The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

  “Or perhaps,” amended Derek, “‘pleasure’ is not quite the right word. ‘Relief’, perhaps, would be nearer the mark. Relief—as I am sure you will understand, Adrian—at the prospect of getting the whole thing tied up and settled at last. As to ‘pleasure’”—by this time they were in Derek’s comfortable, spacious front sitting-room, bathed just now in pinkish radiance through the big west windows—“as to pleasure, well, I take it that the whole business has been rather more fun for you than it has been for me? Wouldn’t you say so? Now, what will you have, Adrian? Whisky? Vodka? Sherry …?”

  This time, of course, they were able to use the proper whisky glasses—and such had been his conditioning over the past four years that Adrian felt for a moment quite ill with guilt as his fingers closed round the fine crystal. He’d never felt guilty like this when lying with Derek’s wife in Derek’s double bed—on the non-Derek side of it, of course.

  “Well—to you and my wife!” said Derek, raising his glass, and Adrian, perforce responding, wondered if Derek had deliberately chosen so uncomfortable a toast, or was it just a momentary piece of clumsiness?

  There was no way of telling. The man was smiling pleasantly, offering no clues. He sat facing the window, and the pink sunset light give his thin, rather ascetic face an unwonted glow of buoyant health and well-being, and he sipped his drink with an air of almost sybaritic enjoyment, though never once taking his eyes off Adrian’s face. Again Adrian felt uncomfortable, and again could pin down no precise reason for it. Presently, Derek set down his glass and cleared his throat.

  “I expect,” he began, “that you’ve been wondering why, exactly, I’ve invited you round this evening?”—and then, in response to Adrian’s small deprecatory murmur, he hastily amended: “Of course, my dear fellow, I don’t mean to imply … that is, I am of course delighted to have you here in any case—only too delighted. Any time. But I was referring to my particular reason for inviting you—by yourself, without my wife—on this particular evening. You haven’t wondered about it, then? Not at all? As you came along in the car, for instance …?”

  Again, there was something just slightly—not provocative, exactly, that would be too strong a word—but something conducive to discomfort rather than comfort about the man’s choice of words. Why, for instance, did he have to keep saying “my wife” instead of “Rita”? Of course, she was his wife still, in law, but all the same one would have thought that, on a social occasion like this, ordinary tact and good manners would have suggested …

  But the alert, lightish eyes, fixed so intently on Adrian’s face, had no hostility in them, only a detached, almost childlike curiosity. Why, the fellow just wanted an answer to his question—it was as simple as that!

  “No, to be quite honest with you,” Adrian replied, “I didn’t wonder at all. Should I have? It seemed to me a most sensible idea that you and I should get together and try to work out between us—without upsetting Rita, that is, or getting involved in any sort of acrimony—that we should try to work out—well, you know. Like finances. That sort of thing.”

  The question of what, if any, maintenance Rita was entitled to from Derek, and whether, in law, any of it would survive the fact of her co-habiting (the word “marriage” Adrian still wasn’t facing) with Adrian, had not yet been mentioned. And it would be nice to know. Not that Rita’s quite reasonable salary from her receptionist’s job wasn’t an adequate contribution to their joint finances, but it would be useful to know her actual rights. One wouldn’t necessarily—or even probably—insist on them: poor old Derek had had a pretty raw deal as it was, without being expected to pay for it as well. Still, an accurate knowledge of the actual facts of any situation can never be other than an advantage.

  “Oh, finances!”—Derek brushed the word aside with an actual sweep of the arm, as if it were a speck of dust on the polished table in front of him. “Finances! Oh, I wouldn’t worry about finances, old chap. Rita will get what she wants out of you, just as she will out of me, don’t you worry. She won’t need any of these lawyer-Johnnies to tell her how to get her pretty little claws on your salary. Or mine….”

  Adrian was taken aback. Was this the Poor Derek whose tender sensibilities had to be considered at every turn? Was this the kindly, super-tolerant husband who loved his wife so much that he would put up with any and every humiliation rather than lose her companionship?

  Adrian tried to pass it off lightly.

  “Yes, well, I expect the lawyers will have something to say on the money question, because they always do, don’t they? But if you’re not bothered about that side of things, and I’m certainly not, then it shouldn’t be too traumatic. So let’s leave it for the moment. It’s the actual divorce, I suppose, that we have to discuss. I’m perfectly willing, naturally, to be cited as co-respondent….”

  Derek seemed to be only half attending.

  “Co-respondent?” he repeated vaguely. “Oh, my dear chap, I don’t think they have co-respondents any more. I don’t think they do. It’s ‘irreversible breakdown’ that’s the thing now. I think it is. Not that I care. She can get rid of me any way she likes.”

  Adrian felt a stab of compassion for the man’s obvious bitterness, but he was irritated as well. Things were difficult enough already, and Derek’s continuing misery was a burden he could well do without. He felt guilty, put-upon and inadequate, and he suddenly longed to punch Derek’s face, hard, right in the middle of those controlled, scholarly features.

  As so commonly happens, such a turmoil of conflicting emotions tends to find expression in a weak trickle of clichés.

  “Yes, well, I expect it’ll all work out in the end,” said Adrian, draining the last of his whisky at a gulp. “No use crossing our bridges till we come to them, eh? We can only do our best. And we must remember it’s Rita’s happiness we really have to think of. After all, both of us, in our different ways …”

  “Rita’s happiness? My dear fellow, we don’t have to worry about that! Rita is always happy when she’s destroying something. She spent nearly seven years destroying me, and happy all the time —didn’t she tell you? Oh, I’m sure she did, she told everyone: how the first few years of our marriage were quite idyllic? Well, I’m sure that for her they were so, there was nothing left of me at the end of them, nothing at all. And that, of course, was where the trouble started. Having destroyed me utterly, she was up against a bit of a dead end. She was like an artist with no more canvasses left to work on….”

  Refilling his glass, he held it up to the dying light, staring into it long and pensively, the flickers of gold reflected faintly on his lined, intelligent face.

  “She has this talent for destruction, you see,” he explained thoughtfully, “and, like all talents, it clamours to be used.” Again he gazed deeply, abstractedly into the golden depths in front of his eyes. “For it is a talent, you know, Adrian, this power of turning to blackness and poison everything you touch. Like every artist, Rita needs scope for the exercising of her gifts; without it, she becomes frustrated. And this, Adrian, is where you come in….”

  “Now, look here … I say …!” Adrian helped himself, unasked, to another neat whisky, and sat for a moment quite at a loss how to continue. He knew well enough—none better—how cruel, how bitter, how downright evil can be the things which otherwise ordinary, pleasant couples can say to and about each other when in the throes of divorce. At such a time, there are no holds barred, the sky is the limit where mutual vituperation is concerned. All the same, had he himself, even at the blackest moments, ever said anything half as awful as this about Peggy? Or she about him? He was sure they hadn’t. On the other hand, had he—or Peggy either, for that matter—ever felt quite as miserable about the break-up of their marriage as Derek was obviously feeling about his? Misery on this sort of scale was something that Adrian hadn’t encountered before; it embarrassed him.

  Still, he must say something. He couldn’t let these outrageous aspersions on the woman he loved—had loved, anyway
—go unchallenged. The whole thing was further complicated, of course, by the fact that he was at this moment a guest in Derek’s house.

  “Look here, I say—” he began again”—you can’t—I mean, Derek, you really can’t—talk like that about anybody. I know you’ve had a rotten deal and all that, but there are limits! I realise you don’t really mean it, but all the same it’s not fair on Rita for you to go around saying …”

  “Not fair? On Rita? When did I ever say I wanted to be fair to Rita? I said I wanted to keep her, but that’s quite different, as I’m sure you’ll be the first to agree…. But come, my dear fellow, enough of this! Before the light is quite gone, I want to show you my garden. Not a big garden, but quite interesting in its way….”

  Normally, there was nothing Adrian hated more than being shown round people’s gardens, and particularly if they were “interesting” ones. This meant, in Adrian’s experience, that they were full of things like half-dead dandelions from somewhere in Tibet, or meagre little globs of foliage encircling a thing like a dried lentil, only blue. And if you made an effort and said the slightest nice thing about it, then you’d get shown its photograph as well, on a colour slide, as soon as you got indoors. On top of which, in this particular case, he’d seen the garden hundreds of time already, from Rita’s bedroom window. Not that he’d taken it in that much —a lot of miscellaneous greenery, as far as he could remember, interspersed by funny-looking shrubs. Probably they were from Tibet if the truth were known, but thank goodness Rita knew absolutely nothing about any of them, and so hadn’t been able to tell him.

  *

  However, on this occasion, Adrian submitted to the impending ordeal with something like alacrity. He appreciated Derek’s effort to change the subject, to pull himself together, and to rescue them both from the embarrassment of all that emotional stuff. By the time they got back indoors, they’d have recovered their usual guarded but nevertheless civilised relationship. For this, it was worth while enduring a spell of moderate boredom. It couldn’t last long, anyway, because twilight was already at hand. Resignedly, Adrian set down his glass, hoisted himself from his comfortable chair, and followed his host across the hall to the door with Edwardian-style stained glass panels which led into the garden. Derek undid the creaking bolts slowly, and with a clumsiness which seemed somehow out of character; and then, with a sort of flourish, he threw open the door.

  *

  Adrian stared, absolutely stupefied. He had known, of course, that “interesting” gardens are liable to contain largish areas of bare earth broken only by little prison-encampments of stakes enclosing, with loving totality, some small and bewildered expatriate from distant peak or blazing desert “… the Lesser Something-Something from the Outer Hebrides …” “a special minature variety that is only found in Iceland … if you come next year, or the year after, you’ll see …”

  Yes, areas of bare earth, and mingy, unenthusiastic plants he had expected: but this …! He gazed unbelievingly. The whole garden was completely bare, lifeless and black, as if it had been swept by a death-ray. Not a green leaf, not a blade of grass anywhere.

  Adrian turned to his host in bewilderment.

  “What …?” he begun helplessly; and Derek answered without looking at him, staring out expressionlessly over his domain of death.

  “She only meant to poison my Mecanopsis superba,” he explained deprecatingly. “She knew I loved them, you see. It’s a special variety of poppy you know, from Bhutan in the Himalayas. I’d been working for years to get them acclimatised, and for the first time they were beginning to flower and propagate themselves. She meant the weed-killer just for them, but you know what a little scatterbrain she is; she didn’t read the instructions on the container properly, and managed accidentally to poison the whole garden—roots, soil, the lot. Probably, it will never recover in my lifetime. Silly little thing, isn’t she? Quite hopeless when it comes to anything practical….

  “And now, my dear fellow, let us go in and eat. As you observe, there is not a lot to be seen out here, and anyway the light is going.

  “I hope you like liver and bacon? It’s the only thing I’ve really learned how to cook so far—I suppose, in my own way, I’m just as hopeless when it comes to anything practical as Rita is!”

  *

  He laughed, as if well pleased with his own humour, then turned and led Adrian indoors and into the dining-room.

  CHAPTER XI

  “BUT DADDY’S always here on Sundays!” cried Amelia, staring incredulously. “I’ve never got here and not found him!”

  Had she been less engrossed in her own disappointment, Amelia would have noticed the fury, quickly controlled, which flickered across Rita’s face at this futile protest. Futile, because how could Rita summon Daddy out of thin air—Rita who, if the truth were known, was a hundred times more agitated about Adrian’s disappearance than Amelia, utterly confident of her secure and permanent place in his heart, could begin to imagine. And had Amelia been older, as well as less self-absorbed, she would have recognised the moment she came into the room that unmistakable look on Rita’s face—the look of a woman who knows, or suspects, that her lover has at last really left her, and that this time he will not come back.

  But Amelia, being only thirteen, was oblivious of all this. She was concerned only with the disruption of her own afternoon.

  “But where is he?” she persisted, unwittingly rubbing salt into a red, raw wound that was beyond the range of her comprehension. “Where did he say he’d gone? When will he be back?”

  No woman in Rita’s situation is ever willingly going to admit to it—certainly not to a thirteen-year-old. The sordid truth—that Adrian had simply not come home either last night or the night before; that he had furthermore pretended (Rita had checked this with his secretary) that on Friday he’d been kept late at the office when he hadn’t; and had thereafter stayed away the whole weekend without even bothering to telephone—all this added up to a picture so humiliating, as well as so drearily commonplace, that almost any woman would have tried to keep it secret.

  Certainly Rita intended to.

  “Your father’s been called away on business, if you want to know,” she snapped. “I expect he forgot all about you.”

  Let her have it right between the eyes, the smug little devil! Let her have a taste of being unwanted, rejected, let down; of having her love and loyalty slapped back into her face like a wet fish!

  While Amelia’s countenance slowly paled, a small flicker of satisfaction came into Rita’s. The two stood staring at each other, in open enmity for the very first time. Suddenly, it was frightening.

  Amelia took a step backwards.

  “I’ll go and ask Dorothy!” she exclaimed, turning on her heel. “Dorothy will know!”—and a moment later she was clattering downstairs at top speed, flight after flight, round the bends of the landings, till she reached the haven of the familiar basement kitchen.

  *

  “Dorothy will know!” In other words, “Dorothy, not Rita, is the one he’s likely to have confided in!” Alone in the big room, Rita stood quivering, like a well-trained gun-dog waiting for some special signal. She was waiting for her lover, just as she had waited all the weekend, and by now she was feeling quite sick with longing for his return.

  Because how can you punish adequately a man who just doesn’t show up?

  *

  “Let me see; Friday. That’s when I saw your Dad last, the Friday morning,” said Dorothy, burrowing eagerly into his new drama like a rabbit excavating a cosy home for itself in some promising hillside. “Yes, he was just off to work, about nine o’clock it must have been, because that was the morning the builders were here, having a look round the Squatters’ Flat. Four hundred pounds it’s going to cost me, but Mr Hudson thinks we might get the Council to pay some of it. Squatters are their responsibility really, he says, and I might be entitled to some damages.”

  It was the ground-floor flat that Dorothy was talking about, t
he one on street level. Even though it was several weeks now since the squatters had cleared out—speeded on their way by awkward enquiries from Social Security about their entitlement to Supplementary Benefit—Dorothy still spoke of the flat—and indeed thought of it—as the Squatters’ Flat, and no doubt would continue to do so until some new incumbent arrived to impregnate the place with his or her new name. So far, this hadn’t happened, because the squatters had left it in such a state, and it had taken weeks of phone calls to get the builders even to come and give an estimate.

  My goodness, what a business it had all been, one way and another! It still gave Dorothy a funny feeling when she thought about it, and especially when she recalled the way in which it had all come about. When the squatters had first arrived—in ones and twos, with rosy, guileless young faces and no luggage, she had taken for granted that they were visitors for one or other of the existing tenants. She hadn’t at first given it a moment’s thought, for was this not Liberty Hall, as she had so often boasted? People were in and out all the time, often staying the night as well, and Dorothy prided herself on asking no questions and making no fuss about such goings-on. And so thus it came about that only when the newcomers had established themselves eleven strong in the ground-floor flat, had changed the locks and had started cheeking her through the back windows when she went out to hang up the washing—only then did Dorothy begin to realise exactly what she was up against, and also how little, within the limits of the law, she could do about it. Her friends, naturally, had been highly indignant on her behalf—Adrian, in particular, volunteering to beat up the lot of them with his own hands. But that, of course, would have, been “assault”, and Dorothy naturally didn’t want her only reliable tenant dragged off to prison at such a time.

  And in fact, it gradually became clear to the onlookers that no such drastic knight-errantry was called for. Before long, Dorothy was referring to “My Squatters” with a note of pride in her voice, positively boasting about them among the neighbours as if they were a sort of status symbol, an authentic hallmark of the sort of trendy, telly-based with-it-ness to which she had always so wistfully aspired.