Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller

Author:Claire Fuller [Claire Fuller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241341827
Publisher: Penguin Books Limited (UK)
Published: 2018-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

13

I caught a bus going north-west from Waterloo and got off at Dollis Hill. I could have used the Underground, but Mother and I had usually taken the bus in London once we could no longer afford taxis. If there was an accident she said she wanted to be able to see her head rolling away instead of having to scrabble around for it in the dark.

I had only been gone for two weeks, but already London seemed foreign, or else it was I who was the foreigner.

I stood outside 24 Forrest Road in the creeping dusk and considered the two women who had shared the upstairs rooms for almost thirty years. My mother had been brought up with certain expectations – a couple of servants, a nice house, a loving husband, a child or two. She had believed she would have all of this when she became engaged to Luther Jellico, a distant and wealthier cousin. But Luther delayed the wedding for two years, and then longer, making her wait until he had returned from Gallipoli. When I was ten, the marriage ended; the entertaining in the grand house in Notting Hill, the tailor-made clothes, the fine dinners, all of them over. My father moved me and Mother to a few rooms in north London.

Mother used to call the place we lived in ‘an apartment’, but 24 Forrest Road hadn’t been properly converted. We shared the front door with our downstairs neighbour, Mrs Lee, as well as the boiler and the plumbing. A bath with a lid, which doubled as a table, stood in the kitchen. Filling it used a boiler’s worth of hot water, as Mrs Lee liked to shout up the stairs. Mother and I had shared the bedroom and the bed at the front of the house, since the second bedroom was full of furniture and clothes that she had brought with us from Notting Hill.

I walked up the path and peeped through the letterbox, but all I could see was a slice of the banister and the light coming in through Mrs Lee’s kitchen window. I had been hoping for a feeling of homecoming or nostalgia, but I could have been peering into a stranger’s house and I knew I no longer belonged there.

I caught the bus back into town, staring at the families in the lit windows of the houses: a man reading a newspaper with his slippers on; a child kneeling on a sofa with her nose pressed to the glass, waiting for her father to come home from work; a young woman on an upright chair, the light from a television flickering over her face. Ordinary lives.

When I got off the bus in Fitzrovia I walked until I came across a small hotel that appeared suitable: probably not expensive but with recently washed net curtains, three steps up to the front door which were free of street dust, the exterior nothing like the boarding house I had stayed in before I’d left London after Mother died.

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