The Spider-Orchid (16 page)

“You could sleep on the couch in the sitting-room,” she pleaded. “It’s quite comfortable. I wouldn’t feel frightened at all if
you
were here!”

One in the eye for Adrian! Or so it sounded. Dorothy hesitated, glancing at him sidelong, to see how he was taking it.

Very badly, to judge by appearances. But Dorothy was wrong in supposing that it was the blow to his male pride that had brought the dark look to his face. What he was actually thinking was that with Dorothy on the sitting-room couch, he himself would be forced back into the double bed, which he hadn’t occupied since Rita’s return from hospital. The prospect of spending the night with the neck-brace, the tears, and the recriminations was more than he could stand.

He was polite, but firm. He explained to Dorothy that Rita needed the whole of the double bed to herself at the moment—that she needed to be able to shift her weight, to turn herself at this angle and at that: and he explained to Rita that they had already trespassed more than enough on Dorothy’s kindness, without asking this favour of her as well. And as to Rita’s fears—well,
he
was going to be here, wasn’t he? Did they really think he would prove incapable of dealing with an intruder into his own flat, should the need arise?

“Everything will be perfectly all right. There’s nothing
whatever
to worry about,” he promised them both, and with this
assurance,
Dorothy heaved herself from her chair and took herself off downstairs.

But less than two hours later—just before one in the morning—Rita was screaming again. Screaming, and screaming, and screaming; and when Adrian, dazed with sleep, rushed to her bedside, she still did not stop.

“She’s here! I saw her! She’s come to kill me!” she shrieked, and nothing Adrian could do would quiet her, until, in the end, as a very last resort, he put his hand over her mouth and held it there.

“
S
CREAMING
? No, I didn’t hear any screaming,” said Kathy vaguely; and Adrian, trying to sneak off to work as if nothing had happened, could have hugged her. If Kathy, in the room just below them, hadn’t heard the screams, then the screams themselves began to seem just a little bit less real, a little bit less demanding of attention from a busy man.

And it wasn’t as if Rita had been able to give any plausible explanation for her terror—if terror it was, and not just another attention-getting ploy, which was what he was beginning to suspect. When she had finally calmed down enough for him to risk taking his hand off her mouth and let her speak, the things she had to say were such a jumble of
non
sequiturs
and blatant melodrama, that he could only conclude that either she had been dreaming, or that she was deliberately making a fool of him.

“I heard her! I heard her tiptoeing about again!” were Rita’s first intelligible words. “She came and leaned right over me,
peering
into my face, but I kept my eyes tight shut, I pretended to be asleep … and so presently she crept away again. Then, a minute later, I heard her at my handbag, I heard the clasp go, and then I heard her scratching and rustling among my things. I know what she was looking for—but Adrian, it’s all lies! I promise you it’s all lies …! She’s just trying to make you hate me …!”

“Who is? What lies? What the hell are you talking about?” But Rita gabbled on, ignoring him.

“And then she was in the kitchen! I heard her! She was trying to be ever so quiet, but
I
heard her! Opening cupboards … pulling out drawers! And then, somehow, I knew that she’d opened the knife drawer … that she was getting out the carving knife…! And that was when I screamed, Adrian! I couldn’t help it! I was so frightened!”

Until the bit about the carving knife, Adrian had been
following
the narrative with some degree of concern, conceiving it
possible
that there
might
have been an intruder going through the place; what with Dorothy’s well-known habit of leaving the back
door unlocked at all hours, such an occurrence was far from impossible. But the knife business made it clear that the whole thing had been merely a nightmare; and Adrian told her so, though not unkindly. She was still an invalid, and therefore entitled to deprive other people of their much-needed sleep whenever she liked, and for the silliest reasons.

To pacify her, he made a tour of the flat, ending up with a particularly careful inspection of the kitchen.

It looked all right. The drawers and cupboards were all shut, the surfaces clear. In fact, it looked a good deal tidier than it normally did, Dorothy being a more meticulous housewife than Rita.

He duly reported all this to the invalid with the intention of reassuring her; but of course it did nothing of the kind; once again, he had put his foot in it.

So he was criticising her housekeeping now, was he? He
preferred
that doddering old woman downstairs, did he? What sort of a lover is it who walks into his mistress’s bedroom in the middle of the night and starts telling her off about the state of the kitchen when she is lying there ill and nearly paralysed? When
other
women are ill and nearly paralysed, their lovers will….

*

Other women! … Other women! How it brought back those rows with Peggy! Did
nothing
ever change, no matter what you did with your life or who you shared it with?

Cold and exhausted, he sat on the end of the bed, hunched in his dressing-gown as though sheltering from a storm, and let the words drum against his skull. By dawn, he was so weary that he couldn’t make out whether she was objecting to being murdered in her bed or to the fact that he never brought her roses now “like you used to do”.

Used he to? He supposed so. But Rita had been different then … exciting, inaccessible, and not constantly in tears. Or if she had, then the tears had been Derek’s fault, not his, and it had been lovely. In those days it had been Derek who didn’t bring her roses, didn’t understand her, wouldn’t listen to her, always had his nose in his books, making notes about rare and coveted plants far into the night, until (as Rita had sourly remarked) you’d have thought he couldn’t tell the difference between a woman and a spider-orchid!

How they had laughed at that! Derek and his spider-orchids had become one of those sweet jokes between them. One of them only had to mention the word, and they’d be in fits of laughter for half the evening, pulling Derek to pieces, delighting in every detail of his hilarious shortcomings.

What fun it had been! No wonder he had brought her roses! If he had.

“I’ll bring you some tomorrow,” he promised, yawning, trying to buy a couple of hours sleep; but of course it didn’t work. Soon she was accusing him of not caring whether she was murdered or not, which just at the moment he didn’t, except that it would all be so exhausting, police and doctors and mortuaries and things.

*

Naturally, after such a night as this, the sight of Kathy, fresh-faced, no responsibility of his, some other chap’s baby balanced on her hip, and with no word of blame on her rosy lips about last night’s uproar, appeared to him like something straight out of heaven. He hoped, with a rush of irrelevant gratitude, that everything was going marvellously for her with this new boy friend of hers.
Certainly,
she looked blooming enough, and it was lovely to see a girl not crying.

“Oh, well, I’m glad it didn’t disturb you,” he said gratefully. “I was afraid we must have woken you up.” (Actually, he hadn’t given Kathy a thought at the time, he had been much too
preoccupied,
but the goodwill he was feeling towards her now made his words near enough to the truth.) “It was—well, you know. One of those things.”

Yes, Kathy knew all right. None better. Her nineteen years had so far encompassed rather more than their share of “those things”, and she nodded with heartfelt sympathy.

“No, I didn’t hear a thing,” she reassured him. “But then, you know, screaming never
does
bother me, unless it’s
him
”—she gestured, with a small hoisting-up of his fat bottom, to the baby propped on her hip. “It’s a funny thing, that. There could be an earthquake, and the whole street screaming, and I’d most likely sleep through it: but the tiniest whimper from
him,
and I’m awake in a flash! We mothers are like that, you know. It’s a sort of instinct.”

There was a note of unaccustomed pride in her voice, as though the idea that there was such a thing as a maternal instinct, and
that she, Kathy, was partaking of it, was a new one to her, and delightful.

Adrian nodded agreement, but did not pursue the topic. This was no moment for involving himself in a discussion of maternal drives and the part they must have played in human evolution. Indeed, there wasn’t much to discuss; you only had to look at that damp, demanding, grizzling creature with dribbles of
egg-yolk
down its chin to know that without some such overwhelming and unreasoning instinct, the human species could never possibly have survived.

He smiled at Kathy, and proceeded on his way downstairs. All he wanted, right now, was to get safely out of the house before anything else happened. Rita was asleep at the moment, but there was no knowing how long she would remain so. It wasn’t as if he was leaving her unattended; Dorothy was here. Dorothy liked happenings, so let them happen away while
she
was in charge, not while he was.

Cautiously as a burglar, he slipped out through the front door, and closed it again softly behind him. Down the front steps on soundless feet: and then—freedom! Away into the damp
anonymous
morning! Away into the law-abiding rush-hour crowds, who moved so meekly, so predictably, along their given ways, who never screamed in the night, or got themselves pushed down flights of stairs, or landed themselves, unasked, on reluctant lovers!

Well, probably they didn’t, you couldn’t really tell, but let’s assume they didn’t! Not one single one of them! Adrian braked, and gestured with a flourish of exaggerated courtesy to the pedestrian waiting at the zebra crossing, ushering the old chap across the road as if he was royalty, and all because he never screamed in the night, or burst into tears, or fell down flights of stairs. Or, if he did, he didn’t drag
Adrian
into it, the excellent old soul!

“Don’t often meet
that
sort of courtesy on the roads, these days,” mused the old man, grinning at Adrian and saluting with his stick as he hobbled across; and even a couple of hours later, dozing in the Public Library over the Sports Page of the Daily Mail, he was still experiencing faint echoes of what it feels like to be a V.I.P.

*

Before he started on his day’s work, there were two calls that Adrian had to make on his office phone. He’d saved them till now
because he didn’t want either Rita or Dorothy breathing down his neck while he made them. Nor, come to that, did he want his secretary, so he sent her into the outer office; then he sat at his desk for a moment, his head in his hands, reminding himself of the points to be covered.

First, there was the child Daphne, who always travelled home from school with Amelia, and was Amelia’s great friend. From her, he wanted a statement that on that fatal afternoon Amelia had left school at her usual time and had gone straight home by her usual route. From his ex-wife Peggy, he wanted confirmation that Amelia had arrived home on that day not later than usual. These two separate bits of information would between them eliminate all possibility that Amelia could have been in the school building at all at the time of the accident. Not that Adrian himself felt the faintest shadow of fear lest his daughter had been
implicated
in the thing; he just knew she hadn’t. But he wanted to have some concrete evidence with which he could confront Rita and thus silence her ridiculous accusations once and for all. He had no intention of enduring yet another night of trying to counter this ridiculous, trumped-up nonsense about his daughter—a schoolgirl of thirteen—creeping around her father’s flat with intent to murder! The sheer silliness of the charge made him wonder, for a moment, if it was worth refuting; but yes, of course it was. Either Rita herself actually believed it—as the result perhaps, of some
shock-induced
hallucination—or else she had some malicious reason for pretending that she did. Either way, the sooner she was confronted with concrete proof to the contrary, the better. He would write down, in a business-like way, exactly what Daphne said, and exactly what Peggy said too. If Rita chose still not to believe these statements, then she could just ring both witnesses herself—he would stand over her while she did it—and with her own ears hear them repeat their evidence.

Daphne’s number, he knew, was somewhere at the back of his diary, because he had several times had to ring up and make arrangements about fetching Amelia from there; but it took him a minute or two to find it, because he had forgotten the child’s
surname
. He had to go right through as far as the R’s before coming to it.

Rolandson. Yes, that was it. He remembered now.

He dialled the number, and by good luck it was Daphne herself
who answered; he hadn’t looked forward to having to make some laborious explanation to a baffled parent before he could get through to the daughter.

But this, as it happened, was the last bit of luck he was to have that morning.

No, Daphne told him, in a small, surprised voice, no, actually she
hadn’t
travelled home with Amelia on that particular day. Yes, that’s right, she usually did, but Amelia hadn’t come to school at all that day; she’d been absent, and so Daphne couldn’t really tell him anything. She was awfully sorry, but she just didn’t know a thing, because term had ended only a few days later, and Amelia still hadn’t been back….

Stalemate. Oh, well, never mind, there was still Peggy, and her evidence would now be even more conclusive. If Amelia had been ill that day, then Peggy would almost certainly have stayed at home from work to look after her, and would be able to vouch for her having been at home for every moment of the time. Her evidence would now by itself be entirely sufficient.

He had already dialled Peggy’s work number and heard the first of the ringing tones, before he suddenly remembered: and slammed the receiver down.

Hell! Peggy wouldn’t be there! She was on holiday, she had taken Amelia down to Seaford for a fortnight.

Damn, damn, damn! Now he would have to ring her at
Seaford
—hunt up the code-number of the place, and all the rest of the bother. And indeed he had already looked up the code-number, and had his forefinger poised to start dialling, before he realised he was up against yet another obstacle.

Where
was it the two of them were staying? He racked his brains; he leafed through the pages of his diary. Had Peggy given him an address? Had he asked her for one? He simply couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even remember if it was a hotel they’d been going to, or ordinary seaside lodgings.

He cursed himself for not having taken more trouble about it all. Fancy a father letting his only child go away on holiday without even bothering to find out her address! The truth was that, even since the divorce, he always left this sort of thing to Peggy. Whatever her failings as a wife (and Adrian had wondered at times whether it wasn’t people’s virtues rather than their failings that make them impossible to live with) Peggy had always been a
careful and loving mother; he had never at any time experienced one moment’s anxiety about Amelia when she was in her mother’s care. This, inevitably, had enabled him to be slack and inattentive about little things like dates and addresses and phone numbers. Peggy always told him, without being asked, anything like this that he ought to know.

Only this time, she hadn’t.

And then again, when she went on holiday Amelia always wrote to him on the very first day, a long gabbling scrawl of
impressionistic
description and highly individualistic comment on the novel environment; most amusing and interesting letters, which he preserved in a special folder.