Tigerlily's Orchids (6 page)

Forget it. Think of something else. He made himself a mug of hot chocolate and sat down to contemplate the three replies he had had to his invitations. All, from the Constantines, the old man opposite and Rose Preston-Jones who also replied for Marius Potter, were acceptances. If they all accepted, how much was it going to cost? What had made him think that the dozen bottles of champagne Rupert had delivered to him the day before would be adequate? He would need wine as well and sparkling water and orange juice and
food
. He put his head in his hands, took it out again at the sound of a key in his front-door lock. He got to his feet. It could only be Claudia – at ten in the morning?

A man he had never seen before walked into the room, snow on his boots and an encrusting of snow on his hair.

Stuart might have asked him who he was but he didn't. ‘How did you get in?' he said. An awful feeling of impending doom was starting to well up inside him.

‘I have a key,' said the man.

He was in his thirties and tall but not as tall as Stuart, his hair receding a little, his features nondescript, apart from his eyes which were the kind that seem to have more white around the irises than most people's. His left hand he was holding behind his back. If asked to describe him, Stuart would have said that he looked clever, though he couldn't have said how he knew this.

‘My name is Frederick Livorno, commonly called Freddy.'

Stuart said before he could help himself, ‘Oh my God.'

‘You may well say so,' said Freddy Livorno. ‘You may well call upon your god. You're going to need him. The key with which I opened your front door I found in my wife's handbag. A highly elaborate handbag, much decorated with metal nonsense. Frivolous, no doubt, but you know what women are. As a practised adulterer, you do know what women are, don't you?'

‘Look,' said Stuart, who was starting to feel frightened, ‘we can talk about this. Why don't we sit down?'

‘The reason I don't,' said Freddy Livorno, ‘is that I prefer to stand in your company. This is not a social visit.' He had the kind of upper-class accent which is more than the result of a public school and a top-of-the-league university, it is learned at one's mother's knee, one's mother possibly being an earl's daughter. ‘I knew where you lived because I read my wife's emails and deduced the rest. Now, would you like to know why I've come?'

Stuart said nothing. He could think of no answer to that.

‘I've come to beat you up. No one has seen me come. Your porter is not at his post. The street was empty of pedestrians due, no doubt, to the snow.' He took a step towards Stuart and brought his left hand from behind his back. It was grasping a stick. Not a walking stick or a cane or the kind of thing you might use to tie a languid plant to, but a short stout stick about an inch and a half in diameter and made, apparently, from some tropical hardwood. ‘Have you anything to say, as they used to put it in court, before the thrashing I intend to administer is carried out?'

Stuart found his voice. ‘You're mad,' he said. ‘Claudia told me you were mad. All right, I'm her lover. She needs me, married to a brute like you.' His mobile was lying on the new coffee table next to his mug of chocolate. He picked it up, said, ‘I'm calling the police.'

For answer Livorno raised his stick and struck Stuart a glancing blow on the side of his head. Stuart dropped the phone and with a yell, for the blow had hurt, punched at Livorno with his fists, ineffectually hitting him in the face and neck. Livorno struck him again, this time on the side of his head and his shoulder, which made Stuart stagger and, like they said in the comics he used to read, see stars. Stuart took a step backwards and another, feeling around him for a weapon. He had no thoughts, his mind suddenly empty but for the need for self-preservation, the need to defend himself. A heavy glass vase, once a gift to his mother from Auntie Helen, its sides nearly an inch thick, stood on a shelf. It was too heavy to be held in one hand, so he took it in both just as Livorno lashed out at him again. It would have been a harder blow than the others, a potentially disabling thrust, but Stuart sidestepped it. He had the vase, his hands hooked over its thick smooth sides, and his mind quite empty, all morality, all fear, all caution – especially all caution – gone, and as a savage poke from the stick plunged into his lower abdomen, he tried a strike at Livorno's head, but the other man ducked. The vase struck him on the left shoulder.

Livorno fell, knocking over the mug of chocolate. He lay on his back in the middle of Stuart's oatmeal-coloured carpet, in a spreading pool of brown liquid. Stuart slumped down beside him, aching all over but particularly conscious of a sharp pain in his head and a crippling pain in the region of his lower abdomen. He was still holding the vase. He put it down, remembering incongruously that its purpose had originally been as a container for sticks of celery. Its surface, he noticed, perhaps for the first time, was chased with a pattern of flowers on one of which a butterfly alighted. Livorno had dropped the stick when he fell and the two weapons lay side by side as did the two men, Stuart's mobile phone about a foot away from them. It began to play ‘Nessun dorma'.

Stuart picked it up, saw that his caller was Claudia. He let it ring. He turned his head as Livorno turned his and their eyes met. At some point he must have punched Livorno in the eye for the socket of his left one was turning purple and swelling. If this were in a film, he thought, fighting would put things right. He'd get up and I'd get up and we'd shake hands and go out and have a drink together. But we won't do that because it's not as if we fell out over one of us saying something rude to the other or impugned the other's honour or any of that shit. We fell out or he decided to fall out with me because I've been sleeping with his wife. And that makes it different. Oh
God
.

Livorno raised himself on his left elbow. He looked at Stuart, saying nothing. By this time Stuart's head was aching so badly that he knew he'd have to go to hospital, to some A & E department. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again Livorno was standing up, holding his left arm just below the shoulder and pressing it against his body. He gave Stuart a kick on the thigh, a kick of contempt rather than malice. Stuart got on to his knees, then to his feet, conscious of a sharp stabbing pain in what he thought might be his bladder. The phone made the noise it made when a text was coming. Claudia again.

He said to Livorno, ‘Are you all right?'

‘You've damaged my shoulder,' Livorno said. ‘I hope I've done worse to you. If you come near my wife again, if you so much as speak to her, I'll do worse. Is that OK with you, Mr Stuart Fucking Font?'

S
tuart sat in A & E, waiting to be seen by a doctor. It was the first time he had ever visited such a place, though he had heard tales from his friends of the long hours you could
wait before being attended to and the unsavoury types who might sit next to you. (‘Unbelievable, darling, the smell!') The conversation around him was all about the cold and the snow, how unusual it was in London, must be global warming or something. Some of them had fallen over on icy pavements and broken their ankles, their wrists, or slipped and strained their backs. Stuart had been told not to use his mobile in there and when he asked if there was somewhere he could get coffee, was directed to a machine. It was as well he was currently job-free – he liked that term better than ‘jobless' – as he had already been there three hours with no sign of reprieve.

After four hours less ten minutes a nurse called him and said the doctor would see him now. Rather triumphantly, as she led him to a cubicle, she said that she had told him his wait would be a maximum of four hours and she had been spot on, hadn't she?

The doctor, a very pretty young woman like an actress in one of those hospital sitcoms, asked him how he'd come to bash his head like that and get what she called an abrasion to his lower abdomen both at the same time. Stuart said he had fallen over in the snow.

‘Standing on your head on the pavement, were you,' said the doctor, ‘and then you got up and kicked yourself in the prostate?'

She laughed knowingly. She asked no more questions but sent him off to have an X-ray. They wouldn't tell him what was wrong, he would have to wait a few days for the results, but they assured him nothing was broken.

Fifteen missed calls, said his mobile screen the minute he switched it on in the taxi. Then it rang and showed Claudia's name.

‘I've been calling and calling you. I've texted you twice. Where have you been?'

It sounded as if she didn't know. But she must by now. He spoke cagily.

‘I went out to buy things for the party and I fell over in the snow. I'd forgotten to take my phone with me.'

‘Oh, sweetheart, were you hurt?'

She obviously didn't know. Freddy hadn't told her. Stuart said he'd been at A & E for seven hours, a gross exaggeration.

‘There's no point in having a mobile if you don't carry it with you,' she said, and then, ‘You're going to kill me, darling, but I think I've lost your key. I mean the key to your flat. I know I took it out of yesterday's handbag last night and put it into today's handbag, I
know
I did but it's not there. It must have fallen out on the Tube. I was digging stuff out of it on the Tube and it must have fallen out. You'll have to have the lock changed.'

Stuart didn't feel up to telling her that no one on the Tube would know whose door it opened. Besides, she hadn't lost it on the Tube, she hadn't lost it at all. Freddy had taken it and let himself in with it …

‘So if I come round after work you'll have to let me in, OK?'

‘I'm all over bruises,' he said.

‘Oh, but that's quite sexy. I'll imagine you're a wounded warrior. It'll be about seven.'

He had started to ache all over. Distantly, he heard St Ebba's Church clock strike four. There was nothing to eat in the flat, he had eaten nothing since nine in the morning and he was very hungry. It was still snowing but he would have to go out and get something, being very careful not to fall over and make his lies into truth. Marius Potter was in the hallway, retrieving his post from the Flat 3 pigeonhole. Marius was in Stuart's eyes a throwback to the distant past of the sixties, an ancient hippie, and he found such people irritating in an
indefinable way. Perhaps not so indefinable, though. It had something to do with the way Marius Potter greeted him with ‘Good afternoon', an old-fashioned salutation Stuart thought was meant sarcastically.

The snow had stopped but, as Maria in the pizza place said, the sky was full of it. She spoke as if the heavy dark clouds which massed above Kenilworth Parade were bags of snow, liable to drop their loads at the slightest pinprick. Stuart, who was conservative in most things, asked for a cheese and tomato pizza. The more outré kind with pineapple and crab horrified him.

‘You want to look after that arm,' said Maria. ‘That could turn nasty.'

As if his shoulder was a bad-tempered dog, thought Stuart. He really ought to get his camera and take photographs of Kenilworth Avenue and the parade under snow. He ought to go up past the roundabout and take pictures of Kenilworth Green and St Ebba's and the cemetery under snow. In future years no one would believe it unless records were kept. But he wouldn't be able to hold a camera. He could barely hold his mobile and he had always been useless with his left hand. Like a fairy tale it was, he thought without much originality, something from the Brothers Grimm, all those houses with little Christmas trees in their front gardens, poking out of blankets of snow.

He ate his pizza and drank a glass of orange juice. He had never been much good with alcohol – it didn't agree with him and he got drunk remarkably fast, experiencing a hangover after only two glasses of wine. Very different from Claudia who could put away an amazing amount without showing the least sign she hadn't been drinking water. It had been puzzling him that she didn't seem to know about Freddy's injuries but of course she easily might not. She had been out doing some
sort of research for an article all day, was still at it, and if those two weren't often in contact he wouldn't have told her. The fact was that if you didn't work yourself, as he didn't at the moment, you got a bit out of touch with people who did. She would be here in three hours. Should he tell her? Considering his injuries had been sustained in a fight with her husband he couldn't not tell her, could he?

Normally, at this time of day when he was expecting Claudia, he would be very excited, anticipating her arrival by putting a bottle of wine – for her, not him – in the fridge, making sure the bathroom basin was clean, checking the bed, where he usually ate his breakfast of toast and his mother's homemade marmalade, for crumbs and coffee stains, if necessary changing the bottom sheet. Today his usual elation was missing. His head ached, his shoulder throbbed, his various bruises were sore and the ache in the pit of his stomach – or wherever – was getting worse. He wouldn't be able to change a sheet even if he wanted to. The prospect of making love to Claudia usually enhanced his afternoon, giving rise to all sorts of delicious fantasies. But this afternoon, even when he thought of her undressing, an icy chill took hold of him. He couldn't do it, not with that pain
down there
, not after fighting with her husband. Freddy Livorno's parting remark came back to him. If you come near my wife again, if you so much as speak to her, I'll do worse. What would worse be? More than anything Stuart feared facial disfigurement. Was that what Freddy meant?

Bending down to pick up the tray on which were the pizza plate and the orange-juice glass, he saw a dull gleam of something up against the base of the sofa. It was the key Freddy had let himself in with. Stuart put it in his pocket, sat down and got Claudia on his mobile. Not her voicemail but her own true voice.