Bitter Orange Read online

  “I heard he won’t be around much longer anyway,” the permanent wave woman said. “He’s thinking about leaving.”

  “Good riddance.”

  I gave a small cough. The first woman glanced at me again, then turned back to her friend and said something I couldn’t hear. She put her hand on her friend’s arm, and the two of them bent their heads together, laughing. Friendship appeared so simple and yet so impossible.

  “Excuse me?” This time they both looked at me square on, their laughter gone. “Are you waiting for a table?” I said.

  “It’s full,” said the permed woman.

  “Oh dear,” I said. “I’m parched. As you were saying, it is dreadfully hot.” I plucked at the front of my blouse and smiled.

  The women paused and faced forward again. “I’ll write a letter to the bishop tomorrow if you want,” the permed woman said to her friend.

  I bought eggs, half a pound of bacon, butter, potatoes, and two bottles of chilled lemonade at the grocer’s. I stopped by the sweet shop for a bag of Everton mints and at the fishmonger’s I treated myself to a whole plaice which a boy in a bloody apron wrapped in white paper and a sheet from The Times. In the bakers I bought a loaf and, on a whim, three Chelsea buns, imagining popping downstairs to see if Cara and Peter would like to share them with me. Four shop people spoke to me with a good morning or a thank you as they handed over my items or change. I liked to count these things. More than seven was a good day.

  I walked back the way I’d come, past the church, but I didn’t see Victor. I stopped by the grave filled with fresh soil which was already turning lighter where the sun was drying it. There was no headstone yet of course—if there ever would be—nothing to say that the last of the Lyntons was lying under the ground. I was still thirsty and hungry too. Making certain nobody could see me, I drank half a bottle of lemonade and ate one of the Chelsea buns from the paper bag, although Mother used to say it was the worst of manners to eat or drink in the street. If food is worth eating, it’s worth eating properly.

  I went along the avenues of yews and limes with the sun again burning the top of my head. Beyond the house at the far end of the lake, the top of the mausoleum tower showed above the trees. I’d looked at it from the outside on my walk around the grounds, and although I had noticed that the lock was broken I hadn’t gone in. When I reached the carriage turn, I put my shopping bag into the dry basin of the fountain in the shadow cast by the marble woman. I dithered over the buns and then took the bag with me, deciding I couldn’t offer Peter and Cara the two that remained when there were three of us in the house. I ate another while I walked.

  The mausoleum’s door was ajar, the wood splintered around the lock. From an empty lobby I climbed the spiral stairs which clung to the distempered walls. At the top was a small landing, a wall ladder and a hatch that I pushed open with my shoulders and clambered through. The roof lantern was open on four sides and gave a view over the length of the lake, glittering in the sunshine and leading my eye to the bridge at the far end. Behind me was what remained of the kitchen garden, brick-walled and overgrown, and another forty-five degrees took me to the house, glowing white in the afternoon sun like a boat sailing over a green sea, and set back from it, the orangery. A flash of sunlight caught the door as it opened and a figure, Cara I thought, came into sight. I couldn’t make out any details or features, but I saw her perform a peculiar beckoning movement with her arm, her palm moving up and down in front of her, and it wasn’t until she had repeated it for a third time that I realised she was throwing something into the air and catching it; throwing and catching.

  The main room at the bottom of the tower contained three tombs: an early Lord Lynton and his first and second wives, buried either side of him, with carved stone gisants on top. At some point a fire must have been lit in the room, and one wall and the ceiling were scorched black. The recumbent lord was missing his nose and three of his fingers, broken off for relics, I assumed, by some soldier, turning the man into a leper. Worse damage had been done to the women. By the light coming through the open door I could make out that where their hearts might have been, holes had been punched into the stone. I peered into the dark cavities but couldn’t see anything, and I wasn’t brave enough to reach in with my hand. I said a prayer for all three and left.

  When I returned to the front of the house I startled a cat, scrawny and ragged, which ran from me with something hanging from its mouth, and as I came to the fountain where I had left my shopping, I saw that the mangy thing had been at my bag. It had licked the sun-softened butter, dragged out the wrapped fish, ripping the newspaper, and taken everything except the severed head, leaving its two googly eyes staring up at me. The headline from the torn newspaper trailed in the grass: Man Takes First Steps on the Moon. I picked up a handful of gravel and threw it at the cat.

  I spent the rest of that week walking the grounds, making a better map of the monuments: the mausoleum, the obelisk dedicated to a dead horse, the flint and shell grotto, the icehouse, and the bridge. I worked with methodical precision, enjoying the good weather and knowing I had the last days of July and the whole of August to produce my report. There were many other smaller pieces of statuary hidden in the foliage—an urn on a plinth inscribed for a concubine, the bottom half of a statue that I suspected was Eros. Every day I went to the bridge hoping it would have changed, that a saviour might have come in the night and stripped away the plants, cleared the flotsam and jetsam from the water, and made it Palladian. I had another uneventful walk into the town. I closed my window when Peter and Cara were cooking, or I went for an evening stroll amongst the bats. The weather stayed warm and dry. I didn’t meet them, my downstairs neighbours, I didn’t hear or see any more arguments, and I worked hard at forgetting about the loose floorboard in my bathroom.

  FOUR

  The vicar—Victor, because of course I know it is him although his title is still slippery—comes once more to sit beside my bed and hold my hand, or he has always been here, waiting while I’ve been sleeping. Soon one of these sleeps will be my last. I will never again gaze up through the branches of a tree to see light moving between the leaves, never press hard against the bark until its pattern is imprinted on my skin. I will never again smell earth after rain, never hear the sound of water lapping against stone.

  Victor asks me about regrets and whether my conscience is quiet, and then he whispers, “Tell me what really happened.”

  “What about the seal of the confessional?” I say, to see if I can catch him out; perhaps he has forgotten everything he learned.

  “All priests have a duty to secrecy.” He shifts his bottom to the edge of his chair. I would like to see if the fingers of his other hand are crossed. I know he is not everything he pretends to be.

  “Even after death?” I say.

  He nods, squeezes my hand. I can sense his anticipation, but it’s not gossip he’s asking for, only the truth. It is for my benefit that he wants to know.

  “Even if it conflicts with the laws of this country?”

  I once overheard them talking about me when I’d been here a year or so. Bolshie, that’s what they called me, and I was pleased. The women here go one way or the other: angry and defiant, or compliant and meek. And surprisingly, considering the sort of person I was for my first thirty-nine years, I refused to be meek. A difficult old bird. Yes.

  “Inviolate,” Victor says, but a Nurse Assist is in the room. I will try to remember to ask him my questions another time, when we are alone.

  I close my eyes. Will the last things I see be my comb, my reading glasses, my watch, the cigarette case, long empty? So few belongings, and of course this time I’ll leave without any of them. Victor lets go of my hand and I am back in my attic bathroom at Lyntons.

  I decide to have a bath on Sunday morning, although the water that spurts from the clunking tap is brownish, and flakes of rust settle grittily at the bottom of the narrow tub. I dressed in my green skirt and jacket, and a blouse, an
d fashioned a hat from cardboard, covering it with a piece of yellow fabric I found in a cupboard. It smelled a little damp and the cloth had rust stains in places, but I was pleased with it—wide-brimmed with a domed crown. I wore it with pride as I walked between the trees along the avenue.

  Victor greeted me at the church door. “I’m so pleased you came.” He glanced over my shoulder. “You didn’t bring your friend?”

  “No,” I said, “not today,” still bemused.

  I was one of the first to arrive. I always liked to be a little early—I thought it showed good manners. I dipped my head towards the altar and sat in an empty pew on the left. A family arrived and settled in a short way behind me, a boy of about seven whining and fidgeting, the mother shushing and hissing his name, Christopher, Christopher. An elderly couple shuffled in and sat in the pew opposite mine. I smiled at the woman and she glanced up at my hat. A few more families and other elderly people sat in the empty seats. As Victor walked along the aisle in his white surplice with his hair tied, I heard a commotion at the back: some jostling and a few loud whispers. I turned and saw Cara squeezing people along in order to make space for her at the end of a row. Her hair was untethered, dark against a long yellow dress, a spot of sunshine on the colourless church walls. I turned to face the sanctuary before she spotted me.

  There were the usual prayers, a hymn I didn’t know well sung to an out-of-tune organ. Victor climbed the steps to the pulpit. He’d seemed rather blunt when I’d met him in the vestry, or at least irritated by his parishioners, but now he was brooding, with long gaps between his words. I kept my head lowered while willing him to speed up, to show some enthusiasm. He mumbled about wombs and conception and moral corruption from the instant we’re formed, and then drifted off into something I couldn’t hear. I strained to listen; I was interested in sinners. I had always thought the Church too ready to hand out absolution, only worrying about keeping up the quota of those who achieved heaven.

  There was another prayer or two and then we were straight on to Holy Communion. I didn’t go up. I wanted to get a feel for the church first, to see how things were done. The line beside me was shorter than I had been used to in London, half a dozen people at most. They knelt before the altar and Victor moved along the row from left to right. “Body of Christ,” he said and presented the wafer. “Blood of Christ,” he said, sounding bored. A small boy moved along beside him holding out a chalice. “Body of Christ,” Victor said again. “Blood of Christ,” he intoned and then paused. Cara in her flowing yellow dress was before him. Victor looked down at her and then at me and I knew then she was the friend he had meant. I couldn’t see her face but I could see her shoulders shaking, her head and hair bobbing, and I thought at first that she was laughing. I was shocked that she could face the altar and laugh.

  “Body of Christ,” Victor said. Her head went forward and although I couldn’t see, I imagined her opening her mouth, sticking out her tongue ready for the wafer. The vicar moved aside to let the boy hold the chalice up to her lips. The woman kneeling to Cara’s left, in a woollen skirt and jacket not unlike mine but pink instead of green, edged sideways knowing something was about to happen. I thought I heard Cara moan when the boy tipped the cup, and I realised she hadn’t been laughing, she had been crying. I closed my own mouth, swallowed as though my mouth were hers. Another sob shook her, a convulsion similar to those I had seen in her bathroom, and her shoulders rounded as she coughed with her mouth shut, choked almost, and coughed again, turning her head to avoid hitting the vicar or the altar boy, turning towards the woman in the woollen suit. Cara’s mouth opened and wine and wet wafer sprayed out, droplets of scarlet speckling the pink fabric, like a cut, pumping. The woman cried out, struggling to move away from Cara, pushing into the kneeling man on her other side, toppling the person beyond him. It might have been funny if Cara hadn’t let out a wail and grabbed at the woman’s skirt, dipping her head and pulling the fabric to her mouth, latching on and sucking at the spilled drops.

  “No, no,” Victor said, but he took a step back, his expression one of horror as if Cara were biting into the woman’s leg and drawing blood.

  The woman tugged at her skirt, yanking it until Cara was forced to let go. Cara staggered up, her long yellow dress nearly tripping her, and turned to face the rest of us: the couple with their walking sticks waiting to receive Communion, the handful sitting in the pews. I saw Cara’s stricken face, her smudged lipstick and mascara running down her cheeks. She pushed her way through, and as she passed me I put out my hand. I don’t know what I would have said or done if she’d stopped because my fingers didn’t touch her skin; she didn’t even see me.

  “Mi dispiace,” I thought I heard her say as she went. “I’m sorry.” The elderly couple separated to let her pass, all of us watching this exotic and fantastic creature.

  I went after her, but when I reached the vestibule she was already passing through the lych-gate. On the other side of the churchyard wall a blue car was waiting. Its engine was running and I could smell the exhaust fumes as though the driver had known a quick getaway would be required. Cara got into the passenger seat, the door closed, and the car drove off.

  After the service, outside the church, huddles of people formed and re-formed. I hovered for a while but the little snippets of conversation I heard included Roman Catholic, Lyntons, and disgusting. Pressing my hat on my head, I set off around the church and was through the back gate when I heard my name called. Victor, still in his vestments, was standing in the grass holding a glass of water.

  We went to sit on the bottom lip of one of the chest tombs in an overgrown corner, hiding from the last stragglers. “Sorry it’s not tea,” he said. “It’s meant to be tea and biscuits after a service, isn’t it? But I just can’t face that lot, not today.” He passed me the glass and leaned his elbows on his knees. “All the sniping about flowers and jumble sales. Besides, they were only hanging around in order to say I told you so for letting a Catholic come to a Church of England service . . .”

  “I hope the stain will come out,” I said.

  “. . . and spilling the blood of Christ.” He sighed.

  “Salt would have done the trick.” I drank some water.

  “Catholics, as I understand it, think the wine is the blood of Christ. Not just a representation.”

  “But you have to be quick.”

  “Hence all the sucking of the skirt.”

  “I heard too that white wine poured on top will cancel out the red.”

  “Your friend, Cara . . .”

  “But I don’t see how that would work, not really.”

  “She’s a bit of a liability, isn’t she?”

  “She isn’t my friend,” I said. “In fact, we haven’t met.”

  “Maybe you should keep it that way,” he said, and my surprise must have shown because then he added, “Sorry. I can’t say I know her, not really, but there’s something . . .” He trailed off. “She came to me asking for confession.”

  “From a vicar in the Church of England?” I said, shocked also that he was telling me. “Although since she’s Italian . . . Catholic . . .”

  He stared at me with curiosity. “We can offer confession, you know, it’s just we don’t do it in a little booth with a curtain and a grille.” He took the glass and gulped some water. I imagined sitting opposite him in the vestry and laying everything bare. Did confessing our sins appease anything? I wondered what penance he had doled out for Cara, and I slid Mother’s locket, which I was still wearing around my neck, along its chain. I didn’t have her earrings on because I had forgotten to retrieve the lost one after I had put back the floorboard the second time.

  “Confession is open to all my congregation,” Victor said, and I lowered my eyes. He sighed again. “I’m not confident that I helped your friend though.” I didn’t bother to correct him this time. “Cara would more likely benefit from a visit to the doctor than a priest.”

  “Is that what you told her?”


  He looked at me. “No, of course not.” After a moment he said, “The bishop is sure to hear about this: wasting the wine, the cost of a good woollen suit, Catholics wailing during the service. There will be more complaints.” He pulled at his hair and it fell loose around his face.

  “More?” I said.

  “A few members of my congregation think I should be more spirited in my delivery and like to report their opinion upward.” His fingers played with the elastic band and the little ball of black hairs that was knotted around it.

  “Your sermon was rather . . . subdued,” I said.

  “Subdued, yes,” he said. He drank.

  We were silent for a while, regarding the church tucked around with green, and I tried to work out what he was thinking from the way he sat: a kind of resignation that everything would go wrong if it hadn’t already, an apathy that nothing could change for the better. Once, a couple of months ago, I would have agreed with him, but now, watching the tiny flies settle on the flat heads of yarrow that had spread amongst the graves and how its white flowers blended with the lichen that bloomed across the stones, I held the possibility that I could become anyone. The only sound was the distant purr of a lawnmower. “Such a heavenly place to be buried,” I said.

  “As you start your journey to a better place?” he asked, remembering our conversation in the vestry.

  “You don’t think so?”

  He tilted his head back against the tomb and closed his eyes. “How many would you say there were?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How many people in the congregation today?”

  I thought for a moment. “Thirty, thirty-five.”

  “Twenty-nine,” he said. “I counted from the pulpit. Every Sunday there’s fewer. And there’s fewer marriages, christenings. Funerals, however, are on the up. I keep waiting for the call from the bishop to say that the parish isn’t sustainable.”

  “It must be busy at Christmas and Easter at least.”