Tigerlily's Orchids (3 page)

Claudia began by writing about shopping. Could it cease to be the principal leisure activity of the British female both under and over forty? Her research into the subject had furnished her with a lot of shopping anecdotes, lists of excessive amounts spent by individual women, the most allegedly spent by any one woman in three hours in Knightsbridge, the stampedes occasioned by the 7 a.m. openings of new West End stores and, to show her compassionate side, a rundown on the suffering statistics of small children operating sewing machines in Chinese sweatshops. Now on to the difference the credit crunch might make to curtailing women's shopping sprees, but first to pour herself a cup of coffee from the pot she had made before she began.

Two more sentences must be typed before she took her break. Claudia followed a principle of
getting into the next bit
before stopping either for coffee or lunch. Once
getting into the next bit
had been done there would be less of a problem in
getting on with it
when she returned to work after half an hour. The coffee was black and strong, its surface made frothy by the artificial sweetener she had put into it, an additive she roundly condemned when writing about healthy diets.

She shifted the coaster along the table surface before putting the mug down, slightly pushing aside the bowl of dried flowers. It seemed to her that they were less attractively arranged than usual but she must be imagining it. After all, who but she would touch them? Maria was far too lazy and to associate Freddy with any household task, however minor, was a joke.

Her mobile told her the time was 10.31. She dialled Stuart Font's number. He answered sleepily but livened up after she had told him in some detail how much she had enjoyed the previous afternoon. No, she couldn't come today. Some badinage ensued on the alternative meaning of the verb she had used, after which she suggested he take her out to lunch the day after, not in his neighbourhood, absolutely not. Why not Hampstead which wasn't too far away to get back, somewhat the worse for wear, to his place in the afternoon? The suggestions he made for ways to spend the following hours evoked from her a ‘Stuart, you are sweet', and a ‘I can't wait to try
that'

She'd call for him – ‘Don't forget I've got a key now!' – but would leave her car in Kenilworth Avenue and they'd take a taxi. ‘And now I must
get on
. Some of us have to work for our livings, you know.'

He said something about emailing her with the name of the restaurant to see if it was all right and she said that was a good idea, having some doubts about his standards when he was paying. Their conversation stimulated her to continue with her piece about fashion in a time of downturn and she moved on to high-street shopping for men.

It was in a men's boutique, though not the high-street kind, that she had first met Stuart. At first she thought he was gay. The man in the Jermyn Street shop who was contemplating and delicately caressing a vicuña coat was too slender and too beautiful to be straight – and too interested in this garment which had been reduced in price to a still hefty thousand
pounds. Claudia advanced on him, introduced herself as a journalist, and started questioning him about buying clothes. Which designers did he prefer? Would he ever buy from M&S? Had he ever had a suit made? The admiration in his eyes and what she called his ‘edgy' comments soon told her she had been mistaken in his sexual orientation. No, he wasn't going to buy the coat, he'd just bought a flat, but he'd like to take her somewhere and buy her a drink. Their ideas of where this drink should come from differed but Claudia quickly made it clear that she favoured a select bar in St James's over the Caffè Nero. Next day they met at the fashionable champagne bar at St Pancras Station, watched the Eurostar come in from Paris and after Stuart had spent fifty pounds on a bottle of champagne, took a taxi to Lichfield House.

Claudia had long since incorporated Stuart's fashion comments in an article (naming no names) but managed to recycle some of them for this one. A thousand words and she was done. She made herself more coffee and had a look at her emails. The top one in her inbox was from Stuart to tell her that he had booked a table at Bacchanalia in Heath Street. Would that do? Claudia googled Bacchanalia, found it satisfactory and far from cheap. She emailed back to say she would let herself into his place at twelve noon next day. That way they could be back from the restaurant by three
as we shall have plenty to do in the afternoon
. She was pleased he hadn't suggested texting her as the necessary abbreviations of such messages would have militated against the sexy tone of their correspondence.

I
t was hard for Stuart to pass a mirror without looking into it. His own reflection brought him a lot of pleasure. He usually turned away from it satisfied that he had rarely seen
a man better-looking than himself. Aware that men are not supposed to feel this way, are expected to take no interest in their appearance apart from being clean and adequately clothed, must be deprecatory and indeed embarrassed should anyone make a favourable remark about their looks, he was careful to dress with discreet casualness or, in the days when he was at work in the City, in sober suits and plain ties. But one of his indulgences was to drop into boutiques of the Jermyn Street kind or wander through the men's department of Harrods, imagining how superb he would look in this Armani tweed jacket or that Dolce and Gabbana sweatshirt.

This morning he was dressed in jeans, a black shirt and a blue sweater. As he eyed himself in the living-room mirror – there was another in his bedroom and a third in the passage – he saw that the sweater was the exact colour of his eyes. No doubt Claudia had already noticed. If she remarked on it he would put on his embarrassed look; unfortunately, he had never mastered the art of blushing. Though nearly sixty, his father so far showed no sign of going bald and Stuart, who had heard that baldness occurs on a gene carried by the male progenitor, thought comfortably that he stood a good chance of keeping his hair into old age. His was thick and a beautiful shade of rich dark brown, almost but not quite black.

He had completed his invitation cards the night before, excluding Freddy Livorno, put them in envelopes, and was going out to buy stamps and post them. The idea of simply placing them in residents' pigeonholes had occurred to him and been dismissed as looking mean. There must be some sort of etiquette about this but he didn't know what it was. Best be on the safe side.

It was very cold outside, one of those English midwinter days when the sky is bluish-grey with pale clouds, no snow has fallen and no frost is to be seen but every small puddle
of water has become a slab of ice. A light yet sharp east wind was blowing. Stuart possessed a winter coat but seldom wore it. Young people don't wear coats. Young people wear T-shirts in below-freezing weather. Maybe he wasn't quite young enough for that and he ventured out in the blue sweater that matched his eyes.

The post office was a counter in the newsagent's in Kenilworth Parade next door but one to Mr Ali's. Further along was the furniture shop. Everything in its window had become a sale item, chairs, tables, beds, lamps, some labelled ‘Unbelievable Reductions!'. Stuart went to the post office, bought his stamps and posted his invitations, then to Design for Living where he weighed up the advantages of buying furniture at knock-down prices but which he didn't much like, against going down to the West End and buying furniture he liked a lot at twice the cost. His mother's words on the subject of money and getting a job came back to him. Auntie Helen's legacy had seemed a fortune when it first came to him but now half of it had gone on the flat, plenty more on the sofa, the king-size bed and the mirrors, and he was spending a great deal on Claudia. A lot more drink would have to be bought for the party. He began to regret posting those invitations but it was too late now. He had to have the party and he couldn't have it in a semi-unfurnished flat.

The assistant who came up to him in Design for Living could hardly believe his luck when Stuart picked out a dining table and six chairs, two armchairs, a coffee table and a standard lamp like a half-open sunflower on a gilt metal stalk. If all went well this would be the first sale he had made that week. Mirrors were Stuart's weakness and they had a couple they had no chance of ever selling, one in a gilt frame with curlicues, the other framed in matt black. The assistant said he would throw that one in for nothing. Stuart didn't much
like any of the stuff he had bought so he had to keep telling himself what a bargain it was. Delivery next day, said the assistant as Stuart handed over his credit card.

The automatic doors at Lichfield House came open as he approached. He stood outside on the doorstep studying Design for Living's receipt, all the items he'd bought listed. Waves of heat from the hallway bathed him as he informed himself anew that the armchairs had cost four hundred pounds apiece and the standard lamp two hundred and fifty. Were those really knock-down prices? His reverie was interrupted by Wally Scurlock the caretaker tapping him on the shoulder and telling him he was letting all the heat out.

‘If you stand there, sir, the doors stay open and when the doors are open all the bloody heat goes out. Right, sir? Savvy?'

Wally seemed to think that reiterating sirs and madams to the residents compensated for the gruffness of his tone and the harshness of his words. Stuart went inside, feeling thankful that he hadn't sent the caretaker an invitation. He let himself into his flat and contemplated his reflection in the mirror, three feet long by eighteen inches wide and framed in stainless steel, on the living-room wall. Cold as it was outside, his face remained its normal pale olive, neither pinched nor reddened. He smiled to show himself his white even teeth, went into his bedroom and put on a tie, in case Bacchanalia demanded it. Surely they wouldn't, not for
lunch
. Stuart reasoned that if a restaurant required men to wear ties and a jacket at
lunchtime
it was likely to be more expensive than one which did not.

He went into the kitchen and made himself a big mugful of hot chocolate, spooning into it quite a lot of long-life cream. The nearest place to buy fresh cream, as far as Stuart knew, was Tesco up beyond the roundabout. You never really knew, when you bought a place, how convenient it was for things like that.
Only living in it for a few weeks told you. When you hadn't a car and the only bus to come anywhere near you was the 113 which went nowhere he wanted to go, when the nearest Tube station was on the universally loathed Northern Line, the nearest cinema probably miles away at Swiss Cottage and no decent restaurants were to be found within a file-mile radius, you began to wonder if you wouldn't have been better off keeping your job and spending
all
Auntie Helen's money on a flat in central London.

Helen Morrison had been his godmother. The first annoying thing she did was to assert her rights in this particular role and name her godson. Stuart's parents had intended to call him Simon George but Annabel Font was very aware of the advantages of having her aunt as his godmother and soon persuaded her husband to give in. As well as being unmarried, apparently childless and rich, Helen was a Jacobite. She still adhered to the view that the present royal family were German usurpers, though their tenure of the throne went back three hundred years, and believed that its present incumbent should be an obscure prince no one had ever heard of living somewhere in central Europe. To her, Stuart was an almost sacred name and Windsor (or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha or Hanover or whatever you liked to call them) a laughable misnomer. So Stuart was christened and wasn't even permitted to have George for a second name as that had been the name of several Hanoverian kings.

The Fonts, though they had agreed to this condition, weren't really the kind of people to suck up to a relative in the hope of getting her money for themselves or their only child. Helen sometimes came to them for Christmas, she sent them postcards from the distant places she went to on her solitary holidays and on his birthdays Stuart regularly received a cheque from her, quite a small cheque. Annabel
and she wrote to each other two or three times a year. They occasionally spoke on the phone. When Stuart got two Bs for his A levels a rather larger cheque arrived, and when he graduated from the east London university no one had ever heard of, the sum he received was a hundred pounds. His mother forced him to write polite thank-you letters, actually standing over him while he did so, but she did this for his letters to the donors of such presents as a paperback book or a CD of music he never listened to.

Helen was eighty-four when she died and Stuart twenty-four. She left four hundred thousand pounds to Stuart but her Edinburgh house in elegant Morningside and two million pounds to the fifty-year-old child no one knew she had ever had and who had been adopted by a butcher and his wife forty-nine years before. Annabel commented on the will, saying that Helen had been a dark horse but conceded that in the circumstances Stuart was lucky to get anything at all. He agreed, handing in his notice next day to his immediate boss who, accepting it, remarked that anyway, what with this imminent recession, Stuart would shortly have been asked to consider his position.

He walked round the flat, deciding where to put the new furniture. Where should the two new mirrors go? One in the spare bedroom and the other in here? His sofa was dark red with a hint of purple and now, with a slight sinking of the heart, he realised that the chairs he had bought were a shade of orangey coral. Would it look dreadful? He would have to brazen it out, insist that this was the latest colour scheme. He was back in his bedroom, wondering if this might be the best place to put the sunflower lamp and wondering too if he'd be
hiding
it in here from the critical eyes of his guests, when he heard the front door open and someone come into the flat. A split second of shock-horror
and then he realised. Claudia. Claudia had a key. He went out to meet her.