Tigerlily's Orchids

by Ruth Rendell

  Richenda had left him a note. She always left him a note. This one incorporated a shopping list and an order to call BT about a fault on the landline. It could wait. He could do those things after she got back. This he wanted and needed, had to have, must be done while she was absent, could only be done while she was absent. The flat was small, just a living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. The computer was kept in the bedroom. He shut the door, wishing he could lock it – there was a key in the lock, but he dared not. If she came back and found that door locked, she would never rest until he had told her why. He wished he knew whether she had started at Rose Preston-Jones’s and still had Stuart Font’s to do, in which case she would be two hours, or had done Stuart’s, was halfway through Rose’s – to himself he called the residents by their given names – and would therefore be no more than half an hour. Would she go on to Hereford without coming home first?

  He sat down, started the computer. When the pictures he wanted began he grew hot and his heart began to beat faster. No imagination was needed, none. He never downloaded, he was too afraid to do that. Besides, he couldn’t print out because he had no printer and he was pretty sure, almost sure, that if you never downloaded these pictures they could never find out what you’d been doing, but there was no one he could ask. They could never find out the sites you’d visited, could they? But he longed to download just one or two – well, say six. Having them in print would make such a difference to his life. Being able to look at them without coming in here, without having to be sure to exclude Richenda, would make him happy.

  And what harm did it do? he thought, as he moved from picture to picture. It wasn’t real. It was just pictures. Just photographs and videos, the stuff that dreams are made of.

  Though more fell in great quantities in other parts of England, in London the snow froze, then began to melt. On Thursday morning it was raining. Olwen had never thought she would be glad to see rain. But she could go out in it, she wouldn’t slip and fall over on wet pavements. As near as the now defunct Wicked Wine but a lot nearer than Tesco was Mr Ali’s corner shop. Its proper name was Alcazar Foods but everyone called it Mr Ali’s. Sophie had called it that the day before when Olwen had opened her front door to see her coming out of the lift and carrying a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

  ‘From Mr Ali’s,’ Sophie said. ‘He doesn’t drink himself but he sells it.’

  ‘Just wine?’ Olwen asked, baulking at a more direct enquiry.

  ‘Well, food and stuff. There was a woman in there buying something for cleaning drains.’

  Olwen put on her old black coat, tied a scarf round her head and searched for an umbrella. She wasn’t sure why she failed to find one – because there wasn’t an umbrella in the flat or because she was trembling and shaking too much to look properly. No one was in the lobby and this pleased her because she knew none of them would do her essential shopping for her. She had asked them all and all had refused. Not rudely or scathingly and the sharpest response she had had was from Michael Constantine who told her that now was her chance to give up drinking.

  The front path to the gate and the street was encrusted with old snow and grey ice in which footprints had made deep craters. The rain falling on it seemed not to have washed any of this away, though it was possible now to see dark paving stones in the hollows. Wally Scurlock should have swept this earlier in the week, not left it till today. He would never do it now but rely on the rain doing it for him. Olwen set off, pressing her boots into the declivities, surprised to find how slippery the uneven surface still was. There was nothing to hold on to except the box hedge and that was no more than eighteen inches high. She was not only unsteady on her feet but weak from lack of food.

  She could see ahead of her that the pavement in Kenilworth Avenue wasn’t much better than the path in here, worse perhaps where the children had hardened the surface by tobogganing on it. She had almost reached the gate when she fell, sliding over backwards and hitting her head on the brick border of the path. It was Rose who found her no more than two minutes later. She had come out with McPhee because dogs need to be exercised whatever the weather. Rose called an ambulance before she even touched Olwen. Then, covering her with her own warm winter coat, she sat down on the low wall, shivering and hugging herself, waiting for the paramedics to come. MacPhee, less conscientious, ran around her in circles, tangling his lead between her legs and yapping, for a walk deferred makes a dog’s heart sick.

  Michael came out on his way to the post office and pronounced Olwen probably concussed. He noticed what Rose hadn’t, that she had a cut on the back of her head which was bleeding into the snow.

  ‘Shall I give her some Rescue Remedy?’ Rose asked him. ‘Or would my own herbal elixir be better?’

  ‘Have either of them got any booze in them? Because if not I reckon she’ll spit them out.’

  Rose thought that a dreadful way for a doctor to talk. It just went to show how much better a practitioner of alternative medicine would be in this situation. The ambulance came after ten minutes and two paramedics, a man and a woman, took Olwen away to hospital. Rose waved cheerily to her as they moved off and then she took McPhee round the block, eagerly anticipating as she picked her way through ice and dirty snow and puddles how, when she got back, she would tell Marius what Michael had said.

  Ataxi took Stuart to the Tesco and brought him home with a back seat full of drink, crisps, nuts, cheese and biscuits. He had also bought two hundred cigarettes. It was expensive, adding greatly to the cost of this party which now he dreaded, though he had no intention of offering cigarettes to the guests. His little fridge was too small to take more than two bottles of champagne and two of white wine at a time. He could put some of it out in the snow if any snow was still there by Saturday. His mother, who phoned five minutes after he got back, thought it would be.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, but there’s no way Daddy and I can come all the way to where you live in this weather.’ Annabel Font always said ‘where you live’ to avoid naming Stuart’s suburb. ‘We’ve had such an enormous lot of snow out here. Of course you do in the country.’

  Loughton might be on the edge of Epping Forest but it hadn’t been ‘in the country’ for about seventy years. Stuart let it pass. He was so enormously relieved that his parents wouldn’t be at the party that he had immediately been put in an ebullient mood. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘There’ll be another time.’

  ‘Well, I should hope there would, Stuart. I’m quite surprised that you haven’t asked us before. After all, you’ve been there for three months – or is it four? A long time anyway.’

  Stuart said nothing, his jolly mood waning. ‘Any more thoughts on a job?’ his mother said.

  ‘I’ve told you, I’m not thinking about jobs until at least April.’

  ‘That attitude is all very well in times of financial stability, Stuart – I’m quoting Daddy – but it’s positively dangerous now. Do you know what Maureen Rivers told me? Her son wrote a hundred and seventy-three applications before he got his present job. Of course, it’s a very good job.’

  Stuart could hear ‘Nessun dorma’ playing in his bedroom.

  Claudia. He said goodbye to his mother as soon as he could, lit a cigarette and went back to the wine and the food. The table up against the front window was the best place to set it out, he thought, and let the guests come into the kitchen for drinks. Where would he put the glasses? He suddenly realised, standing there at the window, that he only possessed about six glasses. He would have to buy some – more expense. Where would it all end? At this thought, this unanswerable question, he looked up and saw, on the opposite side of Kenilworth Avenue, the beautiful girl. She was walking along with her father a little way up to the left, coming in this direction. Party, drinks and glasses forgotten, he pulled on the heavy sweater he had just taken off and plunged out of the flat, out of the lobby, into the icy-cold air. The girl and her father had disappeared.

  Apart from the blow to the
back of her head, there appeared to be very little wrong with Olwen. Her concussion was short-lived and there was no permanent damage. Her stepdaughter Margaret came to see her in the hospital. Olwen had no memory of telling anyone at Lichfield House that she had a stepdaughter or indeed any relatives but Margaret said she had had a phone call from someone called Katie.

  ‘When you come out of here,’ she said in a tone and form of words expecting the answer no, ‘I don’t suppose you’d think of coming to us for a few days.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Olwen, then recollecting that this was what she said only to her neighbours, ‘No, thanks. I shall be OK at home.’

  Margaret and her brother had so much resented Olwen coming into their lives when Margaret was eight and Richard six, trying to take the place of their dead mother and sleeping in their father’s bedroom, that they had done their best to make her life so miserable that she would leave. They succeeded in making her life miserable but she didn’t leave. She stayed because she wouldn’t be beaten and because, if she didn’t love Bill, he certainly seemed to love her. She gave up her job and stayed at home to look after the children. They were rude to her and even physically violent, they stole from Woolworths; when she was eleven Margaret told her father Olwen had a boyfriend she had seen her kissing and when she was fourteen that Olwen had sexually assaulted her. How much of this their father believed Olwen never knew but his attitude towards her changed. He told her to get another job – being with the children was obviously bad for her. So Olwen went back to work and almost as soon as she did so Margaret and Richard ceased to be the children from hell (as she called them to herself) and began to behave like civilised beings. Both went off to university and then to homes of their own and when they came home, as they occasionally did, they behaved to her as if they had always had a pleasant and equable relationship. But Olwen had had enough. At the age of fifty-eight she asked for a divorce and got her decree absolute on the day she became sixty.

  All those years, for the sake of her marriage and for the children, she had severely controlled her drinking, having no more than a couple of glasses of wine a day. But when Bill went away, as he occasionally did on his own to visit his sister and her husband in Lancashire, she binge-drank for the whole weekend. The term wasn’t current at the time and she didn’t call it that. She had no name for it. It was just the time when she drank all day until she passed out and, coming to next day, drank again until nightfall. As far as she knew, Bill never suspected.

  But when she was alone again, living on her own and with her two pensions, with a sigh of relief that was very nearly happiness, she had settled into a permanent binge drinking and thus ending up here, in this hospital. Margaret knew nothing about her alcoholism, none of them ever had. Like hundreds of people, she had slipped in the snow and injured herself. But she never had any sort of accident before and probably never would again – or not until another bad winter. Margaret thought herself exceptionally unselfish and caring to have come to visit her at all.

  ‘Well, I expect you’ll be all right on your own, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll be OK,’ said Olwen. ‘I’m going to have a sleep now.’

  It was only by composing herself for sleep and closing her eyes that she could handle this terrible deprivation, because in the past it was only while she was asleep that she wasn’t drinking. She thought about Mr Ali’s shop. That girl had bought wine from him. Did he also sell spirits? Olwen thought of all the corner shops she had ever been in in various parts of London. The ones that sold wine had also sold spirits. She held on to that, trying to sleep. A different ambulance from the one which had brought her took her home on Saturday morning. It wasn’t really an ambulance at all but something called a people carrier which, appropriately enough, was full of people all being dropped off at various locations in north London. Olwen asked the driver if he would drop her at Mr Ali’s shop.

  ‘Can’t do that, darling,’ said the driver. ‘My job is to take you home, right?’

  ‘I’ll only be a minute.’

  In not at all a ‘darling’ kind of voice, he said, ‘Sorry, darling, but it’s no.’

  The other people in the bus made fidgeting grumbling noises in fear of his changing his mind. He got down at Lichfield House and helped Olwen up the still-unswept front path, on to which more snow, rain, hail and sleet had fallen since she was last there. He took her as far as the lift, summoned it, checked she still had her key and saw her off up to Flat 6. The lift door opened and there stood Molly Flint with a longhaired boy who had a ring in his nose and a stud in one eyebrow, waiting to get into it.

  ‘Not really’ was useless for this urgent request. ‘If you’re going out would you go to Mr Ali’s and see if he’s got any vodka? Gin will do if he hasn’t got vodka.’

  The boy was shaking his head furiously and Molly said, ‘Sorry, I can’t,’ thinking of Sophie who had never got her five pounds. ‘I can’t. I’m late.’

  Carrying two boxes, each containing six wine glasses from John Lewis, Stuart was on his way to meet Claudia in a Starbucks. He had responded to her latest message, cravenly denied that any of the others had reached him, and faced up to this meeting which had been arranged for a long time. His only stipulation was that it shouldn’t be at his flat.

  None of this was enough to save him from the wrath of Freddy Livorno. Doubting that Stuart had taken his warning sufficiently to heart, Freddy put his little gizmo back among the dried flowers. Claudia’s call to Stuart was rapturous. She must be in a bad way, Freddy thought furiously, if she was that excited about meeting her lover in a coffee shop. Could she come to his party tomorrow night?

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Freddy said aloud.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The beautiful girl must live somewhere in the area. He had seen her walking with her father along Kenilworth Avenue. Of course, that might only mean that they were visiting friends in the neighbourhood, but that a friend’s house was nearby would hardly account for her shopping at the newsagent’s on the roundabout. No, she and her family lived locally. Enquiries among his neighbours and perhaps at the shops in Kenilworth Parade would surely locate her.

  Stuart was thinking about this all the time he was having coffee with Claudia at the Euston Road Starbucks. Afterwards, he could barely have repeated a word she had said, though he vaguely remembered something about her falling in love with him. What he did recall was her asking, quite humbly and pleadingly for her and for the second time, if she could come to his party.

  ‘Oh, all right, I suppose so,’ he said very ungraciously. He was surprised to learn that there are some women, and Claudia was evidently among them, who like you more and want you more if you treat them unkindly. It was a revelation. After they had parted he was thinking that he must put this into practice in the future but not, of course, with the beautiful girl. If he was ever lucky enough to find her – and he must, he must – he would never be cruel to her, but treasure her, cherish her, treat her like the exquisite jewel she was. He had been home no more than five minutes and was smoking his first cigarette of the day, when Claudia phoned him on his landline to say that she’d definitely come to his party. She was longing for it.

  It was a fine clear day but very cold again. Little patches of frost lingered in shady spots. He pushed the long table close up against the window, set out some plates on it and arranged the new floral paper napkins in two neat piles. Richenda had told him he should have napkins and that the ones he already had, patterned with Christmas trees, wouldn’t do. More people were about than usual, doing their emergency shopping before the next snowfall, forecast for the following night. Wally Scurlock was coming up the path, carrying a small bottle of something in a translucent red plastic bag. On the doorstep Stuart saw him encounter Rose Preston-Jones, taking McPhee for his walk. He went back to the kitchen, made himself a large mug of hot chocolate and began stuffing as many bottles of champagne and wine into the fridge as it would take. The coldest place on the exterior of h
is flat was the windowsill of the spare bedroom where some optimistic builder had fixed a window box. Stuart put the remaining two champagne bottles and four of wine into the box. They would stay cold there. Proud of his resourcefulness, he lit another cigarette and contemplated himself in the spare-room mirror. There was no doubt that a handsome man’s sexiness was enhanced by a cigarette. He posed, first with the cigarette hanging from his mouth, then holding it negligently some few inches from his face. It was no wonder really that Claudia was in love with him.

  *

  Without a drink, Olwen had made it through the night. That is, she was still alive. She found some stale bread at the back of the fridge, removed the pale blue mould and ate a slice of it with the scrapings from the bottom of a marmalade jar. There was nothing to wash it down with but water and when she had drunk that she was sick.

  If asked (by that inner enquirer to whom the secrets of all hearts may be told), she would have said she was afraid of nothing unless it was being denied access to drink. But she was afraid this morning. Ice lay on the puddles on the path. The pavements weren’t being gritted. The whole country was running out of salt which, apparently, was an essential ingredient of grit. Next time she fell she would break something, she was sure of that, and breaking something meant only one thing to her: many weeks of drink deprivation. Wearing her fur coat, she made her way down in the lift and, standing at the top of the stairs to the basement, called out to Wally Scurlock. Eventually, when she had called a dozen times, he came up.