Tigerlily's Orchids

by Ruth Rendell

  He was obliged to pay the minimum wage. Molly thought that with that coming in she might be able to afford a room of her own. A flat, even a studio flat, to herself she had long realised was hopeless. Elated, she told Carl when he came home from Brent Cross.

  ‘I’m not having you do that.’

  ‘You’re not? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’m not having my wife work.’

  ‘Carl, I’m not your wife – remember?’

  ‘You will be and I’m not having you work. No wife of mine works, right? I keep her.’

  She had never thought of herself as much of a feminist but then she had never heard a man talk like that before, a skinny weasel-faced man in dirty jeans holding a bag of doner kebab slices in one hand and a greasy package of chips in the other. Standing glaring at her in a dirty room cluttered with bags of junk. She started to laugh; it was so ridiculous, she threw back her head and laughed. He said nothing. He threw down the bags of food and punched her on her uplifted jaw. It was a hard punch because, although puny, he was young, and he followed it up with a slap to the other side of her head and then a harder blow to this side.

  Molly fell over, shrieking. But she got up again quickly, holding on to her face with both hands. He muttered, ‘No woman of mine works.’

  She thought she wouldn’t be able to speak but she could. The words came thickly. She had bitten her tongue when he hit her. ‘That’s it. I’m going. I should never have come to this dump, this shithole.’ Her suitcase stood where she had left it and she turned. It took courage to turn her back on him and she braced herself for renewed blows but none came.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said. Tears had come into his eyes.

  Now she was facing him again. ‘You think I’d stop here after what you’ve done? I’ve nowhere to go but I’m going. I can get on a train and go to Torquay, I can ask Duncan to take me in. He would, I bet he would.’

  To her horror and disgust he fell on his knees. He was really crying now. ‘Don’t go. Say you won’t go. We’re engaged, we’re going to get married. I’ll never lay a finger on you again, I promise. I never will.’

  ‘Next time you get angry you will.’ But she knew that even in arguing with him, she was halfway to giving in. How much would the train fare to Torquay be? A lot. And Duncan – suppose he wasn’t in? Everybody went away on holiday this month. He might be away. ‘I’ll stay for just tonight,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to sleep on the floor.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I’ll do anything, Molly. Say you won’t leave me.’

  She wrinkled her nose like someone smelling something bad. It made him wince. ‘Let’s have a look at your face. I haven’t done much, have I?’ He got to his feet. ‘It won’t scar. I haven’t done much. I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’ She didn’t know how she knew that was what they all said. She ate the meat and the chips. There was nothing else. He had brought in cigarettes and she smoked a couple, not because she much liked smoking but because they reminded her of Stuart. Carl said he would go out and buy a bottle of wine.

  ‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘You won’t get round me that way.’

  But when the cheap red wine appeared and he had poured it out into cracked cups she drank some of it. There were no mirrors in the room. She went to the bathroom, carrying soap and toilet roll, and actually managing to get in there without having to wait outside the door, looked at her bruised face. She would have a black eye and a swollen jaw. But as she stood contemplating her damaged image she thought, well, she had experienced something. She knew a lot more of what life was about than she had that morning. This was domestic violence and she had been the victim of it at the age of nineteen. She could talk about it now, not as something she had come across in a book or a newspaper, but at first hand. That didn’t mean she was going to stick around for more of it. Come the morning, let him go off and clean some woman’s windows, and she’d be out of there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was a bit much, Duncan thought, a bit over the top. He hardly knew the girl. And he knew very well what happened when people asked if you could put them up for one night or maybe two. They stayed for ten years. His imagination got to work. She would move in with all her stuff, cases and cases of it no doubt and boxes and bags, and take over the largest of his spare rooms, the nice one on the first floor with the view of the summer house next door and the lane and the magnolia tree in the garden beyond. Her clothes would be left all over the floor and she would of course want to use Eva’s hairdryer. The noise of the dryer would roar through the house early every morning. The bathroom she would fill with cosmetics and bath essence and body lotion. She would have baths and leave a sticky rim of bath oil round the tub. She would be always washing her clothes and would commandeer his washing machine and dryer.

  Moira next-door-but-one had suggested this last when he told her about Molly’s phone call. ‘You wait till you get your electric bill, Duncan. That’ll be an eye-opener.’

  Especially now he wasn’t getting that marvellous heat from next door.

  Would he have to feed her? Cook? He couldn’t quite place her in his memory. Was she the one whose male companion had broken the glass in the French window or the one whose boyfriend had brought the beer? And how long, oh, how long, would she stay?

  She had said she had a job working for Mr Ali. He went down to Mr Ali’s shop to stock up with supplies. Bottled water – all the young drank that – crispbread, apples.

  ‘A very nice young lady,’ said Mr Ali. ‘I’m happy for her she’ll be living in a nice house while she works for me.’

  ‘She won’t be staying for more than a day or two.’

  ‘She’ll be company for you, you’ll see. And with Ramadan coming on apace, only a few days away now, I shall be glad of her assistance. In the late afternoons I get quite faint from fasting, you know.’

  On the way back he met Richenda. She dismounted from her bicycle to chat to him about the emptiness of Lichfield House. ‘It gives you a weird feeling. Kind of creepy, all them vacant rooms.’

  He told her about the imminent arrival of Molly. ‘That little madam lost me my job with poor Stuart. She was after him but she never got nowhere. You want to watch out, Duncan. She’s got her eye on you.’

  Duncan made up the bed in the spare room and put clean towels in the bathroom, a bath towel, a hand towel and a facecloth. It didn’t look right so he took them away, folded them again and laid them on the bed the way Eva used to when they had a guest. Since her death no one had come to stay.

  Molly hadn’t stayed many nights in Carl’s room but still she had accumulated more stuff. There had been things she had had to buy because he hadn’t got them: the ever-needed soap and toilet paper, tea bags because he only drank beer and wine, apples and bananas so that she didn’t get bowel cancer from living on doner kebab.

  Her face ached and she could feel a lump on her left cheek which started to throb as she packed her suitcase and bags. She couldn’t get it all in. Another carrier would be needed, preferably one of those bags with pictures of fruit and vegetables on them that were supposed to last a lifetime. In her searches through the bags which cluttered the room she hadn’t come across any but several remained that she hadn’t sorted through.

  Carl had gone to Brent Cross. At five to four the builders – they never seemed to build anything – had turned off their radio and knocked off. Apart from the throb of traffic in Walm Lane, it was strangely silent. She ought to go before Carl came back but she needed another bag. She sat on the floor, tugged one of the bags over and began pulling out its contents. Not a hoarder herself, Molly wondered why anyone would want to keep all this stuff, most of it broken. Boxes that had once held mail-order purchases, ripped open, a calculator that didn’t work, a broken torch, lots of carriers but all of them the flimsy sort, a much-thumbed copy of a book called The Story of O. She left the contents of the bag where they lay and started on the next one. It
had been buried under several of the others.

  Newspapers on top, mostly the Sun but a few copies of the Daily Mail. A bag of metal bits that looked like the inside of a computer. Another of DVD cases with no DVDs inside them. A cardboard box full of broken china wrapped up in cling film. A small suitcase. She was actually thinking that this would do, this could be used to contain her extra stuff, when she did a double take and saw what it was. She let out a sound, something halfway between a cry and a gasp.

  What she had found was Stuart’s blue leather case and if there was any doubt there were his initials – SF – on its lid.

  *

  Molly’s first reaction was not anger or sorrow or even wonder. It was terror. Sweat broke out on her upper lip, yet she was shaking. Her hands were shaking so much that they had become almost useless. What you were supposed to do in this situation was take deep breaths. She took deep breaths. She clenched her hands and released them. There was something else in the bag, something wrapped in rags, but she was afraid to unwrap it. Taking it in her now steadying hands, she felt through the cloth the outlines of a large knife.

  She knew exactly what all this meant but still she remained sitting there, holding the small blue suitcase in her hands. Without putting it down she struggled awkwardly to her feet. Carl would soon be back. She knew what she must do before he came, call the police, find her mobile and call the police. She could see it on the dusty cluttered mantelpiece. Standing now, taking a tentative step, then another, she reached for it and found it – dead. It had been all right when she’d phoned Duncan but that had been the last of the battery before it needed recharging.

  The suitcase was still in her arms when she heard Carl’s feet on the stairs. She kicked one bag after another in front of her and took refuge between them and the window. He walked in, said, ‘Give me that, bitch.’

  Afterwards she thought how amazing it was that strength and energy came to you when you needed them, when it was a matter of life and death. She bent down, grabbed the box of china and hurled it at him. It struck him on the head, making him duck. She flung up the window sash, threw the suitcase out and leapt after it.

  He was half out of the window when she pulled the sash down, trapping him, his head and arms held like a man in the stocks.

  Down on the pavement she could see Stuart’s suitcase, saw a woman come out of a house, pick it up and look up at her. ‘Call the police,’ she shouted. ‘Call them now.’

  A crowd began to gather. A crowd always does. When he saw them Carl retreated back into the room, letting the window fall shut. Molly went slowly down the ladder, crying now, making little moaning sounds. At the bottom, another woman, big, blonde, motherly, stepped forward and took her in her arms.

  ‘You poor dear, you poor lamb, and look at your poor face.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Duncan had dreaded this happening but when it did and he got used to it he liked it. Molly came for one night, then for two, sleeping in the big spare room with the view and putting her bath essence and body lotion in the bathroom. But there his imagined scenario ended and when she started cooking for him and making real coffee for visitors he said he didn’t see why she shouldn’t stay on and be his lodger while her course lasted.

  Carl Rossini and Walter Scurlock came up in court at much the same time, but Carl’s appearance in the magistrates’ court on a charge of murder was only a preliminary hearing which would lead eventually to his trial at the Central Criminal Court. Wally, who was charged on several counts in connection with indecent images of children, went to prison for a year and had his name put on the sex offenders’ register.

  Richenda took no special interest in the trial and its outcome beyond reading about it in the Daily Mail where there was a triple-column picture of Wally being led between two policemen past a baying crowd, a bag over his head.

  ‘Hope they tie a string round it and pull it tight,’ said Richenda to one of the ladies she cleaned for in Hereford House.

  Later that same day she was standing on the opposite pavement chatting to Duncan about the empty flats in Lichfield House, all those For Sale notices on poles sprouting like trees in the front garden, when a taxi drew up outside and a woman got out. The taxi driver followed her, making two journeys to drop large suitcases on the doorstep. She was a large woman. Someone less dignified or with less perfect posture would have been called obese. About forty-five years old, she wore garments which could be taken for a uniform, though they were not, a small black hat that might have had a peak but did not, a black suit with epaulettes and brass buttons, a mid-calf-length skirt and sensible lace-up shoes. The taxi driver was tipped – not generously if his expression was anything to go by – and the woman lifted the cases one by one into the hallway. When the automatic doors had closed behind her, Richenda said, ‘That will be Mrs Charteris.’

  ‘And who’s she when she’s at home?’ Duncan asked in his facetious way.

  ‘She’s at home now. She’s the new caretaker, that bastard’s replacement. And she wants to be called Mrs, not whatever her first name is. We’ll see how long that lasts.’

  ‘Caretaker, is she?’ said Duncan. ‘She’s got no one to take care of.’ And he went indoors to where Molly was making a cassoulet for their dinner from a Nigella Lawson recipe.

  But gradually the new occupants came, a married couple, an unmarried couple, two girls sharing, a single woman, a single man and a single mother with a small girl. Duncan watched them from his front windows, imagining lives and dramas for them that bore no relation to reality.