Tigerlily's Orchids

by Ruth Rendell

  The marriage broke up, partly because David wanted children and Olwen was frightened at the prospect. She drank too much. Alone, she indulged herself and began drinking a couple of gins a day as well as the wine. While unaware of doing so, she must have learned from her parents how to be a heavy drinker without giving many signs of it to those not in the know. Bill wasn’t in the know, he was a total abstainer, from taste rather than conviction. He didn’t like the stuff. When they went out together he bought her drinks, said he liked to see her enjoying herself and admired her ‘strong head’. Dreaming of Bill now, as she sometimes did, she saw him only as foolish, a mug, to have been so easily deceived. He was on the point of asking her to marry him – and this was the substance of her dream – before he told her that he had two children. In the dream he had five, though, she thought now, he might as well have had ten, his two were so much trouble. She woke up wondering, not for the first time, why she had married him and taken on all that caring and cooking and housekeeping and pretending to be indifferent to alcohol, pretending to like Margaret and Richard, pretending that she didn’t need gin or vodka – it was all one – to keep herself sane.

  Waking, she needed a drink but she had run out of booze. The vodka bottle she had put on the floor by her bed the night before had had at least two inches left in it. Or she thought it had, she remembered that it had. Perhaps she had drunk it before she went to sleep or had awakened in the night and drunk it. Plainly, it was now empty. She got up with difficulty and staggered to the kitchen where she looked in the drinks cupboard. Bottles were there, two gin bottles and one whisky, but they too were empty. She was aware of a fearful fatigue overcoming her so that, shuffling into her living room, she only just made it to the broken-down old sofa before collapsing.

  Bright sunshine coming in through the window cast brilliant pane-shaped light patches on to her head and face. Cursing, she turned her face into the stained cushions. Her craving for a drink was strong now, almost violent. Although she would have been prepared to stagger along to Wicked Wine, holding on to fences and posts, using an umbrella as a stick, she knew her worn-out feeble body would never make it. If she phoned Rupert, could he be induced to come round or send someone over with a bottle of gin? The phone, like most small objects in her flat, was on the floor. She reached over, scrabbling for the phone before she remembered it would be dead. British Telecommunications or whatever they were called had cut it off weeks ago because she had forgotten to pay the bill.

  Any pride Olwen had once had was long gone. Keeping it through those two marriages, concealing the addiction and the smell on her breath and the unsteadiness of her walk, had been gratefully relinquished when she was alone at last and resolved on drinking herself to death. She eased herself off the sofa on to the floor and when she had crawled to the front door, pulled herself up by holding on to the handles on a built-in cupboard. She got the front door open, dropped heavily to the floor again, and crawled across to Flat 5. Her hammering with her fists brought Noor Lateef to the door with Sophie Longwich behind her. The sight of Olwen in a dirty pink nightdress covered by an ancient fur coat made them stare and then look away. Neither of them had ever heard her say more than ‘Not really’, and their reaction to what she said was as if Rose Preston-Jones’s McPhee had given tongue to human speech.

  ‘Could one of you go round the corner and get me a bottle of gin? Rupert’ll be open now. It’s half nine. I’ll pay you when you get back.’

  When she had recovered from the shock of it, Sophie, the more practical of the two, said, ‘Shall I get you a doctor? I could call an ambulance.’

  ‘I only want a bottle of gin.’

  Noor, gaping, took a step backwards.

  ‘It wouldn’t be right to do that,’ said Sophie. ‘I’m sorry but I couldn’t. You ought to have a doctor.’

  Still on her knees, Olwen shook her head with all the violence she could muster, turned round and crawled back to her open front door. The girls closed theirs and inside stared at each other and at Molly Flint who had come out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. They had all led sheltered lives; though a Friday- or Saturday-night session in a pub or club was requisite behaviour for all of them, though they indulged in some mild binge drinking at these times and saw others in a much worse way than they were, the sight of true alcoholism was new to them. They were a little frightened by Olwen’s squalor, her rat-tail hair, her dirty nightdress, her swollen feet like slabs of beef in a butcher’s window. The raw desperate face she presented to them was stripped of that control, that tidying-up and levelling-out which governs the features of the old, creating a mild and almost cheerful blank.

  ‘If she’d asked us to get her some milk we would have,’ said Noor.

  ‘Milk’s not like booze,’ said Sophie. ‘It wouldn’t hurt her.’

  Molly, reputed to be a philosopher, said, ‘You don’t know that. She might be allergic to milk. And it’s not down to us to judge, is it? It’s not down to us to be moralistic.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what we could do,’ Sophie nodded decisively. ‘We could go and get her a half-bottle of gin or even a quarter-bottle and when we’ve done that we could tell Michael Constantine about her and see what he says.’

  The others said this seemed a good idea and they set about scraping together the requisite five pounds.

  ‘You gossip too much,’ Wally Scurlock said to his wife. ‘You’ll get yourself into trouble.’ Mrs Scurlock, whose name was Richenda, said, ‘We’ve been through all that before, Wally. And I’ve told you, so what? And who’s going to get me into trouble?’

  ‘You’ll do it yourself. You stand down there in the hallway shouting at the top of your voice that no one in this place goes out to work. Don’t deny it. I heard you.’

  ‘I’m not going to deny it. It’s true. There’s three of them students – or so they say. And not one of the others has what you’d call a job. Now when I was young and even more when you was young, in a place like this, six flats, everyone’d have gone out to work, nine-to-five jobs the lot of them – well, maybe the wives, some of them, would have stopped at home. Done their own housework in them days.’

  ‘Then you’d have been out of a job,’ said Wally triumphantly.

  Richenda cleaned all the flats in Lichfield House, three in Ludlow House, two in Hereford House and five in Ross House. Her mother had cleaned flats before her and her grandmother before that, but they had dressed for the job, the former in ‘slacks’ and cotton blouse, the latter in an overall. Richenda told the residents that she wore what she called her ordinary clothes because she was no more going to get herself into a uniform than Wally was. If the ordinary clothes – a short tight skirt, tight cardigan over a low-cut T-shirt and stiletto heels – caused some astonishment, Richenda said they could take it or leave it. See what they’d get if they took on one of those single mums who put cards through the door offering cleaning services – their homes stripped bare and an open invitation to every burglar in north London.

  She started at Stuart Font’s, her intention to use no cleansers, no polish and no appliance but the vacuum cleaner. When Stuart pointed out the hot-chocolate stain she said, almost before he had finished his sentence, that this was a job for a carpet-cleaning firm. The woman he was ‘carrying on with’ phoned soon after that and though it was apparent as he moved from room to room, looking over his shoulder, that he wanted to be on his own, Richenda followed him, pulling the Hoover after her and listening carefully to his side of the conversation.

  Wally Scurlock allowed ten minutes after her departure before going out and carrying with him his garden tools in a large canvas bag. He was almost totally uninterested in other people unless they came into the category of those who interested him very much. Therefore, he no more registered Duncan Yeardon taking out of number 3 Kenilworth Avenue a box of papers for recycling than he noticed the cypress tree by Duncan’s front gate. The young girl with a silk-smooth pale face and sleek black hair who emerged from Springmead was
another matter altogether. Wally took in with hungry eyes her slender shape, long slim legs and the flower-petal hands that held a black plastic sack which looked far too heavy for them. He considered crossing the road and offering to carry that sack for her but dismissed the idea as soon as it came to him. Attracting attention to himself was pointless and possibly dangerous.

  Ten thirty was the date of his self-made appointment and it was now twenty past. He walked past the church, designed by Sir Robert Smirke a hundred years ago but now called the Bel Esprit Centre and converted into a mini-shopping mall with cafeteria and children’s play centre, and briskly up Kenilworth Avenue, a street of mixed dwellings, short terraces of three-storey town houses, detached and semi-detached villas, all interspersed with blocks of flats very much like Lichfield, Ross, Ludlow and Hereford but older. At the top was a roundabout where there was a hairdresser’s, a newsagent’s, a building society branch and a shop selling fitted bathrooms, now in the process of closing down. Wally passed two exits and took the continuation of Kenilworth Avenue. Here, past Kenilworth Green and St Ebba’s, the oldest building in the neighbourhood by about six hundred years, was Kenilworth Primary School, its pupils about to come out into the playground for their mid-morning break.

  It was a very long time since anyone had been buried in the churchyard of St Ebba’s but the graves were still there and the gravestones. Wally, whose family had its roots in Merton, had no connection with any burial place in this neighbourhood but he had fixed on Clara Elizabeth Carbury’s grave for his particular attention. He liked the name and, more than the name, the location of her gravestone which was close up against the openwork iron gates dividing the churchyard from the school grounds. Clara, he would have lied to anyone who asked, had been his great-grandmother. By this time he had read the inscription so many times that he knew it by heart. Clara Elizabeth, b.1879, d.1942, beloved wife of Samuel Carbury, Abide with Me, Fast falls the Eventide. RIP.

  The churchyard was on the whole not well maintained, most of the plots shaggy with long grass and the slabs overgrown with weeds. But Clara Carbury’s was an example to all descendants of the dead, most of them negligent and uncaring, in that its marble kerb was clean and polished, its grass plot neat and weed-free and its stone urn sporting a well-pruned pot plant except when the local youth vandalised it. In spite of its trim appearance, created by himself, Wally squatted down to begin on it afresh, taking out of his bag a set of shears and, for the more precise work, a pair of scissors, a trowel and fork and a pack of polishing cloths. He had just begun snipping off the past week’s growth of grass as a hairdresser might start to trim a short back and sides, when the Kenilworth Primary children burst out with shrieks and shouts into their playground. The girls shrieked, as Wally well knew, while the boys shouted. It was the former he was interested in and he could watch them run and jump, their skirts fluttering up in the breeze, almost without lifting his eyes from the trowel he plied to remove a non-existent dandelion.

  Later in the week he would take himself a little further afield to Daneforth Comprehensive and the first year’s netball. There was no convenient churchyard in Daneforth Grove but a window in the stairwell of a nearby council tower block overlooked the school. Wally secured himself a vantage point at this window for half an hour on Wednesday mornings by dint of signing up for a local authority scheme called Salute4Seniors. All this involved was visiting a pensioner and chatting to him or her for twenty minutes, a breeze which meant he could afterwards spend an hour viewing the sub-teens at play. So far, no parent or other interfering busybody had spotted his weekly activities or, if they had, thought them other than innocent.

  The young girl went first down the Springmead garden path to the summer house. Then came the boy. Watching them from his back-bedroom window, Duncan made up his mind that she and her brother must be meeting to have a conversation in their own language. They seldom got the chance to be alone together inside Springmead where the girl’s middle-aged husband was no doubt very demanding, expecting her to wait on him hand and foot and the brother to toe the line. He hadn’t seen the husband go out but probably he had. Not nearly so many people seemed to go out to work as they had when Duncan was that age but that was very likely where he had gone. When he fantasised about people he usually gave them names and now he named the husband Mr Wu after a George Formby song about a Chinese laundryman and the girl and boy Tigerlily and Oberon. He saw them go into the summer house, looking over their shoulders before closing the door.

  Duncan opened the window just as he had opened all the bedroom windows. The weather had grown mild, and though he had turned down the heating, the well-insulated house remained very warm. Soon he would be able to turn it off altogether. Duncan felt rather proud of helping to reduce global warming while at the same time keeping himself very comfortable and his electricity and gas bills down to a minimum.

  Inside the summer house, Xue and Tao sat on rattan chairs, reading nothing, looking at nothing and not speaking. After a while Xue slid on to the floor and lay there, pressing her bare arms and legs against the cold tiles.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Never having practised, Michael Constantine didn’t quite like the idea of attending a patient. It might be illegal for all he knew. ‘If it happens again,’ he said, ‘you’d better call an ambulance.’

  Sophie Longwich hadn’t told him how she had bought a half-bottle of gin and handed it in to the woman who opened the door of Flat 6, a woman who looked to her scarcely human in her tattered fur and with grey hair transformed by neglect into dreadlocks straggled about her face. She was concerned for Olwen but at the same time she was frightened of her. Brought up by gentle courteous parents, she had been taught to respect those she still thought of as ‘grown-ups’. They knew how to conduct their lives, the long years had instructed them in living, and when she found one who didn’t know how, she felt shaken and bewildered.

  Her flatmates had gone out, Molly to her art school in Hornsey, Noor to a business course she was attending in Wembley. Sophie had no lectures today at her South Bank university, and though there was a lot of reading she should be doing, she found herself unable to concentrate on Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger. Several times during the morning she went out on to the top landing and listened outside Olwen’s door. At first there was only silence. She imagined Olwen pouring herself a gin with something – orange or tonic or one of those things people mixed with gin. It didn’t occur to her as possible that gin might be drunk neat. Olwen would be feeling better by now, would have had a bath and put on clean clothes. The idea of Olwen cleaned up and humanised comforted her. She could now allow herself to think about the five pounds the half-bottle had cost. Noor had a rich father who owned this flat, Molly’s parents were comfortably off but she, Sophie, one of five children, had to live on her government loan, all to be paid back one day.

  She read some more of The Great Gatsby and then she went back to Olwen’s door. There was a sound of movement from inside the flat, then a crash that sounded as if something had been flung against an interior wall. She waited. Olwen spoke, cursing, apparently enraged, drumming, by the sound of it, her fists on the floor. Seriously frightened now, Sophie ran back to Flat 5 and into the bedroom she shared with Molly which happened to be the one furthest away from the landing and Olwen’s door.

  Nothing leads to the making of discoveries like an enforced change in one’s lifestyle. Stuart, determined to escape from Claudia’s phone calls, had begun going out a great deal. Long walks were taken, he twice went to the cinema, met his old friends Jack and Martin on Tuesday night, had a drink with an ex-girlfriend for old times’ sake on Wednesday and next day even visited his parents. He had found that it was unnecessary to take his mobile with him. This was a revelation to him; it wasn’t since his mid-teens that he had been anywhere without carrying it or one of its predecessors. But without it in his pocket the heavens didn’t fall, retribution didn’t descend on him, no vengeful illness struck him down. It was even
quite peaceful not hearing ‘Nessun dorma’ every five minutes, restful not having to speak to Claudia.

  When he got home the messages were piling up, two from Claudia, one from his mother from whom he had parted three hours before, one from Martin inviting him to Sunday lunch with himself and his girlfriend. Stuart deleted them all and still lightning didn’t strike him or the earth open. The results of his X-ray had come and revealed that no bones were broken. He knew that already. He studied his own image in the mirror, feeling calm and even cheerful. How handsome he was! Trying to think who he reminded himself of, he came up with José Mourinho, only a younger version, of course. Another way of getting away from the phones would be to join a gym. His figure was perfect but there was no harm in doing a bit of work to keep it that way. Besides, Jack had told him a gym was an amazing place to meet girls, all of them beautiful or they wouldn’t dare strip down to leotards and prance about in public on elliptical cross-trainers.

  At the end of the fortnight he was going to have to confront Claudia. Another discovery made through his new lifestyle was that he didn’t really like Claudia. He fancied her, of course – any man would fancy her. But if he liked her or, more than that, loved her, Freddy Livorno’s threats wouldn’t have carried much weight with him. He would, he told himself, have defied that hectoring bully. No, Freddy had perhaps done him a favour. Instead of missing Claudia and pining for her as she and he too had thought would be the case, he was rather relieved and worrying only about how to stop her coming back to him when the two weeks were up.