Chapter 30

Chapter Thirty: The Orange Tree

Five years later

The orange tree arrived on a Saturday in October, in a wooden crate, on the back of a flatbed truck.

It was not a large tree. It stood perhaps five feet tall, with a slender gray trunk and a crown of dark glossy leaves, and it had been grown, according to the label, in a nursery in the south of Spain from a cutting of a very old stock. Two men in green overalls lifted it down with great care, as though it were a sleeping child, and carried it up the long white path of Hollis Park toward the great Victorian glasshouse that stood at the end, bright and clear in the morning sun.

Behind them, at a respectful distance, walked a procession.

It was an odd, assorted little company. At the head, leaning on a plain black cane that had once belonged to a very old and very stubborn man, came a small, silver-haired woman in a plum-colored coat. She was seventy-one that spring, and she walked slowly now, with a faint rolling gait, but her eyes behind their glasses were as sharp as they had ever been, and she kept up a steady, low, indignant murmur at the two men in front.

"Mind the step," said Ruth Delaney. "It's a living thing. It isn't a sofa."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't yes, ma'am me. Mind the step."

"Yes, ma... Yes."

At her side, in a long gray coat, with a small girl riding on his shoulders, walked a tall, dark man with a narrow, severe face and a very faint pink flush across the tops of his ears. The girl was four years old. She had her father's gray eyes, and her mother's straight dark hair, and a missing front tooth, and she was clutching a paper bag in both hands with the grim determination of a person entrusted with a state secret.

"Papa," she announced. "Is it a big orange tree?"

"Not yet."

"When?"

"In about five years, I'm told."

"That's a very long time."

"It is." Adrian Vance tilted his head, gravely, so that she could look him in the eye. "But Miss Ruth says that good things are worth the wait."

"Miss Ruth says that about soup."

"Miss Ruth," said Ruth, without turning her head, "is generally right."

Behind them came the rest. A stout, brown-faced man in a pressed suit, with a grown daughter on his arm who wore the neat navy uniform of a ward sister. A broad-shouldered woman in a gray coat and a crumpled hat, holding a paper cup. A thin, bespectacled man with a crooked tie and two children trailing at his heels, one of whom had already lost a shoe. A gaunt, quiet figure in a black overcoat who walked a little apart from the others, with a battered thermos tucked under one arm and a faint, private smile on his lips.

And last of all, a little way behind, walking alone, came a woman in a long blue coat.

She was thirty-three years old, but she looked, in the clear morning light, both older and younger. Her dark hair was cut in a simple shoulder-length bob, threaded here and there with the first fine silver. Her face was thin and pale and quiet, with the clear, scrubbed look of a person who has spent a great deal of time in rooms without mirrors. There was a small scar across her right palm. She carried nothing in her hands. She walked with her head slightly bowed, and her eyes on the long white path, and her lips moved a little, as though she were counting her steps.

Lena Vance fell into place beside her.

"Nervous?" she said.

"Terrified."

"It's only a tree."

"It isn't." Celeste Aldine drew a long breath, and looked up at the great glass dome ahead, glittering and green in the sun. "It's the first thing in my life I've ever planted."

She had been out for fourteen months.

It had been, by every account, a slow and careful reentry. The review had gone well, in the autumn after the wedding. The parole board had been presented with a single, extraordinary file: a letter from the chairman of the Cross Family Trust; a statement from a senior partner in a small and growing consultancy; a long, dry, grudging report from a Detective Inspector who described the subject as the most thoroughly rehabilitated offender I have had the misfortune to arrest. There had been a fifth document, which had arrived late, and which the board secretary had read out in a voice that was not entirely steady. It had been written by a ninety-one-year-old man in a morning coat, six weeks before his death, and it had consisted of a single page.

I have lived a long time, it said, and in all that time, I have met three people of true courage. One of them was an accountant named Henry Aldine. One of them was his daughter. I should be obliged if the board would give her the chance to prove it.

She had been released in the spring of the following year.

She had spent the first month at Ruth's. It had been an odd, tender, awkward season, two women of very different ages circling each other in a small warm kitchen, learning the rules. There had been long silences. There had been a great deal of soup. On the eleventh night, Ruth had come into the sitting room at midnight to find the younger woman standing at the window in her nightgown, looking out at the street, with a face as white as paper.

"I can't sleep with the door unlocked," Celeste had said.

"Then lock it."

"It feels wrong. It feels like I'm doing something I'm not allowed to do."

"Cece," said Ruth. "Come here."

She had come. Ruth had put both arms around her, awkwardly, fiercely, and had held her for a very long time, in the dark, in the sleeping house, and neither of them had said anything at all.

In the autumn, she had begun to work.

It was a small job, at first. A junior bookkeeper's post at the Henry Aldine Foundation, a modest, unglamorous, quietly well-funded charity, housed in three rooms above a bakery on the east side. It trained young accountants from families with no money and no connections. It paid their fees. It found them placements. It had, in four years, put forty-one students through their professional exams, and every one of them had been told, on their first day, the name of the man who had made it possible.

It was run, with a gruff and loving hand, by an unassuming man in a battered coat who had resigned his position at the Cross Meridian Group the year before, and who now spent his days reading applications and making stew.

"It's your own recipe, I think," Lena had told him, the first time she tasted it.

"It's my mother's."

"No. It's yours." She had set down the spoon. "She put in too much bay leaf because she was tired and loved you. You put in the right amount because you're paying attention. They're not the same."

Damian Cross had looked at her for a long moment, across the table in the small bright kitchen above the bakery. He had grown a little gray at the temples. There were new lines around his mouth, lines that came from smiling. And he had said, quietly, "That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to my stew."

They gathered in the orange house at noon.

It was a small annex at the eastern end of the conservatory, a warm glass room smelling of earth and citrus, with a flagged floor and a low stone basin and a long window full of sky. For ten years it had been used to store watering cans. Over the summer, at the request of a small and rather insistent committee, it had been cleared, and swept, and fitted with a shining new bed of rich dark soil, laid out in the center of the floor beneath the highest point of the dome.

The men in green overalls set the tree down very gently on the earth. They stepped back. They looked at Ruth, who nodded.

"Well," she said. "Cece. It's yours."

Celeste did not move.

She stood at the edge of the little circle, with her hands at her sides, looking at the slender gray trunk and the dark shining leaves. A shaft of sunlight fell through the dome and lay across the tree like a blessing. Somewhere overhead, in the rafters, a bird was singing. And her face, quite suddenly, was wet.

"I don't know how," she whispered.

"It isn't hard," said Lena.

"I've never done it."

"Neither have I." Lena smiled. She took off her gloves. "Shall we do it together?"

They knelt on the cold stone, side by side, in the dark rich soil. It was cool and damp and fragrant. It stuck to their fingers, and got under their nails, and Celeste laughed once, a short startled sound, and said that it was nothing like she'd imagined. They lifted the tree between them, very carefully, by the root ball, and lowered it into the waiting hole. They firmed the earth around it with their hands. When it was done, Ruth came forward with a watering can, and poured a long slow stream of water over the roots, and the whole bright room seemed to sigh.

Nobody spoke.

The sun shifted. A small breeze drifted through the open vent, and the glossy leaves stirred, very slightly, as though the tree were waking.

"Papa," said a small clear voice from Adrian's shoulders. "Can I give it the present now?"

"Go on, then."

He lifted her down. She trotted forward in her small red boots, clutching her paper bag, and stopped in front of the tree. She looked up at it, gravely, with her head tilted back. Then she dug her hand into the bag, and drew out something round and bright and perfect, and held it up in both fists.

It was an orange.

"It's for Mr. Aldine," she announced. "Mama says he liked them."

For a moment, no one breathed.

Celeste Aldine looked at the small girl in the red boots, and the small round fruit in her hands, and something in her face broke, very quietly, like ice on a river. She went down on one knee in the earth. She put out her hand.

"Thank you," she said, in a voice that was barely a whisper. "Thank you, Ruthie."

"You're welcome." The girl considered her with solemn gray eyes. "Mama says you're sad sometimes."

"I am."

"Mama says that's okay."

"Your mama," said Celeste, unsteadily, "is a very wise woman."

"I know," said Ruthie Vance, with great patience. "Everybody says."

She put the orange into Celeste's hand, and Celeste held it. She held it in her scarred palm, in the golden light, and bent her head, and wept, quite openly, without any attempt to hide it, with the sun on her face and the whole circle of watching friends around her. Nobody said a word. Nobody moved. And after a while, Lena, who was kneeling beside her in the dirt, put one arm around her shoulders, and Ruth put a hand on her head, and a broad, rough, gentle hand came down on her other shoulder, and she looked up and saw Tomas Reyes, with his cap in his hand and tears running down his weathered face.

"Your father was a good man," he said. "I never met him. But I'd have been proud to."

"Thank you."

"He raised a good one."

She laughed. It was a wet, cracked, helpless laugh, and she wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and looked at the orange in her hand, round and bright and impossibly ordinary.

"I can't peel it," she said. "I never could. He always did it for me."

"I'll do it," said Lena.

"In a spiral?"

"I'll try."

She took the fruit. She found her thumbnail, and pierced the skin, and the sharp bright smell rose up into the warm air like a flag. Very slowly, very carefully, with the whole room watching, she began to peel. The rind curled away in a long glossy ribbon. It nearly broke at the first turn. It nearly broke again at the second. But she held her breath, and her hand was steady, and the long orange spiral came away whole, and dropped, unbroken, into Celeste's open palm.

There was a silence.

Then, from somewhere in the third row of watchers, a voice said, in a hoarse, wondering whisper:

"Make a wish."

Celeste closed her fingers around the spiral of peel.

She did not speak. She shut her eyes, tight, and her lips moved, for a long moment, in silence. Then she opened them, and looked at the little tree in the sunlight, and smiled, and it was the smile of a very young child, and it was wholly her own.

"I won't say it," she said. "But I think it's already coming true."

They ate at the long table in the palm court, under the high glass, among the ferns.

It was not a grand meal. Ruth had insisted on soup. Marcus had brought three kinds of cake, and a rather alarming quantity of sparkling cider, and had been forbidden by his wife to open it before two. Damian's thermos, to universal acclaim, proved to contain the best stew anyone had ever tasted, and Mrs. Osei, who had not been known to praise a dish since 1998, was observed taking a second helping.

It was almost three when Lena slipped away.

She went quietly, down the long green aisle between the palms, past the dry stone fountain, to the little bench beneath the banana tree where, five years and nine months before, she had sat in a gray coat with a notebook and waited for a man in black. It was warm there. The air smelled of wet earth and growing things. Rain, a light, silver, October rain, had begun to patter on the glass, high above, and the sound came down through the leaves like a soft applause.

She sat down. She tipped her head back. She closed her eyes.

How strange, she thought. How very strange, to be here.

She thought of a small, serious woman in a gray dress, sitting alone at a kitchen table, with her hair pinned back and her hands folded, listening to a clock tick. She thought she could see her quite clearly, in the lamplight, with the diamond on her finger. She had been so patient. She had been so very tired. She had believed, with her whole heart, that love was a lamp, and that if she kept it lit long enough, someone might come in out of the dark.

You were wrong, you know, Lena told her, gently. Not about the lamp. About the dark.

It was never that someone had to come in. It was that you were allowed to go out.

A footstep sounded on the flagstones.

She did not open her eyes. She knew the tread. It was slow, and unhurried, and a little uneven, the footstep of a man who had spent a decade learning to walk quietly in a loud world. It stopped beside the bench. A warm weight settled beside her, and a long arm slid, without fuss, around her shoulders.

"You've been crying," said Adrian.

"A little."

"Good crying, or bad?"

"I don't believe there's any other kind, any more." She turned her head against his shoulder. "It's all just feeling. It comes in and goes out, like the tide. I used to think it would drown me."

"And now?"

"Now I think it's rather like weather." She smiled. "One dresses accordingly."

He laughed, a low warm sound that she felt against her ribs. For a long while, neither of them spoke. Down the long green aisle, they could hear the others: Ruth's voice, indignant, over the soup; Marcus's, hushed and urgent, over the cider; the high clear laughter of a small girl in red boots who had been entrusted with the last slice of hazelnut cake.

"Lena."

"Mm?"

"Do you ever think about it?" His voice was quiet. "The road. The rain. What might have happened if it had gone another way."

She was silent for a moment.

"Sometimes," she said. "I think about the version of me who didn't have the recorder. Who didn't go through that door. Who stayed on the sofa, and kept on apologizing, and married a man who never looked at her." She turned the ring on her finger. "I think she would have been very kind. And very small. And I think she would have died, one day, in a house with a great deal of furniture, without ever once being asked what she wanted."

"Do you mourn her?"

"I do." She nodded. "She was brave, in her way. She deserved better. But I don't wish her back."

"Nor do I."

"I know." She smiled. "You'd never have met her."

"I would have." He pressed his lips against her hair. "I'd have found her anyway. In a glasshouse, or a boardroom, or a bus queue. I'd have looked up one day and seen a woman writing a very honest report, and I would have thought, there. That's the one."

"You are a sentimental man, Adrian Vance."

"I am a useful sort of idiot," said Adrian. "It's in writing."

She laughed, and turned, and kissed him, and the rain went on falling gently on the great glass roof, like the slow soft beat of a heart.

When they came back to the orange house, the light was beginning to go.

The others had gone. Only one figure remained, standing by the little tree in the amber dusk, quite alone. She had taken off her coat. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, and her hands were stained with earth, and she was looking up at the dark glossy leaves with a quiet, absorbed, tender attention, like a woman listening to a heartbeat.

"Still here?" said Lena.

Celeste turned. Her face, in the dim gold light, was calm. It was thin and pale and marked with the faint lines of old sorrow, but it was open, and quiet, and utterly without fear.

"I thought I'd stay a while," she said. "It's very peaceful."

"It is."

"Do you think it will live?"

"I think it will thrive."

"It might not bear fruit for years."

"It might not."

"I may not be here to see it."

"You will be," said Lena.

Celeste smiled. She turned back to the tree, and laid her hand, gently, flat against the slender trunk, as one lays a hand on the shoulder of a friend.

"My father used to say," she said, "that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. And the second best time was now."

"He sounds like a wise man."

"He was a terrible gardener." A short, bright, wet laugh escaped her. "He killed every plant he ever touched. But he loved them."

"That counts for a great deal."

"I think it counts for everything," said Celeste.

She stood a moment longer. Then she took her hand from the tree, and wiped it on her skirt, and turned, and crossed the stone floor to where Lena and Adrian stood together in the open doorway. She stopped before them. She did not speak. She only looked, at the tall man with the pink ears and the small, sure woman beside him, and her face did something that Lena would remember for the rest of her life.

She smiled.

It was not the old smile, the bright and brittle and beautiful one, that had been made for rooms full of people. It was not the shy, unwilling, half-formed smile of the visitors' room. It was something simpler, and rarer, and far more beautiful, the smile of a person who has come, after a very long journey, to the end of the road, and found, to her astonishment, that there was a light on in the window.

"Thank you," she said. "For coming to find me."

"You were never lost," said Lena.

"No?"

"Only late."

Celeste laughed.

It was a low, clear, startled sound, and it rang out beneath the great glass dome, among the orchids and the ferns, and the little tree in its bed of fresh dark earth seemed to stir, as if it, too, were listening. Somewhere far above, the rain had stopped. A single star had come out, small and white and clear, between the clouds. And in the long gold quiet, the three of them stood together in the doorway of the orange house, and watched the light go out of the sky, and did not speak, and did not need to.

She had rehearsed the evening so many times that she could have performed it in her sleep.

But this one, she had not rehearsed at all.

Lena Vance turned her left hand over in the dusk. The ring on it was plain, and warm, and quite her own. She looked at it for a long moment. Then she closed her fingers, and opened them, and let the evening come.

Love isn't a firework, she thought. Love isn't even a lamp.

Love is a table, with a window, and a candle, and a person who arrives on time.

And you may sit down at it, whenever you like.

THE END