The Spider-Orchid (19 page)

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….

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:

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 the 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.

—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….

That was it! The diary! Amelia’s silly, pathetic, love-lorn diary that he’d put away safely for her three—no, four—Sundays ago—the last Sunday before the accident. Had put it away here, just underneath this yellow folder—and now it was gone!

Had the child come and fetched it? No, of course she hadn’t, she hadn’t been here at all since that day—and anyway, she wouldn’t know where to look. Hadn’t she missed it, though, in all this time? Why hadn’t she rung up and asked him about it? Naturally, she wouldn’t have used the word “diary”, and neither would he. An “exercise book with a red marbled cover” would have been the subject of their conversation throughout. They could trust each other, he and Amelia.

But she hadn’t rung. She hadn’t asked what had become of it. She couldn’t have fetched it, because she didn’t know where it was.

So who was there, besides himself, who
did
know where it was …?

An icy chill went through him, right down his spine and trickling into every limb.

“It’s my opinion you should report it to the headmistress
immediately”
… Rita’s sharp, accusing voice was once more in his ears; it seemed to echo all about him in the empty flat, whispering from the walls, repeating and repeating itself in a jumbled medley as though from invisible loudspeakers everywhere: “The headmistress … the headmistress immediately….” and he now knew suddenly, and without the smallest doubt, exactly what it was that had happened.

*

So Amelia
had
got a motive, just as Rita had kept telling him. Many a crime has been committed for a motive far less compelling.

But the crime, by now, meant nothing to him. It was the agony of humiliation, the insupportable shame that his little girl must have gone through beforehand, that held him rigid. Crouched over the open drawer, he literally could not move.

Not even when he heard footsteps crossing the room behind him —two sets of them, quite firm and distinct … no furtive tiptoeing this time.

*

It seemed like minutes, but could actually only have been a second or two before, from his ungainly crouching position, he managed to turn his head, and look at the two young people staring down at him. He had never seen either of them before…. Yes, he had; the sallow, overweight boy with the bad posture was the one Dorothy had hopefully pointed out to him as a possible new suitor for Kathy.

The girl spoke first. She was slim, and stood very straight, and with her blue eyes and waist-length fairish hair would have been very pretty if she hadn’t been so angry.

“I’m Myra Owen,” she announced herself fiercely; “and this is my husband. I’m not having him persecuted any longer! He’s a marvellous teacher, and absolutely innocent, and we’re not having him hounded out of his very first job and his whole career ruined by a pack of wicked lies! We’ve come to have it out with you, Mr Langley, once and for all!”

“
B
UT
M
UMMY
, I don’t want to go out with them,”
protested
Amelia. “And anyway, it’s a horrible day.”

It was, too. Outside the windows of the comfortable hotel lounge a thin, drizzling rain fell. The parade was gleaming with wet, and almost deserted; and beyond it the grey sea and the grey sky merged at the horizon into an off-putting expanse of nothingness.

Peggy, too, thought that Rita’s invitation had been a tactless one. To telephone out of the blue like that, and—as Amelia had pointed out—on such a nasty day, to announce that she and Derek had arrived in Seaford and would very much like to take Amelia out—well, it put everyone in a spot. If Peggy refused on her daughter’s behalf, it would simply look like mean-spirited jealousy: and if there was one thing that Peggy had kept clearly in mind throughout these four years of vicissitudes, it was her original resolution that she would
not
—absolutely
would
not,
in any circumstances whatsoever display mean-spirited jealousy towards her ex-husband’s mistress. She had seen other deserted wives behaving in such ways, and it never hurt the mistress the least little bit, whereas the cost of it to the wives in dignity, self-respect and pride was beyond all measuring.

So Amelia had
got
to go. Anything else would look like Peggy having dissuaded her.

“
Please,
darling—” she began; and then stopped, seeing the familiar, mulish look coming over her daughter’s features for the first time this holiday. It was a shame; she’d so wanted this
fortnight
to be a happy, amicable time for the two of them, and so far it had been. She hated to introduce this note of discord; and yet it didn’t seem such a
very
big thing to ask of the child—just one afternoon?

Of course, Peggy still had no inkling of Amelia’s
special
reason for hating Rita—Amelia would never have dreamed of telling her mother about it—or, indeed, anyone else. Actually, that first white-hot agony of rage and humiliation had cooled considerably since Daphne had brought her back the diary, safe and sound, on the very
day after the accident. Apparently it had been picked up by a fifth-former from the floor some feet away from where Rita had fallen, and from her, via various friends and sisters of friends, it had found its way into Daphne’s hands, and she had brought it straight over. Since it looked from the outside so like an ordinary boring exercise book, there was every chance that no one in the motley chain of messengers would have read it; and if they had, they would never, ever dare admit to it, which comes to almost the same thing.

With the diary safe in her possession once more, Amelia naturally began to feel better; and when, as the days went by, no rumours came to her ears of a summons for Amelia Summers to go to the headmistress; no letter arrived for Mummy announcing that Amelia was to be expelled … well, bit by bit, naturally, her fears began to subside, and she came to the comfortable conclusion that Rita’s accident must have occurred
before
she’d had a chance to show the thing to anybody, not after: a strange and marvellous mercy of Providence indeed.

But all the same, Amelia did not at all want to go out with Rita and Derek. Why should she? It was much nicer sitting here by the electric fire reading, or talking to Mummy. For some reason, she and Mummy had been getting on much better since they’d come down here; maybe it was because of having all these fellow-guests to giggle about? Real oddities some of them were, Mummy had been drawing caricatures of them, just like the old days at the dentist’s, and Amelia had had a try, too, and discovered that she was really rather good. In secret, delicious intimacy behind one of the palms, they had whispered, and compared notes, leaning over one another’s shoulders in fits of suppressed mirth, Mrs Oh-No-Darling vying for pride of place with Colonel That-Clock’s-Slow.

It was fun, especially on a rainy afternoon like this. Why was Mummy going out of her way to spoil it all?

“You might at least have
asked
me,” Amelia grumbled, with considerable show of justice. “How would
you
like it if someone accepted frightful invitations on
your
behalf, and then only told you when it was too late to get out of it?
I
know, though!”—her voice changed, became suddenly eager and animated. “I know! I’ll run out to the car as soon as they arrived and explain to them that I’m
terribly
sorry, but I’ve already been invited to tea with the Oh-No-Darlings. It’s not even a lie, you know, really; they
are
always
inviting me because of Felicity Oh-No-Darling being such a wet, and they’re trying to get her to make some nice friends….”

Peggy shook her head despairingly. It wouldn’t do. She couldn’t possibly have sympathised more, but all the same, it just wouldn’t. In no time at all it would be all round the neighbourhood that she, Peggy, had grudged her daughter a pleasant little outing with her future stepmother.

“Oh, Amelia, it’s such a little thing,” she pleaded. “Just one afternoon! Why must you be so obstinate …?”

Dear oh dear! Real acrimony was creeping into the thing! And just when everything had been going so well between the two of them—and now it was all going to be spoiled!

Actual tears were welling up in Peggy’s eyes; and in her despair she suddenly gave up, abandoned all her reasoned arguments, and threw her cards on the table.

“Don’t you
see,
darling?” she wailed. “If you don’t go, it’ll look as if
I
’ve
stopped you … that I’m jealous! Everyone’ll think…”

And of course Amelia understood instantly. She knew all about humiliation, and pride, and having to keep your end up. She threw her arms round her mother’s neck in instant, loving capitulation.

“Oh, Mummy, why didn’t you say that before?
Of
course
I’ll go! I’ll go up and get ready at once….”

And a few minutes later, dressed in anorak, trousers, and old Wellington boots, she was climbing into the back seat of Derek’s car. She hadn’t really known what to wear, because Rita hadn’t said what they were going to do, so she had prepared for the worst; and it appeared that she had been right. Rita, too, was wearing Wellingtons, and was all bundled up in a heavy fisherman-knit jersey, from the bulky collar of which her neck-brace protruded awkwardly. With this tough, out-doors sort of outfit she was
wearing
, rather incongruously, a glittering chain-belt of a bright gold colour, and she still had to carry a stick to lean on as she walked.

During the few minutes of polite conversation in the lounge, the afternoon’s plans were divulged. They would be taking Amelia out to tea, of course, but first Rita was anxious for “a nice blow on the Downs” in her company. Derek would drive them up to a suitable spot, and pick them up afterwards, but he himself had set his heart on strolling along under the cliffs this afternoon looking for specimens of the Something-or-Other Seaweed. At this boring and
specialised bit of information, Colonel That-Clock’s-Slow woke suddenly and very surprisingly from his afternoon nap to reveal himself as a fellow seaweed enthusiast, and argumentative with it; and if it hadn’t been for the fact that both the Langleys seemed quite inordinately keen on getting started with their dismal
afternoon’s
programme, there is no knowing how boring the conversation would have become, or how long it would have gone on.

*

It was still drizzling, though perhaps not quite so hard, by the time Derek left them on the cliff-top; and though she had no special fondness for Derek—indeed she only knew him slightly—Amelia watched with longing as the car grew smaller and smaller in the distance, winding away down the steep, zig-zag road by which they had come.

Because the embarrassment of being left all on her own with Rita was awful. Why Rita had arranged—or allowed Derek to arrange—that this was the way it should be, Amelia could not imagine. Surely the whole thing was at least as embarrassing for Rita as it was for her? More so, if anything, Rita being as it were the guilty party in the case, the perpetrator of the original injuries.

*

For some minutes, they walked almost in silence, and very, very slowly because of Rita’s lameness. She was leaning heavily on her stick at every step, and their Wellingtons squelched in the short, soaked turf. It was almost the only sound there was; on such an afternoon as this, there was no one to be seen for miles, and even the gulls seemed to have been silenced by the grey depressingness of the day.

Walking along like this, so very slowly, so very cautiously, through the soft, enveloping drizzle, was chilly work, and despite her lined anorak, Amelia began to shiver a little. There was no wind, but the all-pervading wetness of the salt-laden air had a curiously
penetrating
quality; it seeped through and past every garment you could pile on and got into your very bones. Amelia would have liked to have asked Rita to hurry up a bit, but of course you couldn’t say such a thing to a person who was limping. She thought of offering her arm—but simultaneously with this came the thought of the physical contact involved, and she shrank away from it.

On they trailed, still with scarcely a word spoken. Amelia looked from the dim wastes of sea on their left to the bare, rain-swept curve
of the Downs on their right, and wondered yet again what they were here for. Nothing but sporadic patches of leafless brambles broke the desolation of the view, and for someone in Rita’s
condition
, with every step an obvious effort, the whole expedition seemed just plain crazy. And to choose as a companion Amelia, of all people, when the two of them had so much reason to hate each other!

An awful possibility crossed Amelia’s mind. Had Rita brought her out here on her own in order to
apologise
to her? To try and make amends for the awful thing she had done, or tried to do? Was
this
why it had been arranged that Derek should tactfully take himself off—so that Rita and Amelia could have some hideous sort of tête-à-tête, with Rita apologising, and begging Amelia’s forgiveness? Amelia’s very soul squirmed at the thought of such a confrontation.

“… as we forgive those that trespass against us …”

Yes, but what do the words actually
mean
?
The thing that stands between an injured party and the one who has done the injuring is not something to which forgiveness can be applied like some sort of ointment. Forgiveness really doesn’t come into it, for what stands between such a pair in actual fact is embarrassment: an embarrassment, in this case so vast, so intractable, that the words “I forgive you” or “I don’t forgive you” would simply have no relevance.

A small, sharp cry from a little behind her roused Amelia to the fact that she had unwittingly outdistanced her slower-moving companion. She stopped at once, and turned to retrace her steps. Rita, she saw through the thick damp air, was now right on the cliff-edge, peering anxiously over.

Amelia quickened her pace.

“What is it?” she called; and Rita, gesturing down towards the cliff-face, replied:

“My belt! My chain-belt! Look, it’s gone over the edge. It must have come undone somehow. Look!”

By now, Amelia had come alongside, and was looking over. Sure enough, on a ledge only about seven or eight feet below, lay the belt, coiled like a glittering snake against the chalk.

Amelia was an agile and enthusiastic climber. She could see that the ledge was fairly wide and solid-looking, that the distance was not great, and that there were convenient hand-and foot-holds at a
variety of points. And the cliff, here near the top, was not even quite sheer.

“Don’t worry; I’ll get it for you,” she said confidently, thankful to have something definite to do, to talk about, at last. “If you’ll just stand back a bit, Rita, so I can get over….”

The descent, as she had judged, was an easy one, though of course she had to be a bit careful about her rubber-soled boots on the wet, slippery chalk surfaces. In a matter of seconds, she was clutching the glittering gold links in triumph, and preparing for the return climb.

Above her, Rita’s face was peering over anxiously. She seemed to be leaning over, in a crouching position, in a way that struck Amelia as slightly perilous, especially when you considered that heavy, clumsy contraption round her neck.

“It’s all right. I’ve got it. You get back from the edge,” she called; but Rita only leaned over yet further, still in that tense, purposeful attitude. And now Amelia noticed that the figure above had the walking-stick dangling from one hand; she was reaching over with it, poking and prodding vaguely in Amelia’s direction.

“Take hold of it,” she suggested fatuously, “I’ll help pull you up.”

“No, thanks,” called back Amelia decisively. “I’m perfectly all right: it’s easy.”

And so it was—or would have been—if it hadn’t been for that stick swaying and teetering about so annoyingly just above her face.

“I don’t need it, Rita, honestly,” Amelia called; and then, when Rita didn’t seem to hear her, she shouted, with quite an edge on her voice:

“
Please
,
Rita! Take it away, and get right back. It’s only getting in my way—” as indeed it was, wobbling and wavering within an inch of her face, prodding and jabbing vaguely at every ledge and hand-hold as it came within reach.

“It’s in my
way,
Rita!” she called again, loudly, and with just the beginnings of panic in her voice; but still the stick prodded and jabbed. Each time she reached her hand towards any convenient protuberance on the cliff-side, the stick would be there first, making it impossible for her to get a firm grip.

“Rita!” she shrieked, “Rita, stop it!” and above her, silhouetted against the grey, waterlogged sky, the head and the neck-brace,
like a strange and uncouth bit of mediaeval machinery, leaned yet nearer….

*

The “Mr Langley” hardly registered with Adrian at first. He was staring, dumbfounded, not at his blonde accuser with the flashing eyes, but at the round-shouldered youth who cringed nervously at her side.