Tigerlily's Orchids by Ruth Rendell Page A

might be on the edge of Epping Forest but it hadn’t been ‘in the country’ for about seventy years. Stuart let it pass. He was so enormously relieved that his parents wouldn’t be at the party that he had immediately been put in an ebullient mood. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘There’ll be another time.’
    â€˜Well, I should hope there would, Stuart. I’m quite surprised that you haven’t asked us before. After all, you’ve been there for three months – or is it four? A long time anyway.’
    Stuart said nothing, his jolly mood waning. ‘Any more thoughts on a job?’ his mother said.
    â€˜I’ve told you, I’m not thinking about jobs until at least April.’
    â€˜That attitude is all very well in times of financial stability, Stuart – I’m quoting Daddy – but it’s positively dangerous now. Do you know what Maureen Rivers told me? Her son wrote a hundred and seventy-three applications before he got his present job. Of course, it’s a very good job.’
    Stuart could hear ‘Nessun dorma’ playing in his bedroom.
    Claudia. He said goodbye to his mother as soon as he could, lit a cigarette and went back to the wine and the food. The table up against the front window was the best place to set it out, he thought, and let the guests come into the kitchen for drinks. Where would he put the glasses? He suddenly realised, standing there at the window, that he only possessed about six glasses. He would have to buy some – more expense. Where would it all end? At this thought, this unanswerable question, he looked up and saw, on the opposite side of Kenilworth Avenue, the beautiful girl. She was walking along with her father a little way up to the left, coming in this direction. Party, drinks and glasses forgotten, he pulled on the heavy sweater he had just taken off and plunged out of the flat, out of the lobby, into the icy-cold air. The girl and her father had disappeared.
    A part from the blow to the back of her head, there appeared to be very little wrong with Olwen. Her concussion was short-lived and there was no permanent damage. Her stepdaughter Margaret came to see her in the hospital. Olwen had no memory of telling anyone at Lichfield House that she had a stepdaughter or indeed any relatives but Margaret said she had had a phone call from someone called Katie.
    â€˜When you come out of here,’ she said in a tone and form of words expecting the answer no, ‘I don’t suppose you’d think of coming to us for a few days.’
    â€˜Not really,’ said Olwen, then recollecting that this was what she said only to her neighbours, ‘No, thanks. I shall be OK at home.’
    Margaret and her brother had so much resented Olwen coming into their lives when Margaret was eight and Richard six, trying to take the place of their dead mother and sleeping in their father’s bedroom, that they had done their best to make her life so miserable that she would leave. They succeeded in making her life miserable but she didn’t leave. She stayed because she wouldn’t be beaten and because, if she didn’t love Bill, he certainly seemed to love her. She gave up her job and stayed at home to look after the children. They were rude to her and even physically violent, they stole from Woolworths; when she was eleven Margaret told her father Olwen had a boyfriend she had seen her kissing and when she was fourteen that Olwen had sexually assaulted her. How much of this their father believed Olwen never knew but his attitude towards her changed. He told her to get another job – being with the children was obviously bad for her. So Olwen went back to work and almost as soon as she did so Margaret and Richard ceased to be the children from hell (as she called them to herself) and began to behave like civilised beings. Both went off to university and then to homes of their own and