The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

  But it was no good; and as Amelia grew older, and shriller, and no longer wanted to know if octopuses can catch colds or how high a giraffe would be if it stood on the highest mountain in the world, then the thing became even more hopeless. It seemed that the harder he tried, the more painstakingly he sought ways of relating to this skinny, enigmatic being with the thin strands of greasy hair falling into its eyes, the worse was the trouble into which he was liable to flounder. The frustration, the humiliation, and the sheer disappointment of these occasions was hard to endure.

  A passionate lover of books himself, he had at first watched, with tremulous optimism, the beginnings of a similar passion in his little daughter; and sometimes, greatly daring, he had nerved himself to read aloud to her from one or other of his own childhood favourites. But if he had hoped that these occasional bedtime sessions might form the foundation of a shared enthusiasm, he was to be disappointed. Amelia would lie there, neat and attentive under her bright blankets, and: “Say thank you to Daddy, darling!” Peggy would admonish, almost before he’d enunciated the last sentence of the story; and from his wife’s tone of voice he’d know straight away that he’d done it again: he’d chosen something too babyish (“you can’t expect a schoolgirl of nearly ten to bother with Beatrix Potter”) or too adult (“Rider Haggard is for teenagers, dear, you can’t expect a little girl of only nine …”)

  *

  And he didn’t expect it. Not any longer. Apart from a vague, theoretical satisfaction at having discharged a recognised parental duty, he expected absolutely nothing from these sessions.

  And playing with Amelia was even worse. Sometimes the game in question—Snap it might be, or Ludo—would seem, superficially, to be well within the capacities of a professional man at the height of his intellectual powers: but this was an illusion. No sooner did he join in, than the fun would go out of the game, and the mother-daughter rapport would shrivel as if he’d poured poison on it. They’d go on playing, of course, dutifully, and then either he’d win, and feel guilty at having used his highly-trained adult intelligence to score off so small a child, or else he’d lose, and they’d both chide him for not “playing the game”.

  “It’s no fun, Daddy, unless you really try!” Amelia would protest indignantly, and Peggy would add, gathering up the cards repressively as she spoke: “Yes, Adrian, it is humiliating the way you always play to lose! It’s so patronising! Children have their pride, you know….” and she’d tell Amelia that it was bedtime, in a tight sort of voice that made it perfectly clear that it wouldn’t have been bedtime if only Daddy hadn’t come along and mucked up the evening.

  *

  And so when the divorce, after all the threats, the false starts, the short-lived reconciliations, finally became a reality, Adrian felt quite stunned by how little he minded giving up Amelia. Other fathers weren’t like that. All around him, marriages among his and Peggy’s acquaintances had been disintegrating, and always the central lament, the battle-cry of both parties, the stone wall against which all other factors beat themselves into insignificance, had been The Children. I’m keeping the children. On no account am I letting her take the children. I won’t give them up, he/she won’t give them up, neither of us will give them up.

  And now here was Adrian not only willing to give up Amelia, but even, in the secret depths of his heart, actually relieved at the idea of doing so. What sort of a father was he? What sort of an unnatural monster?

  And then, after all this—after all the guilt, and the heart-searchings, and the court orders, and the sadness—after all this, it turned out that he hadn’t lost Amelia at all, not even in the most mundane and down-to-earth sense. On the contrary, it seemed that he was hereafter expected to spend more time in her exclusive company than he had ever done in his life before—“reasonable access”, the courts called it, and what it meant, in plain English, was that he was to collect Amelia at 2.00 pm every Sunday, and take her out somewhere, do something with her, single-handed, until her bedtime some five or six hours later.

  Adrian was terrified, as only a man who is really hopeless with children can be terrified. The night before the first of these ordeals, he lay awake, sweating. What did she like doing? Where could he take her? What was she interested in? What would he do if she wanted to go to the lavatory and there wasn’t one? And there would no longer be Peggy there, telling him he was doing it all wrong, and thereby lifting the responsibility from his shudderingly incompetent shoulders. There would be nothing and nobody, just himself and Amelia, tongue-tied, adrift in uncharted wastelands of measureless embarrassment.

  In the end, it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d envisaged.

  “Hullo, Daddy,” Amelia would say, matter-of-factly, often following it up with, “Daddy, can I have…?” “Daddy, will you give me…?”—which were as good ice-breakers as any. Also, she seemed perfectly capable of locating a Ladies for herself and taking herself thither without assistance. As Sunday succeeded Sunday that first winter, he took her to the Zoo, to Madame Tussaud’s, to the various museums; and though she was bored, and he was bored, none of it was actually excruciating; indeed, after a while, their mutual boredom began to seem like a faint sort of embryonic link between them, the first he had ever experienced with his own child. He even felt, at times, a perverse little stab of pride at this shared intensity of boredom. Like father, like daughter, he’d find himself thinking with satisfaction as they stumped glumly home from these outings, hardly speaking, thankful, both of them, that it was safely over for one more week.

  Still, it couldn’t go on like this indefinitely. Adrian’s store of patience was far from inexhaustible, and besides, he was getting behind with his work. Sunday had always been his big day for catching up on the technical journals and for assembling his thoughts for the coming week, and so he couldn’t go on frittering away valuable time for ever, even for Amelia’s sake. He thought, irritably, of the peaky, bored little face between the two skimpy, scraped-back plaits… recalled the dragging squeak of her sandals traversing acre after acre of polished floor as they trailed around this or that repository of priceless treasures.

  “I hate marvels!” he heard a little boy of about six complaining tearfully in the Science Museum one rainy afternoon; and this chance overheard remark quite suddenly decided him.

  Never again. Never. If he was a bad father, then he was bloody well going to be a bad father, and Amelia could learn to put up with it. It was a fact of her environment, and the sooner she learned to adapt to it the better. Learning to adapt to his environment has surely been one of the great survival mechanisms of Homo sapiens; and Amelia could damn well learn to survive that way too. She was a member of the goddam species, wasn’t she? Well, then.

  And so this, he resolved, was the finish. Next Sunday, he was going to stay in the flat and get on with his work; put in a real full day on it, as he’d been longing to do for weeks. And as for Amelia, she could like it or lump it. It wasn’t as if she ever enjoyed herself anyway. No matter what he did with her, she was always bored, and so she might just as well be bored in the flat as anywhere else. Henceforth, he was no longer going to put himself out in the least degree for her entertainment.

  *

  And it was on the very next Sunday—the inaugural Sunday of this new and totally selfish regime—that the miracle came into being.

  CHAPTER III

  IT WAS THIS miracle which now, four years later, he was trying to explain to Rita down the telephone, but already he knew it was hopeless. He could tell that it was by the very sound of her breathing, even before she spoke.

  “Hardly a miracle!” she commented, with a mocking little laugh; and he wished, violently, that he’s never told her anything about it at all. “I mean,” she went on, with that lilt of affectionate raillery in her voice which had once so much excited him, but which now—particularly down the telephone—merely sounded shrill and patronising. “I mean, darling, there’s nothing exactly miraculous, is there, about a little girl going t
hrough a phase of Daddy-worship? How old was she at that time? Nine, wasn’t it? That’s just the age! The father-daughter thing, it’s terribly well known. It’s in all the textbooks. You know, the Oedipus thing in reverse, or do I mean Electra? Oh well, anyway, you know what I mean.”

  Adrian knew what she meant all right. She meant that she had felt rebuffed and hurt by his suggestion that she shouldn’t return to the flat till Monday; and had been hurt even more by his ill-judged attempt at explanation. He had been a fool, he realised now, to try to explain to Rita how much his daughter’s weekly visits meant to him. He couldn’t expect her to understand, or to feel other than jealous. Already, he sensed her hostility, before she’d even met the girl.

  “Daddy-worship”; “the Oedipus thing”. Phrases like these, under their guise of casual sophistication, were calculated to smear and belittle. Their effect on a living, actual relationship was like selective weed-killer, attacking insidiously the sturdy, unselfconscious roots of it.

  Not that Rita would have thought all this out before slinging this half-digested psychological jargon at him. She worked by instinct, Rita did, and her instincts were always one jump ahead of him. On whatever ground he tried to base an argument, he would find that these grounds had already been mined beforehand.

  The present case was typical. He’d tried to explain to her how he felt about these visits of Amelia’s, which had been going on so happily and rewardingly for nearly four years now, and she didn’t wait to understand, she didn’t need to. At the first mention of the child’s name, she had made a grab for the nearest cliché, and was there waiting for him with it, before he’d even assembled the relevant data.

  In a way, he couldn’t blame Rita for her resentment, or even for her mockery. The thing did sound soppy when it was put into words. But the whole beauty of it, with him and Amelia, was that they never did put it into words, had never had to. Even at the beginning—particularly, perhaps, at the beginning—it had been the very wordlessness of what was happening between them which had made it all so wonderful.

  It hadn’t happened all at once. In fact, in the very beginning, on that first Sunday of his revolt against the weekly outings which he found so irksome, he’d felt nothing but an uneasy guilt about what he was doing. Poor little girl! Expecting to be taken out somewhere, and then finding herself condemned to spend an entire afternoon cooped up in the company of a silent, preoccupied father who had no attention to spare for anything but the charts and diagrams spread in front of him on the forbidding great desk. He’d had the decency to warn her, of course. “I’m going to be busy,” he’d told her the previous week, “I shan’t be able to take you out anywhere next Sunday.” And, “Yes, Daddy,” she’d said, as she always did, her blue-green eyes fixed on him, and he didn’t know whether she was listening or not. He never did.

  He apologised again when the time came.

  “’Im afraid it’s going to be rather boring for you, chicken,” he said, “I’ve got all this checking up to do, you see, and so you’ll just … well, you’ll just have to…”

  He wished, at that point, that he’d laid in some toys, jigsaw puzzles or something, to put in front of her, like a saucer of milk in front of a cat, but he’d never thought about it.

  “You’ll just have to amuse yourself,” he finished firmly, reminding himself again of Homo sapiens and all that; and, “Yes, Daddy,” she said again. He turned away from her and bent over his work; and from then on he heard nothing from her for an hour.

  For two hours. For three hours. It was only the necessity for turning the light on at a quarter past five that reminded him once more of her existence. Turning in his revolving chair, and stretching his cramped spine, Adrian experienced quite a little shock at the sight of the two straggly plaits dangling barely eighteen inches from his knees. Amelia was lying full-length on the carpet, propped on her elbows, chin in hands, poring over the M–P volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  He stared down at her. She was a good little thing, she really was! Not a sound out of her the whole afternoon.

  “Tea, chicken?” he asked, with a twinge of belated compunction, and she looked up in a dazed, almost startled sort of a way. Then she smiled.

  “What is there?” she asked; and after two or three more similarly laconic exchanges, the two of them were once more engrossed in their respective studies, she nibbling chocolate biscuits as she read, and he sipping a cup of Lapsang tea, pausing every now and then to check one of the digits on his chart against the notes that lay alongside.

  It was seven o’clock before either of them spoke again.

  “Did you know, Daddy, that Numitianus started a whole new religion?” remarked Amelia, as he helped her into her coat preparatory to taking her home, “An actual religion, called Numitianianism. And now nobody’s even heard of it any more! Isn’t that sad for him?”

  Adrian suggested that since this Numitianus was dead and buried more than a thousand years, it couldn’t matter to him whether his pet religion had caught on or not; but Amelia couldn’t agree. They talked about it, on and off, all the way back in the car, and though the argument petered out quite inconclusively, Adrian went home with a strange and unfamiliar sense of accomplishment; a feeling of achievement for which he could find no adequate explanation. She really is a good little kid, was the nearest he could get to it: I really must try and … oh, I don’t know … well … something.

  *

  But by the next Sunday, he really was involved in a rush job, and so whatever resolutions he had made about entertaining Amelia more adequately had to go by the board. All afternoon long he worked on his report, and when, every now and again, he found a moment to glance at the child, there she was, just as she had been last week, stretched out on the carpet with her nose in a book. Only this time it wasn’t the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it was Sir Robert Ball’s Story of the Heavens; and while they had tea—fish paste this time, on Matzo biscuits—she regaled Adrian with an account of the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, and how they had led to the discovery of Neptune. Her voice grew shrill with mounting excitement as she approached the climactic moment when Le Verrier turned his telescope towards the area of the sky where he had calculated that Neptune should be—and there was Neptune!

  As he listened, Adrian was aware, once again, of something happening which was outside the range of his previous experience, and for which he could find no words.

  It was several Sundays later before he realised what it was.

  Amelia loved him. She loved coming here, being with him. She loved the peace, the silence, the sense of intellectual purpose in this quiet, book-lined room. She loved the way he left her alone, the way he had his own work to do, and the fact that it was more important than she was, just as Neptune’s orbit was more important than either of them.

  They were two of a kind, he and Amelia. The struggle to be a “good father” was at an end. Amelia didn’t need a “good father”, had never needed one, she needed him.

  *

  “Adrian? … Are you still there? … I thought you must have hung up on me!”

  Rita’s voice, in spite of the little laugh, sounded anxious and accusatory. Adrian held the instrument a little away from his ear. The few inches of extra distance didn’t really solve anything, any more than burning the electricity bill sets one’s finances straight, but it did make him feel a little more in command of the situation, a little less like a puppet dancing to Rita’s insistent tune. He wished he didn’t know so exactly how she was feeling, there was nothing he could do about it, and it was both painful and boring to know it all so well. He knew exactly how she would be looking, over there in Wimbledon, sitting sideways to the telephone table, leaning forward from the waist, the lovely legs crossed, the tight, sullen little frown already puckering her white brow. Her pale, well-manicured fingers with their freshly-applied pink nail-varnish would by now be moving restlessly, like the quivering of poplar leaves before a storm, fidgeting with the receiver, pluck
ing at the coiled snake of the flex. The small, neat lips would be delicately parted, poised for the attack, ready to snatch up the argument from wherever it might fall and worry it like a bone.

  “I’d have thought,” she was saying, stabbing at the words as was her habit when aggrieved, “I’d have thought that you’d be pleased that I’m so anxious to meet your Amelia! I don’t understand you, Adrian! Don’t you want us to meet…? To be friends…?”

  Adrian was silent. He didn’t want them to meet, and some dark instinct had already told him that they would never be friends. But of course, he couldn’t say this. He wasn’t happy even thinking it, it was so prejudiced, so irrational. How could he possibly know, in advance, whether Rita and Amelia were or weren’t going to hit it off?

  He just did know, that’s all. He played for time.

  “Look, darling,” he said, “don’t let’s rush things. We don’t want to spoil everything by—well—you know—just when Derek is beginning to come round and everything….”

  The sheer non sequitur of these considerations nearly stopped him in his tracks; but he knew he must keep going, keep talking, paper over the rift widening between them.

  “So come as early as you possibly can, darling, on Monday,” he urged, trying to put eager anticipation into his voice. “Come straight from work. Or if you like, we’ll go out to dinner. I’ll meet you at the …”

  But she was not appeased.

  “You’re trying to put me off!” she accused, and he heard, with horror, the beginnings of tears in her voice. He could not bear it when she cried. “You don’t love me any more! You don’t want me to leave Derek and come to you, I can tell you don’t …