Tigerlily's Orchids (2 page)

The girls at Flat 5 appeared to be called Noor Lateef, Molly Flint and Sophie Longwich, and the man on his own at Flat 3 Marius Potter. That was everyone documented. Stuart, who hadn't yet been outdoors that day, ventured on to the front step. The snow was still falling and had settled on pavements, patches of grass, rooftops and parked cars. Stuart noticed that if he stood on the step the front doors remained open, letting in a bitter draught. He hurriedly went indoors and back into his own flat where he sat down once more, added names to his list and wondered whether he should ask the porter (Mr Scurlock), the Chinese (Vietnamese, Cambodian?) people opposite, the elderly chap next door to them, Rupert at Wicked Wine, his best friends, Jack and Martin – and Claudia. If he invited Claudia wouldn't he also have to invite her husband Freddy, incongruous though this seemed in the circumstances?

Stuart added the names to his list, went into the kitchen and made himself a mug of hot chocolate, a drink of which he was particularly fond. He was realising, not for the first time, that though he was twenty-five, he had serious gaps in his knowledge of social usage, a deficiency due to his having lived at home with his parents all his life. Even his three
years of business studies had taken place at a university easily reached by Tube. The company where he had worked since taking that degree until he resigned on coming into his inheritance, was also accessible by the same means, being no more than a hundred yards from Liverpool Street Station. The only breaks from home life had been holidays and the occasional nights he had stayed away in various girlfriends' flats.

All this had meant that inviting people round, stocking up on drink, buying food, gaining some understanding of domestic organisation, remembering to carry his keys with him, arranging with people his mother called tradesmen and paying services bills, were closed books to him. He couldn't say he was learning fast but he knew he had to. Since coming here he hadn't done much but run around with Claudia. Making that hot chocolate without scalding himself was a small triumph. He was thinking how pleasant it would be if he could have his mother living here, but his mother changed, different, tailored as it were to his requirements: as admirable a housekeeper and cook and laundress as she was but silenced so that she spoke only in the occasional monosyllable; able to remove herself without a word or a look when Claudia came round; deaf to his music, invisible to his friends, never, ever criticising or even appearing to notice the areas of his behaviour of which she might disapprove. But if she became this person she wouldn't be his mother.

He was thinking of this, finishing his drink, when she phoned.

‘How are you, darling? Have a nice weekend?'

Stuart said it was all right. In fact, it had been spectacularly good, since he had spent most of Saturday and part of Sunday afternoon in bed with Claudia, but he couldn't even hint at that.

‘I've been thinking.'

He hated it when his mother said that. It was a new departure for her, dating from since his own departure, and invariably led to something unpleasant. ‘I've been thinking that don't you think you ought to get a job? I mean, I know you said when you came into Auntie Helen's money that you'd take a gap year but a gap year's what people take between school and university. I wonder if you didn't know that.' She spoke as if she had made some earth-shaking discovery. ‘Daddy is getting very anxious,' she said.

‘Has he been thinking too?'

‘Please don't use that nasty sarcastic tone, Stuart. It's your welfare we're worried about.'

‘I haven't time to get a job,' he said. ‘I've got to buy some furniture and I only spent half what she left me on this place. I've got plenty of money.'

His mother laughed. The noise she made was more like a series of short gasps than laughter. ‘No one has plenty of money any more, dear. Not with this economic downturn or whatever they call it, no one. Of course you would go ahead and buy yourself a flat the minute you came into your inheritance. Daddy always thought it a mistake. I don't know how many times he's said to me, why didn't he wait a while. With house prices falling so fast he'd soon get that place for half what he paid. It only calls for a little patience.'

Stuart was beginning to think that there could be no circumstances in which he would want his mother here, no matter how much washing, cooking and cleaning she might do, for he could imagine no radical change taking place in her character. He held the phone a long way from his ear but when she had said ‘Are you there, Stuart?' three times he brought it back again, said untruthfully that his front doorbell was ringing and he had to go. She had barely rung off when his mobile on the floor on the other side of the room began to
play ‘Nessun dorma'. Claudia. She always used his mobile. It was more intimate than the landline, she said.

‘Shall I come over this afternoon?'

‘Yes, please,' said Stuart.

‘I thought you'd say that. You're going to give me a key. Aren't you? I've told Freddy I'll be at my Russian class. Russian's a very difficult language and it'll take years to learn.'

‘What shall we do when you get here?' Stuart asked, knowing this would provoke a long description in exciting detail. It did. He sat down on the sofa, put his feet up and listened, enraptured. Outside it continued to snow, coming down in big flakes like swans' feathers.

T
he Constantines had lunched late, the only customers at that hour in the Sun Yu Tsen Chinese restaurant which was on the other side of Wicked Wine in the parade and next door to the hairdresser.

‘I must get some pictures before the light goes,' Katie said, producing her camera from her bag. ‘We could have a little walk. We never get any exercise.'

She was enchanted by the snow and skipped along, picking up handfuls of it. Michael wondered if he could write something about it for his column, something about the crystals all being of a different pattern, or maybe he should disabuse readers' minds of the fallacy that it could get too cold for snow to fall at all. But by the time his piece appeared the wretched stuff would no doubt have
dis
appeared.

‘Can we make a snowman, Michael? When we get back, can we make a snowman in the front garden? They won't mind, will they?'

‘Who's to mind?'

‘I've seen pictures of snowmen. I want one of my own.'

‘It will melt, you know. It will all be gone tomorrow.'

‘Then I'd better get taking my photos.'

The extent of their exercise was walking round the block, up the roundabout, down Chester Grove, along the parade and home, Katie pausing now and then to get a shot of children throwing snowballs, a dog rolling in the snow, a child with a toboggan. Back at Lichfield House she pointed out to Michael the houses opposite, their roofs all covered with snow but for the central pair.

‘Isn't that funny? I'll just take a picture of it and then we'll go in, shall we? It will soon start getting dark.'

In the hallway they encountered the three girls from Flat 5, plump Molly Flint and skinny Noor Lateef shivering in see-through tops and torn jeans, Sophie Longwich comfortable in a padded jacket and woolly hat.

‘I'm frozen,' Molly was saying. ‘I think I've got pneumonia.'

‘No, you haven't,' said Michael, the medical man. ‘You don't get pneumonia through going out dressed like it was July. That's an old wives' tale.' Maybe he should write something about that too …

Noor had gone back to the doors, looking out through the glass panel. ‘It's started to snow again.'

‘That roof will get covered up now,' said Michael to Katie, pressing the button for the lift. While they waited Noor and Sophie told Molly that if she put on any more weight she would have to travel in the lift on her own. Its doors had just closed on the five of them when Claudia Livorno came through the swing doors, carrying a bottle of Verdicchio and walking gingerly because the step outside was icy and her heels were high. She rang the bell of Flat 1.

*

O
lwen had nothing in Flat 6 to eat except bread and jam, so she ate that and when she woke up from her long afternoon sleep, started on a newly opened bottle of gin. She never went near a doctor but Michael Constantine said it was his opinion she had the beginnings of scurvy. He had noticed her teeth were getting loose. They shifted about, catching on her lips when she spoke. In the flat below hers, Marius Potter was sitting in an armchair that had belonged to his grandmother reading
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
for the second time. He would finish the bit about the murder of Commodus and then go downstairs to have supper with Rose Preston-Jones. This would be his third visit, the fifth time they had met, and he was looking forward to seeing her. He had already once cast the
sortes
for her and would do so again if she asked him.

The first day he moved in they had recognised each other as kindred spirits, though they had nothing much in common but their vegetarianism. Marius smiled to himself (but only to himself) at her New Age occupation and lifestyle. Rose was no intellectual, yet in his estimation she had a clear and beautiful mind, was innocent, sweet and kindly. But something about her teased and slightly troubled him. Taking
Paradise Lost
from his great-uncle's bookcase, Marius once again thought how he was almost sure he recognised her from further back, a long way back, maybe three decades. It wasn't her name, not even her face, but some indefinable quality of personality or movement or manner that brought back to him a past encounter. He called that quality her soul and an inner conviction told him she would call it that too. He could have asked her, of course he could, but something stopped him, some feeling of awkwardness or embarrassment he couldn't identify. What he hoped was that total recall would come to him.

Carrying the heavy volume of Milton, he went down the stairs to the ground floor. Rose, admitting him to Flat 2, seemed to be standing in his past, down misty aeons back to his youth, when all the world was young and all the leaves were green. But still he couldn't place her.

T
hanks to the recession, the solicitors Crabtree, Livorno, Thwaite had less than usual to do, so Freddy Livorno had taken the afternoon off and gone home. Now he was in the living room of his pretty little house in Islington, dismantling a basket of dried flowers which stood in the centre of an occasional table. Carefully he removed the plumes of pampas grass, the prickly stems of teasels with their spiked crowns and the slender brittle stalks of honesty (honesty!) bearing their transparent oval seedheads. Into the now empty basket he put the high-tech bug he had bought from a shop in Regent Street and replaced the plants, carefully concealing the deceitful little gizmo.

Now for Claudia's computer, the machine she exclusively used for her journalism as the deputy fashion editor of a national newspaper. A small widget, minute, almost invisible, went in between the keyboard lead and the socket. That should do it, Freddy said to himself. Technology was a wonderful thing, what an improvement on private detectives! As a solicitor, he knew all about that variety of gumshoe, though now he thought their days were numbered. His gizmos were costly and for the two of them he hadn't had much change out of eight hundred pounds, but that was nothing compared to a private eye's charges.

Freddy wasn't the sort of man to speculate about the
character or even the identity of the man who was his wife's lover. Those details would be revealed in time. As to how she had met him, he supposed she had interviewed him for some aspect of her work. She could well have taken up with a male model. But it was of little interest to him. He couldn't even have said if he loved her any longer. If there was one thing of which he was certain it was that he didn't want to lose her, had no intention of losing her. On the practical side, he had a mortgage to pay on this small but extremely expensive house, the repayments of which were considerably helped by her contribution. In these hard times you could never be quite sure what steps building societies might take to recover their money if householders defaulted. No, he couldn't lose the thirty-three and a third per cent she put into it. Also, though no more than two years younger than he, she was a trophy wife whom he was proud to show off, good-looking, lovely figure, well dressed and clever.

Today, apparently, she had gone to her Russian class. Freddy didn't believe in the Russian class but he couldn't be bothered to check on it. No need for that now he had his handy gadgets. He looked in the wine rack and saw that a bottle of Verdicchio was missing, a bottle he was sure he had noticed there this morning. No doubt she and Mr Mystery were enjoying it now, relaxing between bouts. Tomorrow, she had told him, she'd be at home all day, working on this piece she was writing on how to dress well during an economic downturn. Everything she typed on that computer, every email she sent, would be accessible to him when he put in a simple code after she'd gone to bed; everything she said in this room he'd be able to hear when he dialled the mobile number of the gizmo in the dried-flower basket. And then what?

He would take steps.

*

P
ieces you wrote for the newspapers these days had to be full of references, or at least make allusion, to television programmes, celebrities and pop music. Claudia was too young ever to have known anything else so she had no difficulty in comparing something to Coldplay, pointing out the resemblance of an up-and-coming model to Cheryl Cole and referring in a scathing yet amused way to Jonathan Ross's latest escapade on air. These were the kind of things her readers understood. Most of them were under forty. Claudia had no patience with those writers who quoted Shakespeare or made reference to
Rigoletto
as if anyone likely to read their articles had ever been inside the Globe theatre or an opera house.