Free Tigerlily's Orchids by Ruth Rendell Page A

School, its pupils about to come out into the playground for their mid-morning break.
    It was a very long time since anyone had been buried inthe churchyard of St Ebba’s but the graves were still there and the gravestones. Wally, whose family had its roots in Merton, had no connection with any burial place in this neighbourhood but he had fixed on Clara Elizabeth Carbury’s grave for his particular attention. He liked the name and, more than the name, the location of her gravestone which was close up against the openwork iron gates dividing the churchyard from the school grounds. Clara, he would have lied to anyone who asked, had been his great-grandmother. By this time he had read the inscription so many times that he knew it by heart.
Clara Elizabeth, b.1879, d.1942, beloved wife of Samuel Carbury, Abide with Me, Fast falls the Eventide. RIP
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    The churchyard was on the whole not well maintained, most of the plots shaggy with long grass and the slabs overgrown with weeds. But Clara Carbury’s was an example to all descendants of the dead, most of them negligent and uncaring, in that its marble kerb was clean and polished, its grass plot neat and weed-free and its stone urn sporting a well-pruned pot plant except when the local youth vandalised it. In spite of its trim appearance, created by himself, Wally squatted down to begin on it afresh, taking out of his bag a set of shears and, for the more precise work, a pair of scissors, a trowel and fork and a pack of polishing cloths. He had just begun snipping off the past week’s growth of grass as a hairdresser might start to trim a short back and sides, when the Kenilworth Primary children burst out with shrieks and shouts into their playground. The girls shrieked, as Wally well knew, while the boys shouted. It was the former he was interested in and he could watch them run and jump, their skirts fluttering up in the breeze, almost without lifting his eyes from the trowel he plied to remove a non-existent dandelion.
    Later in the week he would take himself a little further afield to Daneforth Comprehensive and the first year’s netball.There was no convenient churchyard in Daneforth Grove but a window in the stairwell of a nearby council tower block overlooked the school. Wally secured himself a vantage point at this window for half an hour on Wednesday mornings by dint of signing up for a local authority scheme called Salute4Seniors. All this involved was visiting a pensioner and chatting to him or her for twenty minutes, a breeze which meant he could afterwards spend an hour viewing the sub-teens at play. So far, no parent or other interfering busybody had spotted his weekly activities or, if they had, thought them other than innocent.
    T he young girl went first down the Springmead garden path to the summer house. Then came the boy. Watching them from his back-bedroom window, Duncan made up his mind that she and her brother must be meeting to have a conversation in their own language. They seldom got the chance to be alone together inside Springmead where the girl’s middle-aged husband was no doubt very demanding, expecting her to wait on him hand and foot and the brother to toe the line. He hadn’t seen the husband go out but probably he had. Not nearly so many people seemed to go out to work as they had when Duncan was that age but that was very likely where he had gone. When he fantasised about people he usually gave them names and now he named the husband Mr Wu after a George Formby song about a Chinese laundryman and the girl and boy Tigerlily and Oberon. He saw them go into the summer house, looking over their shoulders before closing the door.
    Duncan opened the window just as he had opened all the bedroom windows. The weather had grown mild, and though he had turned down the heating, the well-insulated houseremained very warm. Soon he would be able to turn it off altogether. Duncan felt rather proud of helping to reduce global warming