Bitter Orange Read online

  He came into the bathroom and looked about without any sign of embarrassment. “Army?” I said. I knew all the ways to keep the other person talking.

  “Lyntons was requisitioned. Forty-Seventh Infantry Regiment. Americans. Apparently, Churchill and Eisenhower discussed the D-Day invasion in the blue drawing room. Goodness knows what a mess they made of the gardens. The soldiers I mean, not Churchill and Eisenhower, although you never know. Anyhow, you’d better prepare yourself. Liebermann did suggest that you have the rooms downstairs. They are grander, and I was hoping that Cara and I would be staying in the town but, well . . . my circumstances changed.” He smiled. I liked him for talking so I didn’t have to. “There’s only this bathroom and ours downstairs fully working. I hope you don’t mind too much being up here in the attic.”

  I saw him staring at the two halves of rolled-up carpet.

  “There was a smell,” I said.

  In his final letter, Mr. Liebermann had enclosed a key to the side door with his directions, together with instructions to make my way up to the attic rooms. When I’d opened the door at the top of the spiral staircase that first time, the stink had punched me on the face: a reminder of those last few days nursing Mother. A mix of boiled vegetables, urine, and fear. “I didn’t think Mr. Liebermann would mind if I took up the carpet.”

  “Oh, he won’t mind.” Peter flapped a hand in dismissal and went to the window, still talking. “Liebermann has no idea what’s in the house and what isn’t. He sent me an inventory, but nothing matches. There was meant to be a neoclassical chimney piece by Wyatt in the blue drawing room, but there’s just a gaping hole. The grand staircase which was supposed to be marble inlay is definitely scagliola, and now that the damp and mould have had their way it isn’t worth saving, but the upsides are that the cupola is magnificent and I found dozens of bottles of wine in the basement that aren’t listed.” He winked and then bent, hands on knees, to look out of the low window. “Probably corked, mind you. The inventory could be for a different house. I’d assumed Liebermann had visited before he bought Lyntons, but now I’m not so sure. Did you find the bedding we put out for you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “What a view.”

  My two rooms were on the west side of the house, just below the roof and chimney stacks. It was a floor of a dozen or so rooms leading off a corridor that ran north to south. All the west-facing windows looked out onto a glorious view over Lyntons’ ruined gardens, the paths hidden by overgrown box and yew, a tangled rose garden, fallen statuary, and the ravaged flower beds, to the parkland, the mausoleum, and, beyond, a dark treeline and the hangers in the far distance.

  “Have you walked around the grounds yet?” I asked. “Or been to the bridge?” I wanted him to say that he hadn’t so that whatever was there would be mine to discover alone, while at the same time I hoped he would tell me that he had seen the bridge and it was Palladian, so that I no longer had to brace myself for disappointment.

  A Palladian bridge: understated architecture built to join two banks. Most often topped with a temple: stone balustrades and columns, pediments and colonnades under a lead roof, with coffered ceilings and statues. A water-cooled summer house open at either end, and built by the wealthy to stroll through or ride their carriages across. The bridge I imagined rose above the lake and spanned it with five elegant arches, while a spectacular open-sided temple grew upwards from the balustrades. The whole would be satisfyingly symmetrical, but with fine and intricate carvings on the keystones. It wasn’t just a bridge, a means to move from one bank to the other, but a place built for love, for assignations, for beauty.

  Peter straightened. “There’s a bridge, is there? I keep meaning to go down to the lake for a swim but I’ve had plenty to keep me busy in the house, what with Cara and the wine cellar.”

  He kicked at one of the rolls of carpet and laughed. “Getting rid of a couple of bodies, are you?”

  TWO

  When I wake I am alone. My stomach growls and I think I must have missed lunch or breakfast, or both, but it’s a drink of water I need most. They have left a beaker for me on the bedside table but I can only move my eyes towards it. My limbs will no longer do what my mind commands. The people here have changed my sheets and my nightdress, and I am ashamed to think of them touching my sick body, its pink and brown patches and atrophied muscles. I once heard someone say that you are supposed to get more comfortable in your own skin the older you become, more forgiving of its folds and creases, but it’s not true. I used to be a big woman, voluptuous Peter once said. Now my flesh has melted away, but the skin remains and I lie in a puddle of myself. I close my eyes and turn my head to the window; the colour through my eyelids is rose madder. I return.

  The day is new, the light is gold and green, and I am back in my attic bathroom. In my memory the sun always shines at Lyntons; the few drops of rain and rumbles of thunder we had never amounted to anything. It is my first morning and I am going to the lake. First though, I scrubbed the bath, the sink, and the toilet, and swept up the hairs left behind from the pieces of carpet, which I had lugged down the stairs and outside, heaving them onto a rubbish pile I had nosed out behind the stables. I clipped on Mother’s Hattie Carnegie earrings and checked that her locket hung around my neck. Odd, perhaps, to get dressed up for a walk, but I liked to wear them to remember her, to be able to put a hand to my ear or my throat, and recall her voice and the way she used to look at me with love, before my father left.

  While I was retying a shoelace, one of Mother’s earrings flew off my ear as though we three—me, Mother, and the earring—knew they didn’t suit me. A circle of rhinestones with a green Peking glass centre made for someone with more petite lobes. The earring scuttled across the bathroom floor and I chased it; a glittering mouse disappearing down a gap between the boards. I pulled off the other earring, put it on the shelf next to my talcum powder, and stuck my fingers into the hole, pushing my hand down until my knuckles jammed against the wood. There was only warm air. But a board was loose, moving against its neighbours. I tucked my fingers under and was surprised when it lifted out, exposing the joists beneath. In the wide spaces between, a silt beach was strewn with lost objects. The contents of a tiny shipwreck washed up on dark and gritty sand: pins, a rusted razor blade, a button, two hair grips, a few dirty beads from a broken necklace, and the earring. It rested against a metal tube, the diameter of a fat cigar, sticking up from the dust. I tried to pluck it out but it was firmly attached. The tube twisted and extended up above the floor—a short telescope. I licked my finger to clean what appeared to be a small glass disc in the top, and I lowered my face to the tube to look through.

  What I saw was another bathroom from above, larger than mine and more imposing: a roll-top claw-footed bath and a scrolled sink, both of them warped and turning in on themselves as the lens distorted the view. The door was open and a yellow tongue of morning sun from the adjoining room licked the floor. On the back of the sink was a bar of new soap in a china dish, and beside it, on a small table, pots, perfume bottles, and toothbrushes were jumbled together. I watched while the door opened wider and a man came in. It was only when he stopped in front of the lavatory that I realised it was Peter. I jumped back, putting my palm over the top of the tube, and keeping still and silent as if he might at any moment look up and discover me. I recalled what he had said about how the rooms below were going to be mine, and I was grateful I’d been given a couple of converted servants’ quarters with an army-issue bed topped by a thin mattress.

  I remained motionless until I heard the toilet flush, then I twisted the tube down and replaced the floorboard.

  Mr. Liebermann had sent me an inventory too, of sorts: a page enclosed with his directions as well as the key. It was a sheet torn from Lyntons’ sale particulars:

  A Neoclassical Mansion including Entrance Hall, Music Room, Drawing Room, Gun Room, Sitting Room, Dining Hall, Smoking Room, Billiards Room, Boudoir, Saloon, and Ten Bed and Dressing Rooms, Five Bathrooms, and Sta
ff Accommodation. Seated in a Magnificent Timbered Park of 764 acres with Ornamental Lake, Fountain, Parterre, Walled Kitchen Garden, Classical Bridge, Orangery of Outstanding Design, Stable Block, Model Dairy, Ice House, Grotto, Mausoleum, Sundry Follies inc. Obelisk etc., and range of outbuildings. All in a state of some disrepair.

  Mr. Liebermann had scribbled over it in pencil, circling Fountain and underlining Classical Bridge three times.

  I had received his first letter with its American stamp and postmark a month after Mother was buried. A coincidence but a lucky one. With her death, the alimony my father had been paying her stopped, and although Mother left everything she had to me, surprisingly little money remained after I’d paid for the funeral and settled other bills. The apartment we lived in, a portion of a London house, was rented.

  I believed it would be exciting not to know where I would go or what I would do next for the first time in thirty-nine years. We had a routine, Mother and I, which never varied, and I had imagined that being able to eat when I wanted, go to bed when I wanted, do anything I wanted, would make me free. I believed I would be transformed. I’d been preparing for Mother’s death for ten years—every time I came home from the shops or the library, I unlocked the front door uncertain of what I would find. After she was gone, I was ready to leave too. I wanted to be rid of the memories of those years which were soaked into every surface: the chair she monitored the road from while waiting for me to return, the desk where she sat to write her regular letters to my father asking for more money, the bed where I nursed her and where she’d died—which, when I stripped the sheets, smelled of her and made me cry.

  I was ruthless. I invited the local antiques dealer in and told him he could buy what he liked. He hummed and tutted and shook his head while I showed him around the rooms. The furniture was too dark and heavy, he said, the market had all but disappeared for our old-fashioned Victorian items. Still, he took everything including her old haute couture clothes that she’d saved from her previous life, bundling them into boxes, saying he wasn’t hopeful about finding them a home. He paid me less for the whole lot than one dress had cost. I knew it, but I wanted everything gone. He left her underwear, a couple of pieces of cheap jewellery, and one evening dress that I kept for myself. I didn’t think about the future, not then. I had no doubts something would turn up, and I was right, it did.

  A few months previously, an article I’d written about the Palladian bridges at Stowe and Prior Park had been published in the Journal of the Society of Garden Antiquities. They had printed several of my pieces over the years, although they didn’t pay since it was an obscure periodical read, I thought, by probably only half a dozen academics.

  But it must have reached a wider audience, because one day I received a letter from a Mr. Liebermann forwarded by the journal, who wrote to say he’d purchased an English country house and gardens.

  Dear Mrs. Jellico, As an expert on bridges and garden architecture in general, I wonder if you would consider visiting an English country mansion and its estate, which I have recently purchased, and giving me your professional assessment, his letter had started. I wouldn’t have called myself an expert; everything I knew had been self-taught, aside from my year at Oxford. I had always spent my free time in the British Museum library, sitting in my usual chair, reading, making notes, and writing little history articles for pleasure. I’d not visited any historical sites outside London, at least not since my father had left.

  I replied to Mr. Liebermann the same day with my acceptance of his offer—a commission, a chance to get out of the city, and, most excitingly, the possibility of surveying a classical bridge in real life. I didn’t sleep properly until I received his reply. We settled on a fee and an arrangement for me to stay in the house, and I agreed to write him a report by the end of August on the items of architectural interest in the garden.

  For my final week in London I booked into a King’s Cross boarding house, my clothes in one suitcase and my books and what was left of Mother’s belongings in another. I spent the nights awake, listening to the comings and goings of the girls on the street, and the days on my familiar seat in the British Museum library, reading everything I could find about Lyntons. Pevsner had only a page and a half, mentioning the pathos of the main portico, and using the dismissive tone I had come to enjoy, saying that the staircase was of no interest. The book touched on the follies in the grounds, and the orangery, but didn’t mention a bridge. The estate church was listed too, but the interior was disappointing and the monuments sentimental. However, I did learn that the neoclassical house was built at the beginning of the nineteenth century around an earlier brick one. I ordered up the relevant issues of Country Life but found nothing surprising, only a few dull photographs of chimney pieces, the portico, and the lake. One article mentioned a book of drawings, and this led me to a diary written by a woman who had stayed at Lyntons during the summer of 1754. She wrote at length about the tough pheasant served at dinner, how cold and shabby her bedroom was, and that no servant had answered her summons to come and light a fire in the grate. She also wrote about the classical bridge with its fyne arches that spanned the water.

  I went to the lake that first morning, leaving through the side door, walking around the front of the house and passing under the portico’s immense columns and down the wide steps. The formal garden of what once must have been ordered plants and hedges had grown up towards the house, swallowing the bottom steps, brambles cracking the stone and infiltrating the gaps. Valerian and rosebay willowherb had self-seeded, lilac bushes were leggy and untended, the flowers brown, while a rampant honeysuckle, or Lonicera, outclimbed the bindweed, or Convolvulus. At one time, I imagined, the lake and the bridge would have been visible from the house, but now I cut myself a switch to beat my way through the undergrowth, following the shape of a path bordered by nettles that led to a row of Nissen huts, the domed roofs smothered by ivy. When I peered through the punched-out windows, it was clear from the smell and the mess that they had been most recently used as chicken sheds.

  As I passed between monstrous rhododendrons either side of a series of worn steps, the stone pink with dropped and fading flower heads, I couldn’t help but imagine what I might discover: a Palladian bridge more elegant than those at Wilton or Prior Park, wider even than the bridge at Stowe; and unlike Stourhead, mine would have a temple on top. See? Already it was mine. It would be my discovery—I didn’t give one thought to Mr. Liebermann, not then—I would write an article which wouldn’t just be published in a society’s journal; it would be published in The Times.

  I came out downstream, where the land had been excavated into a broad basin that slowed the water and would have given the impression to the owners and their guests that they were viewing a lake and not a dammed and manipulated stream. To my right, the water snaked out of sight around a bend, and when I stepped onto the bank, a raft of ducks rose up from the green water, flapping and squawking. I turned left, walking through a strip of tangled saplings, the ground rutted where the track must have been scoured by tank manoeuvres, although it was already colonised by grasses and ferns. The lake winked at me through the trees.

  A few yards on and I had my first uninterrupted view of the bridge at the head of the lake. It was not as I had hoped. There was no temple on top, only more scrubby bushes and tangled plants growing across it from both banks. There were arches, but they weren’t fine. I considered turning around, but I thought I might as well stand on it just to consider it done. A narrow deer path led over the bridge and I followed this, whacking at the brambles and their berries with my stick as they tried to catch at my clothes and skin. On the east side, the stream was sluggish, slowed by debris that had collected against the stones—branches, leaves, and a white scum that swirled about the surface. It was a sad, dank place, but when I turned from it and gazed out over the lake, the water was clear down to the weed, and in the centre the motionless surface caught the sun and the sky and threw them back to me.
/>   I continued over the bridge and along the opposite bank, ducking under branches and using my switch, walking to the other end of the lake where it narrowed back into a stream, and I crossed a slick weir above a small man-made cascade. I sat here while the sun rose higher, and attempted to draw the bridge and lake in my sketchbook. I was used to being alone and mostly content with solitude even when in the middle of a London crowd, but here, sitting by myself beside Lyntons’ lake, I was conscious of the couple up at the house and found myself wondering what kind of people they were.

  Later, I walked the rest of the grounds and looked at the follies and some of the buildings: the obelisk, the mausoleum, the grotto, the kitchen garden, and the model dairy. I poked my head into musty storerooms, the icehouse, and the stables, unseen creatures running from the light and my heavy footsteps. The rest of the morning I sat on the little bed in my room with my papers on my lap and my books spread about me on the floor—there was no table or chair—writing up my notes, redrawing my sketches, and creating a map of the grounds with the follies marked in relation to the house.

  I washed my underwear and stockings in the bathroom sink using the block of soap that had been left there, its scent gone and its surface cracked, and draped the clothes over a string hung above the bath. Late in the afternoon I heated half a tin of pilchards in tomato sauce on a stove that had been put in my room, together with a few pieces of cutlery and crockery. I placed one of my suitcases on top of the other, put a spare pillowcase over them, and laid out knife, fork, and plate. Sitting crookedly on the floor in front of the dining table I had created, I ate my dinner.