Bitter Orange Read online

  I put my head and shoulders out of the window again. “Starving,” I said, but she had already gone.

  In the bathroom, I brushed my teeth and washed my face, and when I went back into my bedroom a mouse was lying on its side on the open windowsill. The black bead of its uppermost eye was glossy, its brown tweed coat was pristine, and there was no sign of blood or damage, but it was dead. Two or three minutes before, when I had spoken to Cara from the window, it hadn’t been there, couldn’t have been there—hadn’t I leaned on the sill and looked down? I wondered if somehow Serafina had got in when I had collected the envelope, and I checked under the bed and went into the bathroom but she wasn’t there either, and all the other doors in the attic were closed. I returned to the mouse and the back of my head prickled with a horror that wasn’t about the dead, sad little body, but an intimation that someone had put it there for me to find. My hand went to Mother’s locket on its chain around my neck, and then I picked up a shoe and pushed the mouse off the sill. I hoped Serafina would take care of it.

  I led the way past the Nissen huts, through the rhododendrons, down the steps to the lake. The water, glimpsed between tree trunks and bushes, drew us on. And when we came to it, the expanse of it, the turquoise edges and the blue sky reflecting at its centre, was splendid. I wanted to keep Peter and Cara there, admiring its beauty, but Peter said, “Where’s this bridge, then?” and I took them left through the trees until we came to a gap where we could see it, draped in green, only two of its arches clear of plants. “Oh, but it’s charming,” he said, and I felt as though it were a drawing I was unsure of and had been persuaded to show, only to be told it was rather good. I was suddenly proud, and thought that it was in fact a sweet little bridge. “We’d need to pull back some of that undergrowth to get a proper look, but I think you might have something there.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Wasn’t the original house built in 1740 or something?”

  “1745,” I said.

  “We’d have to take a few measurements.”

  “Of course.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact.

  “Is that good?” Cara said, tucking in the loose ends of the turban she was still wearing.

  “Well,” Peter said. “Frances would have to see.”

  “I suppose it is a little like the Palladian bridge at Stourhead,” I said. “But if it was Palladian, or something interesting, wouldn’t it have been mentioned in Pevsner, or some other record?”

  “Oh,” Peter said. “You looked up Lyntons in Pevsner, did you?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Actually, no,” Peter said with an embarrassed laugh. “I suppose I should have, but Pevsner’s always so negative. I prefer an element of discovery when it comes to architecture.”

  “Well, yes, perhaps,” I said, unsure now whether he thought the bridge was important or not, but we had reached it by then and we went single file along the path where I had beaten back the nettles. In the centre, a short section of the waist-high balustrade was clear of plants and we spread out here to look over the lake. The sun on the water made my eyes ache, a headache threatening.

  “Do you ever think about the people who lived here before us?” Cara said. “The servants and the gardeners, the families? The children who jumped into this lake from this bridge on a day like today, just as hot, just as still, but when the bridge was new? What kind of people did they grow into, I wonder. What happened to them?”

  “Everyone dies, Cara,” Peter said gently, as if breaking this to her for the first time. I thought of Dorothea Lynton buried in the churchyard with no one except our dissatisfied vicar and the gravedigger to mark her passing. And I thought of Mother, of course.

  “And what then?” she said. She might have asked him the same question a hundred times before and each time hoped for a different answer.

  “Nothing,” he said, and she turned her head from him but covered the movement by pretending to gaze into the distance where the lake narrowed. “Dead is dead,” he continued, his voice soft, his hands open. “No heaven or hell, no ghosts. If we’re lucky we might be remembered for a generation or two, and then that’s it, and that’s fine.”

  “Is that what you really believe?” Cara said, still looking away.

  “You know I do. And if we’re unlucky we’ll make it into a history book, but even then it won’t be us, it’ll be a made-up version, someone else’s interpretation. It can’t be the full story of who we are. That’s only in our own heads and in the memories of the people who have loved us.” He seemed to be waiting for an answer. “Cara?” he said to prompt her.

  A few months before I was ten, while I was standing in the kitchen of our Notting Hill house, Mother had said to me, “Your father believes that when we die we’re put into the ground and we rot and we make grass, and then the cows come and eat it up.” I was aware of my father behind me, saying nothing. There was a tension in the room between my parents, a battle I didn’t understand. I wanted him to tell me what she’d said wasn’t true, that he didn’t believe this, because it didn’t happen. “Whereas I believe,” Mother continued, “if we’re good we go to heaven.” The vision of the cows and the grass and the bodies was too terrible. I began to cry. “What should I believe?” I said. Whether she answered, and what she said if she did, I didn’t recall.

  “I’m happy to be forgotten in a generation or two,” I said to Cara and Peter, needing to fill the gap. “And for me it’ll probably be a lot sooner.” I laughed.

  “Come on,” Cara said, turning and, with an effort, smiling. “We should eat.”

  “We should swim first,” Peter said.

  “Swim?” I looked from one to the other. “I didn’t know we were going to swim. I don’t have a costume.” Mother’s girdle poked me.

  “Frances and I will watch,” Cara said. “I never really learned how to do it.”

  On the middle of the bridge, Peter began removing his clothes. Cara laughed. “He’s not shy, is he? You’re not shy, are you?”

  Under his trousers he was wearing a pair of blue swimming trunks. His body was spare, narrow hips and broad at the shoulders. Tufts of light hair stuck out from his armpits, and a little covered his chest. He climbed onto the stone balustrade and stood with his feet together. I wanted to warn him that there might be something under the surface, submerged posts, sharp-toothed pike, or pieces of rusting metal; anything could snag that skin and tear him open, but then he was gone, diving through the lilies and pondweed. For a moment, we saw his body flowing below the surface like an animal under ice.

  Cara and I leaned on the warm stone and watched him surface in the middle of the lake. We shaded our eyes while he continued swimming, his head and shoulders becoming a ripple through the sky and the clouds.

  “How did you two meet?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was in Ireland in ’63,” Cara said. “I was twenty-one. It already seems such a long time ago. I can’t believe it’s only six years. All I dreamed of was getting away, to Italy. The Irish have always left Ireland, haven’t they? For one reason or another. I got as far as Dublin once.” She laughed at some memory.

  “Was that a long way from where you lived?”

  “A hundred miles or so. It could have been another planet. I caught the bus to Thomastown, as Cara Cal-ace, changed my clothes, put on some lipstick, and became Cara Cal-ay-chee. I’d been teaching myself Italian from my father’s dictionary, but like I said last night, I can’t speak it, not really. On the bus to Dublin I remember pressing my forehead up against the window and watching the thin men outside the sad pubs, and the thin women with their tired faces hanging out the washing. I wasn’t going to be one of them.” She turned around so her back was to the lake and I did the same. I could see her, a tragic figure on the bus, dreaming of something better. I let her talk, her consonants becoming softer, increasingly Irish. I knew hers would be a more interesting story than my own.

  “I’d already lined up a job for when I got to Dublin. Or at l
east an interview for one, at the Adelphi Cinema. I rolled over the top of my skirt, put on some more lipstick, and when the manager invited me into his cubbyhole beside the projectionist’s booth, I took the cigarette he offered me. He leaned forward to light it and do you know what he said? You’re very pale for a wop. I was delighted, I’d got away with it. I put on my best Italian accent: Ireland, it is a very nice, but there is no sun for months. Only rain, rain, rain.”

  It was odd to hear her suddenly become so convincingly Italian, to my ears anyway.

  “I got the job, behind the cloakroom counter, taking people’s coats. And I rented a room in a boarding house that took in girls. They all believed I was Italian too, and it was great fun for a while, sitting around the tea table and telling them about how the new pope had a terrific way of waving, and how wonderful the weather was, and about the oranges you could pick right off the trees beside the road. All they really wanted to know about was what the Italian men were like. I just rolled my eyes and let them imagine. They worked in Brown Thomas, the department store, those girls, and the butcher’s around the corner, and the accounts office of the Player Wills tobacco factory on the South Circular Road. I forget their names now, but I remember that they came up to me one by one and slipped me a packet of nylons, or a couple of pork chops, or twenty Players. They wanted me to get them tickets to see the Beatles.”

  “The Beatles?” I said. Even I, who knew nothing about popular music, had heard of the Beatles.

  “They were playing at the Adelphi, but the tickets had sold out weeks before and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any. I took the chops and the tights and the cigarettes though and said I’d see what I could do. I made sure I was working that night, and I thought I’d sneak in the back of the auditorium before the Beatles started, but the manager’s boys wouldn’t let me in. I can’t tell you how angry I was, sitting on the floor of the cloakroom for the whole time, smoking cigarette after cigarette. I couldn’t even hear the music because of the screaming.

  “I had to hand over the coats when the audience came out, but I wanted to go backstage, so I started giving out any old coat, and of course the customers started complaining, so I just swung my legs over the counter and left them to it.

  “I bumped into George in one of the corridors backstage. It was a warren back there—staircases and blind corners; it was ever so easy to get lost. He was wandering around looking for the others, I suppose. I thought I’d better carry on being Italian, and we had one of those funny conversations that you have with foreigners: half mime and half made-up words, except that I was the foreigner. He pretended to play the guitar and I got out the coat-ticket stubs and said things like cloaker-roomer. He asked me back to his hotel for a drink, and we went and stood outside the stage door for a while, making conversation and waiting for John and Paul and Ringo. It was so cold, November 1963, I’ll never forget it. George was wearing a huge fur coat and I was shivering so much he took it off and put it around my shoulders. It went right to the ground. I don’t remember what we talked about, Liverpool and Rome maybe. I think we had a cigarette, and then a newspaper van came around the corner. Evening Herald, I think it was, and then the rest of the Beatles came running out of the stage door and all of them, including George, jumped inside the van just as a crowd of girls came running around from the front. The van drove off with them all in it and me just left on the road being run down by these girls who were screaming and shouting like you’d never believe. They knocked me right over. Holes in the knees of my stockings, palms scraped—the shock of it brought tears to my eyes. There was a reporter who helped me up, asked me a few questions, like where I worked, and took a picture. I was in the paper the next day with mascara smeared all down my face, looking a real state.”

  “Oh, Cara,” I said, imagining the excitement, the shock of it.

  “That’s how my mother found out where I was. Someone must have told her my picture was in the paper and that I was working at the Adelphi, although the manager sacked me for leaving the cloakroom unattended. Apparently, someone made off with a whole load of other people’s coats. My mother sent Dermod to fetch me in the Wolseley.”

  “Dermod?” I asked.

  “Dermod helped around the house. A kind of servant, I suppose. He’d been living with us since before I was born, feeding the chickens, you know, a bit of housework, and he did most of the cooking as well. He’s a little simple, but very sweet, and he hated driving that car. He wasn’t supposed to drive at all, but my mother liked the idea of someone taking her around, and you didn’t have to sit a test, not then. I was surprised he’d made it to Dublin on his own. We fought on the street outside the boarding house with all the girls hanging out the windows, watching. I said I wasn’t ever going home, but he started crying, bawling his eyes out. He’s such a soft lump.”

  She paused in her story, her eyes unfocussed as she remembered.

  “Anyway, I drove the Wolseley home and on the way I told him the story about meeting George Harrison. To make him laugh we rolled down the windows and shouted cloaker-roomer at the tractors when I overtook them and at the thin women in their thin coats who were running to bring in the washing before the rain set in. I kept the coat George gave me though—”

  She was still talking when, from the other side of the lake, we heard a long whistle and Peter calling. I had forgotten about him. We both turned, and in the distance he appeared to be standing on the water and waving his arms above his head.

  “I’ll show it to you later if you like,” she said. “But it’s just a man’s fur coat. Come on. I expect he’s hungry.” She lifted the picnic basket she’d brought and walked back the way we’d come. I went after her to the end of the bridge and then returned for Peter’s clothes, which he had folded and left in a neat pile—his shirt and trousers, his shoes and socks. As I walked beside the lake, thinking about what she’d told me, I realised she hadn’t explained how she and Peter had met, in fact she hadn’t mentioned Peter at all.

  Three-quarters of the way along the lakeside, near to where the tower of the mausoleum poked up through the trees, a concrete jetty jutted into the water. The remains of wooden posts ran alongside it, as if there had once been a more picturesque pontoon made of timber, something the soldiers had made more practical and uglier. At the end of it Cara was unpacking the picnic, flapping a checked tablecloth, and farther along the bank Peter was standing on the soft ground and peering between the bulrushes.

  “Look,” he said as I approached. “An old rowing boat. If we could drag it out, I’m sure I could repair it, a few tarpaper patches and we’ll be able to go on the lake. What do you say?”

  I imagined Peter rowing, Cara and me lounging together in the bow, trailing our fingers in the water. An image of Waterhouse’s painting The Lady of Shalott came to mind.

  “That would be lovely.”

  He looked over his shoulder. “You brought my clothes. Frances, you are a wonder.” He came back to the bank and I averted my eyes from his swimming trunks and torso, keeping them on his face. Only when he held out his hands for his clothes did I realise I’d been hugging them to my chest. “I knew Cara wouldn’t have remembered,” he said, forcing his wet and muddy legs into his trousers and pulling his shirt over his head. The cotton stuck to his skin. “I thought I’d have to swim back to the bridge.”

  On the tablecloth Cara had laid out the contents of the basket: slices of buttered bread, smoked fish pâté, a salad of beans and onions, half a dozen quails’ eggs, and a screw of paper filled with salt.

  There was no wind that afternoon, the lake was a new penny lost in an unmown lawn, and the unseen birds that chirped and twittered in the bushes didn’t disturb a twig. I lowered myself to the concrete—it is never easy for a large woman to sit on the floor, especially one wearing a girdle. She must fold her legs beneath her as a horse does, and there comes a moment where she has to let go and drop, and hope it will work out all right.

  The lake puckered at the edges of the j
etty and the strands of weed that grew there lifted and fell back. Peter pulled out a bottle of champagne from the water where Cara had tied it to a post, and the ripples he made spread out across the lake, slicing into the reflections of the trees.

  The bottle could have been in the lake for only a few minutes but Peter declared it cold enough, popped the cork, and poured it into our three tin cups.

  “To Fran, our new friend,” Peter said, holding up his.

  “To Fran, our new friend,” Cara said, tipping hers against Peter’s. They waited, their cups raised.

  “To us,” I said. They had persuaded me it was true. We drank.

  SEVEN

  In the evening as I was sitting on my bed, writing up an observation I’d made when I was standing on the bridge, there was a knock on the door to the attic.

  “Can I come in?” Cara called, coming in.

  I had already changed into my nightdress. I tugged it higher around my neck and put a pillow on my lap to hide my stomach. “In here,” I called.

  She came into the room. She was still wearing the turban. “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I didn’t realise you were working.” She stared at the books beside me on the bed and stacked on the floor. “I didn’t get a proper look at your room when we came up last night. I thought we were living rough downstairs, but you don’t even have a packing case to sit on.”

  “Oh, I’m managing,” I said, straightening my papers.

  “When Peter works, at least he can perch at the table. Don’t you get backache sitting on the bed like that?”

  She bent her head to window height and looked out. She walked around the small room, and took in my open suitcases with my clothes folded inside, my hairbrush on top, a towel hanging over the peg on the back of the door, my plastic shower cap over it. I was being examined, my belongings assessed, and I was concerned she would find them lacking.

  “Is your bathroom next door?” She went out into the corridor and I almost ran to follow her, convinced she must have come upstairs with suspicions about the hole in her bathroom ceiling. “You don’t even have a mirror,” she said, taking a glance around the room. “There might be one in another bathroom. Peter could look for you.”