The Blood Oranges (23 page)

W
HEN CATHERINE COLLAPSED THAT DAY ON THE COLD
stone floor of the squat church and in the midst of Hugh’s meager yet highly emotional funeral service, it was Fiona who first thought of the three fatherless children, Fiona who made her immediate and selfless decision to take upon herself the responsibility of the children and carry them off.

To sum it up, as only last night I finally summed it up for Catherine, Hugh died and Catherine gave way to more than grief and Fiona departed with all three of those young and partially orphaned girls. Fiona and I knew exactly what was happening and what to do. Fiona knew her part and I knew mine. She went. I stayed. Fiona assumed management of the children as if they were hers, I undertook Catherine’s recovery as if she were my wife instead of Hugh’s. Fiona went off to impart womanhood to those three little growing girls, I stayed behind to explain Hugh’s death to Catherine, to account for her missing children, to convince her
that I was not, as she thought, responsible for all her losses, to renew our love.

Last night I talked and Catherine listened. My voice grew thick and confidential in the darkness, she put her hand on mine, she asked questions, every now and then she suddenly raised her wineglass and quickly drank. Exhilaration in the palm of peace? A further step in the dark?

Last night we sat beneath the grapes, Catherine and I, sat together side by side at the little rickety table in the arbor and ate the soft flakes of fish and the grapes on our plates and the bread, the wedges of cheese, sat together comfortably and tasted the dark red acidic tang of the wine and talked together, lapsed into silence. Arm over the back of my chair, glass in hand, I insisted on the accidental nature of Hugh’s death, explained to Catherine that Hugh’s death was an accident inspired, so to speak, by his cameras, his peasant nudes, his ingesting of the sex-song itself. It was not our shared love that had triggered Hugh’s catastrophe. It was simply that his private interests, private moods, had run counter to the actualities of our foursome, so that his alien myth of privacy had established a psychic atmosphere conducive to an accident of that kind. Hugh’s death hinged only on himself. And yet for that death even he was not to blame.

“Hugh was not a suicide,” I murmured, “believe me.”

Last night I covered that ground with all the simplicity and delicacy I could muster and shifted back to Fiona’s motives in going off with the girls. My final low note of reassurance was that Fiona’s departure was not, like Hugh’s death, a finality. With or without the children, I said, 
Fiona herself would one day be coming back to us. At any moment, or at some time in the distant future, Fiona would simply come looking for us through the funeral cypresses. It was not a certainty, of course, but that had been the tenor of our farewell. Nothing was fixed.

R
OSELIA (OUR SMALL, DARK-EYED, SULLEN ROSELLA) HAS
spurned them all. The brazen village lover no longer spends half the night calling to Rosella through the lacy darkness of the cypress trees, the married fishermen have abandoned hope of holding Rosella’s hand. Even the old man who was the most vigorous and insistent of the lot, a short and barrel-chested old widower full of aggressive appreciation, no longer appears each dusk to tie his little female donkey in our lemon grove and to shake my hand, to glance covertly at Catherine, to tempt Rosella with his garrulous promises of lust and tenderness. Yes, I tell myself, they are gone, the lot of them, including the old man who left us one night forever with one hand thrust into his ragged pants and his great dark lecherous old face smiling in the grief of his last denial. Any one of them might have given Rosella a honeyed tongue, a life independent of the headless god. The old man would have put her back to work in the empty field, would have given her the donkey to lead along narrow thyme-scented paths of crushed shell, each night would have given her all the chuckling and naked magnificence of his uncountable years. But they are gone,
all of them, and now the nights are filled with Rosella’s would-be lovers brooding separately in their far-flung huts of stone. And reclining on the wicker settee next to Catherine, I smoke, I listen, I notice Rosella watching us. I think of the old widower rubbing his squat knees in the darkness. I miss him (simple-minded old man with an itch for love), Catherine misses him, Fiona would never have let him go. Only Rosella is indifferent to the still night and all her absent suitors spurned for me. She is here, she is a shadow, she is Hugh’s last peasant nude.

H
OW LIKE FIONA TO INSIST ON HELPING HUGH, I THOUGHT
. While Catherine walked with the children in the middle and I brought up the rear with the rusty shovel, my wife joined Hugh at the head of our burial party and, staggering slightly under her share of the weight of the coffin, helped lead the way. Fiona’s mood was serious, her face was white, it was she and she alone who had to help Hugh carry the coffin. So from silver handles at either end, the small black top-heavy coffin swung between slender woman and slender man and journeyed slowly through the gloom of the noonday trees toward the hole which I, of course, would dig.

“Listen,” I heard Hugh say under his breath, “am I going too fast for you?”

“No, baby. It’s all right.”

For a moment they looked at each other—two heads in significant profile, two lovers joined by their shiny burden.
I saw their glance, I valued it, I noted the tightened muscles of Fiona’s bare arm, I balanced the rusted shovel on one shoulder and smelled the breeze. In my left hand I gripped the pitted iron shaft of the Byzantine cross. Widely separated, speckled in soft light, we were moving, softly moving, and underfoot the carpet of brown pine needles could not have been more appropriate to Meredith’s misery or to the solemnity that Hugh and Fiona were casting over the occasion. For once Hugh was the father, Fiona had become a beautiful dry-eyed priestess for the dead dog and little girls. Catherine was doing her part, though Meredith refused to be consoled, and for the time being the two smaller children were behaving themselves. I too was enjoying the spirit of this unlikely hour.

No more old black dog, I told myself. No more wheezing in the darkness or paws on our bed at night. And how like Hugh to come to Fiona and me with the dead dog in his arms, how like him to leave the old animal’s body for an entire day behind our villa while in one of the narrow streets of the town he managed to find an actual coffin that was small, black, thickly ornamented, and intended obviously for a child. Now only Meredith was sniffling, Meredith who would not hold Catherine’s hand and who walked alone, while in our various ways the rest of us played out Hugh’s game of burial.

“We can stop and rest if you like.”

“It’s OK, baby. It’s OK.”

Fiona believed in the grief of children. I, of course, did not. Fiona’s short yellow shift and slender naked feet meant nothing, in no way contradicted the intensity of her mood as pallbearer. But that faint ring of impatience in Fiona’s
voice? Yes, that brief sound told me that Fiona herself suspected Hugh’s motives, suddenly disliked his evident concern for her well-being at a time like this, doubted that the death of a fifteen-year-old decrepit dog justified all the elaborateness of Hugh’s formal plan. No matter what I might think, Fiona was walking through this grove of death because of Meredith. Whereas Hugh was apparently moving to the rhythm of some dark death of his own.

Muted path, dark green light, rough music of Meredith’s unhappiness. And Catherine, for whom all of this could only be one more domestic incident, was carrying little Eveline high on her hip and I was strolling after them and swinging the cross, shouldering my long-handled rusted shovel. Naturally it was Catherine, I mused, who had discovered the lifeless body of the dog, Catherine who had summoned Hugh, Catherine who had undertaken the job of telling Meredith. Yes, I thought, merely one more domestic incident for Catherine. But as a matter of fact, perhaps she was just as susceptible to her oldest daughter’s grief and her husband’s game as was Fiona. Why not assume that she was moved somehow, and like me was quite satisfied with her more pedestrian role in this makeshift ceremonial affair?

“Meredith, baby, stop crying. Please.”

But crab grass? Familiar crab grass? Full circle at last? And was it really possible that Hugh had brought us full circle through the gloom of the trees and across the carpet of pine needles to this thin strip of gray sand and frieze of sharp-toothed brittle grass which had once concealed his outstretched body from Fiona’s eyes but not from mine? Did he now intend the pitted cross in my left hand to mark
not only the grave of the dog but also the very location where he himself had once sprawled dreaming his naked dream? Had he deliberately selected this spot of his lonely passion as the site for the pathetic grave? But was I reading the signs correctly? Was this in fact the same gray sand, the same black and fibrous crab grass? Yes, I told myself, none other, because now my field boots were sinking ankle-deep into familiar sand and Hugh’s shadow was already stretched out and sleeping in that low and narrow plot behind the crab grass where I would drive the shovel.

“Don’t say anything to spoil it, baby,” Fiona whispered at my elbow. “I’m warning you.”

So now the sonorous gloom of the trees had given way to the clear light of the empty beach. We were standing motionless together between trees and sea with the soft blue sky above us and, at our feet, the small and heavy casket stark on the sand. Bare-chested and thinking idly of incense, white-walled cemetery, family of anonymous mourners, white chapel housing a faceless priest, slowly I struck the shovel upright in the sand and glanced at Fiona, acknowledged her unnecessary admonition, gave her to understand that, as always, she had nothing to fear from her strong and acquiescent Cyril. But Fiona did not return my smile and my imaginary peasant mourners of a moment before were gone.

“Look what they’re doing,” Meredith said then. “Make them stop!”

Catherine glanced at Hugh, Hugh scowled, Fiona began to fidget though her eyes were gentle. For the first time that day I studied Meredith’s little pinched pragmatic face
and saw that she had been rubbing her eyes and nostrils with the back of her hand. Something was always wrong for Meredith, obviously something was already wrong with the funeral. Even the sight of Cyril leaning ready and sober on the handle of the upright shovel was not enough for Meredith. Not now at least.

“Dolores,” Hugh said, “Eveline. Get away from the coffin.”

“They’re just playing,” Catherine said. “Leave them alone.”

“They’re not playing,” said Meredith, “they’re trying to open it. Make them stop.”

“Listen, Catherine. I’m telling you to get those children away from that coffin. Now do it.”

More tears? Fresh cause for adolescent accusation? Or sudden shrieks of pain from the two small girls? Meredith in flight from the collapsing funeral and Hugh stalking off with Fiona? And all because the two fat little girls were flopping and climbing on the coffin at last and, in happy silence, were in fact tugging at the heavy lid which Hugh himself had feverishly screwed in place? Even while we four adults looked on (tall, quiet, silhouetted in the salty breeze, immobile, reluctant to move), now those two small children were setting upon the coffin with all the animation they had held in check from the moment our slow procession had first started off from the villas. Dolores was sitting astride the truncated high-topped brightly lacquered black coffin and riding it, beating upon its thick hollow-sounding sides with both fat hands. Little Eveline was pulling in fierce and speechless delight on the right-hand silver
handle and laughing, kicking the sand, suddenly looking up at me. But now they were reversing themselves, scrambling to change places, so that Eveline was riding the fat black dolphin of the casket while Dolores was struggling on hands and knees to push the whole thing over. Eveline shouted, Dolores suddenly rested one plump cheek coquettishly against the slick hard surface of what she would never know was the old dog’s lead-lined resting place. The casket moved, Hugh glowered. The casket tilted and sank a little deeper into the gray sand. I saw the cry of anger leaping to Meredith’s thin lips.

“Don’t just stand there, baby. Do something.”

But then Catherine stooped down in matter-of-fact slow motion and pulled them off, drew them away, removed their offensive presence from the austere object of Meredith’s despair, led them safely and with a few obvious maternal words to a low hummock of spongy grass and sat down holding them close against her upraised knees and warm and comforting torso. Hugh took two strides and put his long arm around Meredith’s narrow and bony shoulders. Fiona sighed. Catherine squeezed her little culprits. I rubbed my chest. Once more funereal peace was ours.

“Meredith says she wants to dig the grave herself, boy, if it’s all right with you.”

“Sure,” I said, turning away from the shovel. “It’s hard work, but let her try.”

So Hugh relinquished Meredith, whose eyes were more pink-rimmed than ever, I saw, and positioned himself close but not too close to Fiona, while in silence I aligned myself, so to speak, with Catherine. In our semicircle around the would-be grave we allowed ourselves no talking,
no more secret signals, as if at last to convince poor Meredith of our complete attention.

“Whenever you want me to take over, Meredith,” I said, “just let me know.”

But she recoiled from my offer as I knew she must, and thin, disheveled, with her outgrown childish light green frock only partially buttoned up the back (having refused Catherine’s early morning commiseration, having allowed no one to button the dress or comb her short-cropped hair), she bent herself to the task which she could not possibly accomplish. The handle of the shovel was much too long for Meredith, the flat rusted blade much too heavy. Never had she been so insistent, never had she been so cruelly indulged, while the four of us silently waited and looked on.

The shovel scraped in the sand, she held her breath, she twisted and swung her arms, a little shower of moist sand fell through the breeze. On she went, concentrating, wearing down, glancing at Hugh between each stroke. And then Meredith simply threw down the shovel. She broke her awkward rhythm and admitted defeat, not by making some kind of agreeable teary appeal to the waiting and bare-chested friend of her father, but simply by turning full in my direction, hefting high above her head the shovel, holding it aloft in both stiff and frail arms, and then flinging it down. It was a gesture far more vehement than I had expected, and yet no doubt Meredith’s sudden display of unmistakable temper was preferable to any soft-voiced appeal for my assistance. And at least this little wasted interlude was at an end.