Tigerlily's Orchids (16 page)

Inside the lobby of Lichfield House Claudia was hanging on to Stuart, holding his arm and clutching his other shoulder. She had lost all control and begun shouting at him that he needn't think he could treat her like that, never answering her calls, ignoring her after all they'd been to each other. Duncan could no longer hear her and barely see anything now the doors had closed. Regretfully, he turned away to think about cooking something for his supper.

*

S
tuart unlocked his door and pushed Claudia inside. He didn't want her there but it was a preferable alternative to the scene she was making in front of Marius Potter and Michael Constantine.

Once inside, Claudia demanded drink. She needed it. Surely he had a bottle of wine in his fridge? He told her she would have to drink it warm, and while she was taking a long swig, he resolved to be strong and decisive. A break must be made. She set down her glass, said, ‘You've been away. You'd never get a tan like that in this country.'

‘In Barbados,' he lied. ‘And I'm going back there.' He began fabricating. ‘Tomorrow. I'll be away a long time.'

‘Oh, darling, is that why you didn't answer my calls?'

He weakened. Instead of telling her all was over and they were never to see each other again, as he had resolved to do, he agreed with her. That was why. ‘Where does Freddy think you are?'

‘Oh, God knows. Who cares? Let me come to Barbados with you. That'll be the start of leaving Freddy. You don't know how I long to see the back of him.'

This was worse than he had ever dreamt of. ‘Listen, Claudia, you tell Freddy I'm in the Caribbean. Or tell him I've moved – anything. Don't you realise he more or less threatened to kill me?'

‘Yes, but it's all talk, darling. Oh, darling, let's go to bed.'

Claudia admired his beautiful tan, something which once would have gratified him, but he didn't much enjoy himself. It was the last time, though, he made up his mind as she was dressing that it absolutely must be the last time. When he was going about with Tigerlily – something he must make happen – Claudia would get the message, she would give up, she would have to.

By now it was dark, the street lights coming on. He saw
Claudia out, found a taxi waiting hopefully in the parade and put her into it. On his way back he saw the black car, its headlights on, pulling away from outside Springmead with Tigerlily's father at the wheel. He was so excited he could almost feel the adrenalin surge and he ran up the steps and rang the bell. The place was brightly lit behind its slatted blinds. He heard the chimes the bell made, pressed it again, it chimed again, and the door was opened.

Tigerlily stood there, beautiful in her white dress, her hair in two thick black plaits. Even Stuart, not known for his sensitivity to other people's feelings, saw her look of horror. She put one slender hand up to cover her mouth. Behind her, instead of some sort of hallway or room, was another door which she must have closed behind her. It was made of thickly chased glass, apparently coloured green, unless there was a green curtain behind it.

‘I came to ask you over for a drink,' he said, adding when the look remained unchanged. ‘You and your father and your sister, of course. Any time you like. I'm always there.'

She began shaking her head. She took her hand away from her mouth, said, ‘No, no, no …' Then, taking a step forward, she laid one hand on his arm, looked up the street to the right and the left. ‘Are you good man?'

No one had ever asked him that before. He nodded. ‘Yeah – well, I hope so.'

It was what she wanted. ‘I come,' she said. ‘Please. Tomorrow.'

The door was shut. Amazed at his success, quite dizzy with it, he walked down the path to the gate as Tigerlily's father's car appeared from the corner of Kenilworth Parade. The man had seen him and pulled in to the kerb. Stuart also ran, across the road, causing a van driver to brake and curse, plunged into Lichfield House and the sanctuary of his flat.

T
he impossibility of living isolated in this world when you have an addiction and when you have cut yourself off from almost all means of communication, was now borne in upon Olwen. It was something she had not allowed for. When adopting this new ideal life for herself, she had supposed she would always be able to go out to buy her own drink, that wine shops would always be in easy reach and in that failing to pay her phone bill she had nevertheless thought she would be able to use someone else's landline or mobile to ask British Telecommunications for reconnection. Now she realised that everyone in Lichfield House was avoiding her, except Wally Scurlock and he kept in touch only because she paid him.

Even if she had been able to get on the phone again she had insufficient money to pay some wine shop in Edgware or Hendon to deliver to her. As it was, she had been forced into the near-intolerable position of being unable to call on Scurlock for fresh supplies. With the aid of her stick in one hand and clinging on to fences with the other, she had managed the walk – the struggling, dragging, crawling – to the cash machine in the Kenilworth Parade post office. There she found she had thirty-four pounds and some odd bits left in her account. The pensions wouldn't come in until the 24th,
which was the middle of next week. She staggered back home, wondering if an appeal to Scurlock would be any use. Unlikely. Last time she had tried it he had refused point-blank. She could empty her account and offer him twenty pounds to fetch her a bottle of gin but he was bound to say no. It wasn't worth making the journey for only one bottle, he would say.

She had perhaps three inches of vodka left in the bottle and half a bottle of gin. Cutting down, making it last, were alien concepts to Olwen. Of course, she had done that in the past – her whole life had been arranged around having a drink, putting off a second drink, waiting an hour, having a drink and another one, exerting all her will to have no more till next day. But the very point of coming here, of cutting off all ties, of putting the past behind her, had been to drink all she wanted, every drop she wanted, until she died. And she had been happy doing that, she thought as she contemplated the two bottles, really happy for the first time in her life, whatever the abstemious might say.

The terrible nightmare of tomorrow loomed in front of her. As a dry desert it appeared, a brown sunless plain where nothing grew and nothing moved. She poured herself two inches of gin, murmuring, make it last, make it last.

T
urning off his central heating, Duncan opened all the windows in the house. Appreciate the weather, he told himself, don't moan about it. The cloudless sky and the hot sunshine were surely more suited to July than April, and then he remembered how, two years before, April had been just like this, April had been the summer, and afterwards it was cold and wet until September. His painting finished, he set up his garden furniture, a white-painted metal table and four chairs, one of them a cushioned recliner.

From time to time he heard the twittering voices of Tigerlily and the girl he called ‘the other one' and occasionally the high-pitched gutturals of Oberon and Mr Wu. Those three chairs looked very empty and he considered putting his head over the fence and inviting whoever might be out there to join him for a cup of tea or a glass of wine, but then he thought better of it. Instead he asked the Pembers from number 1. They knew all about Tigerlily, Mr Wu, Oberon and the other one, only she wasn't Tigerlily's sister but her stepmother. Or so they said. The family came from Hong Kong and ran a family mail-order business from Springmead: garden plants, seedlings, seeds, annuals and perennials as well as vegetables, very much in demand in these hard times. Moira Jones that Duncan called Esmeralda and Ken Lee at number 7 had told them all about it. Ken had a Chinese mother himself. Hadn't Duncan noticed?

R
ose's three clients of the morning had gone and the fourth and last one was late. Sitting in one of the two small rooms of the Holistic Forum, she felt the onset of depression, once familiar to her, but rare since coming to live at Lichfield House. McPhee would have comforted her, his pretty fluffy face, his muscular furry body in her arms, but obviously a dog had no place here in this temple of hygiene, all white-and-peach tiles, peach carpet, opalescent washbasin and crystal flagons of what Marius – very kindly and sincerely – called ‘magic potions'. The health and safety people wouldn't allow a dog in.

Of course really she knew the cause of her depression – the lack for the past fortnight of Marius in her life. Not McPhee who would be waiting for her when she went home in an hour's time, not on account of the credit crunch keeping a lot of clients away. No, it was because Marius no longer
rang her doorbell, no longer phoned, no longer invited her. She had been a fool to bank so much on it, to read more into his visits than was actually there. He was very clever, highly educated, a mine of history and classical lore, he knew about everything, while she was very ignorant about all but alternative medicine. He had seemed interested in that too but no doubt he had got bored with it – and her. She felt too low, and the lowness was increasing, to take steps herself. Suppose he snubbed her? Suppose she went up in the lift and knocked at his door and asked for a
sortes
reading and he said he was too busy?

The client came. She was a large woman wearing tight white trousers and tight green T-shirt. Rose thought she had seldom seen such an expression of misery on anyone's face.

‘Shall I work out your BMI, Mrs Hayley?'

The client asked what a BMI was and when Rose said it meant body mass index a dark red blush spread over Mrs Hayley's sad face. ‘If you must.'

Rose got her on to the scales, calculated her height and fed the information into her computer.

‘Well, what is it then?'

‘Thirty-two,' said Rose. Two tears welled in Mrs Hayley's eyes and trickled down her cheeks. ‘Please don't be upset. We can deal with this, you know. I'm going to let you have some of my herbal tincture to take three times a day. I want you to drink plenty of water before meals and I shall give you a diet sheet.'

‘They used to say “fat”,' said Mrs Hayley. ‘I didn't mind that. But “obese”, that's awful. It's obscene. That's the trouble, the word
sounds
like “obscene”.'

‘Yes, but it doesn't mean the same thing.'

Rose knew that was a feeble thing to say. She knew that sound was all and that some people rarely saw the printed word.
Mrs Hayley, she suspected, was one of them. That reminded her of Marius, to whom the printed word meant so much …

The green herbal tincture was handed over along with the diet sheet and a booklet of simple exercises. Mrs Hayley paid and when she had gone Rose closed up. McPhee was waiting for her inside Flat 2, rapturously waving his feathery tail at the sight of her. She picked him up and hugged him hard. One of the lovely things about McPhee was that he never minded how tightly you hugged him.

‘What would I do without you?'

McPhee wagged his tail even more vigorously. Rose put his lead on him and took him out for a walk round Kenilworth Green.

I
t was by chance that Olwen discovered that Mr Ali had returned from his pilgrimage and his shop was open once more. Her front door was ajar, she was just inside it, bracing herself to venture out and find Wally Scurlock, when she heard two of the girls talking outside their own flat.

‘That Asian man is back if we need more Coke.'

‘You mean Mr Ali.' ‘Yeah, whatever.'

‘You want to remember I'm Asian,' Olwen heard Noor say. ‘You want to show a bit of respect.'

They began arguing, Sophie shouting that no one called her a racist and got away with it and Noor countering that no one would if she watched her mouth. Olwen pushed her door open and came out. She stood on the threshold, leaning on her stick, but leaning unsteadily, her whole body faintly trembling. The sight of her in her moth-eaten fur coat over the same black dress she had worn for Stuart's party silenced them.

‘Are you OK?' Sophie asked.

‘Not really.'

Molly would have asked if there was anything she could do to help but Molly was down in Flat 1, making Stuart's bed, bringing him her version of a cappuccino and offering to take over Richenda's cleaning job. The two girls looked again at Olwen and Noor said to Sophie, ‘I'll see you out the front,' and departed for the lift.

Olwen said, ‘If you're going round to Ali's and you'll get me a bottle of gin and one of vodka, I'll give you ten pounds.'

Remembering the five pounds she had never had back, Sophie said, ‘You mean you'll give me the price of the booze and ten pounds? And what about the fiver you owe me?'

Well brought up as she had been, Sophie would never have dreamt of talking in that tone to any of her parents' friends (or come to that, her grandparents'), but Olwen, through her lifestyle, had forfeited all deference. As Noor had put it, Sophie wanted to show a bit of respect, but it didn't occur to her to do so. Olwen hesitated but she had to go on. It was a matter of life and death to her.

The date was the 23rd and on the following day her pension would come in. There was no help for it, she would have to trust Sophie, for she could already tell that this girl would be a lot cheaper to employ than the caretaker. Scurlock was already charging her thirty pounds to fetch two bottles of spirits. ‘Will you do it for ten?' Olwen said harshly.

Sophie knew she should refuse. She could see Olwen was killing herself. All the strictures against heavy drinking were known to her, as they must be known to everyone who looked at television or the Internet, not to mention glanced at a newspaper. Olwen was a living (barely) example of what drink did to you. But ten pounds for simply buying what Olwen wanted when she was going to Ali's anyway …