The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

  *

  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.
<
br />   *

  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….”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Seaford!

  Adrian slowly lowered the receiver back into its cradle and sat staring in front of him, utterly non-plussed.

  What the hell were they doing in Seaford, of all places? And it couldn’t possibly be coincidence, because Rita knew perfectly well where Peggy and Amelia had gone—why, she’d actually mentioned the place by name—hadn’t she?—in that note she’d left? Adrian wished violently, now, that he hadn’t so recklessly tossed the note away after a single reading. If only he could re-read it now, he might find in it some clue, some hint, as to what on earth was going on.

  *

  Because the more he thought about it, the more extraordinary it seemed. Rita had only a few days ago been claiming to be terrified of Amelia—had, indeed, in her final note, declared that it was fear of Amelia that was driving her from the flat. Surely, Seaford was the very last place in the whole world that she would choose to go to for a holiday?

  If she had chosen?

  Maybe it had been Derek’s idea? Maybe he had some mysterious reason of his own for wanting to contact Peggy and/or Amelia? And yet another mysterious reason for wanting to drag Rita into it? Goodness knows, he was a mysterious enough fellow; his attitude to Rita had always seemed to Adrian a mystery—a combination of fierce possessiveness with a queer kind of indifference, exploding every now and then into black and bitter hatred.

  And now he’d taken her off for a nice little convalescent holiday in Seaford, the very place where—according to her obsession—murder awaited her. Had he dragged her there by force? Or lured her there by the prospect of some sort of confrontation with Amelia which would dispel her delusions?

  But how come he knew where Amelia was, when Adrian himself didn’t? Had Peggy and Amelia, while neglecting to write to him, written to Derek instead? Or to Rita?

  The whole thing was mad. Completely mad. He couldn’t make any shadow of sense of it. He couldn’t understand in the least degree what any of the four of them could possibly be up to….

  That’s the trouble with being as selfish as you are, Adrian…. You end up not knowing anything at all, about any of us….

  Or something to that effect. The words, now buried deep under tea-leaves and orange-peel in Dorothy’s dustbin, stabbed him with sudden, shocking force.

  Because they were true, in a way. If he’d bothered to find out that Seaford address, instead of leaving it all to Peggy: if he’d actually listened to what Rita said about her fears, instead of dismissing it all as rubbish: if he’d troubled, as soon as she disappeared, to ring round her friends and relations to find out if she was all right….

  If … if … if….

  *

  All right, so he was selfish. He knew he was—goodness knows enough people had told him so, particularly women. Selfish, and proud of it, he was accustomed to tell himself, because after all selfishness is the trendiest of all the failings; and it didn’t, in Adrian’s opinion, do half as much harm as the maudlin efforts of the do-gooders and the martyrs, for ever confusing every issue with their muddled, unforeseeable motivations.

  With another of those flashes of visual recall, he saw before his eyes a further sentence from Rita’s note:

  You never think about other people, and so of course you never learn anything about them.

  This did give pause for thought. As a scientist, he could not dismiss lightly a suggestion that, by his chosen life-style, he was actually blocking off access to data which is freely available to others—others far stupider than himself, too, and with less experience of the world. Like Dorothy, for instance. In his position, Dorothy would by now have known exactly what was going on in Seaford, and why…. Hell, maybe she did!

  He rang her straightaway; but even down the telephone, and even allowing for her devious partisanship, he could tell that she knew nothing. Nothing, that is, about this Seaford business; that she knew more than she would say about Rita’s actual departure still seemed to him probable, but that was of no importance now.

  He rang Rita’s mother next; and various acquaintances in whom she might conceivably have confided her plans: but they were all either away, or knew nothing.

  All day, in the intervals of work, he worried and puzzled over it, but no light dawned. The whole thing seemed completely crazy. And the most maddening, frustrating thing of all was that without the Seaford address of either of the two parties, there was nothing whatsoever that he could do. In his wilder moments, he thought of getting straight into his car and making for the place, and then, once there, simply to keep driving around in the hopes of seeing one or another of them in the street. But Seaford, though described by Derek’s secretary as “a little place”, wasn’t all that little. He looked it up: Population 17,000. You could drive around for days and not run into the person you were looking for.

  Oh, well. Maybe when he got home there’d be a letter? At least the posts were working again now.

  But there wasn’t. And there had been no phone calls. He had a long, unsatisfying talk with Dorothy, in the course of which he wormed out of her th
e fact that she had helped Rita to get away during his absence—“but only because I’ve got two eyes in my head, Mr Summers, and I could see how miserable you both were” —but Rita had told her nothing except that she was going back to her husband “and didn’t want anyone to be told just yet”.

  Dorothy was repentant, and obviously much worried and concerned at this latest turn of events: she declared, tearfully, that she’d never forgive herself, and if the whole lot of them were lying there murdered in Seaford, then plainly it would be all her, Dorothy’s fault.

  Adrian did his best to assure her that they weren’t, and it wouldn’t; and finally went upstairs reflecting that if these were the rewards of listening attentively to another person’s anxieties, then maybe he’d stay the way he was after all.

  It was past nine by now; and he entered the flat with a vague hope that some clue, some message might have materialised in his absence: but of course it hadn’t.

  It was strange that Peggy had neither written nor phoned; and Amelia too. It was more than strange: it was extraordinary.

  What proof have you that they ever went to Seaford?

  —thus Rita had challenged him in her note; but it made no sense. If they hadn’t gone, for whatever reason, then they’d certainly have let him know. And Amelia would have come on Sunday as usual—on both Sundays … it was nearly a fortnight now.

  *

  Was it just conceivable that there had been a letter from one or other of them, and he hadn’t noticed it? If it had come fairly early on, before he’d begun worrying, and if, amid all the stresses and anxieties of his recent existence, he had just gathered it up with all his business correspondence and pushed it into a drawer somewhere?

  He began going through his desk systematically, drawer by drawer.

  At the third one down, he stopped. The sight of his yellow folder of press-cuttings stirred some memory at the back of his mind … a memory of something unfinished … an uneasiness … a reminder of some loose ends of some sort, somewhere….