Tigerlily's Orchids

by Ruth Rendell

  Stuart picked it up, saw that his caller was Claudia. He let it ring. He turned his head as Livorno turned his and their eyes met. At some point he must have punched Livorno in the eye for the socket of his left one was turning purple and swelling. If this were in a film, he thought, fighting would put things right. He’d get up and I’d get up and we’d shake hands and go out and have a drink together. But we won’t do that because it’s not as if we fell out over one of us saying something rude to the other or impugned the other’s honour or any of that shit. We fell out or he decided to fall out with me because I’ve been sleeping with his wife. And that makes it different. Oh God.

  Livorno raised himself on his left elbow. He looked at Stuart, saying nothing. By this time Stuart’s head was aching so badly that he knew he’d have to go to hospital, to some A & E department. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again Livorno was standing up, holding his left arm just below the shoulder and pressing it against his body. He gave Stuart a kick on the thigh, a kick of contempt rather than malice. Stuart got on to his knees, then to his feet, conscious of a sharp stabbing pain in what he thought might be his bladder. The phone made the noise it made when a text was coming. Claudia again.

  He said to Livorno, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘You’ve damaged my shoulder,’ Livorno said. ‘I hope I’ve done worse to you. If you come near my wife again, if you so much as speak to her, I’ll do worse. Is that OK with you, Mr Stuart Fucking Font?’

  Stuart sat in A & E, waiting to be seen by a doctor. It was the first time he had ever visited such a place, though he had heard tales from his friends of the long hours you could wait before being attended to and the unsavoury types who might sit next to you. (‘Unbelievable, darling, the smell!’) The conversation around him was all about the cold and the snow, how unusual it was in London, must be global warming or something. Some of them had fallen over on icy pavements and broken their ankles, their wrists, or slipped and strained their backs. Stuart had been told not to use his mobile in there and when he asked if there was somewhere he could get coffee, was directed to a machine. It was as well he was currently job-free – he liked that term better than ‘jobless’ – as he had already been there three hours with no sign of reprieve.

  After four hours less ten minutes a nurse called him and said the doctor would see him now. Rather triumphantly, as she led him to a cubicle, she said that she had told him his wait would be a maximum of four hours and she had been spot on, hadn’t she?

  The doctor, a very pretty young woman like an actress in one of those hospital sitcoms, asked him how he’d come to bash his head like that and get what she called an abrasion to his lower abdomen both at the same time. Stuart said he had fallen over in the snow.

  ‘Standing on your head on the pavement, were you,’ said the doctor, ‘and then you got up and kicked yourself in the prostate?’

  She laughed knowingly. She asked no more questions but sent him off to have an X-ray. They wouldn’t tell him what was wrong, he would have to wait a few days for the results, but they assured him nothing was broken.

  Fifteen missed calls, said his mobile screen the minute he switched it on in the taxi. Then it rang and showed Claudia’s name.

  ‘I’ve been calling and calling you. I’ve texted you twice. Where have you been?’

  It sounded as if she didn’t know. But she must by now. He spoke cagily.

  ‘I went out to buy things for the party and I fell over in the snow. I’d forgotten to take my phone with me.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart, were you hurt?’

  She obviously didn’t know. Freddy hadn’t told her. Stuart said he’d been at A & E for seven hours, a gross exaggeration.

  ‘There’s no point in having a mobile if you don’t carry it with you,’ she said, and then, ‘You’re going to kill me, darling, but I think I’ve lost your key. I mean the key to your flat. I know I took it out of yesterday’s handbag last night and put it into today’s handbag, I know I did but it’s not there. It must have fallen out on the Tube. I was digging stuff out of it on the Tube and it must have fallen out. You’ll have to have the lock changed.’

  Stuart didn’t feel up to telling her that no one on the Tube would know whose door it opened. Besides, she hadn’t lost it on the Tube, she hadn’t lost it at all. Freddy had taken it and let himself in with it …

  ‘So if I come round after work you’ll have to let me in, OK?’

  ‘I’m all over bruises,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, but that’s quite sexy. I’ll imagine you’re a wounded warrior. It’ll be about seven.’

  He had started to ache all over. Distantly, he heard St Ebba’s Church clock strike four. There was nothing to eat in the flat, he had eaten nothing since nine in the morning and he was very hungry. It was still snowing but he would have to go out and get something, being very careful not to fall over and make his lies into truth. Marius Potter was in the hallway, retrieving his post from the Flat 3 pigeonhole. Marius was in Stuart’s eyes a throwback to the distant past of the sixties, an ancient hippie, and he found such people irritating in an indefinable way. Perhaps not so indefinable, though. It had something to do with the way Marius Potter greeted him with ‘Good afternoon’, an old-fashioned salutation Stuart thought was meant sarcastically.

  The snow had stopped but, as Maria in the pizza place said, the sky was full of it. She spoke as if the heavy dark clouds which massed above Kenilworth Parade were bags of snow, liable to drop their loads at the slightest pinprick. Stuart, who was conservative in most things, asked for a cheese and tomato pizza. The more outré kind with pineapple and crab horrified him.

  ‘You want to look after that arm,’ said Maria. ‘That could turn nasty.’

  As if his shoulder was a bad-tempered dog, thought Stuart. He really ought to get his camera and take photographs of Kenilworth Avenue and the parade under snow. He ought to go up past the roundabout and take pictures of Kenilworth Green and St Ebba’s and the cemetery under snow. In future years no one would believe it unless records were kept. But he wouldn’t be able to hold a camera. He could barely hold his mobile and he had always been useless with his left hand. Like a fairy tale it was, he thought without much originality, something from the Brothers Grimm, all those houses with little Christmas trees in their front gardens, poking out of blankets of snow.

  He ate his pizza and drank a glass of orange juice. He had never been much good with alcohol – it didn’t agree with him and he got drunk remarkably fast, experiencing a hangover after only two glasses of wine. Very different from Claudia who could put away an amazing amount without showing the least sign she hadn’t been drinking water. It had been puzzling him that she didn’t seem to know about Freddy’s injuries but of course she easily might not. She had been out doing some sort of research for an article all day, was still at it, and if those two weren’t often in contact he wouldn’t have told her. The fact was that if you didn’t work yourself, as he didn’t at the moment, you got a bit out of touch with people who did. She would be here in three hours. Should he tell her? Considering his injuries had been sustained in a fight with her husband he couldn’t not tell her, could he?

  Normally, at this time of day when he was expecting Claudia, he would be very excited, anticipating her arrival by putting a bottle of wine – for her, not him – in the fridge, making sure the bathroom basin was clean, checking the bed, where he usually ate his breakfast of toast and his mother’s homemade marmalade, for crumbs and coffee stains, if necessary changing the bottom sheet. Today his usual elation was missing. His head ached, his shoulder throbbed, his various bruises were sore and the ache in the pit of his stomach – or wherever – was getting worse. He wouldn’t be able to change a sheet even if he wanted to. The prospect of making love to Claudia usually enhanced his afternoon, giving rise to all sorts of delicious fantasies. But this afternoon, even when he thought of her undressing, an icy chill took hold of him. He couldn’t do it, not with that pain down there, not after
fighting with her husband. Freddy Livorno’s parting remark came back to him. If you come near my wife again, if you so much as speak to her, I’ll do worse. What would worse be? More than anything Stuart feared facial disfigurement. Was that what Freddy meant?

  Bending down to pick up the tray on which were the pizza plate and the orange-juice glass, he saw a dull gleam of something up against the base of the sofa. It was the key Freddy had let himself in with. Stuart put it in his pocket, sat down and got Claudia on his mobile. Not her voicemail but her own true voice.

  ‘Claudia, I’ve got to put you off. I’m not well. Actually I feel pretty awful.’

  ‘Because you fell over in the snow? What’s happened to you?’

  ‘It was a bad fall,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve ruptured something.’

  ‘Darling, you can’t have. You’re such a wimp, Stuart. But that’s what I love about you. Look, I’ll be with you in an hour at the most. If only you didn’t live out in the sticks.’

  He didn’t have to let her in, he thought. But he knew he hadn’t the strength to keep her on the doorstep, he would have to let her in. It was true he was a bit of a wimp, he couldn’t deny it.

  Rose Preston-Jones was preparing a meal for herself and Marius Potter: salt-free carrot and cumin soup, to be followed by a salad of roquette and artichoke hearts with spelt and pumpkin-seed bread. Even people on her detox regime were often unwilling to eat the sort of food she cooked and prescribed, all but Marius who shared her tastes. The sortes which he had discovered for her that morning – ‘Two other precious drops that ready stood / Each in their crystal sluice’ – they both saw as applicable to the glasses of juice which were to accompany the meal. Neither of them ever touched alcohol.

  Marius arrived at six thirty. In the hallway he had encountered the Constantines and while he was talking to them the automatic doors opened to admit a young woman in very high-heeled shoes. She rang Stuart Font’s doorbell, and when she wasn’t immediately admitted, banged on the door with her mobile phone. This reminded Katie Constantine that hers had been stolen.

  ‘While Michael and I were on the bus. We were upstairs at the front. I was so tired I had my head on his shoulder and my eyes closed. My handbag was on the other side of me and someone must have put his hand in and taken my phone.’

  Marius said that people who lived in poverty, as so many did, were more vulnerable to temptation than others.

  Katie ignored this. ‘I wouldn’t care that much but all my snow photos were on it. And now the snow’s stopped and I don’t suppose there’ll be any more.’

  Inside Flat 2 Marius and Rose greeted each other with a chaste kiss. Marius had a mobile, though he seldom used it. Rose believed that they harmed the brain. Katie, she said, was still young enough to avoid lasting damage if she had the sense not to replace hers and she congratulated Marius on so often letting the battery in his run down. McPhee, who sometimes thought he was a cat, having spent his puppyhood among kittens, jumped on to Marius’s knee and curled up there. Rose made a pot of pomegranate tea and Marius told her about the visitor to Flat 1 and her high heels which Rose said would cripple her in later life and make surgery for bunions more than probable.

  It was dark outside but the street lamps shone with a brassy light on the last of the snow patches. Getting up to pour more tea, Rose called Marius to the window. On the opposite side of the street one of the young Asian people was walking up the path of the left-hand semi-detached house, carrying a heavy-looking bag of groceries in each hand. An older man followed him in, keeping some five or six yards behind him. Rose pulled down the blind.

  ‘That house is called Springmead. I never noticed that before.’

  ‘Nor did I,’ said Marius, thinking of what his sister had told him and wishing he had never asked. Would he ever get over this awkwardness? Yet in this pretty, faded woman, still slim as a sixteen-year-old, her voice still youthful, he could see the sweet shy girl he had made love to all those years ago. All she saw, he was sure, was an old man, tired, worn and ridiculous with his quotations from a poet no one read any more.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Claudia was getting dressed. Stuart lay in bed, watching her despondently. This was the second time she had visited him since his encounter with Freddy and it was plain she knew nothing about their fight; plain too that, for all his fuss about his shoulder, the injuries Freddy had sustained were less than Stuart’s own.

  ‘I had to go to A & E,’ Stuart had said to her.

  If Freddy too had had to seek treatment in a hospital she would surely have told him. Surely she would have said, ‘So did Freddy.’ Why hadn’t Freddy told her? More importantly, why hadn’t he told her he had found out about her affair? Freddy had said to him that if he saw Claudia again, if he so much as spoke to Claudia, he would ‘do worse’. What did worse mean? That he would damage his face or even kill him? Claudia was putting on her stockings in a seductive way. His dread increasing, Stuart started wondering why she even wore stockings. Few women did. He imagined Freddy walking into the room – he might have had another key cut, he might have innumerable keys – and abruptly he got up and went into the bathroom.

  Freddy must be playing some deep game. Or perhaps, which would be worse, an ordinary sort of shallow game. I’m not going to tell her, I’m not saying a thing to her, Freddy might be telling himself, I don’t want to warn her. Warn him, as I have done, so that if she wants to see him he makes it plain he doesn’t want to see her. So that he sends her away, quarrels with her maybe, what do I care? Now totally covered by his camel-hair dressing gown, Stuart looked at himself in the mirror, then went into the living room where Claudia was sitting on the sofa, one leg crossed over the other to show her stocking tops, looking at the stain on the carpet.

  ‘Is that blood, darling?’

  Stuart said no, of course not, it was or had been hot chocolate. He had meant to clean it up. ‘Claudia.’

  ‘Yes, what? I don’t have to go yet, you know. We’ve got at least another hour. You won’t forget to have another key cut for me, will you?’ While he was in the bathroom she must have seen the crate from Wicked Wine. ‘Shall we have one of those bottles of champagne?’

  ‘They’re for my party,’ he said in a repressive tone, and then, ‘Claudia, we have to talk.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  What on earth did he mean? For a wild moment he thought of telling her he had to go away – his mother was ill and he had to be with her … his friend in San Francisco was ill … What sick person would want him nursing them? Instead, he managed, ‘This is getting too much for me, this – well, relationship of ours. If I’ve got this degree of emotional involvement I need to be with you all the time.’ He jibbed a bit at telling anyone he loved her when he didn’t but now was no time for niceties. ‘I love you, Claudia. I adore you.’ Why did ‘adore’ sound so much less real than ‘love’? ‘I can’t bear to let you go home to Freddy. If we’re going to go on like this it’s better we should part.’

  ‘Oh, Stuart,’ she said, pulling her skirt down over her knees. ‘I’d no idea you felt like this.’

  He was beginning to enjoy it. You rat, he said to himself, you heel. ‘If I can’t have you all the time, if I can’t have you to myself, it would be better not to have you at all. It’s going to break my heart, it’s going to half kill me, but it’s better for both of us – don’t you see?’

  She came up to him and put her arms around him, laying her cheek against his. Stuart nearly cried out at the pain of having his bruised back and shoulders squeezed. ‘We don’t have to part permanently, darling. Let’s have a trial separation. We won’t see each other for a – what? A fortnight? We’ll still talk on the phone every day.’

  With that half-measure he had to be content. At least, in the emotion of the moment, she had forgotten about the key.

  Olwen’s father had been a drunk and her mother, to keep her husband company, had been a heavy drinker. But Louis Forgan had held down a job, even led
some sort of social life, while showing few signs of his addiction except to those who know about these things. Olwen and her brother accepted that there was always drink about, whisky mostly, but beer and wine as well. They accepted it as the norm and in friends’ houses wondered why no bottles stood about in every room and the friends’ parents never had a glass beside them. Until, that is, Douglas, who was a year older than Olwen, seemed to realise what was going on and announced at their evening meal that he would never drink another drop of alcohol as long as he lived.

  Both of them had been encouraged to drink wine at table since they were nine and ten. Olwen blamed this custom for her own addiction and in the days when she read newspapers and attended to television, as well as simply having it on, had been made angry by articles and programmes which advocated giving children wine to encourage them ‘to drink responsibly’. In her youth her longing for alcoholic drink worried her and made her actively miserable. She looked with wonder and near disbelief at Douglas who, living away from home, had adhered to his resolve, never touched beer, wine or spirits, and seemed perfectly content. Gargantuan efforts were made by her to follow his example and sometimes she did manage to go without for long periods. Her father died of cirrhosis, her mother suffered what her doctor called ‘drink-related problems’.

  While in one of her abstemious phases Olwen got married. Her husband was a social drinker and, knowing nothing of her family history, persuaded her that an occasional glass of something would do no harm. Olwen’s first drink after doing without for six months was bliss. She had a second one with David and was back where she had been before she met him. For a long time she kept a bottle of red wine in the kitchen which she told him was for cooking. It was always the same kind that she bought so he couldn’t tell whether it was the first bottle or the twenty-fifth whose level had fallen. She paid for it out of her own money for she had always worked as someone’s secretary or, at one place, run the typing pool.