Tigerlily's Orchids (15 page)

‘I could understand it if you were a girl, Stuart.'

Since then there had been various small disfigurements – ‘pink eye' dyeing one retina red, a chipped tooth and the wait until the crown could be in place. Now he was appalled by the sight of his left arm when the plaster came off, the skin white, scaly and wrinkled like he could imagine (but had never seen) the arm of an old person, someone like Marius Potter, for instance. The weather was warm but the state of his arm made wearing a tight royal-blue T-shirt impossible. ‘Nessun dorma' was repeating itself hysterically from his bedroom where he had flung the mobile on his bed. Whatever Claudia might say, he had a horrible feeling that Freddy was sitting in his solicitor's office also listening to that ringtone and waiting for him to answer it. Waiting for the incriminating evidence which would be enough to fetch him down here with a lethal weapon.

He moved his arm up and down from the elbow like someone doing ‘curls'. It felt a bit stiff but it didn't hurt. He was young, the skin would rejuvenate itself – wouldn't it? Once it was back to normal he would go to one of those fake-tanning places, there was one up at the roundabout, and get himself done a lovely golden brown all over. Or maybe find himself a sunbed. But no, those things gave you cancer.

He had rather gone off hot chocolate. Perhaps it was something to do with the way Molly made it – not like his mother did – or else it was the stain on the carpet that Richenda had said was impossible to eradicate. Now he preferred cappuccino. Able to use his arm and hand as if he had never been injured, he made himself a mugful, grated some white chocolate and sprinkled it on the top, and took it to his front-facing window. Stuart was as frequently stationed at the window as the Lady of Shalott and as assiduous a looker in the mirror. But as he drank his coffee he told himself the time had come to stop gazing and act.

Today the weather was warm enough to dispense with the pale blue sweater, but wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt wasn't much to his taste. He possessed one in navy-blue and white horizontal stripes but he seldom wore it. Going into his bedroom to find it and see what it looked like on, he was met by ‘Nessun dorma'. He switched off the phone, a daring step to take and one he could barely remember ever taking before. Although the place had been quiet before, once that key had been pressed it seemed to him to be followed by utter silence. It made him feel a little uneasy. He pulled the striped T-shirt over his head, contemplated his reflection in the mirror in the black-matt frame and decided he was satisfied.

Now the time had come he felt inclined to put it off. Not for long, maybe just for half an hour. So a walk first. Again he went unaccompanied by his mobile. It felt strange, the way,
according to his mother, a woman feels when out without her handbag. The sky was a clear cloudless blue, the sun very warm, and the trees were coming into leaf, a fresh bright green. Other trees he didn't know the name of were a mass of pink and white blossom. He walked up as far as St Ebba's, round Kenilworth Green and back at the roundabout and made an appointment at Embrown to come in for an all-over tanning session the following afternoon. Varying the walk by returning via Chester Grove, he walked past the parade and noticed that Design for Living had closed. Another casualty of the recession. No more putting it off, Stuart, he told himself. The time has come. But what was he going to say to whoever came to the door? That was something he had given no thought to. Maybe simply say that they were neighbours, he had seen them about and would they like to come over for a drink? It was the kind of thing people did. His mother had often done it when new people moved in. Of course it would involve him in more expense and more preparation but all that was worth it to meet the beautiful girl. And they might say no, thank you for asking, but you must come to us.

All Duncan Yeardon's casement windows were open. As if it was high summer instead of only April. He could smell the paint from halfway up the path. Stuart thought of DIY as essentially something you did when you were too old to do anything else and Duncan's activities didn't interest him. Few people's did unless they were young and attractive.

In spite of the sunshine, blinds were down at all the Springmead windows, slatted blinds made of some kind of thin wood, and not a single window was open. The front door was painted black with ‘SPRINGMEAD' on it in silver capitals. Stuart wasn't usually very observant but he noticed the lack of a letter box. That was strange. He wouldn't have been surprised to learn that not having a letter box was against the law.
There was, however, a bell. He pressed it and heard chimes from inside. No one came. Perhaps they were out. The absence of their car meant nothing, as when they weren't out in it, it was kept in a garage.

He rang the bell again. This time someone appeared from the side of the house. The gate was opened between Springmead and number 7 and the beautiful girl's father came out. With him was a girl, but not the beautiful one.

He had a clipped jerky accent and his voice was rather high-pitched. ‘Yes? What is it?'

Stuart felt awkward. He hadn't expected to be treated like someone distributing flyers. ‘I – I mean, I'm a neighbour of yours. I live over there. In those flats. I wondered – I wonder if you'd – well, if you'd like to come over for a drink sometime. You and your –' he found himself using a phrase he thought he would never utter ‘– the two young ladies.'

This one was very different from the beautiful girl, being short, rather squat and with big coarse features. Her hair was jet black and long but not glossy and her eyes looked malevolent, perhaps because they were sunk in fleshy folds. The man said something to her in what was presumably their language, said it in a sibilant whisper. She turned away and went back the way she had come.

The man looked down before he spoke. ‘You are kind,' he said, ‘but no, thank you. We don't go out. We stay in our own place. Thank you.'

He didn't wait for Stuart to go but followed the girl, closing the side gate behind him. Stuart looked round to see Duncan Yeardon standing on the other side of the dividing fence, holding a mug in one hand and a paintbrush in the other.

‘I just popped out for a breather,' Duncan said. ‘Do you fancy a cuppa?'

‘I don't drink tea.'

‘You can have coffee if you don't mind instant.'

Stuart made no reply but went inside. He didn't remark on the heat. Dust sheets and pieces of newspaper covered the hall floor and half the staircase. Duncan brought him a mug of thin coffee in which curds floated.

‘Do you know the people next door?'

‘I've seen them,' said Duncan. ‘They keep themselves to themselves. There's that bloke you were talking to and two girls and a young chap. Well, I suppose that girl lives there too. I've never seen her before. I call the other girl Tigerlily.'

‘The beautiful one?'

‘Well, she's pretty. I wouldn't call her beautiful myself but there's no accounting for tastes.'

‘Tigerlily,' said Stuart in a dreamy tone.

‘That's not her real name, mind. I made that up or got it out of a book or something. I call her Tigerlily and the boy Oberon. Mr Wu, as I call him, is her husband.'

Stuart was appalled. ‘Are you sure?'

Remembering that this was a relationship he had himself invented, Duncan said no, he wasn't. ‘I mean, he's not her husband. He's not called Mr Wu either. That's just my fun.'

Stuart put his half-empty mug on the floor because there was nowhere else and said he must be off. ‘I need to rest because of my arm.' Duncan hadn't asked him about it, an omission he resented. Outside the Lichfield House gate he met Wally Scurlock, carrying a bottle of gin and a bottle of vodka.

‘Not for my consumption, sir,' said Wally, ‘so you needn't look like that.'

‘I wasn't looking like anything. They're for Olwen, are they?'

‘I perform this little errand for her, yes. You wouldn't care to take it on, I suppose?' Wally had been on the point of saying that Stuart had plenty of time because he ‘did fuck
all' but decided it would be going a bit far. ‘She'll pay,' he said.

‘I've got a bad arm,' said Stuart. ‘I'm convalescing.'

H
is encounter with Rose (or Rosie as he then knew her) came back to Marius with almost total recall once he had found the right place for her in his memory. He had just finished his degree, it was in classics and he had got a first. And in those days, as he told himself, a first
was
a first. Six months off and then a year at teacher training college. The six months he spent at the Hackney squat as part of a commune with people called Storm, Anther and Zither (not their real names), Simon Alpheton the painter, who wasn't famous then, and a woman named Harriet something. Rosie had arrived one morning, brought there by Storm whose girlfriend was her friend. Well, it was more like the middle of the afternoon as no one ever got up before late lunchtime. She was rather shy and quiet and looked a lot younger than her real age. He remembered her extreme slenderness and her long pale hair.

No one in the commune ever did anything. They sat around on the floor in the evenings and sometimes long into the night, smoking pot, passing damp brown joints round the circle, picking things up – a green glass ball, an ostrich egg, a string of beads – and stroking them, cooing over them and making sounds of wonder as if they were priceless objects. Why did they? He couldn't remember, and now he felt ashamed of wasting his time. But he had done it with the rest of them and so had Rosie who sat next to him.

She had been allotted a mattress in Harriet's room. No one had a bed. It was summer and hot. In some of the rooms the windows had been boarded up because the glass was broken
but not in his. It was quite airy in his room and quite clean. He had always kept his living places clean, much to the derision of the others. That night no one wanted to go to bed because of the heat – except Rosie, who got up rather unsteadily and asked where she was to sleep. He said he would take her to Harriet's room, but when they were out in the passage – that house was a maze of passages – she looked trustingly at him and said she didn't want to be alone. He was used to the place but he could see that to a newcomer it could be more than intimidating. It could be frightening. Darkness prevailed. Cobwebs hung everywhere, grey veils swaying in the draughts from the broken windows. Bulbs were in only a few of the light sockets, burnt-out candles stood about in cracked saucers, old Indian bedspreads were draped over some of the mattresses and pinned up at some of the broken windows. He put his arms round her. She was trembling but warm and soft.

‘Let's go into my room,' he said. ‘It's better there. It's nice there. And there aren't any spiders.'

‘I don't mind spiders,' she said.

After all these years he remembered that. He had meant to lie down beside her and not touch her again, but he couldn't keep to this resolve, partly because she so evidently didn't want him to. The lovemaking was lovely, he remembered, protracted and repeated, and they fell asleep in each other's arms, something he had read about happening to couples as quite a normal common thing, but it had never happened to him before. They moved away from each other later, surely another normal thing. But in the morning – the afternoon, really, when he woke up – she was gone.

Storm had brought her so it was to him he had gone. Who was she? Where was she? But Storm was too far gone on an acid trip, out of his head on the stuff, even to know whom
he meant. And Storm's girlfriend had broken up with him and disappeared so she was no help. Marius had asked the other people in the commune but no one knew Rosie's other name. She was just Rosie and they talked of ships passing in the night. Why had she come in the first place? No one knew. That wasn't the kind of thing they enquired about. They were there to escape from questions of that kind – what are you doing? Why are you here? What time is it? When are you going to get a job? Who's that girl?

Within weeks he went off to his teacher training and he forgot her. Or thought he had. There had been other girlfriends, even a fiancée. He had never married but he wasn't enough of a sentimentalist to attribute his singleness to his night with Rosie. But now that total recall had come to him he stayed away from her. Being in her company embarrassed him.

W
hen Claudia arrived at Lichfield House it happened that several of the residents were either on their way out or reaching home. This was because the time she had chosen was five thirty in the afternoon. Stuart himself was returning from his tanning session at Embrown and Michael Constantine from a meeting with the features editor of his newspaper. The Scurlocks, together for once, were on their way to visit Richenda's mother in the Royal Free Hospital, and Marius Potter was off to a house in Mill Hill where on Tuesday evenings he tutored a seventeen-year-old for her Latin A level. Duncan Yeardon wasn't there but, having finished his decorating for the day, was whiling away the time until his dinner by watching Lichfield House.

He saw the arrival of the tall blonde woman whose husband had broken up Stuart Font's party and Stuart Font's arm. She got out of a taxi, had an argument with the driver and flounced
off up the path. The door opened to receive her as it had opened for that medical chap two minutes before. Stuart appeared next, looking as if he had been on a long holiday in the Caribbean, but stopped outside the Bel Esprit Centre to stare at Tigerlily and Mr Wu who had just got out of their car. Stuart waved and called out hi and wasn't it a lovely evening but Mr Wu hustled Tigerlily into the house and quickly closed the front door. Duncan was beginning to enjoy himself.

The man who looked like an old hippie – Duncan called him Ringo – came out, then went back as if he'd forgotten something. Stuart trailed slowly up the path, obviously fed up about Tigerlily not talking to him. What was going on there? Before he could provide an answer, the wife of the madman who had injured Stuart appeared, the glass doors opening for her and almost precipitating her into Stuart's arms. The word Stuart used was uttered so loudly that Duncan heard it clearly from his open window – and deplored it as unnecessary and a sign of the times. The doors stood open, kept in that state by the press of people all standing on the threshold. That caretaker chap and his wife pushed their way through, the caretaker or porter or whatever he was shouting that they'd break the door mechanism if they went on like that.