Tigerlily's Orchids

by Ruth Rendell

  The police had come, he had seen them arrive from his window, and, standing there in the glorious warmth while a thin sleet fell against the windows, he expected to see them emerge with Freddy handcuffed. But nothing of that sort happened. They came out alone just as an ambulance arrived. Then Stuart appeared, pushed along in a wheelchair, his left arm in a sling made out of a Burberry scarf. Duncan recognised the check pattern even through the rain and snow mixture. Why did you have to be in a wheelchair when it was your arm that was injured? Some health and safety rubbish, he supposed. One thing was sure, that young man was certainly not gay. Very much the reverse, in fact.

  It had been an exciting evening but now it seemed to be all over. Twenty past ten, time for bed really. Duncan drew the curtains, keeping more of the lovely heat in. He bolted the front door, went into the kitchen to fetch himself a glass of water in case he got thirsty in the night and, pausing at the foot of the stairs, noticed something unexpected. The wallpaper was coming off, just beginning to peel away from the staircase wall. Would heat do that? He supposed it would. It was a sign to him to get rid of the wallpaper, he had never liked it, and redecorate the place. Do it himself in what they used to call distemper but didn’t any more, one of those new whites, apple white, almond white, or maybe the absolutely pure white he really preferred. He went on up the stairs to bed.

  In the Lichfield House gossip ratings, Olwen’s drinking took second place to the repeated turning over, thrashing and dissecting of the assault on Stuart Font. Richenda Scurlock said to her husband that she didn’t mind how many sexual partners single people had, that didn’t hurt anyone, but when you were married it was a different thing.

  ‘Not your business,’ said Wally, who was still limping from a badly bruised leg sustained when Freddy pushed him over. ‘You ought to be thankful they don’t want you for a witness.’

  ‘They don’t want you either.’

  ‘No, thank God.’

  Wally was thinking of the sites he visited. He was innocent, he thought, he had done nothing, and what Stuart Font got up to was nothing to do with him, but suppose the police had come down here, suppose they had just looked at his computer and because they were experts been able to … They hadn’t and they weren’t going to. Thank God. He didn’t want the police anywhere near these flats. Who had called them? he wondered. Some interfering busybody, probably that Dr Constantine – if he was a doctor.

  Richenda must have said something to the three girls because they seemed disappointed at not having a chance of going into court. ‘But if a guy goes into another guy’s place,’ said Molly, ‘and, you know, like beats him up with a stick, he can’t just get away with it, can he?’

  ‘Apparently he can,’ said Marius Potter, not sorry that no one had asked him who called the police.

  Halfway through Sunday morning Katie Constantine said to her husband, ‘Isn’t it lovely, Michael, now you’ve qualified and something like this happens you can say to everyone, “I’m a doctor!”?’

  ‘Except that I don’t feel like a doctor because I haven’t got a job. You can’t be a sort of disembodied doctor. I wouldn’t even dare say I was one.’ He sighed and went back to reading all the letters he had had in response to the article he had written about St John’s wort being useless as a cure for depression. There had been even more emails, most of them unfavourable and several abusive. All troubled him because, like most people, he hated being vilified and called names in print, but the one that frightened him was from a professor of psychiatric medicine at some university. The professor pointed out that Michael’s piece was inaccurate because recent research had shown that St John’s wort did ameliorate certain types of depression if used with care and therefore could no longer be called alternative medicine. This was worse than the trichologist. There was also an email from the features editor enquiring if he would like to respond, in other words defend himself. Michael hadn’t answered this and didn’t intend to because he had no defence.

  Stuart’s arm had been put in plaster. Weeks would pass before he could use it again. He told his mother the party had been a success but he had slipped on the ice next day and broken his arm.

  ‘But there isn’t any ice,’ she said. ‘The rain has washed it all away. Round here, at any rate. I suppose it may be different where you live.’

  Nothing had been heard from Claudia. Stuart wondered a little about how Freddy’s visit of Saturday evening had come about. Had Claudia told him she was coming to his flat? Or had he overheard her phoning him? He wondered but not for long. However you looked at it, he had had a lucky escape. If Freddy’s aim hadn’t been so poor, he, Stuart, would be dead by now.

  On Monday morning one of the girls from Flat 5 called on him to ask if there was anything she could do to help. It was Molly Flint but he didn’t know that or had forgotten and didn’t bother to ask. Molly weighed about a stone more than she should have done and in his mind he called her ‘the fat one’.

  ‘You could unload the dishwasher,’ he said. ‘I managed to fill it but taking the stuff out and putting it away is hard with only one arm.’

  ‘It must be. Where shall I put these glasses?’

  ‘They’re new. Maybe you could find a place for them in one of those cupboards. And when you’ve done that you could make me a mug of hot chocolate. Don’t worry about the cleaning. Richenda will do that.’

  Molly put all the glasses away very tidily, reloaded the dishwasher with the plates Stuart had left lying about, made the chocolate and brought it to him with some Duchy Original lemon biscuits on a plate.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Stuart. ‘Tell me something. Have you seen a very beautiful girl around here, Thai or Vietnamese or something, about twenty, always about with her dad? I wondered if you knew where she lived.’

  ‘No, sorry, I don’t,’ said Molly sadly.

  ‘Pity. I think I’ll go and lie down now. I’ve got a bit of a headache where that animal hit me.’

  Claudia hadn’t phoned because Freddy had broken her jaw. Or it felt as if he had. On Sunday morning he maintained total silence, making no reply to her taunts and indignant questioning. Then, suddenly, he turned to face her and fetched her a blow across the face.

  ‘You don’t want to press charges,’ he said to her while he was driving her to the A & E department of the nearest hospital. ‘When they ask you who did this you reply, like Desdemona, ‘Nobody, I myself, farewell.’ That is, you write it down since you won’t be able to speak for a bit.’

  Claudia began to cry.

  ‘In my opinion,’ said Freddy, ‘things were a lot better when domestic violence was a private matter between husband and wife and the police just took it for granted.’

  This was not the first time Mr Ali was visiting Saudi Arabia but this time he was taking his eldest son with him and there was no one to run the shop. Olwen, arriving with her carrier bags, found it closed. She shuffled back to the post office where there was a telephone kiosk. This kiosk had several times been broken into by vandals and the phone cable pulled out of the wall but at the moment it was intact. Olwen asked the man behind the counter for the Yellow Pages. A receipt left behind by a customer served to make notes on with the pencil attached to the wall by a length of string.

  Making phone calls requesting things or responding to requests was something she had been doing for the various firms who had employed her all her life. There was nothing new in that. What was new was the attitude of the wine shops. The first two she called wanted a credit card number plus expiry date before they would deliver anything. Olwen hadn’t brought her card with her. At the third number she called they suggested she come in to select her gin and vodka but that was impossible. They were in Edgware. The woman in the fourth shop said they never delivered anything.

  People who came into the post office looked at her curiously, amazed to see someone who apparently had neither landline nor mobile. On her way back to Lichfield House, she met Wally Scurlock coming back from St Ebba’s churchyard. The
weather was improving, the schools were open again and, while ostensibly tidying up Clara Carbury’s grave, he had spent a pleasant twenty minutes watching the pupils of Kenilworth Primary School at play.

  ‘Would you get me a bottle of gin and one of vodka from the Tesco?’ Olwen said to him. ‘I’ll pay you.’

  ‘I should just about think you would, madam.’

  ‘Ten pounds.’

  ‘Twenty,’ said Wally. ‘It’ll have to wait till this afternoon. I haven’t got time to go back up there now.’

  Passing the front windows of Hereford House, he had seen his wife plying the vacuum cleaner in one of the ground-floor flats. This sight brought him the addict’s inner surge of excitement at the prospect of being alone to indulge his vice. What he had been doing at St Ebba’s or sometimes did at the pensioner’s tower window was self-indulgent entertainment – but no more than that. It paled beside the near ecstasy of watching those sites. While the schools had been closed and when Richenda was cleaning flats here or in one of the other blocks, the computer had drawn him as a magnet draws a needle, initially a soft tug, then a violent attraction that clamped him to the screen.

  Once he wouldn’t have believed himself capable of finding one site after another with such expertise. But he had learned that nothing teaches you a skill like a burning desire to acquire that knowledge. On the icy days when going out at all was a chore to be avoided, he soon found ways to access more graphic and harder films, permitting himself to see activities he had never dreamed possible. The playful pupils of Kenilworth Primary couldn’t compare with this.

  But Wally was not entirely without a conscience. He dealt with it mainly by his fear of the law and also by telling himself – incongruously – that what he did was harmless. These were photographs, these were videos, it wasn’t real. Your actual police (as he put it to himself) coming into the building had frightened him more than he let on to himself at first. Far more than he let on to Richenda. He had been waking up in the night in a sweat, imagining what might have happened, what they might have done. This fear sent him scurrying back to the grave in St Ebba’s churchyard where, as he squatted down, shears in hand, by Clara Carbury’s grave, he told himself this was better than the computer, this was entirely innocent, no more than a childless man indulging his love of children by watching their games. But he knew it wasn’t that and it wasn’t better.

  Now, for the first time since Stuart’s party and the police visit, with that familiar and wonderful feeling of breathless anticipation, he sat down at the computer, pressed the start key and then moved the mouse on to the one for Internet Explorer.

  ‘Other joy / To me is lost. Then let me not let pass / Occasion which now smiles.’ This was Marius Potter’s sortes reading for 13 February. The occasion referred to could be St Valentine’s Day which would fall next day. He had thought of buying a card and had taken a look at those on offer at the Kenilworth Parade newsagent’s but they were all so vulgar, hearts with arrows through them, pink bows, glasses of champagne, bunches of roses. Even these last were unsuitable to send to Rose. Perhaps he should send flowers and then visit her on this auspicious day.

  He was going to tell her. He had made up his mind.

  But it wasn’t so easy, he found himself thinking a few hours later. Suppose her memory of their night together was different from his. If she looked back to it at all it might be that she remembered it with distaste and regret. Probably, like the rest of them in the commune, she had been promiscuous, free and easy, doing no one any harm by her behaviour and none to herself. But she had only stayed there for one night and though she had seemed to enjoy herself as much as he had, there was her rapid departure next morning to be taken into consideration. It was almost as if she had fled from him and from that house, the scene of a yielding to temptation brought about only by the use of an unfamiliar drug.

  And now he confessed to himself that time had brought many changes in his own attitude to life. It was bound to have done. With a lifetime of teaching behind him, he was still the intellectual of those days, loving the classics, devoted to poetry, still a socialist, a campaigner against nuclear weapons, a health freak and advocate of alternative medicine. But the view he took of sexual matters had altered radically. To him now the idea of having sex with a woman one had just met was nauseating. Indeed, most sexual encounters seemed distasteful and he could barely remember when the last one he had experiencd had taken place. Years ago certainly and then with a woman who had come back out of his past and expressed a wish to resume their relationship. It hadn’t worked, it was over almost as soon as it had begun.

  But he could conceive of a love affair with the right woman and he was half ashamed to confess that he saw this in a romantic light. No doubt it was the result of reading so much poetry. He imagined himself meeting someone who would love him and, smiling derisively to himself, thought that she would have to love him, for to look at he was now far from an object of desire. But it was impossible and would never be. He and Rose must continue as they were, friendly acquaintances – perhaps a little more than that – and he would never remind her of what had happened thirty years before.

  He wasn’t going to tell her, after all. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.

  So his idea of sending her a dozen red roses on the following morning must come to nothing. He would go down, ask her out for coffee, or more probably green tea, and say nothing about its being St Valentine’s Day.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Stuart dared to venture out now that the pavements were free of ice but he found that a broken arm – though less of a hindrance than a broken leg – inhibits walking to a certain extent. He mostly stayed at home, feeling sorry for himself. There had been no word from Claudia. In fact, ‘Nessun dorma’ was seldom heard in Flat 1 these days. Only his mother, who knew nothing of the fracas which had ended the party, still called him and she preferred the landline. He guessed that Martin and Jack, or more likely Jack’s girlfriend Hilary, had been inclined to rethink their friendship with him after hearing Freddy Livorno, particularly the bits about him being a villain and a shagger of his wife. Nothing had been heard from them and no calls had been made from the Pembers or Duncan Yeardon to thank him for inviting them. Perhaps they were embarrassed. Molly Flint came regularly to make him cups of chocolate and wash dishes and run errands, and when he went out to pick up his post he had encountered Marius Potter who uttered his usual formal greeting. But he had the inescapable feeling that Marius’s smile was amused rather than sympathetic.

  *

  Taking a taxi to a wine shop in Cricklewood, getting the driver to wait and then drive her back home had grave drawbacks. Due to her lack of a phone, Olwen had to use the post office phone box or hail a taxi in the street, not easy in Kenilworth Avenue, and once one had been secured, get the driver or the shop proprietor to carry a crate of spirit bottles back to the cab. She did it once but with great difficulty and when the crate had been deposited in the Lichfield House lobby, she had to ask Mr Scurlock to carry it up in the lift for her. The effort of it, the energy it demanded and the strain of all that talking and asking and pleading was almost too much for her. When she was back in her flat, the first bottle opened and the first glass poured, she lay down on her sofa, groaning with exhaustion and admitted to herself she was too weak for this, she could never do it again.

  Wally Scurlock had charged her ten pounds to carry the crate up. That plus the taxi fare there and back and the waiting came to twice as much as it cost to employ him to go up to Tesco and bring her back two bottles of gin. Of course she got more by the crate but maybe she could persuade the caretaker to bring three bottles at the time.

  ‘Not for twenty bloody quid I couldn’t, madam. I’m not like some, I haven’t got no car. I have to carry it and it’s nearly pulled my arms out of their sockets.’

  Olwen hated having to speak to him. She hated having to speak to anyone. ‘Thirty pounds for three bottles, then.’

  ‘Correct me if I’m wron
g but I thought I’d explained I can’t carry three bottles. Two bottles is my limit and that’ll cost you thirty quid. Like every-bloody-body else, I’ve had to put up my charges.’

  Considering the flat was hers and she paid no rent, her pension plus the retirement pension had always seemed quite adequate to her needs. After all, she ate very little, she bought practically nothing but drink. But in the face of Mr Scurlock’s demands her bank account was diminishing at a rapid rate. The last time she had been to the cash dispenser, always walking with a stick now as well as hanging on to bushes and fences and lamp posts, she had found that if she were to draw out her customary £200 she would be overdrawn. Taking £150 instead, she nevertheless gave Wally Scurlock thirty pounds to fetch her two bottles of vodka.

  Next door to the Tesco, on the other side of the car park, was a store called IT Heaven where they had a sale on. Wally brought Olwen’s vodka and, carrying it in two plastic bags, wandered over to have a look at what was on offer. He hadn’t intended to buy anything but, thanks to Olwen, he was very flush at the moment and the price reductions were, frankly, ridiculous. It would be imprudent not to buy one of those printers. Wally told himself that if you had a computer you really needed a printer as well. Suppose the computer crashed, as they sometimes did, and all the emails were lost, as might happen if not transmuted to paper. He went in and bought a small printer in a nice shade of pale grey with blue trim.

  It took him a while when he got home to make it work – that is, to attach it to the computer and program the computer to accept it. But in the end he succeeded and then he realised he had no paper. Well, he wasn’t going back up there or traipsing all the way over to West Hendon. He’d buy the paper next time that old soak wanted another couple of bottles of her poison. One of her poisons. It wasn’t as if there was anything he wanted to print out. Any images he wanted to look at he could just as well see on-screen.