Tigerlily's Orchids (10 page)

Stuart tramped up Kenilworth Avenue, carefully placing his feet in the oval indentations made by those who had gone before him like the page who trod in Good King Wenceslas's footprints. He was on his way to look for the beautiful girl.

W
ally Scurlock had walked all the way up Kenilworth Avenue to the churchyard, was actually squatting down by Clara Carbury's grave, before he realised something was wrong. St Ebba's clock had struck, with a double stroke, half past ten, but no Kenilworth Primary School children had come out to play. Even inside gloves, his fingers were growing numb and his feet in wellies were icy. Perhaps the children were late because of the weather. The weather affected everything, spoilt everything. He paced a bit, slapping his upper arms with his gloved hands. It was supposed to warm you up but it didn't. St Ebba's struck three strokes for the three-quarters and then he knew. They had closed the school! That's what they did in snowy weather, they closed the schools. The comprehensive, visible from the pensioner's tower, would also be closed. Wally felt cheated of what he thought of as a legitimate and harmless activity, a pastime which saved him from the indulgence he truly – intensely, exultantly – preferred. He got slowly and stiffly to his feet.

The churchyard lay peaceful and silent under its thick and fleecy covering. No such silence had prevailed in this part of London for many years, the cars undriven, the buses stilled, pedestrians housebound. Wally knew what would happen if he went back along the snow-hushed streets to Lichfield
House and down into his basement flat. Richenda would be out cleaning. He thought with hatred of Richenda. With her great bosom and wide hips, her big painted face and lacquered hair, she was the antithesis of his desire, but it was because this was what she was that he had married her. A real woman, a big woman, was what a man like him should want. Except that when they had been married for no more than a few weeks he knew she wasn't. His imagination wasn't big enough to substitute, when they were in bed at night, one of these schoolchildren or the tiny lovely girl from Springmead for the pulsating bulk in his arms. Even with all the lights out, the blinds down, the curtains drawn, the imagined girl wasn't real enough to dispel Richenda.

Yet the girl was a grown woman. He could somehow tell that. Her breasts were tiny, her legs a teenager's, her back and shoulders narrow, but she was maybe twenty-five years old. If, knowing what he now knew, he could have found a woman like her, wouldn't she have saved him from the churchyard and the pensioner's tower, and more than that, much more, from what he was about to do?

Through Rose Preston-Jones's window he saw Richenda plying the vacuum cleaner. If she saw him she gave no sign of it. His feet were frozen, he could scarcely feel them any more. Another resentment welled up inside him as he made his way over to the stairs on his numbed feet. What sort of an architect must it have been to design a block of flats with a lift for the residents on the ground and upper floors but only a staircase for the caretaker's use? Going down was one thing but coming up, as he was obliged to a dozen, two dozen, times a day, was deliberate cruelty. It was bad enough now and he was only in his forties. And then there were the other blocks, Ross, Hereford and Ludlow – he was the caretaker for the lot of them, forced to go out into the open whatever
the weather to attend to some footling matter in another building.

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.

T
hough 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.

A
taxi 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.

A
part 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.