Tigerlily's Orchids (7 page)

‘Claudia, I've got to put you off. I'm not well. Actually I feel pretty awful.'

‘Because you fell over in the snow? What's happened to you?'

‘It was a bad fall,' he said. ‘I think I've ruptured something.'

‘Darling, you can't have. You're such a wimp, Stuart. But that's what I love about you. Look, I'll be with you in an hour at the most. If only you didn't live out in the sticks.'

He didn't have to let her in, he thought. But he knew he hadn't the strength to keep her on the doorstep, he would have to let her in. It was true he was a bit of a wimp, he couldn't deny it.

R
ose Preston-Jones was preparing a meal for herself and Marius Potter: salt-free carrot and cumin soup, to be followed by a salad of roquette and artichoke hearts with spelt and pumpkin-seed bread. Even people on her detox regime were often unwilling to eat the sort of food she cooked and prescribed, all but Marius who shared her tastes. The
sortes
which he had discovered for her that morning – ‘Two other precious drops that ready stood / Each in their crystal sluice' – they both saw as applicable to the glasses of juice which were to accompany the meal. Neither of them ever touched alcohol.

Marius arrived at six thirty. In the hallway he had encountered the Constantines and while he was talking to them the automatic doors opened to admit a young woman in very high-heeled shoes. She rang Stuart Font's doorbell, and when she wasn't immediately admitted, banged on the door with her mobile phone. This reminded Katie Constantine that hers had been stolen.

‘While Michael and I were on the bus. We were upstairs
at the front. I was so tired I had my head on his shoulder and my eyes closed. My handbag was on the other side of me and someone must have put his hand in and taken my phone.'

Marius said that people who lived in poverty, as so many did, were more vulnerable to temptation than others.

Katie ignored this. ‘I wouldn't care that much but all my snow photos were on it. And now the snow's stopped and I don't suppose there'll be any more.'

Inside Flat 2 Marius and Rose greeted each other with a chaste kiss. Marius had a mobile, though he seldom used it. Rose believed that they harmed the brain. Katie, she said, was still young enough to avoid lasting damage if she had the sense not to replace hers and she congratulated Marius on so often letting the battery in his run down. McPhee, who sometimes thought he was a cat, having spent his puppyhood among kittens, jumped on to Marius's knee and curled up there. Rose made a pot of pomegranate tea and Marius told her about the visitor to Flat 1 and her high heels which Rose said would cripple her in later life and make surgery for bunions more than probable.

It was dark outside but the street lamps shone with a brassy light on the last of the snow patches. Getting up to pour more tea, Rose called Marius to the window. On the opposite side of the street one of the young Asian people was walking up the path of the left-hand semi-detached house, carrying a heavy-looking bag of groceries in each hand. An older man followed him in, keeping some five or six yards behind him. Rose pulled down the blind.

‘That house is called Springmead. I never noticed that before.'

‘Nor did I,' said Marius, thinking of what his sister had told him and wishing he had never asked. Would he ever get over
this awkwardness? Yet in this pretty, faded woman, still slim as a sixteen-year-old, her voice still youthful, he could see the sweet shy girl he had made love to all those years ago. All she saw, he was sure, was an old man, tired, worn and ridiculous with his quotations from a poet no one read any more.

C
laudia was getting dressed. Stuart lay in bed, watching her despondently. This was the second time she had visited him since his encounter with Freddy and it was plain she knew nothing about their fight; plain too that, for all his fuss about his shoulder, the injuries Freddy had sustained were less than Stuart's own.

‘I had to go to A & E,' Stuart had said to her.

If Freddy too had had to seek treatment in a hospital she would surely have told him. Surely she would have said, ‘So did Freddy.' Why hadn't Freddy told her? More importantly, why hadn't he told her he had found out about her affair? Freddy had said to him that if he saw Claudia again, if he so much as spoke to Claudia, he would ‘do worse'. What did worse mean? That he would damage his face or even kill him? Claudia was putting on her stockings in a seductive way. His dread increasing, Stuart started wondering why she even wore stockings. Few women did. He imagined Freddy walking into the room – he might have had another key cut, he might have innumerable keys – and abruptly he got up and went into the bathroom.

Freddy must be playing some deep game. Or perhaps, which would be worse, an ordinary sort of shallow game. I'm not going to tell her, I'm not saying a thing to her, Freddy might
be telling himself, I don't want to warn her. Warn
him
, as I have done, so that if she wants to see him he makes it plain he doesn't want to see
her
. So that he sends her away, quarrels with her maybe, what do I care? Now totally covered by his camel-hair dressing gown, Stuart looked at himself in the mirror, then went into the living room where Claudia was sitting on the sofa, one leg crossed over the other to show her stocking tops, looking at the stain on the carpet.

‘Is that blood, darling?'

Stuart said no, of course not, it was or had been hot chocolate. He had meant to clean it up. ‘Claudia.'

‘Yes, what? I don't have to go yet, you know. We've got at least another hour. You won't forget to have another key cut for me, will you?' While he was in the bathroom she must have seen the crate from Wicked Wine. ‘Shall we have one of those bottles of champagne?'

‘They're for my party,' he said in a repressive tone, and then, ‘Claudia, we have to talk.'

‘What on earth do you mean?'

What on earth did he mean? For a wild moment he thought of telling her he had to go away – his mother was ill and he had to be with her … his friend in San Francisco was ill … What sick person would want
him
nursing them? Instead, he managed, ‘This is getting too much for me, this – well, relationship of ours. If I've got this degree of emotional involvement I need to be with you all the time.' He jibbed a bit at telling anyone he loved her when he didn't but now was no time for niceties. ‘I love you, Claudia. I adore you.' Why did ‘adore' sound so much less real than ‘love'? ‘I can't bear to let you go home to Freddy. If we're going to go on like this it's better we should part.'

‘Oh, Stuart,' she said, pulling her skirt down over her knees. ‘I'd no idea you felt like this.'

He was beginning to enjoy it. You rat, he said to himself, you heel. ‘If I can't have you all the time, if I can't have you to myself, it would be better not to have you at all. It's going to break my heart, it's going to half kill me, but it's better for both of us – don't you see?'

She came up to him and put her arms around him, laying her cheek against his. Stuart nearly cried out at the pain of having his bruised back and shoulders squeezed. ‘We don't have to part permanently, darling. Let's have a trial separation. We won't see each other for a – what? A fortnight? We'll still talk on the phone every day.'

With that half-measure he had to be content. At least, in the emotion of the moment, she had forgotten about the key.

O
lwen's father had been a drunk and her mother, to keep her husband company, had been a heavy drinker. But Louis Forgan had held down a job, even led some sort of social life, while showing few signs of his addiction except to those who know about these things. Olwen and her brother accepted that there was always drink about, whisky mostly, but beer and wine as well. They accepted it as the norm and in friends' houses wondered why no bottles stood about in every room and the friends' parents never had a glass beside them. Until, that is, Douglas, who was a year older than Olwen, seemed to realise what was going on and announced at their evening meal that he would never drink another drop of alcohol as long as he lived.

Both of them had been encouraged to drink wine at table since they were nine and ten. Olwen blamed this custom for her own addiction and in the days when she read newspapers and attended to television, as well as simply having it on, had been made angry by articles and programmes which
advocated giving children wine to encourage them ‘to drink responsibly'. In her youth her longing for alcoholic drink worried her and made her actively miserable. She looked with wonder and near disbelief at Douglas who, living away from home, had adhered to his resolve, never touched beer, wine or spirits, and seemed perfectly content. Gargantuan efforts were made by her to follow his example and sometimes she did manage to go without for long periods. Her father died of cirrhosis, her mother suffered what her doctor called ‘drink-related problems'.

While in one of her abstemious phases Olwen got married. Her husband was a social drinker and, knowing nothing of her family history, persuaded her that an occasional glass of something would do no harm. Olwen's first drink after doing without for six months was bliss. She had a second one with David and was back where she had been before she met him. For a long time she kept a bottle of red wine in the kitchen which she told him was for cooking. It was always the same kind that she bought so he couldn't tell whether it was the first bottle or the twenty-fifth whose level had fallen. She paid for it out of her own money for she had always worked as someone's secretary or, at one place, run the typing pool.

The marriage broke up, partly because David wanted children and Olwen was frightened at the prospect. She drank too much. Alone, she indulged herself and began drinking a couple of gins a day as well as the wine. While unaware of doing so, she must have learned from her parents how to be a heavy drinker without giving many signs of it to those not in the know. Bill wasn't in the know, he was a total abstainer, from taste rather than conviction. He didn't like the stuff. When they went out together he bought her drinks, said he liked to see her enjoying herself and admired her ‘strong head'. Dreaming of Bill now, as she sometimes did, she saw him
only as foolish, a mug, to have been so easily deceived. He was on the point of asking her to marry him – and this was the substance of her dream – before he told her that he had two children. In the dream he had five, though, she thought now, he might as well have had ten, his two were so much trouble. She woke up wondering, not for the first time, why she had married him and taken on all that caring and cooking and housekeeping and pretending to be indifferent to alcohol, pretending to like Margaret and Richard, pretending that she didn't need gin or vodka – it was all one – to keep herself sane.

Waking, she needed a drink but she had run out of booze. The vodka bottle she had put on the floor by her bed the night before had had at least two inches left in it. Or she thought it had, she remembered that it had. Perhaps she had drunk it before she went to sleep or had awakened in the night and drunk it. Plainly, it was now empty. She got up with difficulty and staggered to the kitchen where she looked in the drinks cupboard. Bottles were there, two gin bottles and one whisky, but they too were empty. She was aware of a fearful fatigue overcoming her so that, shuffling into her living room, she only just made it to the broken-down old sofa before collapsing.

Bright sunshine coming in through the window cast brilliant pane-shaped light patches on to her head and face. Cursing, she turned her face into the stained cushions. Her craving for a drink was strong now, almost violent. Although she would have been prepared to stagger along to Wicked Wine, holding on to fences and posts, using an umbrella as a stick, she knew her worn-out feeble body would never make it. If she phoned Rupert, could he be induced to come round or send someone over with a bottle of gin? The phone, like most small objects in her flat, was on the floor. She reached over, scrabbling for the phone before she remembered it would
be dead. British Telecommunications or whatever they were called had cut it off weeks ago because she had forgotten to pay the bill.

Any pride Olwen had once had was long gone. Keeping it through those two marriages, concealing the addiction and the smell on her breath and the unsteadiness of her walk, had been gratefully relinquished when she was alone at last and resolved on drinking herself to death. She eased herself off the sofa on to the floor and when she had crawled to the front door, pulled herself up by holding on to the handles on a built-in cupboard. She got the front door open, dropped heavily to the floor again, and crawled across to Flat 5. Her hammering with her fists brought Noor Lateef to the door with Sophie Longwich behind her. The sight of Olwen in a dirty pink nightdress covered by an ancient fur coat made them stare and then look away. Neither of them had ever heard her say more than ‘Not really', and their reaction to what she said was as if Rose Preston-Jones's McPhee had given tongue to human speech.

‘Could one of you go round the corner and get me a bottle of gin? Rupert'll be open now. It's half nine. I'll pay you when you get back.'

When she had recovered from the shock of it, Sophie, the more practical of the two, said, ‘Shall I get you a doctor? I could call an ambulance.'

‘I only want a bottle of gin.'

Noor, gaping, took a step backwards.

‘It wouldn't be right to do that,' said Sophie. ‘I'm sorry but I couldn't. You ought to have a doctor.'

Still on her knees, Olwen shook her head with all the violence she could muster, turned round and crawled back to her open front door. The girls closed theirs and inside stared at each other and at Molly Flint who had come out of the
bathroom, wrapped in a towel. They had all led sheltered lives; though a Friday- or Saturday-night session in a pub or club was requisite behaviour for all of them, though they indulged in some mild binge drinking at these times and saw others in a much worse way than they were, the sight of true alcoholism was new to them. They were a little frightened by Olwen's squalor, her rat-tail hair, her dirty nightdress, her swollen feet like slabs of beef in a butcher's window. The raw desperate face she presented to them was stripped of that control, that tidying-up and levelling-out which governs the features of the old, creating a mild and almost cheerful blank.