Bitter Orange Read online

  Somewhere in the pipes under the floor, water was churning and slopping about like an upset stomach. I turned to go and saw the pillow in the bath. It was the spare pillow I sometimes used, the same pillow I had held across my lap while Cara told me her story the previous night. I hadn’t noticed it gone. It had been placed at the opposite end to the taps and there was a slight indentation in the feathers as though someone had slept there, in the bath. It horrified me, its appearance, its incongruity, like a pile of human faeces in the middle of a living room carpet. I picked up the pillow by a corner. A long grey hair adhered to the cotton, and I stripped off the case in such a way that I didn’t have to touch the outside. I stuffed the case behind the toilet, and as I took the pillow back to my bedroom, the shadow at my back followed close behind.

  EIGHT

  “Miss Jellico?” Victor is saying. “Your lunch is here. Would you like something to eat?”

  I used to be able to smell the food in this place an hour in advance of its arrival, the still-pink sausages, potatoes mashed before all the water had been drained off, and baked beans in tomato sauce reduced to a paste from reheating. I would eat it all.

  My gut complained and I tried to ignore it, said nothing, and my disease hid itself inside me, undetected until it was too late. And now it is too late. Victor helps me to sit up. They must be glad to have him here, helping out for free, propping me up, listening. I am lucky to have my own room, and that there was funding to build this wing for those of us who are dying. I have heard them call it end of life, but whatever the nomenclature, it seems one of us pops off every other day. Victor wears his vestments to gain entry, given that he isn’t family and I haven’t asked for him, but I know he doesn’t visit any other people at the end of their lives; it’s my sins he wants to hear, no one else’s.

  He puts the plastic spoon in my hand, tries to wrap my fingers around it, but the pain in my joints is too great. Without the awful pity I see on other faces, he takes the spoon back. He must think I am much changed, transformed from the person I once was: shy and awkward, large and plain. Now I am a woman of bone and skin, the patches of pigmentation like a map of a rocky archipelago; I am obdurate and uncooperative, drifting on a sea of memory between islands of lucidity.

  Ignoring the re-formed meat slices in their too-brown gravy, he chases insipid sponge pudding and vivid custard around the bowl and blows on it before he holds the spoon to my mouth. I am starting to like him more than when I knew him previously: pudding before the main course. Priest, preacher, imam, minister? I have forgotten the word.

  The food tastes of sugar. I swallow. “What would you choose for your last meal?” I ask.

  “This isn’t your last meal, Miss Jellico. I’m certain you’ll have plenty more meals.”

  Platitudes. I ignore them. “What would you choose?”

  He blows on another spoonful of pudding. “Oh, I don’t know. A nice roast dinner? Rare beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

  “Not a beef vegetarian, then?” I say, remembering.

  “A beef vegetarian? Does such a thing exist?”

  I could tell him that it once did, but instead I say, “I’m surprised you wouldn’t choose bread and wine.” He smiles as though he knows that I’m in on his joke. Bread and wine is the last meal I eat with Peter and Cara. No, not the last meal, just the last food in the house. Empty bottles stand around their room as if we have been having a party. On the table amongst the used glasses and dirty plates there is a woven basket and inside it, the dry end of a morning roll.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me, Miss Jellico?” Victor asks. In his voice I hear the love I once ignored and it draws me back from Lyntons. “Jesus forgives all sins.” He says it at volume, seemingly for someone else’s benefit, and I realise one of the Care Assisters is also in the room, coming to see if I’ve finished my meal. I used to be a fast eater.

  “And yet I am still paying for mine,” I say, and he leans forward and I know he is hoping for something new, a tiny piece of bright cloth with which he can patch the hole in his knowledge, something I’ve never told in twenty years. Should I tell it now? He has forgotten he’s holding the spoon, and a slop of custard and sponge pudding falls onto his knee and down his cassock, and he springs up.

  “Bugger it,” he says and grabs at the paper napkin that has been left with the food, and smears the cloth. “Damn it,” he says. And I think he isn’t very good at pretending to be a clergyman after all. I am full, of sponge pudding and custard, of life and death. I close my eyes and three weeks before the crust of bread and the empty bottles are in Peter and Cara’s sitting room, I am walking onto the side terrace at Lyntons.

  On the side terrace Peter has placed a rusty stool from the basement and three upturned packing cases, one as a table. He came up to the attic, knocking on the door at the top of the stairs, then knocking on the bedroom door to ensure I was decent, and asking whether I minded getting up and having breakfast with Cara because he had to go and meet someone. He didn’t say why he didn’t want Cara to be alone. Breakfast was coffee and figs picked from a tree in the kitchen garden, thick cream with gooseberry jam, and tiny sponge cakes studded with currants that I hadn’t seen when I’d visited the baker’s. I was hungry.

  Cara, in a white embroidered blouse which was grubby around the neckline and a long skirt, was sitting on the paving stones in the shade, her back to the wall of the house. She was holding a book open on her knees and smoking a cigarette. In my mind she smiled as she let a rough farm boy touch her in a barn in Ireland, and then I chased the thought away.

  “Peter’s gone into town,” she said, squinting up at me. “He had to make some telephone calls and post a couple of letters. He said he’d take you on a tour of the house when he gets back.” I didn’t tell her that he had woken me and asked me to go down to eat with her. He hadn’t asked me not to say, but I liked the idea of us having the tiniest of secrets.

  She flapped the book in front of her face. “Will it rain today, do you think? Everything is horribly heavy. Shall we go to the lake? There might be a breeze by the water.”

  I stared at the food and wondered if it would be impolite to put two of the little cakes in my mouth at once. “I ought to visit the kitchen garden,” I said. “I need to add the dimensions to my plan of the estate.”

  “But that’s work,” she said. “It’s too hot for work.” She saw me hesitating, eyeing the food. “We could take breakfast with us. You could dip your toes in the water while we eat.” She scrubbed out her cigarette on the terrace paving and got up. “Liebermann’s report can wait another day.”

  Cara put the pot of jam and the bowl of cream in the wide pockets of her skirt, and tied the little buns and figs in the tablecloth. She poured us both a coffee from the pot—I didn’t ask for milk since there didn’t seem to be any on offer—and she passed me a cup to carry. I drank my lukewarm coffee while we walked through the garden. When the words If food is worth eating, it’s worth eating properly popped into my head, I dismissed them with a private smile.

  “Where will you go in September when you leave Lyntons?” I asked. We were walking through the rhododendrons. I had a daydream that they would ask me to go with them to Italy; a vision of the three of us standing on a Venetian bridge, gondolas tied up alongside the buildings, the sun catching on the water.

  “Wherever the work takes Peter, I suppose.”

  “Maybe you’ll go to Italy.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  The picture in my head vanished in an instant.

  “But isn’t that where you’ve always wanted to go?”

  “How about you?” she said. “Will you go back to London?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Wherever the work takes me, I suppose.” We laughed.

  I held back a thin branch and let her go in front. “How long have you been married?” I hoped she would continue with her story. Already I was a willing audience.

  She stopped and turned. “Pe
ter and I aren’t married,” she said, tapping her wedding ring on the tin cup she carried. “This is just for show.” And I was surprised that a secret pleasure leaped inside me, one that shocked me even as I noticed it. We carried on walking and she continued to talk. “Just like everything else, he says it’ll happen one day, but he won’t speak about it, Fran. He doesn’t like speaking about anything important, he brushes it away. He says he wants to look after me, keep me safe, and I know he’s telling the truth, that he loves me when no one else would.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true. . .” I trailed off, embarrassed that it wasn’t clear whether I thought he didn’t love her, or that no one else would. We came to the lake and walked out onto the jetty. Cara dropped the food wrapped in the tablecloth and put down her coffee cup, and before I knew what she was doing, she’d pulled the ring from her finger.

  “I wear it because Isabel would expect it of me, and for those small-minded people in the town, and so the vicar will let me in his stupid church. Have you noticed how much he looks like an effeminate Jesus—all that dark hair and beard?”

  And while I was thinking that maybe she was right, she tossed the ring far into the lake as if she were skimming a stone.

  “What?” she laughed, seeing my face. “It’s all about free love now, isn’t it? And anyway, Peter’s married, you know. To his first wife, Mallory.” And in an instant my absurd hopefulness for something I couldn’t name was snatched away. Cara sat on the concrete and picked at the knot she’d tied in the tablecloth. I was still standing and she looked up at me. “I expect that’s who he’s gone to telephone. He pays her alimony, you know. That’s where the money goes, not on the food I buy. And she’s always complaining that it isn’t enough. I suppose he feels guilty for leaving her. Poor old Peter. She was desperate to have children, but it didn’t happen. Anyway, he thought she would have made a terrible mother, so he left. And then he found me.” She said her last words too lightheartedly, and gave up on the knot in the tablecloth. I sat beside her.

  “Sorry, Fran. I’ve shocked you. I thought you’d worked it out. I did. We were in Ireland, in his car, and he said he had to go back to England and couldn’t stay with me. I wrote wife on the misted-up window and he got very angry and rubbed it out, and said he was trying to get a divorce but that it was difficult.”

  “He stayed on with you and your mother when his car broke down?”

  “He stayed three nights that time: Mr. Byrne had to diagnose the fault, order the part, wait for it to arrive, and fit it. Dermod arranged for Father Creagh to come around when Isabel was out. Did you know that Dermod taught me the rosary, took me to Holy Communion and confession, told me all the Catholic stories while I sat next to him at the kitchen table? Isabel knew he did it, but she pretended she didn’t. She’d been brought up a Protestant, but I was allowed to pick and choose. I liked Catholicism, I still do; I know where I am with it. But at school they called me the Protestant, even though I learned my catechism with the rest of them. That was Paddy’s name for me too.

  “I had to sit opposite Father Creagh in the back parlour and listen to him saying I was ungrateful, and a worry to my mother and to God, and that good girls don’t run off to Dublin. Dermod had hung up the one picture we had of Jesus for Father Creagh’s visit, but it wasn’t like the holy pictures my friends had in their houses—the ones where you can see flames coming out of Jesus’s chest and he looks so sad and pathetic, or where he’s holding his heart in his hand. The one we owned was by a Spanish painter, I’ve forgotten his name. Not the actual one of course, a copy. Jesus was wretchedly handsome on his cross, and looking like a real man with real blood coming from his hands and feet, and all he had on was that little white cloth tied around his waist. I sat there in the back parlour while Father Creagh talked to me, and I said, Yes Father, sorry Father. And all the time he was speaking I was looking up at the painting and imagining it was Peter’s face instead of Jesus’s and that I helped him down from the cross, and lay next to him, and the cloth, which suddenly didn’t seem to be tied on anywhere, just slipped off.”

  She said it to shock me, and I was shocked. I was starting to learn that this was what Cara did. But what I didn’t know then was that each scandalous statement or action was designed to be more outrageous than the last. She laughed at the memory of it, and to hide my hot face I took the tablecloth with the food inside it and picked at the knot.

  “After that I didn’t spend much time in the house,” she continued. “I couldn’t bear seeing Isabel making eyes at Peter, and him letting her win at draughts out of some social obligation. I took my Italian-English dictionary and went up above the river to learn some new words. That’s where Peter found me, under the umbrella, practicing. I think I was on the Cs: corsetto, corsia . . .I’m already forgetting the words. He came under the umbrella and I taught him the meaning of corteggiatore even though it wasn’t the next word in the dictionary. It means suitor, or lover. I wasn’t sure though that he got the hint. He is the most naive man I’ve ever met. But we sat on the rock for an hour or more, talking about my plans to get away, about Italy, which he’d never been to, France, which he had. And then he said that the car was ready and he was leaving, and I wondered if he’d come to find me to say goodbye. We walked home in the rain, and when we got back to Killaspy he tilted up the umbrella and Mr. Byrne was there, wiping his hands on an oily towel, and we realised the rain must have stopped ages ago.

  “I asked him if he was going to buy the house and he said, No, I don’t think I will, and I took that to mean he wasn’t interested in me and that he would be going away and not coming back. But he only meant he wasn’t going to buy the house. It’s very easy to read too much into what Peter says. He went inside to pack and I couldn’t bear to stand there with Isabel, so I ran across the fields to Paddy.

  “He was in the barn sweeping. I can’t remember what we talked about. I was thinking of Peter saying goodbye to Dermod, going out to the porch with Isabel, shaking her hand, giving her a kiss on the cheek. I wondered whether he would ask where I was so he could say goodbye to me too, or whether he wouldn’t think about me at all. In the barn I let Paddy press me up against the hay bales while I imagined Peter putting the case he’d arrived with into the boot of his car and getting into the driver’s seat. I thought about Isabel tapping on the car window to delay him again while Paddy rubbed himself against me. We were still dressed. I was angry with Peter; I had my eyes closed but I could see him starting his little green car, Isabel standing on the drive, and Dermod watching from the house. Paddy was groaning and his wet mouth was on my neck, and suddenly it was disgusting, he was disgusting, and I pushed him off. He shouted that I was a tease, and didn’t all Protestant girls give it up? He put his hand down his trousers and adjusted himself and then picked up the broom where he had dropped it and said, What difference does it make whether we do it now, or after we’re married?

  “I ran out of the barn, around the farmhouse and through their vegetable patch at the back, and then I was on Hatchery Lane, running in my father’s wellingtons, galumphing up to the Thomastown Road. The little green sports car came around the corner. I didn’t think it would—in all the stories the girl is always too late, the boy has left—but there it was, coming towards me with Peter in it. His face lit up when he saw me—I knew he was pleased. He asked if I wanted a lift back to Killaspy, and I said, No, I want to go for a drive, and although he seemed surprised I got in and we drove off into the countryside. I told him a story about Saint Brigid and how she was fed on the milk of a white cow and that her skull is in Portugal and the Portuguese bring it buckets of water and her skull turns the water to milk. He laughed and said he’d never met anyone like me before.

  “He stopped the car in the entrance to a field and I thought, Go on then, kiss me, but he just sat there, staring out at the rain while the windows steamed up. I took one of his hands and put it on my knee, on top of my woollen tights, and he said, Oh, Cara. And I was shaking so much that
he asked if I was cold. Will I get you the blanket from the boot? he said, and I laughed and told him that he’d been in Ireland too long. And he looked at me and said he didn’t want to leave, but then he seemed to regret saying that and he took his hand off my knee and said he had to catch his plane back to England, and then he drove me home.”

  The knot in the tablecloth I had been picking at came undone. “And was that when you wrote wife on the steamed-up window?” The little cakes had broken into twos and threes, crushed under the figs.

  “That was later. When he came back.” Cara took the jar of gooseberry jam from her pocket and set it on the jetty. She looked in the other, and we could both see that the pot had turned over, and the cream, clotted with its yellow crust, filled her pocket. “I think we’ll get married when his divorce comes through. And we’ll have lots of blond-haired children and live happily ever after.”

  I didn’t say that she’d already told me that. Instead I said, “I think you’ll make a marvellous mother.” But I knew I was saying those words because they were required, not because I thought she would.

  “Yes,” Cara said, and then immediately, “No.” She picked up a piece of sponge, dipped it in the cream in her pocket, and held it up to my mouth, waiting, until I leaned forward and took it. She selected a fig and used a fingernail to make a slit in the skin long enough to insert the tips of her thumbs and rip it open. “There was a child, you see, and I let him go.”

  I was surprised, shocked even. I had imagined a simple love story, albeit complicated with a first wife. But now here was a child that Cara had let go. I wasn’t even sure what that meant; adoption, I supposed.