The Spider-Orchid (9 page)

The quarrel was cleared up in the end, of course, splinters of glass and all, but on the following morning—which was Friday—Rita was still wearing her sniffy, martyred look. Clearly, it was no morning for saying brightly over the breakfast table, “By the way, darling, your husband has invited me to dinner tonight, and has specially asked me not to bring you.” It seemed to Adrian that it would be an altogether better thing to put the matter more gently, like Darling, there’s a meeting of the Finance Committee this evening that I just have to go to … so don’t wait up for me … I may be pretty late….

*

Fancy having to tell lies like this about an assignation with a bloody
husband
!
But there; it sometimes seemed to Adrian that life did just exactly what it liked with you, tossed you like a bit of driftwood just anywhere, simply for the fun of laughing at your contortions as you struggled comically back to safety.

S
IX
-
F
IFTEEN
, D
EREK HAD
said; and as Adrian edged his car into the parking space in front of 22 Winthrop Drive, the evening light had already changed from gold to pink, and the first tinges of purple were creeping up over the roofs to the east. Derek must have been watching from the window, for he had the front door open before Adrian had finished locking the car. He stood there in the doorway, smiling hospitably, but not troubling to step an inch forward in welcome as his guest came through the gate, shutting and latching it behind him, and walked up the short gravel path towards the front door.

“This is very good of you—” began Adrian, as he drew near, and, “Not at all, it’s a pleasure,” Derek responded, and the two men shook hands.

“Or perhaps,” amended Derek, “‘pleasure’ is not quite the right word. ‘Relief’, perhaps, would be nearer the mark. Relief—as I am sure you will understand, Adrian—at the prospect of getting the whole thing tied up and settled at last. As to ‘pleasure’”—by this time they were in Derek’s comfortable, spacious front
sitting-room,
bathed just now in pinkish radiance through the big west windows—“as to pleasure, well, I take it that the whole business has been rather more fun for you than it has been for me? Wouldn’t you say so? Now, what will you have, Adrian? Whisky? Vodka? Sherry …?”

This time, of course, they were able to use the proper whisky glasses—and such had been his conditioning over the past four years that Adrian felt for a moment quite ill with guilt as his fingers closed round the fine crystal. He’d never felt guilty like this when lying with Derek’s wife in Derek’s double bed—on the
non-Derek
side of it, of course.

“Well—to you and my wife!” said Derek, raising his glass, and Adrian, perforce responding, wondered if Derek had deliberately chosen so uncomfortable a toast, or was it just a momentary piece of clumsiness?

There was no way of telling. The man was smiling pleasantly,
offering no clues. He sat facing the window, and the pink sunset light give his thin, rather ascetic face an unwonted glow of buoyant health and well-being, and he sipped his drink with an air of almost sybaritic enjoyment, though never once taking his eyes off Adrian’s face. Again Adrian felt uncomfortable, and again could pin down no precise reason for it. Presently, Derek set down his glass and cleared his throat.

“I expect,” he began, “that you’ve been wondering why, exactly, I’ve invited you round this evening?”—and then, in response to Adrian’s small deprecatory murmur, he hastily amended: “Of course, my dear fellow, I don’t mean to imply … that is, I am of course delighted to have you here in any case—only too delighted. Any time. But I was referring to my particular reason for inviting you—by yourself, without my wife—on this particular evening. You haven’t wondered about it, then? Not at all? As you came along in the car, for instance …?”

Again, there was something just slightly—not provocative, exactly, that would be too strong a word—but something
conducive
to discomfort rather than comfort about the man’s choice of words. Why, for instance, did he have to keep saying “my wife” instead of “Rita”? Of course, she
was
his wife still, in law, but all the same one would have thought that, on a social occasion like this, ordinary tact and good manners would have suggested …

But the alert, lightish eyes, fixed so intently on Adrian’s face, had no hostility in them, only a detached, almost childlike curiosity. Why, the fellow just wanted an answer to his question—it was as simple as that!

“No, to be quite honest with you,” Adrian replied, “I didn’t wonder at all. Should I have? It seemed to me a most sensible idea that you and I should get together and try to work out between us—without upsetting Rita, that is, or getting involved in any sort of acrimony—that we should try to work out—well, you know. Like finances. That sort of thing.”

The question of what, if any, maintenance Rita was entitled to from Derek, and whether, in law, any of it would survive the fact of her co-habiting (the word “marriage” Adrian still wasn’t facing) with Adrian, had not yet been mentioned. And it would be nice to know. Not that Rita’s quite reasonable salary from her
receptionist’s
job wasn’t an adequate contribution to their joint finances, but it would be useful to know her actual rights. One wouldn’t
necessarily—or even probably—insist on them: poor old Derek had had a pretty raw deal as it was, without being expected to pay for it as well. Still, an accurate knowledge of the actual facts of any situation can never be other than an advantage.

“Oh,
finances
!”—Derek brushed the word aside with an actual sweep of the arm, as if it were a speck of dust on the polished table in front of him. “
Finances
! Oh, I wouldn’t worry about finances, old chap. Rita will get what she wants out of you, just as she will out of me, don’t you worry.
She
won’t need any of these
lawyer-Johnnies
to tell her how to get her pretty little claws on your salary.
Or
mine….”

Adrian was taken aback. Was
this
the Poor Derek whose tender sensibilities had to be considered at every turn? Was
this
the kindly, super-tolerant husband who loved his wife so much that he would put up with any and every humiliation rather than lose her companionship?

Adrian tried to pass it off lightly.

“Yes, well, I expect the lawyers
will
have something to say on the money question, because they always do, don’t they? But if
you’re
not bothered about that side of things, and
I’m
certainly not, then it shouldn’t be too traumatic. So let’s leave it for the moment. It’s the actual divorce, I suppose, that we have to discuss. I’m perfectly willing, naturally, to be cited as co-respondent….”

Derek seemed to be only half attending.

“Co-respondent?” he repeated vaguely. “Oh, my dear chap, I don’t think they have co-respondents any more. I don’t
think
they do. It’s ‘irreversible breakdown’ that’s the thing now. I
think
it is. Not that I care. She can get rid of me any way she likes.”

Adrian felt a stab of compassion for the man’s obvious bitterness, but he was irritated as well. Things were difficult enough already, and Derek’s continuing misery was a burden he could well do without. He felt guilty, put-upon and inadequate, and he suddenly longed to punch Derek’s face, hard, right in the middle of those controlled, scholarly features.

As so commonly happens, such a turmoil of conflicting emotions tends to find expression in a weak trickle of clichés.

“Yes, well, I expect it’ll all work out in the end,” said Adrian, draining the last of his whisky at a gulp. “No use crossing our bridges till we come to them, eh? We can only do our best. And
we must remember it’s Rita’s happiness we really have to think of. After all, both of us, in our different ways …”

“
Rita’s
happiness? My dear fellow, we don’t have to worry about
that!
Rita is always happy when she’s destroying something. She spent nearly seven years destroying me, and happy all the time —didn’t she tell you? Oh, I’m sure she did, she told everyone: how the first few years of our marriage were quite idyllic? Well, I’m sure that for her they were so, there was nothing left of me at the end of them, nothing at all. And that, of course, was where the trouble started. Having destroyed me utterly, she was up against a bit of a dead end. She was like an artist with no more canvasses left to work on….”

Refilling his glass, he held it up to the dying light, staring into it long and pensively, the flickers of gold reflected faintly on his lined, intelligent face.

“She has this talent for destruction, you see,” he explained thoughtfully, “and, like all talents, it clamours to be used.” Again he gazed deeply, abstractedly into the golden depths in front of his eyes. “For it
is
a talent, you know, Adrian, this power of turning to blackness and poison everything you touch. Like every artist, Rita needs scope for the exercising of her gifts; without it, she becomes frustrated. And this, Adrian, is where
you
come in….”

“Now, look here … I say …!” Adrian helped himself,
unasked,
to another neat whisky, and sat for a moment quite at a loss how to continue. He knew well enough—none better—how cruel, how bitter, how downright evil can be the things which otherwise ordinary, pleasant couples can say to and about each other when in the throes of divorce. At such a time, there are no holds barred, the sky is the limit where mutual vituperation is concerned. All the same, had he himself, even at the blackest moments, ever said anything half as awful as this about Peggy? Or she about him? He was sure they hadn’t. On the other hand, had he—or Peggy either, for that matter—ever felt quite as miserable about the break-up of
their
marriage as Derek was obviously
feeling
about his? Misery on this sort of scale was something that Adrian hadn’t encountered before; it embarrassed him.

Still, he must say
something.
He couldn’t let these outrageous aspersions on the woman he loved—
had
loved, anyway—go
unchallenged.
The whole thing was further complicated, of course, by the fact that he was at this moment a guest in Derek’s house.

“Look here, I say—” he began again”—you can’t—I mean, Derek, you really
can’t
—talk like that about anybody. I know you’ve had a rotten deal and all that, but there are limits! I realise you don’t really mean it, but all the same it’s not fair on Rita for you to go around saying …”

“Not
fair
? On
Rita
? When did I ever say I wanted to be
fair
to Rita? I said I wanted to
keep
her, but that’s quite different, as I’m sure you’ll be the first to agree…. But come, my dear fellow, enough of this! Before the light is quite gone, I want to show you my garden. Not a big garden, but quite interesting in its way….”

Normally, there was nothing Adrian hated more than being shown round people’s gardens, and particularly if they were “
in
teresting
” ones. This meant, in Adrian’s experience, that they were full of things like half-dead dandelions from somewhere in Tibet, or meagre little globs of foliage encircling a thing like a dried lentil, only blue. And if you made an effort and said the slightest nice thing about it, then you’d get shown its photograph as well, on a colour slide, as soon as you got indoors. On top of which, in this particular case, he’d seen the garden hundreds of time already, from Rita’s bedroom window. Not that he’d taken it in that much —a lot of miscellaneous greenery, as far as he could remember, interspersed by funny-looking shrubs. Probably they
were
from Tibet if the truth were known, but thank goodness Rita knew absolutely nothing about any of them, and so hadn’t been able to tell him.

*

However, on this occasion, Adrian submitted to the impending ordeal with something like alacrity. He appreciated Derek’s effort to change the subject, to pull himself together, and to rescue them both from the embarrassment of all that emotional stuff. By the time they got back indoors, they’d have recovered their usual guarded but nevertheless civilised relationship. For this, it was worth while enduring a spell of moderate boredom. It couldn’t last long, anyway, because twilight was already at hand. Resignedly, Adrian set down his glass, hoisted himself from his comfortable chair, and followed his host across the hall to the door with Edwardian-style stained glass panels which led into the garden. Derek undid the creaking bolts slowly, and with a clumsiness
which seemed somehow out of character; and then, with a sort of flourish, he threw open the door.

*

Adrian stared, absolutely stupefied. He had known, of course, that “interesting” gardens are liable to contain largish areas of bare earth broken only by little prison-encampments of stakes enclosing, with loving totality, some small and bewildered expatriate from distant peak or blazing desert “… the Lesser Something-Something from the Outer Hebrides …” “a special minature variety that is only found in Iceland … if you come next year, or the year after, you’ll see …”

Yes, areas of bare earth, and mingy, unenthusiastic plants he had expected: but
this
…! He gazed unbelievingly. The whole garden was completely bare, lifeless and black, as if it had been swept by a death-ray. Not a green leaf, not a blade of grass anywhere.

Adrian turned to his host in bewilderment.

“What …?” he begun helplessly; and Derek answered without looking at him, staring out expressionlessly over his domain of death.

“She only
meant
to poison my Mecanopsis superba,” he explained deprecatingly. “She knew I loved them, you see. It’s a special variety of poppy you know, from Bhutan in the Himalayas. I’d been working for years to get them acclimatised, and for the first time they were beginning to flower and propagate themselves. She meant the weed-killer just for them, but you know what a little scatterbrain she is; she didn’t read the instructions on the container properly, and managed accidentally to poison the whole garden—roots, soil, the lot. Probably, it will never recover in my lifetime. Silly little thing, isn’t she? Quite hopeless when it comes to anything practical….

“And now, my dear fellow, let us go in and eat. As you observe, there is not a lot to be seen out here, and anyway the light is going.

“I hope you like liver and bacon? It’s the only thing I’ve really learned how to cook so far—I suppose, in my own way, I’m just as hopeless when it comes to anything practical as Rita is!”

*

He laughed, as if well pleased with his own humour, then turned and led Adrian indoors and into the dining-room.