Bitter Orange Read online

  After I had washed up in the bathroom sink and put everything away, I returned to my work. The next time I looked up, the light in the room was apricot from the lowering sun. I stood and arched my back, stretching and twisting my neck, and crouching at the open window, I looked over the grounds, trying to imagine how they might have been when they were first laid out—the distant fields green and unploughed, the oaks and cedars with their limbs intact and their bases clear of nettles. A time when every view from the house had been designed to create an idealised English landscape of vistas and open spaces framed by the dark rising hangers.

  A smell of cooking came from below, garlic frying in butter, something meaty, and my stomach groaned—half a tin of pilchards was not enough. I leaned out of my window to inhale the aroma and as I looked down I saw a foot on the windowsill below mine, glimpsing grubby toes with newly painted green nails before I quickly withdrew my head. I wondered how one got to know one’s neighbours.

  For supper I finished the heel from the loaf of bread I had brought with me, and the tin of pilchards. I would have to go to the town the next day if I wanted to eat.

  The air in the attic was soupy even with the window open, and I lay under a sheet in my nightdress thinking about who might have lived in the room before me and who had slept in the one next to mine before it was converted into a bathroom. Had a prying manservant who wanted to observe his mistress fixed the spyglass in the floor, or had a degenerate son, perhaps, thought it would be fun to ogle the family’s guests? Just as I was imagining the requisite madwoman locked in the attic watching life going on below her, I heard a shout, a woman’s voice—Cara’s. I sat up and a light was switched on in the rooms below mine; the glow visible through my window and when I poked my head out of the window, Cara and Peter’s bathroom light was turned on too. She yelled something in Italian, spitting out the words. Peter’s reply was loud but measured:

  “Please, Cara. It’s late, can we not start this now.”

  She shouted back at him, her foreign words carrying outside into the night.

  “In English, please,” Peter said.

  Cara screeched, an animal in a trap. There was a crash, glass breaking or china smashing, that made me momentarily pull in my head as though she were coming for me. A door slammed and my window frame shuddered in response, and somewhere below, Cara began to weep, still shouting through her hiccups, trying to catch her breath, making no sense. One of them yanked the windows closed and I didn’t hear anything else, but my thoughts were drawn back to the spyhole in my bathroom floor.

  I knew of course right from wrong. My father, Luther Jellico, had instilled it into me before he left and then Mother had continued in her way: payment will always be due for any wrongdoing, don’t lie or steal, don’t talk to strange men, don’t speak unless spoken to, don’t look your mother in the eye, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t expect anything from life. I knew there were rules I was supposed to live by but it was an intellectual knowledge, a checklist to be ticked off against each new action, not inherent as it appeared to be for everyone else. There was nothing on the list about spying. I went to the bathroom and lifted the board without compunction. I knelt on the floor and looked through the hole.

  Cara was curled on her side on the bathroom floor wearing a nightdress, her face obscured by her hair, the corkscrew coils wild. Her knees were pulled into her chest and her head lay on Peter’s lap, her breast heaving out an occasional sob. He wore pyjamas and sat with his back against the wall, legs straight out in front. He stroked her hair, his head lowered over hers, and I marvelled at the love I thought I saw in that motion, a mutual giving and receiving I had never known. After a few minutes she sat up and covered his neck and face with little kisses while he remained stiff and upright, as though waiting to see whether she would suddenly change and lash out at him with a claw. She kissed him on the mouth, pressing her lips to his while her hand, a wedding ring on one finger, moved across his thigh and into the gap in his pyjama bottoms. I didn’t look away, I was curious. Before her fingers were inside the opening, Peter gently took hold of her wrist and pulled her hand away. Cara hung her head, her body shaking with sobs. He stood her up, lifted her into his arms, and, as if she were a child or an invalid, carried her from the room.

  THREE

  The next morning, without any breakfast, I worked on my notes, and by the time I left the house the day was already hot, my palm sticking to the plastic handles of my string shopping bag. I hadn’t been able to find my hat and could only think I must have left it on the bus. I crossed the weedy carriage turn and started the long walk down the avenue. The surface was pitted and full of potholes probably made by the army trucks that must have rumbled down it for the last time many years previously. The sun was fierce on the crown of my head and already I was thirsty. At the far end, in the distance, half a mile away, someone was coming along the avenue on a bicycle, and a moment later I realised it was Cara, head lowered and legs working to pedal up the slight slope to the house. What was one supposed to do in such circumstances? I had seen the colour of her nightdress—baby pink—knew the high keening wail she made when she cried, and yet we had not been introduced. Mother would have stopped and made polite conversation, pretending she had heard and seen nothing. Of course there was the weather. I could mention how blue the sky was or ask whether Cara thought it was going to rain, but I wasn’t confident that I could look in the eye someone whose hand I had seen moving into her husband’s pyjamas. Perhaps I could ask her whether she had anything I could drink. By now Cara had come around the left-hand bend, and I could see she was wearing a green headscarf tied under her chin, and sunglasses. Her knees, below the same crocheted dress she’d worn yesterday, pumped up and down. I imagined the bottle of lemonade she might have in her basket, cold from the refrigeration unit in one of the town’s shops.

  I wiped a damp palm on my skirt, ready to shake her hand when she stopped, and continued walking towards her. My words, How do you do, I’m Frances, I’m here to examine the garden follies, seemed like pebbles in my cheeks, dull things that would plop from my mouth and fall to the ground. I could hear the old man’s wheeze of the bicycle’s suspension and the rubber limp of her under-inflated tyres on the stones of the avenue, and I could see her cheeks, flushed from the exertion.

  Then, when she was almost level with me, I walked off the paved surface and into the grass, and stood behind the nearest tree, pressing my back flat against it. I couldn’t even pretend that she wouldn’t have seen me.

  As she rode her bicycle past, Cara trilled the bell, raising some crows into a cawing flap. I stayed there until she had time to reach Lyntons, get off the bicycle, hammer on the front door, and disappear inside, time enough for my blush to fade.

  At the end of the avenue the main track turned sharp right towards the road, the way I had arrived. But straight ahead in the direction of the town, a footpath led between two fields, much overgrown and full of the buzz of insects. The sky was matt blue and the sun continued to shine, drawing all the liquid in my body to the surface, where it collected under my arms and in my cleavage; if Cara had passed me now, I would have knocked her off her bicycle to get at the fictional bottle of lemonade in her basket. I decided I was closer to the town than to Lyntons so I pressed on, thinking about the long glass of water I would ask for when I reached the tea shop; there had to be a tea shop.

  When the fields ended, the path widened but grew darker, overhung with yews angling inwards until their branches intertwined overhead like a wedding arch, and I walked under them, a bride without a groom. The banks rose on either side, the earth track worn down, exposing the brown bones of the trees’ roots. I was grateful for the shade, and it wasn’t until a semicircle of daylight became visible ahead, and then an iron gate with a graveyard beyond, that I realised this avenue of yews must have been the one that generations of Lyntons had walked, ridden, and for a final time been carried along, supine in their best clothes, to the estate church mention
ed in Pevsner. The gate was locked in place by knee-high grass, but beyond it, headstones leaned and butterflies zigzagged between a buddleia and flowering thistles. I shoved at the gate, pushing and flattening the couch grass enough to be able to squeeze through the gap. Here, at the back of the churchyard, the graves were untended; moss and rain had eaten away the dates and the names until the people beneath were no more than worn capitals. I followed the graves forwards in time and found four Lyntons lying together: two Dorotheas, a Charles who had died aged twenty, and a Samuel who had lived for a year.

  I took the path that tracked around the church, past another yew, its waist almost the tower’s thickness, and a heap of grass cuttings, dead flowers tossed on top, the whole smelling of rot and warm vegetation turning slimy. On the northern side of the church, the vicar, in a black cassock, stood amongst the stones. His face was obscured as he bent his head above the pages of a book. Beside him an older man holding a cap rested on a long-handled spade. The two of them were standing over an open grave.

  I kept close to the building and went around to the front door, which was unlocked. I hadn’t been in a church since Mother’s funeral, but the smell of beeswax and the air, as cool as running water, were familiar and friendly. Then, I had cried all through the service and the hymns. I wasn’t able to stop even when the vicar was saying a few words or when the handful of Mother’s elderly friends who had come were singing, although I wasn’t certain whether my exaggerated weeping was from self-pity or horror that Mother was actually dead.

  This church was beautifully plain: pews, whitewashed solid walls, a wooden ceiling. I didn’t think it was disappointing. I went down the aisle, slipped through a door into the vestry and was opening a cupboard above the sink when I heard a voice behind me.

  “Can I help you?”

  I turned; the vicar was standing in the doorway, the Book of Common Prayer in his hands. His eyes were bagged as though he had missed several nights’ sleep, and his hair was pulled back from his face in an odd style, but most disturbing was his dark beard. I hadn’t met a vicar before who wasn’t clean-shaven.

  “Sorry. I was after a glass,” I said. “For water.”

  “I’m afraid you need to bring your own vases for flowers, and there’s an outside tap for general use.”

  “I mean to drink.”

  He went past me and pulled back a cloth curtain strung below the sink, took a glass off a shelf, filled it from the tap, and handed it to me. “Mr. Lockyer saw you come in through the back gate.” He looked me up and down, and I was aware of myself: a middle-aged woman rather thick around the waist, hair greying and her throat bobbing as the water went down. But I must have passed whatever test he had set for me because he held out his hand and said, “Victor Wylde.”

  I hesitated, moved my hand that was holding the glass forward, withdrew it, and gave an embarrassed laugh before placing the glass on the drainer. My hand went out again, and withdrew again so I could wipe my palm on my skirt before I shook his hand.

  “Victor?” I said. “Victor the vicar?” The words slipped out without thinking and he rolled his eyes as if he’d heard the joke many times before. “Sorry,” I said. “Frances Jellico. How do you do?”

  He must have already noticed my ringless fingers because he said, “Miss Jellico,” with a nod of his head. “Are you one of the people camping out at Lyntons?” He fetched a handkerchief from a pocket hidden in his cassock and I had a sudden horror that he was going to use it to wipe his palm where we had shaken, but instead he dragged it around his neck and stuffed it back in his pocket.

  “I’m writing a report on the follies and the garden buildings,” I said.

  “It was a Lynton we were burying. In fact, it was the last Lynton.”

  “I had no idea there were any still living.”

  “Well,” he said. “There aren’t any more. All of them are in the ground now.” He reached up to the back of his neck, undid a hook or a button, and before I could turn away, pulled at his dog collar, the whole coming out from under his cassock with a sort of bib attached. I had never given much thought to the vestments of clergy, but this was so shocking he might as well have reached up his skirts and removed his underpants. I looked towards the sink, stumbling over something else to say.

  “He . . . he . . . didn’t have any relations?”

  “She,” the vicar said from behind me. There was the rustle of clothes being removed, his voice muffled while he took something over his head. “No relations, no friends as far as I could tell. It was just me and Mr. Lockyer, the gravedigger, and her of course. The last Dorothea Lynton was quite a character. Bloody cantankerous and forgetful. A difficult old bird.” Coat hangers clanged together.

  “My goodness,” I said, not certain that vicars were supposed to gossip about their parishioners in that way. “Still, Mr. Wylde, she’s gone to a better place, wouldn’t you say?” It was a phrase I’d heard Mother use. I glanced over my shoulder. The vicar had removed his cassock, and underneath he was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tee shirt like the ones my father had owned, but unlike my father’s this had a sunburst pattern across the front in pinks and yellows, tie-dye I thought they called it.

  He raised his eyebrows. “If it makes you happier to think so. And Victor, please.” He smiled, took the glass from where I had left it on the drainer, filled it from the tap, and bending over the sink, poured the water over the back of his white neck. “God, it’s hot out there,” he said, straightening. “Dorothea tried living at Lyntons again a few years back. She converted one of the attic bedrooms into a bathroom apparently so that some elderly woman she took with her could live up there, like a proper old-fashioned maid. I don’t think they lasted a month. I’m surprised you’re managing. Is there even electricity and running water?” He put his hand up to his hair behind his head and in a nifty movement slipped an elastic band off and onto his wrist so that his hair fell in fat waves around his face. I could only stare.

  “It’s very atmospheric.” I had a strange need to defend the place.

  “Dorothea Lynton believed she was done out of a fortune by the army or the government, or someone,” he continued. Rivulets of water were turning the pink streaks on his vest to mauve, and there were beads of water in his hair and beard. “She liked to tell anyone who would listen that she was swindled out of her possessions.” He refilled the glass and handed it to me. This time I sipped at the water.

  “And was she?”

  “I’d say she had a few loose marbles, but you’re living there. I’ve heard it’s been gutted, hasn’t it? Nothing left. I think the army patched the roof but that was about it. I can’t imagine it’s much fun staying in a house in ruins.”

  “But it could be such a lovely house when Mr. Liebermann does it up. And the grounds are—”

  “Mr. Liebermann? The American who bought the place?” Victor closed a wardrobe door, tugged his vest out of his jeans, and when he saw me looking, gawping, he said, “Off duty for the afternoon.” He slotted his prayer book into a space on a shelf. “My uncle used to tell me about the Christmas parties the Lyntons would have at the house every year before the Great War, for the villagers. Back when money wasn’t an issue. A fir tree that reached the hall ceiling, music and dancing, as many mince pies as a man could eat. And a game of hide-and-seek for the village children. Apparently, they’d have to line up afterwards to receive a gift from Dorothea. They were probably expecting dolls or spinning tops. My uncle used to laugh when he described the expressions on their little faces as they were handed a ragged piece of tapestry, a polished stone, or a dried and pinned beetle and told it was a family heirloom.” Victor shook his head. “Yes, a difficult old bird.”

  He walked me to the lych-gate and we shook hands once more. As he was turning away, almost as an afterthought, he said, “I hope you’ll come to the service on Sunday with your friend. God knows I could do with a few new faces in the church.” And before I could say that I didn’t know who he meant, that like Do
rothea Lynton I had no friends, he was heading across the churchyard towards a gap in the wall that led through to what must have been the vicarage garden.

  The town was smaller than I had imagined: a baker’s, grocer’s, sweet shop, and fishmonger’s, no cinema, no bookshop. The narrow pavements were full of women with baskets and children dawdling behind them, or women standing in small groups talking with ease about—I imagined—schools and shoes and the price of cabbages. What would it be like to have such a life? One that revolved around a husband and children. I didn’t understand how it had happened to them; what trick of make-up or hairstyle or conversation had these women shared when they were in their late teens or early twenties that I had missed? It wasn’t that I hankered after a husband or longed for children, just that these other lives seemed so alien, I couldn’t imagine how they had come about.

  There wasn’t a tea shop in the town, but I passed the Harrow Inn, a public house which advertised sandwiches and coffee on a board outside, and realising how hungry I was, went in.

  Two women stood at the entrance to the dining room, blocking the doorway. They glanced at me as I approached and then turned away without acknowledgement.

  “Sandra told me she posted her letter last week,” one of the women said. “We just need a few more to do the same.”

  The other, undoing the knot of her headscarf, tutted. “It’s blazing out there.” She lifted the scarf off her head and pushed up her flattened curls with the palm of her hand. A chemical smell of perming lotion came from her hair. “Christine said I should avoid direct sunlight for the first day or two. But I don’t see how I can go on wearing this thing when it’s so blazing out there.”

  “I could give you the gist of it, if you like,” the first woman said, waiting for an answer from the woman with the new permanent wave. When none came, she said, “It is important.”