Tigerlily's Orchids (32 page)

All that ugly old furniture was gone from Marius's flat. There was nothing to do. Stuart's place required only a quick once-over with the vacuum-cleaner brush and Rose's not even that. Richenda went off to her jobs in Ludlow House, thinking with some satisfaction about her decree nisi which had come through that morning and Wally's trial scheduled for a date in the middle of September.

A
ny housewifery skills Molly had she had learned while Stuart's servant. You pushed the vacuum cleaner about and you wiped down surfaces with a bit of cloth. You scattered scouring powder over the basin and the sink and the bath and rubbed at it and rinsed it. You didn't know what to iron so you ironed everything. This was the extent of Molly's expertise but she had performed these actions from love so they had been pleasurable and she had been rapturous when
receiving Stuart's rare thanks. She felt very differently about Carl. While she was living with him – and she meant to live with him for as short a time as possible – she wasn't going to sweep and dust but she must do something about the bed. It had begun to smell. No, he hadn't got any other sheets. When the ones that were on the bed got in too bad a state he took them to the launderette, washed and dried them and then put them back on the bed. Because she wasn't paying any rent to Noor while she was here, or any rent at all come to that, she went down to the British Home Stores and bought two sheets and two pillowcases and remade the bed.

‘You're a star, you are,' Carl said. ‘Do you know that? You'll make a wonderful wife.'

‘Oh, I don't know, Carl.'

‘I do. We better fix a date to get ourselves married.'

‘I'm not twenty yet,' said Molly. ‘I can't get married.'

‘My nan was sixteen when she got married.'

‘Yeah, well, that was olden times.'

She took the dirty sheets to the launderette and learned how to operate the washing machine and the dryer. It was very different from the arrangements at Flat 5 Lichfield House. On the way back she found a charity shop where they had a pair of green-and-black-striped curtains for sale. If they were hung up and the light excluded she might be able to sleep at night instead of lying there looking at the street lamp and the car headlights flickering across the ceiling. And the workmen who came by day and walked about on the scaffolding wouldn't be able to see in and whistle at her.

Carl said that when he'd finished work next day he meant to go down to the registrar's office at Burnt Oak and find out what you had to do to get married.

‘I'm not getting married, Carl,' Molly said, hanging curtains. ‘I'm not getting married for years and years. Before I even
think of marriage I'm going to be an art historian or maybe the curator of Tate Modern.'

‘It won't do any harm finding out how it's done, though, will it?'

Someone with a car parked at Brent Cross offered him £20 a time to clean his car every week for the next six months. On the strength of that Carl bought two gold or gold-plated wedding rings.

‘I'll want to have one too, so all the girls know I'm not in the running,' he said.

Molly looked through all the papers for people advertising for a third or fourth tenant to share a flat. She phoned all the ones that looked possible but so far they had been more than she could afford. Could she live in a hostel? Would she be able to bear it? In the evenings Carl brought in doner kebab and chips or pizza and they ate it sitting on the floor watching TV. Then they mostly went down the pub.

With nothing much to do all day but fruitless flat-hunting, Molly started sorting through the bags that furnished Carl's room. She found a lot of
Heat
and
Knave
magazines but no essential bathroom requisites. ‘If you take a toilet roll down that bathroom,' Carl had said, ‘you have to bring it back with you. But you like don't, you forget. Same applies to soap.'

‘Then what do you do?'

‘Me, I do without.'

That made Molly shudder. She took the soiled T-shirts and torn jeans down to the launderette with the sheets but when they were washed they fell into rags. In another bag she found a couple of empty vodka bottles, a woman's handbag with a broken strap, about a hundred old copies of the
Star
and a framed photograph of an old woman Carl said was his grandmother, the glass cracked diagonally across her face.

‘Is she the one that got married at sixteen?'

‘That was the other one,' Carl said uncertainly.

Sometimes she saw herself spending the rest of her life groping through dirty rubbish in plastic sacks. In a gloomy half-dark
dump
with the workmen's Radio 2 playing outside the window. Even though she'd be back at college in five or six weeks, she ought to get a job. In her school holidays she'd worked serving in a greengrocer's and another one cleaning offices. Noor said she'd worked as a croupier but Molly didn't believe it, though she was good-looking enough. But why would she when her dad was rolling in money? She wondered if Mr Ali might need an assistant and one morning she took the bus and then another bus to Kenilworth Avenue and his shop. It was more for the outing, for something to do and somewhere to go that she went, for she had no real hope. Mr Ali would want a Muslim girl who wore a headscarf. But he didn't, or he couldn't get one, and he agreed to take her on, three days a week, the 3 p.m. to 8 shift.

He was obliged to pay the minimum wage. Molly thought that with that coming in she might be able to afford a room of her own. A flat, even a studio flat, to herself she had long realised was hopeless. Elated, she told Carl when he came home from Brent Cross.

‘I'm not having you do that.'

‘You're
not? What's that supposed to mean?'

‘I'm not having my wife work.'

‘Carl, I'm not your wife – remember?'

‘You will be and I'm not having you work. No wife of mine works, right? I keep her.'

She had never thought of herself as much of a feminist but then she had never heard a man talk like that before, a skinny weasel-faced man in dirty jeans holding a bag of doner kebab slices in one hand and a greasy package of chips in the other. Standing glaring at her in a dirty room cluttered
with bags of junk. She started to laugh; it was so ridiculous, she threw back her head and laughed. He said nothing. He threw down the bags of food and punched her on her uplifted jaw. It was a hard punch because, although puny, he was young, and he followed it up with a slap to the other side of her head and then a harder blow to this side.

Molly fell over, shrieking. But she got up again quickly, holding on to her face with both hands. He muttered, ‘No woman of mine works.'

She thought she wouldn't be able to speak but she could. The words came thickly. She had bitten her tongue when he hit her. ‘That's it. I'm going. I should never have come to this dump, this
shithole.'
Her suitcase stood where she had left it and she turned. It took courage to turn her back on him and she braced herself for renewed blows but none came.

‘Don't go,' he said. Tears had come into his eyes.

Now she was facing him again. ‘You think I'd stop here after what you've done? I've nowhere to go but I'm going. I can get on a train and go to Torquay, I can ask Duncan to take me in. He would, I bet he would.'

To her horror and disgust he fell on his knees. He was really crying now. ‘Don't go. Say you won't go. We're engaged, we're going to get married. I'll never lay a finger on you again, I promise. I never will.'

‘Next time you get angry you will.' But she knew that even in arguing with him, she was halfway to giving in. How much would the train fare to Torquay be? A lot. And Duncan – suppose he wasn't in? Everybody went away on holiday this month. He might be away. ‘I'll stay for just tonight,' she said. ‘You'll have to sleep on the floor.'

‘I don't mind. I'll do anything, Molly. Say you won't leave me.'

She wrinkled her nose like someone smelling something bad. It made him wince. ‘Let's have a look at your face. I haven't
done much, have I?' He got to his feet. ‘It won't scar. I haven't done much. I don't know what came over me.'

‘That's what they all say.' She didn't know how she knew that was what they all said. She ate the meat and the chips. There was nothing else. He had brought in cigarettes and she smoked a couple, not because she much liked smoking but because they reminded her of Stuart. Carl said he would go out and buy a bottle of wine.

‘Not for me,' she said. ‘You won't get round me that way.'

But when the cheap red wine appeared and he had poured it out into cracked cups she drank some of it. There were no mirrors in the room. She went to the bathroom, carrying soap and toilet roll, and actually managing to get in there without having to wait outside the door, looked at her bruised face. She would have a black eye and a swollen jaw. But as she stood contemplating her damaged image she thought, well, she had experienced something. She knew a lot more of what life was about than she had that morning. This was
domestic violence
and she had been the victim of it at the age of nineteen. She could talk about it now, not as something she had come across in a book or a newspaper, but at first hand. That didn't mean she was going to stick around for more of it. Come the morning, let him go off and clean some woman's windows, and she'd be out of there.

I
t was a bit much, Duncan thought, a bit over the top. He hardly knew the girl. And he knew very well what happened when people asked if you could put them up for one night or maybe two. They stayed for ten years. His imagination got to work. She would move in with all her stuff, cases and cases of it no doubt and boxes and bags, and take over the largest of his spare rooms, the nice one on the first floor with the view of the summer house next door and the lane and the magnolia tree in the garden beyond. Her clothes would be left all over the floor and she would of course want to use Eva's hairdryer. The noise of the dryer would roar through the house early every morning. The bathroom she would fill with cosmetics and bath essence and body lotion. She would have baths and leave a sticky rim of bath oil round the tub. She would be always washing her clothes and would commandeer his washing machine and dryer.

Moira next-door-but-one had suggested this last when he told her about Molly's phone call. ‘You wait till you get your electric bill, Duncan. That'll be an eye-opener.'

Especially now he wasn't getting that marvellous heat from next door.

Would he have to feed her? Cook? He couldn't quite place
her in his memory. Was she the one whose male companion had broken the glass in the French window or the one whose boyfriend had brought the beer? And how long, oh, how long, would she stay?

She had said she had a job working for Mr Ali. He went down to Mr Ali's shop to stock up with supplies. Bottled water – all the young drank that – crispbread, apples.

‘A very nice young lady,' said Mr Ali. ‘I'm happy for her she'll be living in a nice house while she works for me.'

‘She won't be staying for more than a day or two.'

‘She'll be company for you, you'll see. And with Ramadan coming on apace, only a few days away now, I shall be glad of her assistance. In the late afternoons I get quite faint from fasting, you know.'

On the way back he met Richenda. She dismounted from her bicycle to chat to him about the emptiness of Lichfield House. ‘It gives you a weird feeling. Kind of creepy, all them vacant rooms.'

He told her about the imminent arrival of Molly. ‘That little madam lost me my job with poor Stuart. She was after him but she never got nowhere. You want to watch out, Duncan. She's got her eye on you.'

Duncan made up the bed in the spare room and put clean towels in the bathroom, a bath towel, a hand towel and a facecloth. It didn't look right so he took them away, folded them again and laid them on the bed the way Eva used to when they had a guest. Since her death no one had come to stay.

M
olly hadn't stayed many nights in Carl's room but still she had accumulated more stuff. There had been things she had had to buy because he hadn't got them: the ever-needed soap and toilet paper, tea bags because he only drank
beer and wine, apples and bananas so that she didn't get bowel cancer from living on doner kebab.

Her face ached and she could feel a lump on her left cheek which started to throb as she packed her suitcase and bags. She couldn't get it all in. Another carrier would be needed, preferably one of those bags with pictures of fruit and vegetables on them that were supposed to last a lifetime. In her searches through the bags which cluttered the room she hadn't come across any but several remained that she hadn't sorted through.

Carl had gone to Brent Cross. At five to four the builders – they never seemed to build anything – had turned off their radio and knocked off. Apart from the throb of traffic in Walm Lane, it was strangely silent. She ought to go before Carl came back but she needed another bag. She sat on the floor, tugged one of the bags over and began pulling out its contents. Not a hoarder herself, Molly wondered why anyone would want to keep all this stuff, most of it broken. Boxes that had once held mail-order purchases, ripped open, a calculator that didn't work, a broken torch, lots of carriers but all of them the flimsy sort, a much-thumbed copy of a book called
The Story of O
. She left the contents of the bag where they lay and started on the next one. It had been buried under several of the others.

Newspapers on top, mostly the
Sun
but a few copies of the
Daily Mail
. A bag of metal bits that looked like the inside of a computer. Another of DVD cases with no DVDs inside them. A cardboard box full of broken china wrapped up in cling film. A small suitcase. She was actually thinking that this would do, this could be used to contain her extra stuff, when she did a double take and saw what it was. She let out a sound, something halfway between a cry and a gasp.