She paused a moment, watching him. Then:
“Come on, darling, guess again! You can’t? You can’t really? Well, then, let’s give you a few clues, like in those party games. Who is it who hates me—who has always hated me? Who is so jealous of me that it’s like a sort of illness? Who? Come on: Who? Who?”
Her lips smacked wetly; her eyes were alight with victory. Adrian would not speak at first, nor look at her. Then, in a sullen, harsh voice he tried one more red herring.
“Peggy?” he muttered unconvincingly, and then, raising his head, he continued clearly and decisively, “My dear Rita, you flatter yourself! If Peggy had been that jealous of you, she’d—”
But Rita interrupted with a sneering little laugh.
“Oh, Peggy!” She spoke the name witheringly, brushing it aside with contempt. “Of course it wasn’t Peggy, the poor fish! She hasn’t got it in her, either! Guess again, Adrian! Guess again! I’ll give you just one more clue. Who is the little snow-white angel who can do no wrong? The little snow-white angel who loves her Daddy so much, with a sick, neurotic sort of love…?”
Adrian took a step forward.
“Rita! Don’t you dare! If you ever again so much as hint that Amelia—!”
“Oh, but darling, I won’t! I’ll never breathe a word of it to any living soul! I’m sorry I said as much as I did to that newspaper man; as you say, I was in a state of shock at the time—but even so, I still wouldn’t reveal Amelia’s name. And afterwards, for your sake, I actually took the whole thing back, pretended I hadn’t known what I was saying, and that in fact I hadn’t been pushed at all.
“But, Adrian, I did know what I was saying. I had been pushed. For your sake, I told a lie. And for your sake I will go on lying. I know how much your daughter means to you, and I don’t want it to be through me that she gets sent to a special school, or a mental hospital, or whatever it is they do with child murderers. I’ll shield her, Adrian, I’ll keep her dreadful secret till the end of my days: but on one condition…”
“Shut up! If it wasn’t for your bloody plaster and your goddam injuries, I’d knock you from one end of the room to the other! I’ll not stand by and hear my daughter—”
“You just can’t face up to it, can you, Adrian? I knew you were going to react like this. But listen. She did do it, and I know she did it—I was there, remember? And what’s more, the silly child left incriminating evidence which luckily, it is in my power to reveal or to suppress…”
“Rita, you’re mad!” Adrian’s fury was turning to a sort of incredulous bewilderment. “You know as well as I do that Amelia couldn’t have done it. She isn’t even at the school at such an hour of the evening! Besides which, she has absolutely no motive of any sort—this jealousy idea is simply a load of rubbish, and you know it! I admit that right at the beginning I was afraid that she might be jealous, after having had me to herself for so long; but as it turned out, she wasn’t. She’s not the jealous type. In fact, she was beginning to be quite fond of you—hang it all, Rita, you were trying to make her fond of you, and you were succeeding! You were going out of your way to be nice to her—you were making a big effort, I could see you were—and I was most grateful—”
“Pity you never thought of saying so at the time!” exclaimed Rita with a sudden, heartfelt bitterness which contrasted strangely with the foregoing histrionics. Then, with a return to her former melodramatic style, she resumed:
“You say she had ‘absolutely no motive’. But she had, you know. A most compelling motive.”
Something in the way she spoke sent a chill through Adrian. He recognised in it the quiet confidence, the suppressed triumph of the player who really has got the ace of trumps in his hand.
Fear had him rattled. It brought the anger back into his voice and confused his train of thought.
“Motive” he blustered, “of course she hadn’t a motive! What motive could she have had? Just tell me that. What motive?”
Still Rita just smiled, with that strange air of assurance. Already, her smile seemed to say, victory was in the bag. There was no hurry.
Adrian clenched his fists till the nails bit into his palms. If he had believed in prayer, he would have prayed in that moment for Rita’s miraculous recovery then and there so that he could have knocked her down.
“What motive?” he repeated savagely; and this time Rita deigned to answer him.
“Did it never occur to you, Adrian, that your wonderful little daughter might at some time or another have done something really wicked and shameful? And that I might be the only person to know about it? How would that be for a motive? She only has to get rid of me, and she’s in the clear, isn’t she? And don’t ask me, Adrian, what this shameful secret of hers was, because I’m sure you’d hate to be told. You only like hearing nice things about your little darling, don’t you? Nice, clever, marvellous things, that prove how perfect she is! You don’t want to hear the truth, and so I won’t tell you. I’d hate to upset you….
“But while I don’t want to upset you, Adrian, I don’t feel a bit that way about the police. Anyway, it wouldn’t upset them, would it, they’re used to dealing with sordid and disgusting secrets, it’s part of their job. And so, if it happened that they were actually to question me….
“No, no, Adrian, don’t get hysterical! It won’t come to that! I won’t let it! I know how much your daughter means to you, and for your sake I will keep her murder attempt, and its sordid little motive, a complete and absolute secret, now and for ever. I’ll never mention it again—but on one condition! That you let me stay with you, Adrian: that you don’t throw me out. That you love me again, the way you used to do….”
Tottering forwards, she propelled herself with strange, stiff tripping movements towards him. She looked like a huge mechanical doll, arms lovingly extended as though by the operation of some sort of machinery inside.
“I love you, Adrian, I love you!” she kept repeating as she came on. He raised his fists as if to ward her off, knowing all the time that he must not give her even the lightest push. His clenched knuckles whitened with the frustration.
“Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!” he yelled; and hardly had the echoes of his voice died away than there came a tap at the door, and in walked Dorothy, her face all lit up with gleeful concern.
*
“He is her boy friend, I’m certain of it!” she burst out, unable to contain her news any longer. “I’ll swear he is, because do you know what?—I heard her crying! And you know how Kathy is —she always cries when she’s happy, haven’t you noticed? I just had to come up and let you know…!”
CHAPTER XIX
IT ALL ENDED in another lecture from Dorothy about Rita’s nerves.
Adrian had followed his landlady down the four flights of stairs to the basement partly to get the hell out of the crazy accusations going on above, and partly to ensure that, this time, Rita would not be able to eavesdrop on the conversation and then keep him awake half the night going on and on about it.
Dorothy settled him comfortably at her big kitchen table, at his back the pleasant warmth of the anthracite boiler, and began her little homily.
“The thing you’ve got to remember, Mr Summers, is that she’s not over the shock yet. A dreadful shock it must have been for the poor young thing” (Adrian could not suppress a small smile as he noted the ease with which “That Woman!” had changed into “the poor young thing” as a result of the recent drama) “and we can’t expect her to be quite entirely reasonable about it yet. It’s up to the rest of us to be a bit patient with her for a while. I mean, it’s no joke, is it, falling headlong down a flight of stairs, even if you weren’t pushed! And if you keep fancying that you were, and brooding over it, the way she’s been doing—well, it takes its toll, doesn’t it? It must do.”
As to this, Adrian would not commit himself. After all, it was nearly three weeks now since the accident, and quite a number of days since Rita came out of hospital, and already you could see a big i
mprovement. She was stronger, walking more easily, moving altogether more confidently—surely it was time she pulled herself together a bit emotionally as well?
Dorothy shook her head, with an air of dark foreboding. She didn’t like things to come right as simply and straightforwardly as all that; it was against Nature.
“Well, I don’t know, Mr Summers, I’m sure,” she said. “We mustn’t look for miracles, must we, not after a dreadful accident like that? And then you must remember there was the anaesthetic and everything … it does funny things to a person, you know, an anaesthetic. Even just gas at the dentist’s, there’s some people can’t take it. They go kind of funny afterwards, and start imagining things that never happened. There was this woman I once knew who swore that her dentist had been—you know—carrying on with her—going the whole way, you understand—the same time as he was taking out eight of her teeth and draining an abscess. Well, I know I’m only an old maid, and maybe my opinion’s not worth much, but it did strike me—well, I mean, I did venture to doubt…. You know, when you start actually trying to picture it, how he could have managed …? Well, anyway, to cut a long story short, I couldn’t help but be a bit disbelieving—and, my goodness, did she get in a paddy! She knew it had happened, she said, she’d been conscious all the time and she remembered it! But it was all right, she said, because she loved him, too…. I forget how it all ended. I do know she was never satisfied with her plate, though…. Even years afterwards, she was still complaining….”
“So you mean,” interrupted Adrian, controlling his impatience as well as he could, “you mean that the anaesthetic they gave her might have given Rita delusions about the whole incident? Well, yes, I do agree that that’s perfectly possible. It’s rather along those lines that I’ve been thinking, myself—”
But Dorothy wasn’t ready, just yet, to take Yes for an answer; not until the last ounce of drama had been extracted from the situation, the last shred of mystery enjoyed to the full.
“Yes, well, Mr Summers, I’m sure I hope you’re right. I hope so indeed. I’d hate to think that the poor girl’s fancies might have any truth in them. But if you don’t mind my saying so, Mr Summers, I wouldn’t just dismiss what she says as nonsense. And I wouldn’t keep arguing with her about it, I really wouldn’t. All this reasoning with her, and proving it can’t have happened, it only puts her back up, and fixes it in her mind, like. Now, what I say to her when she starts on about it, I say, Yes, my dear, dreadful isn’t it, all these hooligans and that, I’ve heard there’s more muggings in the schools these days than out in the streets. And then we have a nice little chat about it all, all the rapings and the murders you read about, and it kind of takes her mind off. That way, I don’t have to contradict her, and nor I don’t have to say Yes, dear, I’m sure you’re quite right, you were pushed.
“See what I mean?”
*
Sound psychology, no doubt. But then, Dorothy didn’t know that it was Amelia who was the prime target of Rita’s obsession. Had she done so, she would have undoubtedly been almost as outraged and angry as was Adrian himself; this, no doubt, was why Rita had refrained from mentioning it to her. All that Dorothy knew was that Rita was convinced that “somebody” had deliberately pushed her, and she imagined that Rita was as mystified as herself as to who this “somebody” might be.
Indeed, it was this very element of mystery that had aroused Dorothy’s sympathy to the utmost.
“You can’t wonder the poor young thing’s just a bag of nerves can you?” she commented, setting an outsize mug of tea in front of Adrian, and providing another for herself. “I mean, think of it! To be all the time suspecting that someone is after you, trying to kill you, but never the least idea who it is or why! You can see why the poor girl hates being up in that flat by herself, can’t you? She keeps thinking she hears footsteps on the stairs, she says; and of course she can’t just get up and go and have a look like anyone else might, because it still takes her ever such a time to get out of her chair … that’s what’s so frightening for the poor thing! She just has to sit there, waiting for there to be a knock, or for the door-handle to turn, and wondering all the time who it is, and if they’ve crept up deliberately, knowing that she’s helpless…. Oh, now, I say, Mr Summers, you haven’t even started your tea! It’ll be getting cold!”
Adrian reached out a reluctant hand towards the jumbo-sized mug, trying to hide his distaste. He hated tea after his evening meal, coffee was the only proper beverage, and he’d been hoping, somehow, to dispose of the intimidating volume of fluid while Dorothy wasn’t looking. But now, all hope of subterfuge was gone. With Dorothy’s hospitable eyes beaming right at him, he lifted the mug grimly towards his lips; but before he’d steeled himself to take so much as a single sip, there came from upstairs a sudden, fearful scream.
Both of them leaped to their feet, and even as they did so there came a second scream, and a third, echoing and re-echoing down the four flights of stairs.
Now, whether it was a tribute to Adrian’s coolness and presence of mind, or whether it was just one more instance of the heartlessness with which Rita had so recently reproached him—it has to be recorded that his immediate reaction to those first terrifying seconds was to seize the opportunity to tip his tea down the sink while Dorothy’s back was turned; after which he rushed immediately to see if Rita was being murdered, taking the stairs three at a time, and outdistancing the panting Dorothy almost before she was through the kitchen door. Such was his headlong speed that he almost collided with the plump youth who was supposed to be Kathy’s new boy friend; but this was no time for social niceties so he charged on without apologising, up the next two flights and in through his own front door, which was ajar.
*
What he’d expected to find, Adrian could not have said; there simply had been no time to run through the possibilities, to conjure up pictures of blood on carpet and walls, of smashed glass and overturned furniture. And yet, when he burst into the flat and found none of these things—the carpet still spotless from this morning’s hoovering and all the furniture in place—his reaction was one of pure shock. It was like leaping from what you thought was a ten-foot wall, and finding that the ground was only two inches below you.
You feel a fool first. Then angry.
“Rita!” he called sharply—and at that moment he saw her, standing in the doorway of the bedroom, very straight in her plaster, and her eyes blinking as if in unaccustomed light. She was wearing her dark tapestry dressing-gown, her black hair hanging loose about her shoulders, so that against the darkness of the unlit bedroom she had been barely visible at first glance; her face just a greyish triangle hovering five feet above the ground.
“Rita!” he shouted again—sure, somehow, that she was tricking him, though how, or for what purpose, he could not surmise. “Rita! What is it? What’s the matter?” He could see, now, that her face really was pale, her eyes really were wide with terror; and yet even now he could not get rid of the idea that he was being tricked. “What’s happened? What’s all the screaming in aid of?”
By this time, Dorothy had appeared on the scene, puffing and gasping from her exertions, but ready with all the warmth and reassurance in which Adrian’s approach had been so singularly lacking. Within seconds she had Rita back in bed, pillows comfortably arranged behind her aching back, and then, to satisfy the still trembling girl, she set off herself on a tour of the flat, stumping from room to room, with Adrian shamefacedly in her wake, making sure that no intruder lurked under any table or inside any wardrobe—not even a miniature intruder behind the ironing-board. In the course of completing this task, she had managed also to put on the kettle; and so within a couple of minutes a hot water bottle and a cup of tea had been added to the invalid’s comforts; and such was the restorative effect of all this, that Rita was by now sobbing against Dorothy’s shoulder, and saying she “felt better already”.
The whole thing had taken three minutes flat; and Adrian gazed at Dorothy
with a sort of awe. It wasn’t, actually, the sort of expertise he had any ambition to emulate—being good at this sort of thing was just looking for trouble, as anyone could see—but all the same, it was expertise of a sort, and as such it won from him a certain grudging admiration. Rita, with Dorothy’s stout arm around her, was sobbing, but not in her usual accusing way, more like a child; and like a child, she seemed to be making an effort to obey Dorothy’s instructions to “Come on, ducks, tell old Dorothy all about it.”
“It” didn’t, from Adrian’s critical point of view, amount to very much; certainly not enough to warrant all those shrieks and screams. What had happened was this.
When Adrian had elected to follow Dorothy downstairs, Rita had felt, she claimed “very rejected”; and after crying for a little bit, and listening for Adrian to come back, she had decided to go to bed. This was a manoeuvre she could just about manage by herself now, though with difficulty; it took her, she claimed, the best part of half an hour just to settle herself comfortably under the bedclothes; and this (so she asserted) was the real cause of the trouble; she should never have been left to struggle on her own like this.
Because naturally, having expended so much time and effort on getting herself into bed, she was understandably reluctant to set to work and get herself out of it again for any but the most urgent of reasons; and so when, after a few minutes, she began to hear “a funny sort of sound in the sitting-room”, she found herself extremely reluctant to go and investigate. Besides, at that stage in the affair, she naturally assumed it was Adrian, back in the flat but sulking, and not bothering to come in and see her.
The Spider-Orchid Page 15