The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

Adrian retorted sharply that this was no way to talk about the poor girl and her accident, which had only just escaped being a very serious one indeed; and Derek agreed that No, indeed it wasn’t, and no doubt Adrian himself had some much, much nicer things to say about it? He, Derek, was all ears.

  At this, naturally, Adrian was rendered speechless. It took him several seconds to adjust to the extraordinary turn the conversation had taken, and to take in that the gist of it, so far, amounted to a quite unfounded charge against himself: an accusation of wanting to push Rita, now that she was ill, back on to Derek. This was just exactly what he did want, of course, but this was no reason for accusing him of it.

  “What the hell is this all about, anyway?” he blustered, trying to capture the initiative. “When did I ever say anything about Rita’s returning to you? As a matter of fact, I’ve assumed all along that naturally I shall—”

  “‘Naturally!’ Dear, dear!” Derek gave a small unpleasant laugh, and then continued: “My dear chap, don’t get me wrong: please don’t think that I’m objecting to your noble, gentlemanly, and very proper reluctance to throw my wife on the scrap-heap as soon as she becomes a bit of a burden. Not a bit of it. On the contrary, I applaud such a decision. But to ask me to believe that it is natural in you to behave like this—that is, with common decency….”

  “Derek! Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere—!”

  Adrian felt perturbed rather than angry. These elaborate and gratuitous insults were too blatant to be taken at face value; they seemed to indicate a bitterness run out of control rather than straightforward enmity. Had something new happened? And if so, what…?

  “Listen,” he went on, “this is no time for slanging each other and trying to sort out the rights and wrongs of the thing. I’ve no doubt there’s plenty I should be apologising for. But right now, with Rita in hospital after a really very nasty accident…”

  “‘Accident’? Ah yes, of course, I’d forgotten that you’d still be using that word for it. Of course you would. ‘Naturally.’ But that’s not what the paper said, is it? And it’s not what Rita herself says. She says …”

  Suddenly, light dawned. For a moment, Adrian was too astounded to speak. He, of course, like everyone else, had seen the quote in the paper, had been shocked by it; but then, when nothing further happened, and when Rita herself made no further reference to the matter, he concluded that the whole thing must have been a bit of journalistic kite-flying, or that Rita, if she had spoken the words at all, had spoken them while still in a state of shock, and not knowing what she was saying. The people at the hospital must, he judged, have reached the same conclusion, or else by now, surely, the police or someone would have taken some sort of action?

  He began explaining all this to Derek, in the smiling, throw-away tones of a man clearing up a ridiculous little misunderstanding between friends. But the silence from Derek’s end of the phone was total, and went on and on. Adrian found himself beginning to ramble uneasily, to lose the thread of what he was saying.

  “I mean, hang it all, Derek,” he found himself expostulating, as much to extract some sort of response from Derek’s end of the line as to defend himself, “I mean, you can’t be seriously suggesting that I—”

  “Of course not!” Derek’s voice sprang back into the ear-piece with a suddenness that made Adrian jump. “Of course I’m not suggesting it, I wouldn’t be such a fool! It would only set you polishing up your alibi to even smoother perfection, wouldn’t it? And I’m sure it’s an excellent one already. I won’t even waste time on checking on it, whatever it is, so certain am I that it will prove watertight. ‘Naturally’ it will. But I thought you might like to know that if the police should take it into their heads to come and question me, then I shall feel obliged to reveal to them the fact that Rita rang me up that very morning—the morning of the day of the “accident”—and told me that you were throwing her out. She was very distressed, poor girl, she wanted to come back to me, to her dreary old no-good husband! Would you credit it? Maybe if I’d agreed, if I’d said, Yes, darling, you pack your things right away and come back to your own sweetie-pie who loves you —well, if I’d said that, then maybe the “accident” would never have happened. Would it? Because, my dear Adrian, you only had the two ways of getting rid of her, hadn’t you? She’s not the sort of girl to go off and stand on her own two feet, you know that as well as I do. She has to cling, Rita does, she’s like that special dwarf variety of wisteria of mine, which was among the plants that she destroyed so effectively—it was hanging like little black bootlaces from its trellis, did you notice? Of course you did —and of course you know that that’s what she is, too—a clinger. She’d never have left you until she was sure she could come back to me—you’d have had her on your back for ever. And so when I, selfish creature that I am, said Not B-Likely—that was the moment, wasn’t it, when you realised that you now had only the one other option left to you? And so really”—here Derek’s voice took on a meditative quality, as of one philisophising about Life and the Human Condition—“and so really, it was my selfishness, wasn’t it, just as much as your murderous violence, that pushed her down that flight of stairs? We murdered her together, didn’t we?—attempted it, that is to say.

  “Butter-fingers, eh, both of us…?”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  IN ALL HIS self-absorbed and unheroic dread of Rita’s homecoming, Adrian had forgotten one vital factor: Dorothy. He should have foreseen that Dorothy was going to absolutely love it, just as she’d been absolutely loving the whole thing right from the beginning—from the first horrifying phone call, right through the paralysed-for-life scare to the startling “someone pushed me” allegations. For her, Rita’s return with her back dramatically in plaster was going to be the grand finale of the most glorious catastrophe in all her years as a landlady, and she wasn’t for worlds going to miss out on one single detail of any of it. And of course, in the process of not missing out, she was inevitably going to make things much, much easier for Adrian. Long ago, Dorothy had discovered that only by helping people in their troubles do you get to the real, juicy core of the disaster, in all its scandalous and thrilling details; and now, true to her lifelong philosophy, she was only too willing to help Rita—really to help her—spending half her days up in the flat doing with generous gusto anything that needed doing.

  And of course, lots of things did need doing, especially during those first days of all, when Rita could only walk with extreme difficulty, stiff as an upended roll of lino, and couldn’t sit down at all without assistance.

  Dorothy was in her element, her kindness, her curiosity and her unquenchable delight in the horrific combining to produce just that blend of inquisitive concern and practical usefulness which is invaluable in a sick-room. She helped unstintingly, cooking, cleaning, ironing, making beds, so that when Adrian came home in the evenings there was hardly a thing left for him to do. He was absolutely thankful; it allowed him to get on with his work and all his usual activities almost as if nothing had happened.

  *

  And so it came about that it was to Dorothy, not to Adrian, that Rita first confided her fears. She felt “scared”, she said, of being right up here at the top of the house. She kept fancying she heard footsteps on the stairs: strange shufflings and bumpings in the adjoining room.

  Dorothy was sympathy itself. She could quite understand this feeling, she declared, so weak as Rita still was, and with that great heavy thing around her neck. It must make her feel, Dorothy surmised, dreadfully helpless “if anything was to happen”.

  “Just how my grandma used to feel when she had her hip.”—Dorothy enlarged on the theme—“She was living up top of a big house at the time, too, and being used to servants and all that in her young days, you know, she couldn’t get used to the idea of being up there on her own and it’s being no one’s job to look after her. ‘Suppose there was a fire!’ she used to say. ‘Or robbers! How would I ever get down the stairs fast enough?’”

>   Dorothy’s grandmother—her hip, her delicate nerves and her aristocratic forbears—kept Dorothy up in the flat ironing and tidying for an entire afternoon, and by a natural enough sequence of ideas these topics led to a reference to the old diary, including all that name-dropping of long ago. Amelia Caroline Ponsonby. One of the Ponsonbys.

  “Amelia—our Amelia, that’s to say—she was thrilled to bits when I let her see it,” Dorothy chatted on, slowly pushing the iron back and forth over one of Adrian’s shirts. “Funny thing, wasn’t it, both of them being called ‘Amelia’! And on top of that, here’s our Amelia keeping a diary too! She was telling me all about it, how—Why, whatever’s the matter, dear? Aren’t you feeling well? Got a funny turn, have you? It’s like that, you know, when you first come out of hospital. Very funny you can feel sometimes, all of a sudden. I remember the lady who was here—let me see—not the last one before Kathy and that lot, but the one before that—Well, she’d had this operation, you see, gall-bladder it was, dreadful pain she’d been having, and the very day she come out, she …”

  But Rita, rigid in her plaster casing, was still trembling, her jaw shaking atop its rampart; and when Adrian came in that evening Dorothy took it upon herself to waylay him on the stairs and describe the whole episode to him, and to surmise, with grave looks and ecstatic head-shakings, that the poor thing’s nerves were still not right, not right at all, and that in Dorothy’s opinion she should never have …

  Adrian leaned against the banisters, frowning impatiently. He did not at all want to snub Dorothy, especially after all her kindness—which indeed had by now become indispensable to him—but he hated having to be dragged into Rita’s emotional state, being forced to consider what was, or might be, going on in her mind.

  For, apart from politenesses and trivial platitudes, he and Rita had conversed hardly at all since her return from hospital, and Adrian was praying that it might go on that way. There had, it is true, been a brief spell immediately after Derek’s ridiculous phone call when it had crossed Adrian’s mind to have the whole thing out with Rita straightaway, at the very next visiting hour: to ask her what on earth she’d actually meant by that astounding statement to the press, and whom she was meaning to accuse? He had thought about doing this; had thought about just how to word it; and in the end had done nothing. It is always easier to do nothing than something, and in this case he could tell himself that he was putting the thing off for Rita’s sake—that she was still in a shaky state, and must not be upset. In the course of these reflections he began to see the point, after all, of the irritating sanctity of illness, which he had always so deplored: it seemed that it allowed other people, as well as the patient, to procrastinate and to escape responsibilities. Of course, he told himself, there would have to be a proper confrontation some time, not only about Rita’s mysterious accusation, but also about the question of what the hell she was doing at the school in the first place. “Amelia asked me to come”—Rita’s explanation so far—just didn’t make sense; and he couldn’t, at the moment, check it with Amelia herself because the Easter holidays had started, and Peggy on a sudden whim had taken the child down to Seaford “for a change of air”, and they wouldn’t be back for a fortnight or more.

  “Yes, well, thank you, Dorothy. Thanks for telling me,” he kept saying, one hand on the banisters; but still Dorothy kept right on talking, until, mercifully, a diversion was created in the shape of a sullen, overweight youth, whom Adrian hadn’t seen before, pushing his way wordlessly past them and out through the front door. Dorothy’s ever-hungry attention was immediately caught by this new phenomenon, and the almost-talked-out subject of Rita’s nerves was temporarily forgotten.

  “See?” She leaned towards Adrian confidentially. “See? I believe that’s Kathy’s new boy friend! That’s the third time he’s been here! Oh, I do hope so, poor kid, she’s had such rotten luck so far! All those hippies and layabouts—but this one, he looks a different type, didn’t you think? Not good-looking of course, not like That Brian, but more sort of steady. Didn’t you think so?”

  Adrian, who had thought nothing except that his new incumbent (if such he was) seemed just as unmannerly as his predecessors, could find nothing to say. He hadn’t been following Kathy’s love-life with sufficient attention to have an opinion of any kind. On the other hand, he had no wish to damp down any of Dorothy’s facile enthusiasms, which so often proved so beneficial to all concerned—and not least to himself at this present juncture. So he simply made an indeterminate, vaguely encouraging sound and seized the opportunity to escape.

  He approached his own landing feeling unsettled and apprehensive. Despite his boredom with the conversation, Dorothy’s words had sunk in—or some of them had. He was annoyed at being made to feel anxious about Rita again just when things were beginning to be not too bad; and he began fighting back against Dorothy’s unsettling insinuations before he’d even reached his flat.

  *

  So Rita felt scared, did she? What the hell did she think he felt, coming home evening after evening to this awful anomalous situation, the two of them living here together neither as lovers nor as enemies, neither friends nor strangers, and never knowing what to say, how to behave? It was enough to scare anybody!

  In default of anything more imaginative, he usually said, “Hello, my dear, how have you been today?” as soon as he got home, and then, while she told him, he would unload his briefcase, set out the papers on his desk, plan his work for the evening. Things were particularly busy in his department at this time of the year—in fact, “She would do it just now!” had been the very first thought that had flashed through his mind when he heard that she’d broken her neck. Flashed quite involuntarily, of course; people don’t choose their first reactions to shocks like this.

  “Hello, my dear, how have—” he was beginning, as usual; but this time Rita was ahead of him, interrupting, cutting across the safe little bit of routine he had so painfully managed to evolve. Very regal did she look, almost awe-inspiring, standing right in his path, straight and rigid in her plaster, like the statue of an Assyrian queen. So unexpected was the apparition, that it took him a few seconds to take in what she was saying, and a few more to realise that it was something to which he couldn’t just not listen.

  *

  It looked like good-bye to his evening’s work, anyway. It seemed that Rita had overheard bits of his colloquy with Dorothy on the stairs, and was wild to know the rest. What had they been saying about her? What had Dorothy been telling him? And while they ate the fish pie and baked potatoes that Dorothy had left in the oven for them, Adrian found himself cornered into satisfying her curiosity. It was against all his instincts to do so, and so he answered her questions as briefly as he could, and sulkily. It wasn’t that there was anything in that long-winded conversation with Dorothy that he considered worth hiding; it was just that it was all so tedious, and he was quite certain that at some point or other in the exchange Rita was going to start crying. He would find that he had said the wrong thing, insulted her in some complicated way, and the rest of the evening would have to be spent in sorting out the misunderstanding. A sort of weary boredom enveloped him, and he ate his baked potato almost without tasting it—not even bothering to split it open and put butter in. Usually (as dear old Dorothy well knew) he loved baked potatoes with butter; but this evening it seemed that he wasn’t to be allowed to enjoy even that.

  “Nothing much—I was simply asking her how you’d been today”—he stalled: but of course it was no use. Rita wasn’t a woman to be diverted from her purpose so easily, and the ensuing interchange was like being checkmated at chess. She drove him back and back, pouncing on his every evasion, parrying every change of subject, until at last there was no way to turn, and he was cornered, compelled, against all his instincts, into asking her what it was she’d meant when she told Dorothy she was “scared”?

  He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to hear a thing about it. This was exactly the sort of emo
tional confrontation he’d been trying to avoid all these days, but having been manoeuvred into asking the question, there was no way of not hearing the answer:

  “Well—wouldn’t anyone be scared?” retorted Rita, with a short laugh. “I mean, when someone has had one try at murdering you, you really can’t help wondering when and how the next try is coming. Can you?”

  Adrian gulped. He tried to count ten before answering, but only got as far as three.

  “You mean, then—you seriously mean—that all that stuff you told the newspapers was supposed to be true? You weren’t just in a state of shock when they interviewed you—not knowing what you were saying …?”

  “I was in a state of shock, all right….” A little smile played around the tip-tilted jaw-line atop the plaster. “Naturally I was. But I also knew what I was saying. I knew perfectly well. And it was true. That’s why I said it. I was pushed.”

  She waited, lips slightly parted, for Adrian to ask the next question she had lined up for him; and something in her air of greedy expectancy made him long not to ask it. But of course he had to.

  “Well, so who was it? Who do you think pushed you?”

  The smile glinting at him over the rim of the neck-brace was horrible. From this angle, it seemed as if it, too, was supported by plaster and criss-cross metal wires. You could see that what was being led up to was something she’d been looking forward to saying for days. He watched her savouring it, the delicate tip of her tongue lightly travelling around the curved bow of her pink lips.

  “Who? Now now, Adrian, darling, don’t let’s pretend! You know very well who it was. You can’t not know!”

  Adrian gritted his teeth.

  “You’ve been talking to Derek!” he accused her. “Well, as it happens, so have I! And let me tell you, Rita—”

  “To Derek? Oh, but darling, I wouldn’t listen to Derek! He’s half crazy with jealousy, so he can’t see anything straight. Would you believe it, the poor silly man insists it was you who pushed me! Did you ever hear such nonsense? When he said that, I just laughed out loud, the whole ward must have wondered what the joke was! No, darling, of course I know it wasn’t you! You haven’t got it in you. And besides, you love me….”