The Orange

'And so, Mr Evans, would it be correct to say that the last time you saw your wife she was at home, sitting at the kitchen table? I think that was what you said to me when we went through this yesterday. Is that correct?'

******

Jane wandered round the kitchen while George ate his breakfast. It was early in winter so there were no cade lambs in their boxes by the warm kitchen range. Lambing didn’t start for a month or so yet. This was a quieter time of year, but George and his dogs still spent all the daylight hours out on the fells. During lambing he would be out all night too, stoically exhausted. Lambing was Jane’s favourite time of year. She loved having the new-born lambs, whose mothers had died or rejected them, in the house with her. She loved caring for them, squirting milk down their throats through a syringe, watching their ever so wobbly first steps, usually ending up in 4-legged splits, as they explored the flagged floor of the kitchen. She loved their company and their bleating calls for attention.

Today was an auction day. A day away from the farm and its responsibilities, a break for George from his usual routine of patrolling the moors, checking on the sheep and carrying out repairs to walls and fences. A chance for him to spend time with other farmers, hearing what was going on in their worlds.

She went with him to the market sometimes, but he didn’t look as if he wanted company today, so she hadn’t put her better clothes on, just her usual rough skirt and home-knitted jumper.

She watched him cutting his orange so carefully, with his long, sharp knife and wished that she’d put on her market clothes. She could have grabbed her coat and quickly swapped slippers for polished lace-up shoes, when George had got up to go, following him out to the truck, ready for a lift into town. She would have enjoyed a morning visiting the library and having a coffee and a tea cake at the café. She might also have gone to the church, with its soft stained-glass light and its musty wax polish smell. A space to think in the silence of centuries.

George wouldn’t have said anything to stop her. He never did. But, as it was, she fiddled around with the plates and cups on the table, ready to do the washing up when he’d finished his breakfast.

George pushed his plate and knife across the table towards her and left the house.

******

George was a big blustery sort of bloke, comfortable in his layers of thick woolly clothes and his dirty old cap. He spent his days on the fells, calling for his sheep and shouting at his dogs.

Each day he got up in the morning ready to eat and work and he came home at dusk, ready to eat and sleep.

Today was market day so breakfast was at six-thirty, even earlier than usual seven o’clock. At this time of year, it was the old cast ewes, who could no longer cope with the hard life of the high fells, who went to auction. The plan was that lowland farmers would buy them and they’d spend their remaining, useful years living in a terrain that was kinder to old souls.

But first George needed his breakfast. He’d eaten his cereal and toast, drunk his big mug of overly sweet tea and now he looked at the orange which Jane had put on the plate in front of him. He didn't like oranges, or indeed any fruit, and he knew that Jane knew this. But he never commented on the food Jane produced for him, he just got on and ate it. He knew she meant well, wanting to keep him fit and healthy.

When oranges had become Jane’s chosen fruit of the day, a few weeks back, George hadn’t been sure how to eat them but then he’d remembered how he and his friends had sucked and chomped on orange segments at half-time in school football matches. He remembered how quickly they had eaten those juicy sections and had decided this would be the perfect approach to getting eaten what, he rightly suspected, would become his daily orange ration.

So now Jane put a long, sharp, serrated knife on George’s plate with his orange. The knife efficiently sliced through the fruit. He spread the pieces out onto his plate, first the halves, then the quarters and, finally, eighths.Ramming each piece into his mouth, he fixed his teeth onto the edge of the flesh, where it met the pith. Clamping his teeth together, he pulled, breaking the juicy fruit away from its skin. A forceful suck, two quick chews and a swallow, one segment down. Repeat seven times. All done.

George pushed his plate and knife across the table towards Jane and left the house.

******

Yesterday afternoon, when Jane knew it would be hours before George came back home, she had stood in front of the mirror in their bedroom, naked from the waist up. She had never been one for scrutinising her body.  As a young girl she had been taut and fit, happy with herself, no need to check her reflection. She would have laughed at the thought of the old woman’s wrinkles she saw now, not really flab, she was too thin for that, but skin folded over where muscles would previously have held it firm.

Jane held an orange against her right breast, comparing them, looking at their similar mottled, dimpled skins. She ran her index finger lightly across each surface, both had the same smooth, waxy feel. On the dressing table in front of her was an ancient, dull-red, material-bound book, lying flat open at a page with an old-fashioned, ink-sketched illustration of a woman’s breast and an orange. The rest of the page contained a lengthy medical description, outlining the diagnosis when a breast looks like the surface of an orange followed by a short reference to an equally short prognosis. The diagram showed bubbled, pocked skin and pressed in nipples, just like Jane’s right breast.

Jane looked back at her reflection, shrugged, pulled on her clothes and left the room. She went downstairs, through the hall and out of the house. She knew what George would do if one of his sheep was as sick as she was.