The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

  “Oh, Rita, don’t be so utterly absurd! She’d think I was nuts! Don’t you realise that kids with crushes on their English teachers are two a penny, and if the schools were to be expected to take action about every daft symptom of these adolescent passions, they’d have no time left for teaching! Here, give the thing to me, and I’ll put it away safely for her till she next comes. We should never have looked at it really, not either of us; but I suppose there’s no harm done so long as she never finds out….”

  He pulled open a drawer of his desk and, quite unaware of Rita’s eyes following his every movement, he pushed the volume out of sight under a yellow folder of press-cuttings.

  “There!” he said, slamming the drawer shut. “Now let’s stop worrying about it and go to bed. I’ve had just about enough of today myself, and I should think you have too.”

  *

  Adrian lay awake for a long time that night, feeling Rita’s soft body nestled up against him like a small child begging to be forgiven. Although he could not bring himself to make love to her, or to feel any of that protective tenderness which usually follows a quarrel and a reconciliation, he was intensely aware of her, his brain prickly with a sort of uneasy pity. And as he lay there, restless and wakeful, he became aware not merely of a lack of tenderness, but of a growing sense of actual physical revulsion against this slender, fine-boned body which had once given him such delight.

  He was appalled at the feeling. It was unjust as well as heartless. After all, he didn’t know that those horrid anecdotes he’d been hearing about her over the weekend were true—indeed, there was substantial reason to suppose that they were not—or at least that they were greatly exaggerated. Rita herself had in effect denied them; had pointed out, very plausibly, that Derek had plenty of motive for both conscious and unconscious distortion of the truth. And as for Rita’s mother, well, it was the commonest thing in the world for a grown-up daughter and her mother to be at loggerheads. The daughter is liable to be bossy and inconsiderate; and the mother, her erstwhile power gone for ever, retaliates by fishing up grievances out of the past which the daughter cannot refute because her memory does not go back that far. No doubt, Rita had been a horrid little girl, and a troublesome and ungrateful teenager; but the shocking and lurid anecdotes currently retailed by Mrs Fayers were doubtless exaggerated out of all recognition, having gathered to themselves over the years new and ever more colourful accretions of wickedness every time the adult Rita seriously annoyed or upset her mother: “the mother-daughter thing”, as Rita herself would doubtless have labelled it. Looking back over the weekend, Adrian felt quite ashamed at having allowed his judgement to be swayed by such a jumble of tittle-tattle and hearsay evidence. In the morning, he would admit this to Rita, and tell her he was sorry.

  *

  How hot it was, though, how unbearably hot! He’d never get to sleep like this. He longed to move over to his own side of the bed, to turn over and lie with his back to her on the cool, unrumpled part of the sheet. But he dared not do so for fear of waking and upsetting her. Her limp, sleeping body felt sticky in his arms, and alien somehow, almost as if it wasn’t mammalian at all; a bird, perhaps, a great sticky bird, or even a vegetable—one of those exotic, tropical plants they’d seen at Kew the other day, all spines and dark fleshy leaves, mysteriously thriving in the artificial, steamy heat of the great hot-house….

  And a few minutes later, despite the heat, and the discomfort, and the cramp in his left arm, Adrian was asleep.

  *

  Not soundly asleep, though. His rest was broken by uneasy dreams … Rita, with her beautifully-manicured fingers, counting off numbers on some white-and-chrome machine of whose purpose, in the dream, he had no idea.

  “Ten,” he heard her clear, purposeful voice enunciating. “Ten … nine … eight… seven …” Although there seemed to be no change in the cool, dispassionate tones as the digits crept downwards, Adrian felt the beginnings of nightmare steal over him … and he knew that something … something terrible … was just about to happen. But before it happened he was somehow already in another dream, not a terrible one at all this time, not in its beginnings, though perhaps with a slight sense of anxiety about it. He dreamed that it was evening, and that he had come home to the flat carrying in his briefcase some piece of work which was very much on his mind—an emergency report to look over, something like that. There was some piece of information urgently needed for the work —some fact or date that he had to look up—and he walked in his dream over to the bookshelves and pulled out a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It seemed heavier than he remembered, and as he braced his muscles against the unexpected weight, he was aware once again of the onset of nightmare. With a sort of dreadful inevitability, the volume fell open, and there, squashed between the pages, like a book-marker, like a pressed flower for remembrance, lay the budgerigar: dead, pressed out flat to three or four times its natural size, its blood-stained feathers partially plucked and oozing on to the page.

  “I thought I’d mark the place for you, darling,” said the dream-Rita, smiling down at him, with an air of intelligent interest in his work which she had never shown in life; “I thought that if I—”

  *

  Adrian awoke, certain that he was screaming at the very top of his lungs, rousing the whole house. But of course he wasn’t: only the very tiniest little catch in his breath marked his awakening, and his whole soul was flooded with thankfulness at the realisation that the whole ghastly experience was at an end.

  Or was it? He lay there, sweating and panting, trying to recover from the dream as one recovers from a sudden attack of illness. Even now, wide awake and fully conscious, the feel of Rita’s soft skin pressed against his own made his flesh crawl. He was aware, with his rational mind, of how utterly unfair to her this was; but there was nothing he could do about it.

  *

  He slept no more that night. Presently, the darkness gave way to the grey light of dawn; and by the time the first pink of sunrise filtered through the curtains, he knew what he had to do.

  Knew, too, though helpless as a zombie to prevent it, how cruel and unfair he was being.

  CHAPTER XV

  RITA WAS TAKING it quite extraordinarily well: no tears, no scenes, no recriminations. In fact, she spoke hardly at all. She just sat quietly on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched a little as though against a shower of rain, and allowed the clichés to pour over her.

  “Nobody’s fault …” “neither of us really to blame …” “just one of those things …” “better now than later …” “will always treasure the good times we had together …”—and only when Adrian had quite run out of these stock phrases and manufactured sentiments did Rita look up at him, and enquire meekly, like an au-pair girl who has failed to give satisfaction, how soon he wanted her to go?

  The guilt was awful. Adrian did not know what to say or where to look. He had been counting, he realised now, on a blazing row, a scene of savage mutual recrimination to oil the wheels of parting. Faced instead by acquiescence on this monstrous and wholly unprecedented scale, he simply did not know what to do next. All the tortured resolutions of the night seemed to be crumbling beneath the weight of Rita’s non-resistance, leaving him bereft of motivation. He stared at her helplessly, as if waiting for her instructions; but her meekness seemed impregnable, she turned the other cheek relentlessly, like some sort of battering-ram.

  “This morning, did you mean?” she persisted humbly. “Did you want me to pack up and go right now? I could, if you like”—and by the time Adrian had expressed his outrage at this suggestion, and had assured her that he’d never meant to hurry her in the very least, that of course she must take her time, make plans at leisure, and that the last thing he wanted to do was to put any pressure on her—by his time it was quite unclear, even to Adrian, whether he was persuading her to go or to stay. With a wild, unseeing glance at his watch, and a meaningless mutter of sheer desperation, he made a dive for the bathroom, slammed
and bolted the door, and turned on all the taps to their fullest extent, as if to drown under the gushing water the tumult of his indecision.

  There was no tumult really; and certainly not one of indecision. The decision had been made during the night; and it had been a right one. The harsh clarity of that sleepless dawn had shown him things about himself, and about his relationship with Rita, which he had not wanted to face; but they were true things. Lying now in the hot, enveloping water, Adrian realised that though Rita’s response to his ultimatum had startled him almost out of his senses, it hadn’t, in fact, changed anything, or modified in the very least degree any of the factors which had made him resolve to break with her.

  “Factors”? There was only one factor really, and Adrian thought about it, sadly, while slowly and luxuriously soaping himself. It was difficult, now, to remember exactly when it was that he had stopped loving Rita, because he had refused to admit it, even to himself, for such a very long time. It is pleasanter to be in love than not to be; and to think that you are is at least better than nothing. And so the weeks and months had gone by, and he hadn’t wanted to notice that there was any change, and anyway, it had all been so very gradual. The whole thing, of course, had been brought to a head by this foolhardy attempt to live together. Many a good love affair has foundered on this rock, and Rita must surely have been aware of the risk she was taking in moving in on him the way she did. Admittedly, he’d sometimes asked her to do just this, and had told her how enchanting he would find it; but surely a grown woman, past thirty, should have known better than to put faith in vague protestations of devotion? Surely a lover is entitled to tell a certain number of lies, some of the time? It simply isn’t fair to believe every word a man says….

  But hardly had this comfortably self-justifying thought taken shape in Adrian’s brain than another, even better, one followed hot on its heels, and with an exultant swirl of water around shoulders and knees, he allowed it to take possession of his mind.

  What a fool he’d been! What a blind, conceited idiot! Why hadn’t it occurred to him before that all the time he’d been reluctantly falling out of love with Rita, she had probably been falling out of love with him likewise? And meanwhile both of them, out of the usual mixture of cowardice, vanity and sentimentality, had been refusing to admit it.

  The more Adrian reflected on this new possibility, the more he approved of it. It explained everything, which satisfied his scientific temperament, and it also released him from all further guilt and heart-searching. All that farrago of apologies and explanations that he’d spent half the night concocting, in a sweat of compunction and guilt—it had all been unnecessary! Rita hadn’t minded! That’s why she hadn’t cried and stormed and made a scene—it was because she hadn’t minded!

  How simple things can be! Adrian felt that there was a moral in this somewhere, but before he’d had time to work it out, his attention was caught by the “ping” of the telephone being replaced. He hadn’t heard Rita’s voice at all—the sitting-room door must have been shut as well as the bathroom one—and he wondered, vaguely, who she could have been ringing so early in the morning. But he quickly decided that, whoever it was, it was a Good Thing. It meant that she was taking action—making plans of one sort or another. Arranging to go and stay with her mother, maybe? Or even with Derek? Not that this last seemed at all likely, in the circumstances; but anyway, she was phoning somebody, that was the main thing. With a vague sense of accomplishment, of having brought things to a satisfactory conclusion, Adrian lurched upwards from the cooling water and reached for a towel.

  *

  Far away across London, Amelia laid down the receiver, and stood staring at it, as if she still could not believe what she had heard.

  And indeed she could not. The thing was so monstrous, so unspeakably appalling, that she simply could not take it in. At first, she had not even recognised Rita’s voice, so soft was it, and so carefully pitched; and when, after some seconds, she did begin to recognise it, she still could not believe what she was hearing.

  She’d thought, at first, that it must be some obscene kind of a joke. That Rita had discovered her precious and most private diary —this she gathered quite early on; that Rita had read it, too, and been “disgusted” by it—this, also, she managed to take in, bewildered, and speechless with fury. But when Rita went on to inform her, softly, and in dead earnest, that she intended to take the diary up to the school this very day and show it to the headmistress—“and then what will happen to your precious Mr Owen?” —at this point, Amelia’s thought processes simply blacked out: the horror of the thing was beyond what her mind could grasp. She simply stood there, unable to move or speak, while Rita’s low, careful voice purred on and on, and finally came to a stop; and even then, with the dead phone buzzing on and on in her ear, she still went on standing there. No one interrupted her, or broke into her trance of horror, for Peggy had already just left for work when the call came. Rita had timed it well; and even if Amelia had retained the presence of mind to try and ring her father, she would not have been able to get through. Rita had the thing well in hand; she had been planning it since quite early this morning.

  And so the minutes ticked by, until presently half an hour had passed. Already, Amelia was late for school. She couldn’t go, of course, she could never go again, she would stay at home and kill herself, but even that wouldn’t do any good, because it wouldn’t stop Mr Owen seeing the awful things she’d written, wouldn’t stop him being shocked and revolted … merely being dead is no protection against this sort of thing.

  Might there, though, be some way of averting the catastrophe? Amelia’s numbed mind was beginning, a little bit at a time, to function again, and she set herself to devising desperate measures of counter-attack. Like capturing Rita, and tying her up somewhere? Or waylaying her outside the school, and taking the diary by force, knocking her down in the street if necessary?

  But outside which entrance should Amelia lie in wait? While she hovered near the staff-room steps, Rita could be slipping down through the Middle School basement cloakroom; while Amelia mounted guard by the main entrance, Rita could be gaining admittance through the porter’s lodge—oh, there were a dozen ways! And besides, how could Amelia hope to hang about unnoticed for any length of time? “Pst! Amelia! I say, Amelia, Music’s started! Miss Lucas’ll be furious!” or, “Amelia Summers! May I enquire what you think you’re doing out here in the street during school hours…?” Oh, it would be hopeless! Worse than hopeless, for it would call everyone’s attention to her before she’d had any chance to do anything.

  Of course, if she’d only known when Rita intended to go, it would have been easier; but naturally Rita hadn’t given her any inkling at all, she was far too cunning. At some unknown hour, from some unknown direction, Rita was going to slip along by some unpredictable route, and gain admission to the school. It was all planned, specially, evilly planned, so that Amelia should have all the agony of knowing what was about to happen, and yet no opportunity of averting it.

  *

  There was no way. No way at all.

  “I’ll kill her!” screamed Amelia into the empty house. “I will! I’ll kill her! KILL her, KILL her, KILL her!”

  *

  And that evening, just after six, news came from the school that Rita had been found lying at the foot of the Art Room stairs with her neck broken.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THIS, AT LEAST, was the substance of the story brought by Daphne, arriving hot-foot from the scene of the disaster. Or if not precisely the scene itself, at least straight from the thrilling presence of a girl whose sister’s best friend actually had been there, right on the spot. Well, practically on the spot: she’d heard the screams, anyway, and had watched the ambulance driving away.

  It had happened like this. This girl, Rosemary Something, a Fifth-Former, had chanced to be staying on after school for a final rehearsal of the Upper School play; and just as the final tragic scene was coming up, with the cho
rus of Greek women all tearing their hair and bewailing their destiny almost without a slip—just at this juncture, there’d been these awful screams. It was hard to tell just where they were coming from; in the deserted school building everything echoed so, up and down the empty stairs and corridors. Anyway, they’d all rushed along, pell mell, just as they were, clutching at their safety-pinned Grecian robes, head-dresses and myrtle wreaths all awry, but by the time they’d located the scene of the accident, most of the excitement was already over. A little knot of cleaners, and a teacher or two, were still gathered by the front entrance, watching the departing ambulance; and from the buzz of excited talk Rosemary gleaned what titbits of information she could with which to regale her family at the tea-table; from which, in turn, her young sister collected random earfuls to share with such friends and class-mates as lived nearby. And so now here was Daphne, hopping from one leg to another with impatience, and well-nigh collapsing under her surfeit of undivulged news.

  But Peggy was adamant. Amelia was very much upset, she said primly, and wouldn’t want to see anyone just now. She did not feel it necessary to add that none of this had anything to do with Rita’s accident; that Amelia did not even know about it yet, and whatever was the cause of her distress it could not be that, as it had been going on all day, long before Rita had so much as set foot on those fateful stairs.

  This, at least, was how Peggy read the situation. She had come home from work to find her daughter already quite worn out with grief and despair, her face so swollen with crying as to be hardly recognisable. Nothing Peggy could do—no persuasions, no loving cajolery, not even a sharp, last-resort scolding—would induce her to say one single word in explanation.