The Spider-Orchid Read Free Page A

neglecting to be home in time to cook his supper.
    Naturally, Adrian had at the time fought this rather unadventurous programme with all the fervour that becomes an impassioned lover: but actually, in the end, it had all worked out rather well, with Rita arriving at two o’clock on Thursday afternoons to go to bed with him, and taking herself away promptly at four because of Poor Derek. Sometimes, she came on Tuesday evenings as well and cooked a meal for Adrian; or maybe they’d go to the theatre together, but she was always gone well before midnight because of Poor Derek, and so Adrian was able to get to bed at his usual time. He hated being kept up late; it triggered off in him a tiresome kind of insomnia that kept him half-awake, half-dreaming for the best part of the night, leaving him depressed and irritable, and quite unfit for the pressures and demands of his job the next day. Poor Derek, it seemed, suffered a similar problem, that’s why Rita had to be home so promptly by midnight. They made a singularly compatible triangle, Adrian sometimes reflected; they could hardly have been luckier in one another.
    How comfortable it had all been, he mused now, staring disconsolately into the golden depths of the whisky. How secure, and settled, and unbothersome! Even the yearnings and the frustrations, he realised now, had been an integral part of the happiness.
    “Oh, if only you didn’t have to go , darling,” he’d so often sighed, as the hands of the bedside clock crept onward, and Rita began to fidget, and look for her stockings, and think about trains to Wimbledon; “Oh, if only you could stay with me longer … all night….”
    Actually, it would have been most inconvenient if she’d stayed all night: not because anyone else in the house would have objected—least of all the landlady—but simply because staying all night necessarily involved still being there in the morning, and this Adrian would have found it hard to tolerate. At forty-seven, a divorced man, and already four years away from the turmoil of family life, Adrian had developed a number of small habits which he himself recognised as old-maidish, but nevertheless had no intention of relinquishing—and foremost among these was his rigid early-morning routine. Up at seven—long, leisurely bath, followed by yoghurt, cornflakes, egg boiled for an exact four minutes—and all the time a book propped in front of him—on thesoapdish, alongside the bathroom mirror, or leaning against the coffee-pot while he ate. And there was the silence, too, the sense of unassailable solitude. Lovely, enveloping solitude, from which he could emerge unscathed into his busy day like a moth from its cocoon.
    *
    All of which was completely incompatible with Rita. Why he was so sure of this, Adrian would have found it hard to say, since he had never given her a trial; but he just knew.
    And now, through no fault of his own—unless letting things slide, taking each day as it came, were to be counted as faults—now, the whole thing was to be whipped from under his feet, without warning or apology. Whipped away not just for a single morning —and even that prospect had, in the past, been enough to put him on his guard—but for all his mornings, for the rest of the foreseeable future.
    Rita not wanting to be woken as early as seven … Rita in the bathroom … Rita saying why not shredded wheat? … Rita boiling his egg too soft, or, as the case might be, too hard….
    That Rita would take over these and similar housewifely concerns, despite any protests that Adrian might nerve himself to make, was a virtual certainty. She (like any other woman in her position) would know that she had just so long to make herself indispensable to him, and so she would set about it without delay, burrowing like a frantic woodworm into the structural framework of his life in order, with a touch here and a touch there, to make sure that the previously smooth-running machinery would no longer