too loudly, a woman giggling, something clacking along the pavement that I couldn’t identify, and later, the distant shouts of a drunken youth. I tried to ignore them. Occasionally inside the hotel a door closed or the toilet flushed, or a goodnight was called, though I couldn’t work out who was speaking. Water gurgled through the pipes and outside a squeak started up, followed by a clunk. I imagined a man with a wooden leg walking past.

  At two in the morning I needed the lavatory. I tried to sleep, to ignore my nagging bladder. At two thirty I dressed and pressed my ear to the adjoining wall, listening for bedsprings, and then at the door for footsteps, but I heard nothing, no one. I went into the corridor and pressed the button for the light. The glare made me wince, but the corridor was empty and I hurried around the corner to the bathroom, the button ticking away my allotted time until I reached the security of the light cord. I stared up at the ceiling while I was sitting on the toilet trying to make my body offer up enough for me to last through to the morning. There was no central light point, no ceiling rose with a hidden hole for anyone in a bedroom on the floor above to look through and see me.

  Outside the bathroom I pressed the switch. When I was around the corner the overhead bulb went out just as I saw someone there at the end of the corridor, standing so that the light coming through the far window shone on his shoulders. It was George. The white dressing gown he was wearing hung from his bony frame and was untied, open at the front.

  I could see what he wanted. He was waiting for an invitation, a nod of understanding, and there was a perverse part of me—my need for penance, a payment for using the little lens under my floor and for everything else—which rose like indigestion and made me want to say yes, yes, yes, and hold my door open and invite George to step inside. He smiled, and I saw again those horrific teeth and I went into my room alone and locked the door. I stayed awake for the rest of the night, lying fully dressed on top of my bed with a shoe in my hand, the heel facing towards the door. I left before breakfast to catch the train and the bus back to Lyntons.

  “How does God know who is responsible for a crime?” I think I ask the man standing beside my bed. “If a person steals some food, for example, is he, the thief, the guilty one? Or is it his parents for not teaching him right from wrong? Or society for not helping when he has no money and is starving?” The man beside my bed is clean-shaven and wearing trousers and a jacket; the dog collar has gone. “What if it seems to be one person, but it is actually another?”

  He is holding a clipboard, and I strain my neck to see what it says because it is the one from the end of my bed and I want to know if they write an estimated time of death. An ETD, I think, and I laugh.

  I wait for him to say something like, God is all-seeing. That would be his easy answer.

  “Still got your sense of humour then, Mrs. Jelli-co?” the man says, and I see he is the doctor not the vicar, and from the voice, I hear that he is a she. It is easy to make assumptions. It is what helped get me here in the first place. The window is open and I close my eyes, listening to the sound of traffic on the main road, like waves on a stony shore.

  The bus sighs and huffs when I alight outside the town near Lyntons. The late-afternoon shadows are long, and midges dance between them.

  I went along the same track I had walked at the end of July, this time carrying only my handbag with the stolen book inside, and I stopped in the place recommended by Mr. Liebermann. I had become desperate to return home—the word I had used for Lyntons in my head when I was in London—impatient with the delays in my connections, frustrated by the circuitous route the bus had taken through the villages of Hampshire. But looking at the house now, I was as panicked as when I had left. No longer about the judas hole, but from an idea that my life was out of my control, a dread that anything could happen and I couldn’t stop it. I considered turning around and walking back along the track, taking a room at the Harrow Inn, and catching another bus in the morning. But where to? As I dithered, Cara walked out onto the portico with Peter following. He stood close behind her and I remembered what it had been like to have him close enough behind me to feel his breath on the back of my neck when we’d stood together in the Museum. Cara looked over to where I waited, and I heard her exclamation and my name carry across the fields.

  I would have preferred a more subdued return, one where I could have gone up to my rooms and readjusted, but Peter came to collect me in the car, raising the dust along the avenue. When he reached me, he got out and took both my hands in his as though I had been away for a month.

  “I’m really glad you’re back,” he said, not letting go, shaking my hands up and down, and seeming so pleased that I blushed. “Cara was as excited as a child when she saw you. Come on. Get in.” He carried on talking about the Museum and Lyntons, and when we were in the car he started the engine but immediately turned it off.

  “You must be wondering . . .” He stared straight ahead, his hands on the steering wheel. He struggled for the words. “Look, if that’s why you went, it’s all right. I understand.”

  A pulse beat in my throat. Had they discovered the judas hole after all? Could one of them, lying in the bath, have seen the tiny circle in the middle of their ceiling and called the other? Could a ladder have been brought up from the basement and the hole investigated?

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “Cara told me that she spoke to you just before we opened the Museum.”

  “Oh, yes.” A surge of relief went through me.

  “As I said when we talked in the library, she enjoys making things up. She’s a fantasist.”

  It didn’t sound like a word Peter would have used to describe her, and I thought perhaps he had got it from one of the doctors he’d mentioned.

  “The harmless kind,” he added.

  “She made it up? About the baby?”

  “Yes,” he said, and then, “No, not all of it.”

  A thrush landed on the
railings beside my open window. I waited for it to sing but it cocked its head and flew off before Peter spoke.

  “There was a child. Finn.”

  “She didn’t tell me his name.”

  Peter gripped the wheel. Each word he spoke was deliberate, slow, as if he were dragging them out from deep inside. “She told you I wasn’t the father?”

  “She said there wasn’t a father at all.” I put my hand on his shirtsleeve.

  “I loved him like he was mine. Mallory—my wife, Cara must have told you I was married? Am married. Mallory and I didn’t . . . couldn’t . . . have children, you see, something I always regretted. To have a little one running around, they bring a place to life, don’t they? But Mallory had got used to it being just the two of us; it was easy, comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable? We bought a house in Surrey, where she still lives. I think she’d accepted how it was between us—companions, best friends, I suppose. I’m not sure what kind of mother she would have made anyway. She’s just not that sort, if you know what I mean.”

  I nodded, imagining a society woman, interested in cocktail parties and bridge evenings.

  “I didn’t intend to fall in love again, with Cara. There was something about her then, in Ireland. I tried to keep away, but in the end it was impossible. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And I know it doesn’t excuse what I did, leaving my wife, but what happened with Cara was unexpected. I wasn’t looking for someone else, someone else with a child.”

  Perhaps he felt he’d said enough, or he needed to keep some things back, because he closed his eyes for a moment or two and when he opened them he said, “Cara has a few odd ideas. She’s confused. We have to be gentle with her. We have to watch her.” He sat up straighter and looked at me.

  “You don’t mean that she could hurt herself?”

  “She keeps reminding me of this deal, a pact we made, a long time ago. But she doesn’t have it in her to hurt anyone, whatever she might say. We just have to be careful.”

  “What pact?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. It was one of those things that couples say to each other. A promise, you know.” I didn’t know, but I could tell he wanted to close down the conversation. “She thinks she needs to suffer. To pay for it.”

  “For letting Finn go, you mean?” I was careful to use the same words as Cara had when we’d sat on the jetty. Peter gave the slightest of nods, bare acknowledgement.

  “And the father?”

  “A farm boy in Ireland.”

  “But she—” I started. “She was so convincing, so definite that they didn’t . . . hadn’t . . .” I couldn’t say the words had sex to Peter, and made love was too romantic for the fumbles up against the hay bales Cara had described.

  “We all know what Cara says!” He lifted his hands from the steering wheel and smacked it with his palms. My hand flew off his arm and lay on my lap, fingertips upwards, abandoned like a beetle turned over and left on its back. “She says it to everyone who will listen: you, probably the last Catholic priest in Scotland, and that vicar down the road. She got pregnant. She had sex in a barn or a cowshed, or I don’t know where. And I don’t know why she can’t admit it and neither do any of the doctors I’ve taken her to. She’s never going to be content with being unremarkable. It’s the bloody Church and her blasted religion. Religions! All sensible human beings know it isn’t possible.”

  “Yes, of course.” I said. “Poor Cara.” Just as Cara had almost convinced me that it was true, now it was Peter’s turn, and I could see that I had been foolish. Of course the baby had a father, and it must have been Paddy.

  Peter rested his forehead on the top of the steering wheel and sighed.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice was muffled. “None of this is your problem, Franny. I’m sorry if we drove you away.”

  Inside, secretly, I glowed at him using Franny. “Don’t worry. It wasn’t anything Cara said. I just had to go for a while, clear my head. And I wanted to visit the library in London to see if I could turn up more about the bridge.”

  He wound down his window and a breeze that smelled of harvests blew across us. “You couldn’t find anything in the library here? I never fixed the balcony, did I? I hope you were safe, going up.”

  “I was perfectly safe,” I said. “But I didn’t find anything.”

  I had gone to the library at Lyntons one afternoon when he and Cara were sleeping off lunch and a few bottles of wine. When I opened the door, a hare was sitting in the middle of the room, on the pages of the books that no one had bothered to clear up. The doors to the terrace were open but the hare didn’t turn and run. Barrel-chested and big-footed, it stared me down malevolently, until, still holding on to the door handle, I had stepped back into the hallway and closed the door.

  Peter looked at me. “We missed you. I missed you,” he said, and I was aware of my lungs and my liver and my heart. He took my hand from where it rested on my knee and squeezed my fingers, and I was certain he must also feel the blood pulsing in my body. “We’ve got used to having you around. There’s something about you being here that tempers me and Cara, a soothing influence.”

  I laughed, feeling self-conscious. “It was only a couple of nights.”

  He laughed too and the moment was gone. “Of course.” He let go of my hand and started the car. He put it in gear and negotiated a three-point turn. “Did you have a nice time in London?” he asked. “Catching up with old friends, I suppose? You must tell me if you have any restaurant recommendations for the next time I’m up in town, I’m sure you know lots of places.”

  When we were almost back at the house he said, “Cara and I are so excited. We have some surprises for you.”

  As we were approaching the gates, I craned my head and looked up at Lyntons through the windscreen. The east facade was as austere as ever. At the attic window, in the room opposite my bedroom, someone was staring out: a pale oval, the eyes, mouth, and nose barely visible, not clearly a woman or a man.

  “Is that Cara in the attic?” I said, and Peter slowed the car so he could also look up. My fingers touched Mother’s locket around my throat, the cold metal heart.

  “Where? There she is.” One of the windows on the floor below mine was raised and she stuck out her head.

  Peter stopped the car in front of the fountain.

  “Frances! You’re back!” Cara called.

  We got out. “But someone was up there, up at the window,” I said to Peter. “Is there anyone else in the house?”

  “It must have been a trick of the light. There’s no one else here.”

  “Hurry up!” Cara called. Peter waved, and, too late since she had already ducked back inside, I waved as well. I tried to look up at the attic, but I was too close to the house to see into the top windows.

  We went through the front door, and inside there was the usual damp chill despite the warm evening, and the usual crumbs of plaster debris under my feet. Peter led the way up the grand staircase.

  “What is it?” I said. “What’s the surprise?” I didn’t really want to know. I wanted to carry on to the attic and see if anything had been touched, whether the pillow was back in the bath, or another mouse lying on the windowsill, but from the top landing we went along the hallway to their rooms.

  “You have to close your eyes,” Peter said when we were outside their door.

  “Why?” I said. “What is it?”

  “Come on, Franny, don’t be a spoilsport.”

  I shut my eyes, one hand reaching, my fingers spread. Peter’s arm went around my waist and I was aware of his body, tense with excitement. I heard and felt him open their sitting room door, and he steered me forward.

  FOURTEEN

  I store up questions for Victor, for when he returns. He will return. What does he know about shinjū? Does he believe in ghosts? Does he think there is ever any justification for killing another? Isn’t it always wrong, always a sin that must be paid for? How much have I changed? Would he recognise me if he saw me in
the street—if I had the strength in my muscles to walk, of course?

  Do our actions betray our nature?

  I had seen her somewhere before but didn’t know her name, couldn’t place her: glasses, big jaw with an underbite, lipstick she must have gone to the chemist for and chosen specially for the occasion. Her face niggled like an unreachable itch in the middle of my back.

  “Anne Bunting,” the woman replied to the question of her name.

  One of the men at the wooden desks with their notes and files and books laid in front of them asked her what her profession was.

  “Librarian.” She rolled her lips together, smearing the lipstick.

  “Do you recognise this book?”

  Anne Bunting held it with confidence and familiarity, as a sculptor holds a chisel and mallet. She turned it over, read the spine, studied the cover, and opened it. “Yes,” she said. “It’s one of ours.”

  I recognised it too: English Country Houses, Volume III, and then I recognised her. Anne Bunting glared at me across the courtroom and I couldn’t help myself, I blushed. I had never stolen a library book before then; other things later, but never a library book.

  “One that shouldn’t be removed from the library?” the man asked.

  “None of our books are to be removed from the library. They must be viewed in the reading room.” Anne Bunting touched the corner of her mouth with the tip of a finger, concerned her lipstick had smudged.

  Another of the men—they were all men and none of them had ever held a chisel and a mallet—stood and said, “Your Lordship”—or was it Your Majesty?—“I fail to see the relevance of this line of questioning.”

  His Lordship Majesty raised an eyebrow at the man who was putting the questions to Anne Bunting, who in turn pretended to be surprised. It was a charade, the law.

  “To provide evidence of character,” the man who was asking the questions of Anne Bunting said. “To provide evidence of Miss Jellico’s poor character.”

  I’d never had a birthday party, surprise or otherwise. Never played charades or been led into the middle of a room blindfolded for friends and family to jump out. Mother had taken me and another girl to the zoo for my eleventh birthday, and although we’d had nothing to say to each other, when her birthday came around she invited me to her party out of social obligation. The terror and humiliation of that afternoon remained with me for many years: my old-fashioned dress, the present I’d given unwrapped in a frenzy and cast aside, the rules of blind man’s buff that I didn’t understand, the girls I understood less. And somehow worse, the kindness of the girl’s mother when I cried.