Tigerlily's Orchids

by Ruth Rendell

  He started the computer and googled ‘Passports’. Molly had finished with the vacuum cleaner and was standing behind him asking him if he’d like a cappuccino.

  ‘You know, I’ve like gone off them. I think I’m back to hot chocolate.’

  ‘We haven’t got that much milk but I could run up the road and get some.’

  ‘You do that,’ said Stuart absently, and added, ‘there’s a good girl.’

  Molly, who should have been at college, was standing in a queue at Mr Ali’s when Carl phoned her. It was the third time he had phoned that morning.

  ‘There’s like someone else, isn’t there?’

  ‘So what if there is, Carly? It’s not like we were engaged or anything.’

  ‘Maybe you weren’t, Moll, but I was.’

  ‘Oh, come on. It takes two to be engaged.’

  ‘It’s that Stuart, isn’t it? The one that had the party?’

  ‘So what if it is, Carly?’ Having got to the top of the queue, Molly ended the call and bought her milk. On her way back, she met Katie Constantine.

  ‘Did you know two flats in Lichfield House are on the market?’

  ‘Which two?’ Suppose Stuart was going to sell his flat and move, Molly thought, and hadn’t bothered to tell her? ‘Not Stuart Font’s?’

  ‘Not so far as I know,’ said Katie. ‘That Mr Yeardon who lives over there told me.’ She waved a vague hand. ‘Funny you have to hear it from someone who doesn’t even live there, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but which ones?’

  ‘Number 2 and number 3. That’s Marius and Rose. Michael says they’ll be lucky to sell what with this credit crunch.’

  Molly felt happy to have a piece of news for Stuart. But when she told him he barely seemed interested. He was occupied on his computer, printing out reams of stuff. She stood behind him sadly for a minute or two and then she went off to wash up his chocolate mug. Stuart had discovered many websites dealing with eligibility for a British passport, marriage to a British citizen, right of residence and right of abode. Everything seemed to be all right if you married this British citizen before 1949 but that would make you about eighty now. The first of January 1983 seemed another significant date. He didn’t know why. All that was clear was that Tigerlily wouldn’t become a British citizen and thus have a British passport just because she was married to him. On the other hand, suppose it was true she came from Hong Kong? Had Hong Kong once been part of the Commonwealth? His father would know but he didn’t want to ask his father.

  The day was fine if rather windy. He went out for a walk to think about it, watched by Molly from the window. Fresh air – or the diesel-scented fug which passed for it – was supposed to clear one’s head, and as Stuart passed through the kissing gate into Kenilworth Green, he found that it was having that effect. A plain fact had emerged from all that circumlocution and bumf. Getting married to Tigerlily wouldn’t help her get a passport. She would have to get on to the Home Office herself and ask what to do, a procedure which would no doubt entail holding the phone line for about three-quarters of an hour while listening to Handel’s ‘Largo’. Marrying him would be no short cut. Much as he told himself he adored Tigerlily, he couldn’t help feeling relief that he wouldn’t have to marry her. All he need do was take her to a hotel that night, hide her from her family and find somewhere for them to live. Maybe rent a flat on the other side of London while renting out Flat 1 Lichfield House. That way he wouldn’t be much out of pocket.

  Sitting down on the bench under the blossoming chestnut trees, he indulged in delightful fantasies: he and Tigerlily sitting side by side, her hand in his, watching TV, he at the computer while she cooked delicious Chinese meals, she bringing him a glass of chilled white wine or possibly champagne on a Chinese lacquer tray, kneeling in front of him like the geisha in the picture, he and Tigerlily entwined on a big low white bed.

  The wind blew apple and chestnut blossom on to the grass like snow. He thought how there had been snow on the ground when first he saw her. She was the loveliest girl he had ever seen and soon she would be his. But not, luckily, his wife.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The police had never come. They hadn’t phoned him. This must mean that the woman who looked from a distance like a little girl – but with her wrinkled face not the kind of little girl he might fancy – hadn’t told the police. More to the point, Rose Preston-Jones, who knew him, hadn’t done so either. And Rose would soon be moving. She hadn’t bothered to tell him, of course, he was only the caretaker, only the person responsible for the welfare of everyone in the four blocks. Wally had seen the advertisement in the window of an estate agent’s, which had just opened where Wicked Wine used to be, her flat for sale and the one that belonged to Marius Potter.

  It looked as if he was safe. He would be more careful in future. Better stay at home, at least for a while, and as soon as Richenda went out cleaning, visit his favourite sites on the computer. Once she had gone he unscrewed the nuts on the vinyl panels and lifted out his Toshiba, glad now that he hadn’t opted for the alternative and dropped it into the Regent’s Canal. Pleased with himself and his escape from those women, he did something he had wanted to do for a long time but hadn’t quite dared. He printed out the choicest pictures, spent ten minutes or so contemplating them, and then put them away in the space where the computer had been.

  At ten twenty-five this Wednesday morning he walked across the road to his new friend’s house. Duncan Yeardon had encountered him while they were both shopping in the Tesco, they had got talking, recalling their meeting at Stuart’s party, and Duncan had invited him over ‘for a coffee’ and a look at his new decorations.

  The coffee was thin and had the consistency and flavour of Bisto gravy, a favourite of Richenda’s. Wally ate a Marie biscuit and remarked that Duncan kept his home very warm.

  ‘Not me,’ said Duncan. ‘The heating’s been off for weeks. It’s the insulation. Wonderful insulation this place has got, enough to warm the cockles of the hearts of those climate-change people.’

  Wally didn’t know what he was talking about. As far as he knew, cockles were a kind of downmarket shellfish. He was looking at Duncan’s newspaper which lay open on the arm of a chair at a story of a man who had been abusing children in Thailand and who had been watching hundreds of child pornography websites. There was a picture of the police taking his computer away while the abuser stood by, running his hands through his shoulder-length hair. Wally didn’t want to talk about it and was commenting on the beauty of his host’s back garden, visible through wide-open French windows, when Duncan said, ‘These men make you sick to your stomach. I tell you what I’d do to them. I’d cut their – well, neuter them, like what they do to animals.’

  Wally knew he ought to agree but somehow he couldn’t. He needed to put up some sort of defence.

  ‘Abusing kids is bad, of course, that’s terrible, but there’s no harm in watching films, is there? They’re not real, they’re just pictures.’

  He was amazed at Duncan’s response. ‘Just pictures, are they? How d’you think they got those pictures, then? Real kids had to do those things, didn’t they? Real children had to be made to do those things.’ Duncan’s voice was shrill with indignant rage. ‘Trafficked kids, probably. Slave kids had to be forced to do that.’

  ‘You want to calm down,’ Wally said, and added, ‘It’s not me you want to get mad at. I don’t make the bloody films.’

  And Duncan did calm down. ‘Bloody is right,’ he said in a sad voice. ‘I wonder how many die when those things are done to them, I just wonder.’

  Wally didn’t stay long after that. He wouldn’t have much more to do with Duncan Yeardon. The man had made him feel vulnerable and frightened all over again. Was it true all that stuff he had said about children being forced to do those things? A lot of people believed that children enjoyed sex and wanted it just like adults did. Or it could be computer-generated, couldn’t it? The really sadistic stuff, the cruel tortures, they
couldn’t be real but made up of bits of film sort of mixed up on a computer. Wally didn’t know how but it must be something like the way they made dogs dance and rabbits sing for the commercials. It wasn’t real animals and watching it was just harmless fun.

  Michael Constantine was having a drink with his features editor. It was this man, midway between an acquaintance and a friend, who had got him his job. Their meeting would have been for lunch, Michael knew very well, if he was in favour. As it was, various difficulties which had come up were being pointed out to him; for instance, the large number of emails the newspaper received, drawing attention to discrepancies in Michael’s articles. Lately there had also been tweets of a derisive or insulting nature.

  ‘Surely a bit of controversy is good,’ Michael said on his second gin and tonic. ‘Argument, discussion, all that sort of thing. A lot of this stuff is opinion, after all. What I write is my opinion. It’s not as if we’re talking about errors.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact we are,’ said the features editor, who never drank anything but water at lunchtime. ‘That piece of yours about solar panels under the heading “Powerful Stuff”, you don’t seem to know the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt hours. Apparently it’s a confusion between power and energy.’

  Michael didn’t say anything.

  ‘That’s halfway to understandable, I see that. But saying under the same heading that solar panels on a roof can heat up a house so that snow won’t stick to its roof – well, that’s simple fantasy, isn’t it?’

  Michael remembered picking up this piece of information from Marius Potter who had grinned at the time as if he knew it was – well, simple fantasy. ‘I’m sorry. I must have been having an off day.’

  The features editor laughed heartily to take the sting out of his words. ‘Don’t let it occur again, will you?’

  Molly was always in the flat these days, it seemed to Stuart, at least a couple of hours each day. He several times tried to get rid of her by reminding her in an entirely uncharacteristic way that he was concerned about her missing college. She always said that she was on her way there, she had just ‘popped in’ to perform some essential task.

  ‘I like you to have everything looking nice,’ she said, smiling and putting her face too close to his.

  These past weeks he had needed to do nothing for himself, not even pick up a mug from the floor or empty an ashtray. She had scolded him once about his smoking but stopped when she saw his frown and had one herself when he offered her the packet. She made his bed and changed his sheets, cleaned the bath and scrubbed the tiled walls of the shower, waxed the floors and cleaned the windows. Once, in an impulsive moment after she had fetched his clothes from the dry-cleaner’s, he had said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  Her bright flush and adoring eyes told him not to say anything like that again. As an unpaid housekeeper she was a treasure but her presence in his flat had its downside. He disliked her being there while he changed his clothes, even though he shut himself in his bedroom. It meant putting on a dressing gown to go to the bathroom, and when he did, there she was putting bleach down the lavatory pan.

  ‘Time you went, Molly,’ he said, but to not much effect.

  ‘When I’ve ironed the tea towels.’

  Not even his mother ironed tea towels. He dressed himself with care in a snow-white shirt, laundered by Molly, black slub silk trousers and a blue denim jacket he had just bought in Hampstead. When he emerged from his bedroom Molly asked him if he was going somewhere nice.

  ‘A hot date,’ said Stuart.

  ‘Have a good time.’ Molly’s tone was doleful.

  She opened the front door for him like a maid. He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, the first time he had ever touched her. But she ought to have some reward for all she did, poor thing. He smiled to himself, shaking his head, as someone slipped out through the automatic doors. No one he knew, whoever it was. He was carrying a small blue suitcase. It was of the softest, sleekest leather, the shade of a summer sky at dusk and in it he had placed a change of underwear, a clean shirt, a toothbrush and razor and various other essentials of daily life. Some hours before he had phoned the Crown Hotel in Cricklewood and booked a double room for himself and Tigerlily.

  But he was less happy about the forthcoming encounter than he had expected to be, because he had realised that what she must want of him was a false passport. It was obvious when you thought about it. Stuart was afraid of breaking the law. Apart from this, he didn’t know how to go about it. Was it rather like getting hold of a handgun? You went into a pub in somewhere like Brixton or Harlesden and got talking to dubious-looking characters until one of them offered you what you wanted? Once, when he had been in such a place, he had been offered heroin and that had frightened him a lot. Well, he thought it was heroin. The dealer had offered him ‘Big H’. Was he to go through all that again? Perhaps he need not think about it now. Or think about Claudia.

  She had phoned him the previous evening. ‘Where are you?’ he had said, afraid of Freddy.

  ‘Oh, he’s out. Don’t worry about him.’

  But he did worry. The phone call turned into an argument, she saying she had to see him, he trying to tell her once again that their affair was at an end, but finally agreeing, knowing this was a promise he couldn’t keep, to see her on Friday evening. St Ebba’s clock struck seven just before he reached the roundabout. There, in the newsagent’s, was where he had first seen Tigerlily. It had been love at first sight, he thought. But if only he could have just chatted her up a bit, asked her out and let everything take its normal course. She might be moving in with him now instead of his having to go through this horrendous business of passports and hotels and hiding from her dad or uncle or whoever he was. As for Claudia, when she turned up at the very expensive restaurant he said they would meet at, for the first time he wouldn’t be there. Perhaps that would teach her. He was disconcerted when, as he approached the kissing gate, ‘Nessun dorma’ sounded again.

  ‘Where are you now?’ said Claudia’s voice.

  She must have heard his sigh. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I only wanted to tell you that I phoned the restaurant and they said you hadn’t made a booking. They said that if you don’t we shan’t be able to get in, so I did. In your name, of course. You didn’t tell me where you are now.’

  He ended the call and switched off the mobile.

  It was still as light as at noon. The chestnuts and the apple trees had shed all their blossom and it lay in billows of white and pink on the grass. After a while he sat down on the swing as St Ebba’s clock struck the half-hour. Seven thirty. The swing had been made for people a lot lighter than him and it creaked a bit. He swung up and down a little, remembering from childhood that you placed your toes on the ground and pushed to make the swing rise higher. Better not do too much of that in case he broke it. Now to have a go on the carousel, spin it round a bit. He looked at the time on his mobile: seven forty. Which way would she come? Through the kissing gate or along the path from Chester Grove? He walked a little way along the path. No one was about, no one at all. When he turned round, walking back and emerging once more on to the green, he expected to see her coming through the gate, running perhaps because she was late. The green was empty yet for a single rabbit which hopped under the fence and came out on to the grass where it began eating a weed with yellow flowers.

  Stuart returned to the swing. He felt he was being watched, yet when he turned round to look into the churchyard he could see no one. It was still daylight, but among the gravestones and under the dark evergreen trees, darkness had almost come. Nothing moved. He got off the swing and went up to the fence. There was no reason to suppose she would come through the grounds of St Ebba’s and find herself having to climb over the fence, but still he stood there, peering in among the tree trunks, the sensation of someone watching him now overpowering.

  He was afraid. Of what he didn’t know. The stillness? The clear brig
ht sky from in which the sun had gone but where distant stars showed? St Ebba’s struck eight and the brazen notes sounded ominous. The kind of breeze that comes with dusk rustled through the new leaves and the last of the blossom, sending a shower of petals on to the grass. How long was he going to wait for her? Another half-hour? It was five past eight. The invisible eyes were still fixed on him. He turned his back on them, walked towards the see-saw, sat down on the low end of it, astride like a rider. Behind him came a crunching sound, like someone stepping on underbrush in a wood. He turned round then, certain it was Tigerlily, come at last.

  Sophie was the only person who had come shopping on foot. To balance herself, she had got the checkout girl to put the vodka in one carrier and the gin in another. Cars were queuing up to leave the car park and one driver shouted at her when she rushed across the exit in front of his Honda. She never liked passing St Ebba’s after dark, the churchyard was full of strange-shaped shadows and small things that moved. The small things that moved had eyes, so they were only wildlife, mice and squirrels and things, she supposed, but she always hurried past and past the green too. This time, though, something big moved among the graves and if it had eyes they held no green or golden glitter. Sophie ran, the carrier bags swinging and banging against her legs, heading for the safety of the roundabout.