Free Tigerlily's Orchids by Ruth Rendell Page B

while at the same time keeping himself very comfortable and his electricity and gas bills down to a minimum.
    Inside the summer house, Xue and Tao sat on rattan chairs, reading nothing, looking at nothing and not speaking. After a while Xue slid on to the floor and lay there, pressing her bare arms and legs against the cold tiles.

CHAPTER SIX
    N ever having practised, Michael Constantine didn’t quite like the idea of attending a patient. It might be illegal for all he knew. ‘If it happens again,’ he said, ‘you’d better call an ambulance.’
    Sophie Longwich hadn’t told him how she had bought a half-bottle of gin and handed it in to the woman who opened the door of Flat 6, a woman who looked to her scarcely human in her tattered fur and with grey hair transformed by neglect into dreadlocks straggled about her face. She was concerned for Olwen but at the same time she was frightened of her. Brought up by gentle courteous parents, she had been taught to respect those she still thought of as ‘grown-ups’. They knew how to conduct their lives, the long years had instructed them in living, and when she found one who didn’t know how, she felt shaken and bewildered.
    Her flatmates had gone out, Molly to her art school in Hornsey, Noor to a business course she was attending in Wembley. Sophie had no lectures today at her South Bank university, and though there was a lot of reading she should be doing, she found herself unable to concentrate on Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger. Several times during the morning she went out on to the top landing and listened outside Olwen’s door. At first there was only silence. She imaginedOlwen pouring herself a gin with something – orange or tonic or one of those things people mixed with gin. It didn’t occur to her as possible that gin might be drunk neat. Olwen would be feeling better by now, would have had a bath and put on clean clothes. The idea of Olwen cleaned up and humanised comforted her. She could now allow herself to think about the five pounds the half-bottle had cost. Noor had a rich father who owned this flat, Molly’s parents were comfortably off but she, Sophie, one of five children, had to live on her government loan, all to be paid back one day.
    She read some more of
The Great Gatsby
and then she went back to Olwen’s door. There was a sound of movement from inside the flat, then a crash that sounded as if something had been flung against an interior wall. She waited. Olwen spoke, cursing, apparently enraged, drumming, by the sound of it, her fists on the floor. Seriously frightened now, Sophie ran back to Flat 5 and into the bedroom she shared with Molly which happened to be the one furthest away from the landing and Olwen’s door.
    N othing leads to the making of discoveries like an enforced change in one’s lifestyle. Stuart, determined to escape from Claudia’s phone calls, had begun going out a great deal. Long walks were taken, he twice went to the cinema, met his old friends Jack and Martin on Tuesday night, had a drink with an ex-girlfriend for old times’ sake on Wednesday and next day even visited his parents. He had found that it was unnecessary to take his mobile with him. This was a revelation to him; it wasn’t since his mid-teens that he had been anywhere without carrying it or one of its predecessors. But without it in his pocket the heavens didn’t fall, retribution didn’t descend on him, no vengeful illness struck him down.It was even quite peaceful not hearing ‘Nessun dorma’ every five minutes, restful not having to speak to Claudia.
    When he got home the messages were piling up, two from Claudia, one from his mother from whom he had parted three hours before, one from Martin inviting him to Sunday lunch with himself and his girlfriend. Stuart deleted them all and still lightning didn’t strike him or the earth open. The results of his X-ray had