Rita was expostulating later that evening, when they were at last on their own. “Fancy you, a grown man, letting poor Derek stuff you up with all those fantasies and lies! Don’t you realise he’s mad? Not properly, mental-hospital mad, I don’t mean—just mad where I’m concerned. It’s ever since he found out about you, actually, Adrian, it really seemed to send him round the bend for a while, and since then, every so often he gets fits of being downright paranoic about me. When he’s like that he’ll accuse me of just any crazy thing that comes into his head. This weed-killer nonsense, for example; it’s typical.” “You mean you didn’t do it, then?” By now, Adrian was beginning to feel quite at sea, and did not know what to believe. Derek’s quiet, bitter revelations had been painfully convincing at the time; but now here was Rita being equally convincing to the contrary. What she said was perfectly plausible; a man as hurt and humiliated as Derek appeared to have been might well over-react to minor disagreements and mishaps, building them up in his mind into something quite out of proportion to the original facts.
