The Spider-Orchid (18 page)

With a leap of joy in his heart which quite startled him by its intensity, Adrian realised suddenly that the old Dorothy was back! Somehow, somewhere, during the course of this diatribe, she had quietly returned! Already, she was on her feet, putting the kettle on, while at the same time describing in colourful detail exactly what would by now have befallen That Brian if she, Dorothy, had been the lady in the case.

And this time, Adrian drank his daunting mug of tea as if it was nectar, drank it right up, as a sort of small thank-offering to the gods for restoring Dorothy-ness to the world again.

It was shortly after this that he noticed that it was ten o’clock already. Had they really been talking that long?—Rita would be furious! There was really no chance at all that she would still be asleep after all this time. Taking his leave of Dorothy—a good deal more warmly than usual because of his gratitude to her for being herself after her brief but alarming abdication from the rôle —he sped off upstairs. He noticed, as he went, how very quiet the house seemed to be tonight. The ground-floor flat, naturally, was quiet, for there was as yet no one in it; but so too, when he reached that landing, was Kathy’s. No crooning from the radio—no crying baby—no voices raised in argument or laughter. His own flat, too, when he walked into it, was absolutely silent; and this time he really
was
puzzled. Surely Rita couldn’t
still
be asleep—or, alternatively, still sullenly lying there, waiting for him to make the first move? He strode swiftly to the bedroom and flung open the door.

*

It was empty. The bed, though rumpled and unmade, had obviously been empty for some time. It was quite cold. And on one of the pillows lay what he was by now naturally looking for—a note.

S
HEER, INCREDULOUS RELIEF
at first blotted out all other considerations.

She was gone! She was actually
gone
! Such luck, so soon, had been beyond his wildest dreams. Crumpling the note into a tight ball, he tossed it into the air for the sheer joy of it, and batted it with the flat of his hand into the newly-emptied waste-paper basket.

It landed dead centre. Perfect! He laughed aloud, and flung himself full-length on the spacious, unmade bed, his own again at last!

Freedom! Freedom! At last, after all these weeks, the bed was his, the flat was his. His very life was his own again, to live exactly as he chose. It was like being let out of prison, it was like recovering from a long illness—and with the Easter weekend just coming up too, so that on top of all this freedom, he would be having a holiday as well.

Tomorrow was Good Friday. It would be succeeded by Saturday, Sunday and Monday, all official holidays. For four whole days he would not have to drive to work, to keep his temper, to suffer fools, to agree with nonsense, or to consider anyone’s convenience at all except his own! Just as some men need to go on the bottle every so often in order to get a break from ordinary life and ordinary civilised behaviour, so did Adrian need an occasional orgy of pure, uncomplicated solitude. With four whole days ahead of him, he could go on a real bender, going to bed when he liked, getting up when he liked, reading all night with the light on and no one to complain about it. Reading all day, too, if he chose, without anyone saying, “But I thought you said that after lunch we were going to …?” He could do what he liked without anyone arguing; he could think what he liked without anyone saying “You mean you don’t love me?”

*

It was intoxicating! It was like winning the Pools! He went to bed in a state of mindless euphoria, comparable to that of a seven-year-old on the night before his birthday—the one, magic night of the
year when all the toys in the world are within his grasp, from an electric train set to a working model of a moon-rocket.

*

But of course—as with winning the Pools—this first, carefree euphoria cannot last. For a few hours, perhaps—at most a day—the joy is pure and unsullied; then, relentlessly, the problems set in.

By morning (he hadn’t, after all, been reading all night, but sleeping like a log for eight and a half hours)—by morning, the ecstasy was gone, and the problems, small and large, were buzzing round his newly-awakened head like a swarm of mosquitoes.

What should he
tell
everybody—that was the first question. Last night, in the first flush of relief and joy, he had planned to tell no one at all, to hug the thing to himself as a precious secret, and to revel in his miraculous and unpremeditated solitude as if it was a secret vice.

But now, in the harsh light of 8.15 am, he realised how totally impractical was this project. Rita would probably have been on the phone to half their friends and acquaintances already, in tears, and giving her side of the story: which was rather unfair, when you came to think of it, because what
his
side of the story was he had no idea, and therefore couldn’t retaliate in kind.

Who should he tell, then? And how? Certainly, he would have to tell Dorothy, and tell her quickly, otherwise she would be coming up as usual this morning to tidy round and help Rita to get dressed. And as soon as he had dealt with this—and had listened to her flood of reproaches, lamentations and forebodings concerning the whole matter—then he would straightaway have to tackle the problem of Rita’s things. He wasn’t going to keep them here another day if he could help it.

He shut his eyes, and buried his face in the pillow so as not to have to see them any more; but he still had to think about them in order to make his plans. He could see them in his mind’s eye all too clearly; her clothes, her make-up, her bottles and jars of this and that. Her clothes-brush, her scent spray—and, of course, far worse than these relatively portable objects were the bits and pieces of furniture and equipment that had been seeping insidiously, week by week, into the flat. The oval mirror, of course, had been broken, so that was one problem solved; but the cut-glass fruit bowl hadn’t, nor all those imitation Wedgwood plates and dishes which now
cluttered up the handsome oak sideboard. And then there was her bedside table, varnished a hideous yellowy colour, and the candlesticks, and the china model of Bambi. There were her hair-curlers too, and the squalid cretonne box containing powder, lipstick and dirty hairnets. There was her steam-iron, and her clogged-up carpet sweeper, and her hanging wardrobe of transparent plastic—oh, a million things! Until they were gone, he couldn’t really feel free of her. He was aware, suddenly, of the hidden power of mere objects. It was as if they’d grown a faint, sticky web around them during the night in which they planned to entangle him, and hold him a helpless captive, until it should please her to return….

The very air seemed full of threats. Lifting his head from the pillow, he forced himself to open his eyes. He looked from the beside table to the sunray lamp; from the hair-drier to the
imitation
crocodile boots; and then scrambled apprehensively out of bed as if some doomful gong had sounded somewhere.

*

Fortunately for Adrian, telling Dorothy what had happened and arranging for the packing up of Rita’s belongings turned out to be one and the same task, more or less.

“But what about her
things,
Mr Summers?” had been Dorothy’s first and entirely spontaneous reaction to the dramatic news of Rita’s disappearance; and it was immediately followed by an offer to come up “right away” and help him get them packed.

Adrian couldn’t have thought up a more convenient reaction on his landlady’s part if he’d tried for a year; but all the same, he was shocked.

Didn’t she
care
?
He
didn’t care, naturally; in fact quite the contrary, but that was different.
Someone
ought to care, and in this case Dorothy was the obvious person, she having befriended Rita so assiduously of late. She
must
care, it was her duty to care, if only as an antidote to his own ruthless unconcern. There should be a proper balance in these things, with some people reliably feeling the right feelings, in order to make a solid basis from which other people could safely feel the wrong ones.

It did cross his mind, as Dorothy laboured her way upstairs in front of him, that Dorothy and Rita might have plotted the whole thing between them, which of course would explain Dorothy’s unconcern as well as her astounding lack of curiosity. He knew that Dorothy could be very cunning sometimes, and very devious. He
knew also that, when it suited her, she could lie fluently and
without
the smallest qualms of conscience, and so it wouldn’t be the least use asking her anything.

At one time, it had struck him as odd, not to say paradoxical, that someone as untrustworthy as Dorothy should have so many people queueing up to confide in her their darkest secrets; and it had taken him some months to realise that actually there was no incongruity in this at all. A person who can tell lies easily and without guilt is actually a far more trustworthy confidante than an honest person, who is bound by the truth. Confronted by a straight yes-or-no question from some third party, the honourable truth-teller will have no option but to answer truthfully—i.e. to give
away your confidences. Whereas an accomplished liar, once she is on your side, can be relied on to keep your secret through thick and thin; she will tell, competently and without batting an eyelid, all the lies that are necessary to keep you out of trouble. To be a liar is not at all the same thing as to be untrustworthy; quite the contrary.

What Dorothy’s motive could have been in involving herself in this conspiracy to get Rita out of the house without his knowledge (if indeed she had done so) he could not guess, and he had no intention of trying. Motives are usually mixed, and only partially conscious; and the unravelling of them, in Adrian’s experience, was liable to be not only fruitless, but tedious in the extreme.

*

Anyway, Dorothy was a marvellous help with the packing. All those tasks that to him seemed so distasteful—fingering through the
garments
in the wardrobe, collecting shoes and boots together from here, there and everywhere—under the bed, behind bits of furniture —all this Dorothy undertook with gusto, contributing a running commentary the while on where each item might have been bought, and when, and what had been its probable price. All that Adrian had to do, really, was to help with lifting the heavier things, and to carry rubbish down those long flights of stairs to the dustbins. The back door, he noted with wry amusement, was no longer locked; in fact, it was swinging wide open, filling the house with swirling draughts from the wild April day outside.

*

By evening, the cases and boxes were all packed, the pieces of furniture done up with brown paper and string. All that remained
now was to ring up a removal firm first thing in the morning, and have them sent off to—

Well, where? And now at last Adrian was up against the crunch, which he had been trying to avoid thinking about all day.

He did not know where she had gone. Presumably she was either at her mother’s or at Derek’s—but which? He dared not ring either address for fear that she
was
there, and would answer the phone, and the thought of hearing her voice, of having to make actual contact with her after all that had happened, just simply terrified him.

He could ring Derek of course, at work, but that could not happen until Tuesday. No one would be working now until after the weekend—three more whole days to get through with all those boxes and things lined up waiting, an ever-present threat, a reminder that she
could
—oh, yes, she
could
—change her mind and come back. She could do it tonight. Or tomorrow. Any time. Until her belongings—every last tube of face-cream and jar of eye-liner—were out of the house, there was no security. He was like a man under suspended sentence.

*

He spent a restless, uneasy weekend, neither enjoying the holiday nor getting down to any solid work. Every time he heard a step on the stair … a car drawing up outside the house … he would find himself in a sweat of apprehension. His anxiety began to invade even his dreams. Twice—three times—on the Saturday night he woke, fancying that some disturbance in the flat had woken him. Once, he even thought he heard the sound of one of those heavy suitcases being dragged across the floor, and he’d leapt out of bed in absolute horror, his half-awakened mind full of visions of Rita in there in the sitting-room, quietly and methodically unpacking everything in the dark, releasing her belongings once more into his flat, like plague bacilli from some Science Fiction laboratory….

But of course, there was nothing. The boxes and cases, the corded-up furniture, were still piled as he and Dorothy had left them, looming like monsters startled into immobility by the sudden light. Coming out on to the landing, and in the very moment of switching on the light, he’d fancied he’d caught a glimpse of flying hair disappearing round the banisters, vanishing into the darkness of the floor below; but when he thought back to this moment afterwards, he could not be sure it had not been the tail-end of one of his
dreams. Anyway, it hadn’t been black hair, like Rita’s, it had been lightish, almost fair, if it had existed at all.

He searched the flat in every corner, and even explored the rest of the house, right down to the kitchen, but without result. He took the opportunity of locking the back door while he was about it—evidently, Dorothy was right back on form now, he reflected wryly—and made his way back to bed.

But it was a long while before he could sleep. The sky was already growing light before the fell into an uneasy doze, and he woke, tired and unrefreshed, to yet another wasted day of apprehension and inability to concentrate.

By evening, he had had enough of it, and, determined not to endure another night like the previous one, he did a thing he rarely did—he took a sleeping-pill, and slept like the dead till past nine the following morning.

This was the Monday—Bank Holiday Monday—and he reflected, thankfully, that this was his last day of constant anxiety and fear of Rita’s return. Tomorrow, Tuesday, would be an ordinary working day, at last, and the moment he got to the office he would phone Derek at work and tell him that Rita’s luggage would shortly be on its way to Wimbledon.
Tell
him, not ask him; since she’d left Adrian of her own accord, her belongings were now Derek’s responsibility again, not his.

*

It was Derek’s secretary who answered the phone.

“Mr Langley? No, I’m afraid Mr Langley’s not in this week. Can I give him a message when he returns?… Oh. Oh, I see. No, I’m afraid he didn’t leave an address … Mrs Langley hasn’t been well, you know, and he’s taken her for a short holiday by the sea. No, the South Coast, he told me … a little place called Seaford, not far from Eastbourne….”