The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

  This was so nearly the truth that Adrian could not think what to say. In panic and confusion, he fell back on the old, despairing clichés.

  Of course he still loved her. Of course he wanted her to come to him. But not yet. It was all so sudden …

  “Sudden!” Rita fairly spat the word back at him, and who could blame her. “It’s nearly four years since you first asked me to marry you! I was twenty-nine then, and now I’m thirty-three! Four bloody years of waiting, and working on Derek, and being faithful to you—do you realise I haven’t let Derek make love to me once, in all that time…?”

  He did know, but only because she’d told him so, repeatedly, over the years, always wanting from him some reaction of overpowering gratitude which he just couldn’t dredge up. Such confidences embarrassed rather than flattered him, he didn’t want to know about her and Derek, one way or the other. He wanted her marriage to be her problem, nothing to do with him, he didn’t want the responsibility of it. The implicit demand that he should be spiritually in attendance in the Wimbledon bedroom, keeping Derek’s hands off her, night after night, wearied him and made him feel uncomfortable.

  But of course, there was no way of explaining this. He closed his eyes, and from six inches away let her indignation flow over and past him. At this distance from his ear, her voice sounded tinny and robot-like, spending its force on the electronic convolutions of the telephone service between here and Wimbledon.

  “And what about next Sunday? And the Sunday after that … and the Sunday after that …?” Her distant anger was coming closer, and nothing could blot out the tears in her voice now. “… all the Sundays? We’re planning to live together, that’s what you said! So is this what it’s going to be like? I’m to be thrown out every Sunday for the rest of my life? Thrown out of my own home, to walk the streets …?”

  “Darling, you’re getting yourself worked up over nothing,” he intervened, with exaggerated composure, knowing very well that it wasn’t nothing, but not knowing how else to treat it. “We’re not talking about every Sunday, we’re talking about next Sunday! Give me a chance! It may not be sudden from your—I mean our point of view, but it’s sudden for Amelia. Surely you can see that?”

  She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. He’d had nearly four years to prepare Amelia for this outcome! Ever since she was nine years old, in fact—nearly a third of the kid’s whole life, she was thirteen now, wasn’t she? Surely, in all that time …?

  That a man could thus procrastinate, could put off a necessary but uncomfortable task week after week, month after month, for nearly four years, was beyond her comprehension. Or she claimed it was.

  And why an uncomfortable task, anyway? Why not a delightful one? Why hadn’t he presented the thing to Amelia as something exciting, something to look forward to? He could have played down the stepmother angle, after all Rita was a lot younger than he was, she would be more a sort of big sister to Amelia … a friend … someone to have fun with. The three of them could go on Sunday outings together….

  It was the word “outings” which caused the intake of breath through Adrian’s teeth; but of course Rita couldn’t have known that. She burst into tears.

  “I don’t know what to do!” she sobbed, collapsing at last into the simple, humiliating truth, all her defences down. “I told Derek Sunday,” she wailed. “I told him I was leaving him properly on Sunday! Now what am I going to say?”

  Adrian was sorry for her. This was something he remembered all too well from his own experience of a broken marriage: this desperate struggle to keep one’s end up in the eyes of one’s injured spouse, who, from the moment he or she learns of the Great Love, is going to be right there watching, sharp as a needle, for cracks to appear in it. He understood exactly the sort of humiliation it was going to be for Rita to have to go shamefacedly back to her husband with the news that actually Lover-boy didn’t want her until Monday.

  It was awful for her. He was truly sorry, and if she hadn’t been in Wimbledon, he’d have put his arms round her and told her so.

  But all the same, he wasn’t going to give in. He had one last, desperate card to play, and he played it.

  “I’ll have to make sure that Dorothy doesn’t mind,” he said. “After all, she is the landlady. It’s her house—” and he dropped the receiver into the cradle before Rita’s entirely justified protests could rattle about his ears.

  Because, of course, the objection was ludicrous. Dorothy never minded anything. A spinster in her late sixties, she had spent most of her adult life deliberately cultivating broad-mindedness as a substitute for everything that she might be thought to have missed out on in life; and so the idea that she might object to one of her tenants bringing his mistress to live with him was just simply laughable, and Rita knew this quite as well as he did.

  It wouldn’t make her laugh, though. That was the trouble.

  CHAPTER IV

  “SHE’S RATHER LIKE Anne Boleyn, I thought,” said Amelia, spooning sugar into the mug of strong tea which Dorothy, all agog with curiosity, had set in front of her. “You know—black almond-shaped eyes—well, almost black—and that very white skin. The Spaniards remarked on how very white her skin was—Anne Boleyn’s, I mean—in one of their Despatches. And they said she had six fingers, too, which was supposed to be a sign of witchcraft. I looked to see if She has got six fingers, but she hasn’t….”

  Amelia pushed a strand of stringy, lightish hair out of the way of her tea and drank thirstily, her pale rather small face almost lost behind the huge mug. Dorothy, on the other side of the scrubbed wooden table which was the central feature of her basement kitchen, watched her young visitor with satisfaction. She always liked it when Amelia came wandering down here for some part of her Sunday afternoon visit to her father; and today there was the additional excitement of being in on the girl’s very first reactions to the glamorous new arrival in her father’s life. After four years of having him all to herself, Sunday after Sunday, it was going to be hard on the poor kiddie, she was sure to be jealous and miserable about it, for a start, anyway. Unless, of course, Dorothy mused, it didn’t really make all that much difference to her? It wasn’t as if Mr Summers was the sort of father who’d ever put himself out much for the child, or tried to amuse her; not as far back as Dorothy could recall, anyway.

  Not that Dorothy herself was all that concerned about amusing Amelia either; it was more a question of Amelia amusing her. Now that the girl was thirteen or so, she was beginning to be really good company. There she would sit, chattering away, dropping an innocent remark here or an unconscious hint there, from which Dorothy was gradually enabled to build up, bit by bit, some sort of a picture of life in that top flat where, for nearly four years now, Adrian Summers had been keeping himself to himself with almost impenetrable success.

  He was a good tenant; she knew that much, of course. Right from the start, she had had no doubts at all about taking him on. From her long years of experience as a landlady, she had summed him up instantly as a steady, responsible sort of a man, and it was plain that he had a decent job. Something to do with petroleum, he’d told her—Research Director in the Something-or-other Department. It sounded quite classy, anyway.

  And her early judgement had been amply vindicated. Over the years, Mr Summers had proved himself quiet, reliable, and no trouble at all. An ideal tenant, really. The only trouble was that Dorothy, like so many landladies, didn’t, in her heart of hearts, really like ideal tenants. They were no fun. They added no colour to existence. They were like guests at the bottle-party of life who hadn’t brought a bottle with them.

  Of course (as Dorothy would have been the first to admit) no sane landlady deliberately sets out to acquire tenants who are going to throw chairs at each other in the small hours or lock themselves in the bathroom screaming—and indeed, it would be difficult to frame an interview that would reliably select for this sort of thing—but all the same, if such things should chance to happen, there is no point in not making the be
st of them. And the best can sometimes be very, very good indeed.

  And in a way, of course, she was being unfair. Her top-floor tenant was not what all landladies would have described as ideal, and he did have a private life of sorts going on up there, with his mistress slipping along Thursday afternoons as regular as clockwork, and often Tuesday evenings as well. But let’s face it, it had been going on for years now, all the news-value had gone out of it. You couldn’t shock the neighbours with something that went on and on like that, same time every week, and the same girl, too.

  And so Amelia’s revelation this afternoon that this Rita Langley was actually coming to live with Daddy had filled Dorothy with delightful anticipation. Him such a bookworm of a gentleman, and conceited with it, and her a common-or-garden minx—my goodness, now the sparks were going to fly!

  She probed the child skilfully.

  “Well, any time, dear, if you don’t fancy being up there with the pair of them, you can always come down to old Dorothy. You know that, don’t you? I’m always pleased to see you. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I wouldn’t be cooking gingerbread most Sundays from now on, or perhaps a date-loaf—remember you were asking me only the other day how to make those date-loaves of mine? Anyway, you’ll be welcome any time you like to pop down. Because let’s face it, it won’t be quite the same now, will it, dear, for you and your Dad? Not with a third person, I mean. Two’s company, they do say….”

  Amelia drew an end of wispy hair into her mouth to chew, and then almost spat it out, remembering. Mummy had threatened her with plaits again, like a baby, if she kept sucking the ends of her hair; but it wasn’t this that was moving her to try and break herself of the habit. She knew well enough that Mummy would never stick to it, mothers never did, for the simple reason that the daughters always cared so much more, a million times more, about whatever was the thing that was being argued about, no mother could possibly stand up to it.

  No, it wasn’t Mummy’s half-hearted threats that motivated her; it was something quite, quite different; something so new, so wonderful, that Amelia could as yet give no name to it, even in her own heart.

  *

  Mr Owen had arrived at the school only this term. He was the new English teacher, replacement for Miss Barbour, who had gone off to be a headmistress somewhere or other, and at first Amelia had hated and resented the change. Miss Barbour had been super, she’d read Kubla Khan as no one else in the world would ever read it; Amelia had listened spell-bound, hating from the bottom of her heart those girls who had giggled at the line:

  As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing….

  She could have killed them for making mock of so beautiful a poem read in so musical a voice.

  And now this stout, bossy man with the horn-rimmed glasses and the North Country accent was having the impertinence to read to the class the very same poem! It was sacrilege! It was an insult to Miss Barbour’s memory! This time, thought Amelia darkly, she, too, was going to giggle at the “Fast thick pants”!—that would show him where he got off! But no; perhaps, on second thoughts, it would be more dignified just not to listen at all, that would put him in his place better than anything!

  The strong, resonant voice with the unfamiliar enlongated vowels boomed round the classroom, and Amelia put her fingers in her ears, hoping he would notice.

  But he didn’t. He wasn’t looking at her at all, or at any of them, his eyes were fixed on his copy of Selections from the Poets:

  … Through caverrrns measoorless to maan

  Doon to a soon-less sea …

  The feeble pressure of Amelia’s fingers could do nothing against such resonance; she had no option but to listen, and by the time he had reached the final lines:

  Weave a saircle roond him twice

  And close your eyes with hooly dread,

  For he on hooney-dew hath fed

  And droonk the milk of Paradise.

  By this time, she, too, had drunk the milk of Paradise.

  She was in love.

  Which was why it was now so important, so desperately and urgently important, to get out of this habit of sucking her hair. People who have drunk the milk of Paradise just don’t bite the ends of their hair, and the thought that Mr Owen might one day actually catch her at it, might get a glimpse of the wet sticky spikes dangling against her blouse, making disgusting marks on it, filled her with horror.

  “What” she said to Dorothy; and Dorothy good-humouredly repeated the gist of her remarks, ending up, this time, with the exhortation to Amelia, “Not to let them put your nose out of joint, dear!”

  Daddy, too, had expected her to be jealous of Rita. Amelia felt embarrassed, and a little shocked at herself, for not feeling any of this expected resentment.

  But the truth of the matter was that, for Amelia, curiosity had been overwhelmingly the most powerful emotion roused in her by her father’s evasive and circumlocutory disclosures last week. Curiosity, and the exciting prospect of its imminent satisfaction, had effectively wiped out other possible discontents, and Amelia had looked forward to the coming Sunday with avidity. For years now she had been curious to learn more of this elusive, invisible woman whom everyone was so careful never to mention in her presence; and now, at last, the mystery was to be unveiled. She was actually to see the wicked, glittering creature; to talk with her, and see how Daddy behaved towards her.

  “I’m going to have a stepmother!” she’d rather rashly—not to say prematurely—announced to a circle of awestruck classmates in the school playground. “A stepmother! Isn’t it awful!”—and having thus gathered around her an open-mouthed and admiring audience, agog for further details, it was rather a come-down to have to admit that she didn’t even know if the lady in question was dark or fair; and that no, she couldn’t say whether her father kissed her—you know—properly—or not, because she’d never actually seen them together….

  All this was now to be remedied; and what with this, and with being in love with Mr Owen, and the whole world being so wonderful, jealousy didn’t really come into it. Daddy’s surprise and gratitude at her “taking it so well” made her feel rather mean for a moment, but there was no way of explaining her real feelings because they’d sound as if she didn’t love Daddy as much as she used to do, and didn’t care about their Sunday afternoons together any more.

  Which wasn’t the truth at all. She did enjoy coming here still, but of course it wasn’t quite like it had been when she was a little girl. Then, Daddy’s shadowy book-lined room, lit by the orangy glow of the standard lamp, had seemed like an Aladdin’s cave of learning, infinite in its possibilities.

  But now, at thirteen, she was becoming aware of the limitations of things. She had discovered that some of Daddy’s books were boring; others incomprehensibly difficult. Of the ones she loved, many had become over-familiar through constant re-reading; and in any case, she often had homework to do now, and could no longer spend whole afternoons just browsing around the shelves at random. And there was another thing, too; when she did have a stretch of time to spare, she seemed, these days, to prefer writing to reading.

  Particularly since the arrival in the universe of Mr Owen. Ever since the second week of term, she’d been secretly keeping a diary in which she recorded faithfully every glance he happened to throw in her direction, every word he ever addressed to her, even if it was only, “That’ll do, Amelia,” when she’d read on beyond her allotted portion of Paradise Lost.

  She’d been lying on the floor bringing this slightly non-earth-shaking narrative up to date this very afternoon, when Rita had suddenly turned up—and at this point in her reflections, Amelia remembered, with a little jolt of dismay, that in the excitement of the new arrival she’d forgotten to hide the precious volume away again! It must still be lying there, on the carpet, for all the world to see!

  She jumped up, scraping her chair back from the table.

  “Oh, Dorothy, may I bring my—well, a piece of work I’m doing —may I bring it down h
ere to finish?” she asked urgently; and Dorothy nodded her head, and smiled to herself, knowingly.

  Trouble already! It wasn’t, naturally, that she wanted things to go wrong for Amelia—she was truly fond of the child. But all the same, if there was going to be trouble up in that top flat, then she, Dorothy, might just as well have a ringside seat for it.

  It wasn’t as if you made disasters worse by enjoying them; otherwise, every time there was a drought, all those sunbathers spread-eagled on beaches all over the world would have shrivelled the earth to a cinder by now, and brought all life to an end.

  And they hadn’t. So why pick on Dorothy?

  Amelia hurried up the long flights of stairs anxiously. The diary didn’t look like a diary, it looked like an ordinary school exercise book, with a red marbled cover. Certainly, Daddy would never think of looking at it, it would no more occur to him to wonder what his daughter had been writing, page after page, all through the long afternoon, than it would occur to her to check on his graphs and formulae.

  But Rita was another matter. Rita was an unknown quantity, and might do anything.

  *

  The two of them drew apart, hastily, when Amelia burst into the room. Averting her eyes, she gathered up her property with all speed, and retreated. They had been kissing “properly”, she felt sure, and so tomorrow she would be able to enlighten her playground audience, without, of course, letting on that she hadn’t actually seen the phenomenon with her own eyes. Meanwhile, the diary was safe. It had been on the floor still, exactly where she had left it, and she felt sure that neither of the lovers had given it a glance.

  *

  “Keeping a diary, eh?” enquired Dorothy, her pale, allegedly short-sighted eyes behind their gold-rimmed spectacles taking in absolutely everything, as usual. “That’s what my grandma used to do, keep a diary, when she was your age. I’ve still got it somewhere, quite an heirloom it is by now. Her name was Amelia, too. Funny!”