Tigerlily's Orchids

by Ruth Rendell

  Before he lifted up the torch to shine it into the place that was on the other side of the curtain he could feel leaves brushing against him just as the insects’ wings had done. He raised the light and heard himself gasp aloud. He was standing in a forest or plantation, filling what had once been a room, the same size and measurements as his living room. The entire space between the French windows and the front window, also black-curtained, had been taken over by these plants, row upon row of them, green, flowerless, as far from orchids as could be imagined. They looked rather like tomatoes but somehow he knew they weren’t tomatoes. He knew, without knowing quite how, that they lacked the innocence of tomatoes or sunflowers or artichokes or any other of those plants they slightly resembled. And a scent came from them, very faint but one he had smelt before in the street, long ago when he was young, a scent that even then he had been afraid of.

  He was afraid now, fearful of walking among them, of damaging them. It was as if, bruised by his passing them, their leaves would emit a stronger substance or gas into the hot air. And now he was aware of how extremely hot it was, hotter than his own house, hotter than it had been even in the noonday sun of the past days. He began to lose his fear of them and as he walked round the outer row to the door into the hallway, or where the door had been, for it had been removed from its hinges, he picked off the top of one of the plants. Then he picked another, about four inches of stem with leaves on it shaped like splayed hands, and put both pieces in his pocket. The hallway too was full of plants, and the dining room. The kitchen was full of plants but for a passage to the fridge and sink. Sweat began spouting from his forehead and cheeks. Now his eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness and he could see as well as he had in the garden. He stared in wonderment at the hundreds – thousands? – of plants, the long stalks, the green leaves, and passed his hand across his forehead, wiping away sticky moisture.

  A cupboard on the wall here, exactly where there was a cupboard on his kitchen wall, would contain the electricity meter. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Never mind. He thought of it now. He opened the door and there was the meter, where it ought to be. But the reading on the gauge was so much less than his own that it was laughable. A low figure preceded by three noughts. How could that be? Duncan remembered reading somewhere that unscrupulous householders who didn’t want to pay exorbitant electricity bills somehow bypassed the meter and connected a supply for themselves from a source in the street.

  But was that controlled from a temperature gauge and time clock in a cupboard on the landing as his was? Keeping gingerly to the narrow space between the outer row of plants and the wall, he reached the stairs and began to climb them. His progress was necessarily slow because the heat was almost too much for him and sweat actually dripped from his cheeks on to his shirt. That there might be more plants upstairs he hadn’t expected but there were: plants along the landing, plants in three of the bedrooms, a motionless sea of dull green. The doors to these rooms had been removed but the one to the fourth, and smallest, bedroom was still there and it was shut.

  Duncan didn’t know what might be in that room. Not plants, though. He would look inside and then he would find the cupboard where the boiler must be. He opened the door very slowly and cautiously. The floor was covered with quilts and what he thought were called futons. There was also a pair of bunks, again laden with quilts. No black curtain here but only the blind which was pulled down. He retreated, leaving the door open, and began stepping gingerly through the rows of plants to find the source of this overpowering heat.

  In the small room, naked but for a thin pair of shorts, Tao woke up when he heard someone downstairs. Not Deng Wei Xiao. He would have phoned first and come in by the front door. The girls would never be allowed to come alone. Besides, Deng had beaten Xue so badly when she’d been going to meet that man, that she was afraid to step an inch out of line, afraid to move out of the room she now shared with Li-li in the flat. The boy sat up in his bunk and listened. Whoever it was, that person was coming up the stairs, had reached the top. Tao shivered when he thought how the plants must be getting crushed, bruised, spoilt.

  The door moved a little, came open. By then Tao was under the quilt, as still as a stone. But he could just see out. The intruder was the old man next door. Tao had often seen him staring into the Springmead garden and gazing down from a window at the back of his house, when he and Xue had been on their way to the cool plant-free summer house. The old man moved away, leaving the door open. Tao got up very quietly, very stealthily.

  For just this eventuality Deng Wei Xiao left whoever might be here a selection of weapons, a hammer, a knife, a baseball bat. No guns. Whatever must be done must be done silently. Tao chose the bat. He squatted down in the doorway and watched the old man go into the boiler cupboard and turn off the heating. If that happened, Deng said, if it happened for more than half an hour, the plants would die and they would lose thousands.

  Tao watched the old man begin to descend the stairs. Being so old, he was probably deaf. Tao remembered his grandfather in Chang-Sha who had gone deaf when he was this man’s age. The old man lumbered down, clutching hold of the banister rail. He didn’t seem to hear someone following him down the stairs as Tao moved softly, waiting for him to reach the bottom. Then, as he waded between the plants, and reached the inner glass door inside the front, Tao struck. He brought the baseball bat down on the old man’s head and watched him drop with a long-drawn-out groan to the floor.

  He lay on the floor, crushing the plants. Never, never damage a single plant, was the warning that had been instilled into Tao and the girls. But what was worse, sacrificing five or six plants or leaving the old man to call the police? The old man mustn’t be here, though. He mustn’t be found in here. Tao got both doors open, the inner glass door and the front door. In moving Duncan he saw with horror and some panic how many more of the plants he was crushing and spoiling, but there was no help for it. Deng would understand, wouldn’t he? It was three in the morning, still and silent. He dragged Duncan or Duncan’s body – was he dead? – out into the street and and laid him on the pavement, close up against the low hedge. Taking his mobile and his money would make it look more like a mugging but Duncan didn’t have a mobile or any money on him beyond a few copper coins. His pockets were full of nothing but keys.

  Then Tao went upstairs very fast and switched the heat on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Marius was having less than his usual luck with the sortes. He had opened Paradise Lost the evening before at Rose’s request. She wanted to know if the man who was buying her flat would sign the contract next day. Marius’s saying the sortes were only a bit of fun and not to be taken seriously, made no difference. The page at which he opened the volume was halfway through Book X and what he read was: ‘But death comes not at call; Justice Divine / Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries.’

  ‘Nothing to do with buyers or house agents, I’m afraid, sweetheart.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Marius. That slowest pace sounds like my solicitor and I’ve certainly been praying if not crying.’

  ‘The death bit doesn’t seem to apply,’ said Marius, ‘for which we should be thankful.’

  But perhaps it did. When he was young Marius had longed to sleep in till ten or even midday. He seldom got the chance. Now there was nothing to stop him sleeping in he invariably woke up at six, and this morning because of the heat, it was just before four thirty. The sky was the colour that has no name, a gauze of grey veiling palest blue. He stood in Rose’s open front window, savouring the fresh cool morning that would become milder in two or three hours’ time. Kenilworth Avenue had its dawn look, depopulated, still, crammed with cars on both sides. In the gap between two of the cars, a space about a yard long, he could see something lying up against the hedge. Or someone. Someone or something lay on the pavement.

  Marius took his keys and his mobile and ran across the road.

  ‘But death comes not at call,’ h
e murmured to himself. On his knees by the body, he soon knew it wasn’t a body but a living, though unconscious, man. Duncan still clutched a single key in his hand. A torch lay beside him. Marius dialled 999 and waited. He took off his sweater, rolled it up and laid it under Duncan’s head. He sat there, waiting as the sun came up. Oh, come on, come on, what are you doing? Where are you? ‘Justice divine,’ he thought, ‘mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries.’

  And then the waiting and howling came from far off, grew louder, waking up everyone in Kenilworth Avenue, as the ambulance arrived, parked and two paramedics came running.

  ‘That’s four times we’ve had an ambulance down here since February,’ said Molly. ‘Two times for poor Stuart, twice for Olwen and now this.’

  Carl nodded slowly. ‘Somebody like mugged him, is that right?’

  The two of them were drinking cappuccinos in the Bel Esprit Centre. ‘Hit him on the head with a blunt instrument, poor old thing. That’s what they call it, a blunt instrument. His money and his mobile were gone so they must have got those.’

  ‘Is he going to make it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Fingers crossed.’

  ‘May as well be dead at his age, though.’ Carl yawned. ‘I’m getting you a ring as soon as I’ve like got the dosh. It won’t be long. Then other guys’ll see you’re engaged.’

  ‘Oh, Carl, I don’t know,’ said Molly.

  Today was the day to do it. Olwen had planned it carefully, having nothing else to do. Things would have been easier if she had had any money but she had none and no means of getting any. A look of unmistakable relief had crossed Margaret’s face when Olwen told her she had lost her bank card.

  ‘Well, you won’t need it, will you?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Olwen to be on the safe side.

  ‘You’ve got to take some exercise. Some gentle walking is all that means. It’s not as if you want to go shopping.’

  Someone who’s going to die soon ought to be able to do everything they want, Olwen thought. There was only one thing she wanted – to drink and die. To drink herself to death, as she had always intended, but do it in her own time. If she had to do that by stealing, well, so be it. She would steal. Others had stolen from her, that girl especially, that girl who had her bank card. It no longer mattered. She no longer cared.

  Part of Olwen’s plan had involved going out for small walks. Just so that when the time came she could get as far as the taxi. Using a stick helped. It displeased her that she was better able to walk, that she was stronger, because she knew this must be due to having no alcohol for the past weeks. The day was very hot, the whole of this month of June was being one of the hottest Junes ever. Olwen was wearing her black tracksuit bottoms and an old black T-shirt with a faded and no longer identifiable logo on its front. Margaret switched on the fan for Olwen and said she was going next door to see Helen.

  ‘I’ll be an hour at the most.’

  That meant at least three hours. One hour would have been enough for Olwen’s purpose. Once Margaret was out of the way, Olwen found the number of the taxi service the family used in their personal directory and with it the account number. She pressed the requisite keys on the phone, gave Margaret’s name and the password she had so often heard her use, and when they asked her where she wanted to go, she said, ‘Kenilworth Green.’

  ‘What’s the postcode?’

  Olwen didn’t know. Maybe she had known once but she didn’t any longer. They looked it up and it took a long time.

  ‘When would you like it?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  Olwen found an environmentally friendly shopping bag in a kitchen cupboard and put into it the almost full bottle of gin and the unopened bottle of brandy from Margaret’s drinks cupboard. If they had known her better, Olwen thought, her cunning, her need, her unscrupulousness, they wouldn’t have left it there. Margaret wouldn’t see the taxi come because she and Helen invariably sat in the room at the back.

  It came two minutes early. Carrying her bag of drink in her left hand and grasping the stick in her right, Olwen made her way down the path and the driver got out to help her into the taxi. It was quite a long journey from Harrow but when she reached the kissing gate there was, of course, nothing to pay because the cab was on account. The Kenilworth Green turf was no longer a uniform green but bleached in patches to pale straw.

  Olwen had intended to find some tree or shrub cover under which to hide herself, and trees there were in plenty but none to sit under and not be seen. She had only once before been in the place and then had hardly been aware of the neighbouring cemetery. That was a place which had plenty of cover – trees with undergrowth, overgrown slabs and tombstones. What better, what more appropriate place to die? The hedge which separated it from Kenilworth Green was low, no more than three or four feet high. Climbing it had been easy for Stuart and Wally and all those others who frequented this place, a mere matter of stepping over. Not for Olwen. Limping up here with the aid of her stick had been almost too much for her. She crawled along the hedge, stopping every few moments to rest, and just before the hedge met the high boundary fence she saw that it had been broken down. Purposely? Perhaps, for it looked as if someone or even some animal had forced a way through. Olwen just managed to step over the broken bit and on the other side found herself up to her knees in grass and nettles, brushwood and brambles.

  Children were out in a playground on the other side of the cemetery, running around, shrieking and pushing each other. Olwen had no idea there was a school there. She had noticed very little of the neighbourhood when she lived at Lichfield House. Blundering on, holding on to gravestones for support, she gave up when she found herself a shady spot between a large cuboid tomb, box-shaped and of dark granite, and a dense wall of privet. This wall was perhaps four feet high as if someone had intended to create a hedge across the cemetery but given up after putting in no more than three or four plants.

  It reminded her of when she was very young, a child of seven or eight. There had been just such a section of hedge in her parents’ garden, with a space between it and the rear fence, and she had spent many hours inside it, first covering the top of the space with branches and calling it her camp. She had had cans of Tizer in there – oh, the innocence of it – and biscuits and had taken her pet dog with her when he would come.

  Inside this sanctuary she sat down on the grass, sat down with great difficulty, squatting first, then kneeling, then easing herself to lean against the side of the tomb. It would be impossible for her ever to get up unless aided and she wouldn’t be aided. All was silent now, the schoolchildren had gone in, traffic was a distant murmur. The ground was very dry and dusty, the air still and warm. Slowly, because she was savouring this moment, this preliminary, she unscrewed the cap on the gin bottle, lifted it to her lips and drank.

  Olwen thought she had never in her entire life experienced such ecstasy. It was the most blissful drink she had ever taken. Briefly she thought of the cruelty of those who had taken it from her and would keep it from her. But she had eluded them, she had triumphed. Closing her eyes, she tilted the bottle and poured gin down her throat. She was happy.

  Half a dozen miles away, Duncan had regained consciousness soon after he arrived at the Royal Free Hospital. They gave him a scan and then another scan and it seemed he had no brain damage. A doctor told him he had had a very lucky escape as if what had happened to him was his own fault. Perhaps it had been, Duncan didn’t know, because he had no memory of events prior to and immediately after the attack. The hospital wanted to know if there was anyone near to him they should contact and Duncan said Jock and Kathy Pember. He could remember things like that but not what had happened to him just before he was hit on the head. A policeman came to see him and Duncan told him he thought he must have been for a walk somewhere in green fields. He remembered a lot of leaves. No, he no longer had a mobile and he was sure he hadn’t any money or credit cards with him when he went out. The policeman tho
ught his mind was wandering because he had never before encountered anyone without a mobile.

  Later in the day the Pembers came. Jock asked if he could describe his attacker but lost interest when Duncan said he could remember nothing about what had happened to him. Then Kathy told a long story she had read somewhere about a woman in the United States picking out her assailant in an identity parade. How could she tell it was him?

  ‘He was the only one wearing handcuffs,’ Kathy said.

  Duncan said rather crossly that his case couldn’t be a parallel because he had no memory of an assailant, wouldn’t have believed he had an assailant but for the bang on his head. He told Ken and Moira about the leaves when they came next day. Not a few leaves as it might be on a single plant but fields of them.

  ‘You were dreaming,’ Ken said. ‘That’s what it was. Were you brought up in the countryside?’

  ‘I suppose I was.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. You were reverting to childhood. Sugar beet, those leaves would have been.

  Duncan was allowed to go home next day. A wall of heat met him when he got inside the house. The first thing he did was take off his jacket and then he felt in his pocket for his handkerchief to wipe off the sweat which had started all over his face. No handkerchief was there. Perhaps he really was doing what Ken had suggested and reverting to his childhood, for what he brought out was a crumpled tissue and with it two green stems with withered leaves attached. Then he remembered. The memory came back in disjointed fragments but it came back, the green rows, the intense heat, the smell, the stairs, the cupboard with the heating gauge, the movement behind him as he reached the foot of the stairs …