The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

  Damn, damn, damn!

  CHAPTER XXI

  BUT AT LEAST, when he got home that evening, there had been no more footsteps—or, if there had, they were keeping them from him, thank goodness.

  Maybe it was cowardly of him, but he hadn’t gone straight up to the flat when he got in, but had slipped off down to the basement to have a word with Dorothy first. Not that Dorothy’s account of the day’s doings could be a hundred percent relied on—far from it. But then, that was the whole point of coming to her first. Whatever she told him, he’d know that at least it wasn’t as bad as that, and so would be able to go up and face the reality in the comforting knowledge that it could have been worse.

  That Dorothy’s report might prove to be wholly favourable, had simply never crossed his mind; and for a moment it quite threw him.

  Yes, Rita seemed a lot better today, Dorothy told him, glancing up from her copy of Vogue in an uncharacteristically off-hand manner. Yes, she’d managed to dress herself, and this afternoon had even gone out for a little walk. Yes, outside. In the street.

  “That’s good,” commented Adrian warily, and waited for Dorothy to tell him what had gone wrong. That the poor young thing had come back looking as white as a sheet? That Dorothy had had to help her up the steps and give her a drop of brandy to calm her nerves? That, in Dorothy’s opinion, the poor silly girl was rushing things too much, was overdoing it—this opinion, of course, being backed by appropriate anecdotes of the multifarious disasters which had befallen acquaintances of Dorothy’s who, over the years, had “overdone it” in various assorted ways after various assorted illnesses and mishaps?

  You should watch her, Mr Summers, see that she takes things a bit more slowly—he waited for Dorothy to admonish him thus darkly—and when she didn’t, he had a sense of disorientation.

  “You mean she managed to come down all those stairs by herself?” he asked—almost prompting Dorothy to restore normality by some doomful pronouncement on the probable outcome of the rash escapade. But all she said was, “Yes, she must have done, mustn’t she? Soon be quite herself again, won’t she, at this rate?”

  For a minute or two more, Adrian hung about in the doorway, unable to believe that this was really the end of the day’s news. It was like opening your morning paper and reading the headlines:

  “MILLIONS CROSS THE ROAD IN SAFETY”

  “DOCTOR SAYS THOUSANDS NOT SUFFERING FROM STRESS”

  Was Dorothy ill, he wondered? Or annoyed about something? And why wasn’t she urging him to sit down, to stay and chat for a minute, and to drink one of those awful mugs of tea? Admittedly, he nearly always refused, or else cursed himself for the waste of time if he accepted; but simply not to be asked was quite another matter. He stood for a few moments more, quite ridiculously hurt and put out; and then, because there seemed nothing else to do, he turned and made his way upstairs.

  *

  Rita must have been tired out by her unaccustomed exertions, because when Adrian came into the flat, everything was silent, and it seemed that she was asleep. Either that, or she was sulking—anyway, the bedroom door was shut, and there was no sound from behind it. For a few moments, Adrian stood, in deep thought: then, bracing himself, he decided to leave well alone, and went straight to his desk. He’d been longing for a chance to sort out the pile of stuff that had accumulated there during these last traumatic days, and this really seemed to be the moment he’d been waiting for. Of course, if Rita was only sulking, and was lying there listening to his every movement, then of course there’d be hell to pay; but a man has to take some risks, some of the time, if he is to salvage any life of his own at all. Besides, he could always say he’d thought she was asleep, and was afraid of disturbing her. And in any case, Dorothy would be up soon, organising some sort of a meal for them, and that would provide a diversion. He’d press Dorothy to stay and eat with them; you can’t really quarrel in a threesome—or, if you do, it is not nearly so painful. Someone, willy-nilly, becomes pig-in-the-middle, deflecting the sharpest of the blows from either direction.

  *

  But Dorothy didn’t come. The clock ticked; Adrian’s waste-paper basket gradually filled up with all those so-recently precious documents which had somehow become rubbish while no one was noticing; and still no sound came from the bedroom.

  He was growing hungry. Of course, there was no actual reason why Dorothy should cook their meal for them, evening after evening, but she’d been doing it for so many days now that Adrian found himself feeling really quite aggrieved at this sudden lapse.

  He thought of going into the kitchen and opening a tin of roast chicken, or something, but immediately realised that if he did this he would be more or less compelled to offer some to Rita. He would have to go into the bedroom, find out if she was hungry, sick, cross, better, worse, crying, sulking, remorseful, affectionate…. The intensity with which he didn’t want to know any of these things was like an illness; so he dismissed the idea of the tinned chicken, and went on with his sorting.

  *

  By eight o’clock, the waste-paper basket was full to overflowing, and Adrian went downstairs to empty it. He was surprised, as he went through the kitchen en route for the dustbins, that Dorothy, usually so eager for a chat with anyone at any time, hardly looked up; and when he reached the back door, he got another shock.

  The back door was locked. Locked!

  It was easy enough to unfasten; that wasn’t the problem. He lurched back into the kitchen like a man in shock.

  “Dorothy!” he exclaimed, “You’ve locked the back door! Whatever have you done that for?”

  Dorothy looked at him over the top of her gold-rimmed spectacles. There was a sort of smug, wary slyness about her. She pointed out, entirely reasonably, that it was Adrian himself who’d been urging her for years—ever since he came here, in fact—to do just this. Especially since the business of the squatters, he’d been going on at her about how she ought to lock the back door.

  And now she’d locked it. So what about it?

  What indeed? Everything she said was absolutely true, and incontrovertible. How could one set against such unexceptionable logic the awful sense of shock, of personal affront, which had assailed Adrian when he’d shoved at the door in the old, familiar relaxed way, and it hadn’t swung open for him?

  It was an absurd feeling! It was beyond all sense and reason! As Dorothy had just reminded him, it was he himself who had been telling her for years what a fool she was to leave the door unlocked. He’d even, after the episode of the squatters, had a key cut for her himself, and had muttered imprecations on her when he found that she’d just shoved the key to the back of the knife drawer, and never used it at all.

  Blithering old fool, he’d thought! Putting the whole household at risk with her damn carelessness!

  And so whence, now, came this overwhelming feeling that with the locking of the back door, some awful disintegration was beginning? That some vital centre of the house had suddenly fallen apart, leaving them all defenceless?

  It was this word “defenceless” coming into his mind that brought Adrian to his senses. For obviously, it is leaving doors unlocked that renders people defenceless, not the other way round. He pulled himself together, apologised to Dorothy, handsomely admitting the rightness of her arguments; and then, retracing his steps to the back door, he turned the key, still stiff and shiny with newness, and let himself out into the black, windy night. On his return, with the empty basket, he carefully re-locked the door and set off on his return journey—the first lap of which took him, of course, through the kitchen once again.

  Usually, he traversed this stretch of the terrain as rapidly as possible. It was a sort of race, actually, with Dorothy trying to capture his interest in what she was saying faster than he could get across the room and out through the further door. Sometimes, she succeeded, and then he would sigh, lean up against the door frame, and wait while she regaled him with the latest state of play between Kathy and Brian; or maybe
about the gas being cut off at Number Twenty-two up the road just when the old lady was sick with pneumonia, and when they’d come to turn it on again and say they were sorry the boy had said What old lady?—because of course being Australian he’d been out with his pals every single evening and didn’t know who was in the house and who wasn’t, you know what these Aussies are….

  Always, it would sound as if this was the climax of the story … or this … or this … but it never was. Always, there was more of the tale still to come. It was like mountain-climbing, with those further, higher peaks for ever appearing ahead just when you think you have reached the top….

  How boring it all was, he’d tell himself; how he longed for her to get to the end of the thing and release him!

  But tonight, the tables seemed to be well and thoroughly turned. He found himself actually missing her chatter; actually trying, inexpertly, to set her going again, as if she was a run-down machine.

  For it was unheard of for Dorothy to be like this! It was against nature! Something obstinate and pertinacious arose in Adrian, and he determined, precious though his time was, to stay down here and force things back into their normal course; to make Dorothy be herself again.

  How were the Brewers, he asked her, sitting himself down uninvited at the kitchen table? Had they managed to patch things up after leaving here? And what about the Harveys?—and Mrs Worsley??—and That Miss Evans?—mentioning at random the names of various ex-lodgers whose most intimate and private concerns had at various times over the past years hummed like gnats on summer evenings through this superbly well-documented kitchen.

  No. Nothing much. Not lately. I haven’t seen her.

  But Adrian was not to be put off by these discouraging and un-Dorothy-like replies. He tried again.

  How about the Squatters? Had she seen anything more of them? One of them, if he remembered rightly, had come back a few days after the great exodus to ask Dorothy if she’d seen anything of his leather cycling gloves, and had written out for her, with a stubby, almost illegible bit of pencil, an address to which they could be sent.

  At the mention of the Squatters, a faint quiver of response could be discerned in Dorothy’s slumped pose, and she exerted herself to remark that this was the third lot of builders that had come to look at the Squatters’ Flat, and these building firms, they’re all the same these days, you can’t count on them for anything.

  “They come and look at the place,” she complained, “and they say they’ll send in an estimate, and then that’s the last you hear of them! It’s beginning to get me down, Mr Summers, it really is! Sometimes I wonder why I’m running this place at all! All the work … and the worry … I sometimes wonder what I’m doing it all for.”

  This un-Dorothy-like sentiment could not be allowed to pass for one moment: Adrian fought for the return of her Dorothy-ness as if for his life.

  Of course there was a point in what she was doing, he assured her. Apart from anything else, didn’t she realise how important she was to them all?—how attached they all were to her? Why, he couldn’t imagine how any of them could manage without her at all. Look at all she’d been doing for him this last couple of weeks, looking after Rita so splendidly; he just didn’t know how he could have coped without her. And not just these last two weeks, either, she’d been marvellous all these four years, really she had; and look how fond Amelia was of her.

  He could see, by the end of his speech, that she was beginning to feel just a bit better—as who wouldn’t be under such a barrage of praise and appreciation?—and so he pressed on.

  “And Kathy, too,” he reminded her. “The way you look after that baby for her, and listen to all her troubles! The number of times I’ve found her down here, crying, and you cheering her up, and lending her packets of things, and taking messages for her boy friends …!”

  “Well, I do my best, I suppose,” said Dorothy, plainly a little bit mollified, but still glum. “And that’s another thing, Mr Summers! That Kathy! She hasn’t been down here for days! I don’t know what’s going on up there at all, I really don’t! You know that new boy friend of hers I’ve been seeing around—the one I told you about? You saw him yourself one time, remember, and you agreed with me that he seemed more the steady type? Well, it looks like he’s not her boy friend at all—not any more, anyhow! Isn’t it a shame? I saw him with my own eyes, I happened to be looking up through the banisters, and I saw him going out of the door with quite a different girl! Holding hands, they were, and slipping out as if they didn’t want anyone to know! A good-looker she was, I will say that, long blonde hair down to her waist—well nearly blonde—and lovely blue eyes! Determined-looking, too. She’ll get him, I said to myself; our Kathy’ll never stand a chance against that one! She’s not a fighter, Kathy’s not, that’s always been her trouble … she lets them walk all over her …”

  In vain did Adrian point out that Kathy’s relationship with this nameless boy might well have been a figment of Dorothy’s imagination right from the start. After all, Dorothy had never actually seen them together, had she? Well, then. Probably he and this girl were just a couple of friends of hers and Brian’s….

  At this, Dorothy’s face darkened.

  “Don’t talk to me about That Brian!” she commanded. “If it wasn’t for him, Kathy’d have found herself a nice, steady fellow long ago! If only he’d go away and stop away, not all this coming and going and messing her about! He knows she’s crazy about him, she’ll never turn him away no matter how he treats her, he knows that: though let me tell you, if I was a young girl like her, in her position, I mean….”

  With a leap of joy in his heart which quite startled him by its intensity, Adrian realised suddenly that the old Dorothy was back! Somehow, somewhere, during the course of this diatribe, she had quietly returned! Already, she was on her feet, putting the kettle on, while at the same time describing in colourful detail exactly what would by now have befallen That Brian if she, Dorothy, had been the lady in the case.

  And this time, Adrian drank his daunting mug of tea as if it was nectar, drank it right up, as a sort of small thank-offering to the gods for restoring Dorothy-ness to the world again.

  It was shortly after this that he noticed that it was ten o’clock already. Had they really been talking that long?—Rita would be furious! There was really no chance at all that she would still be asleep after all this time. Taking his leave of Dorothy—a good deal more warmly than usual because of his gratitude to her for being herself after her brief but alarming abdication from the rôle —he sped off upstairs. He noticed, as he went, how very quiet the house seemed to be tonight. The ground-floor flat, naturally, was quiet, for there was as yet no one in it; but so too, when he reached that landing, was Kathy’s. No crooning from the radio—no crying baby—no voices raised in argument or laughter. His own flat, too, when he walked into it, was absolutely silent; and this time he really was puzzled. Surely Rita couldn’t still be asleep—or, alternatively, still sullenly lying there, waiting for him to make the first move? He strode swiftly to the bedroom and flung open the door.

  *

  It was empty. The bed, though rumpled and unmade, had obviously been empty for some time. It was quite cold. And on one of the pillows lay what he was by now naturally looking for—a note.

  I can’t stand another night of this, [he read] the constant terror, the constant listening for footsteps—and so I am going away. I am in danger here. I know you don’t believe it, Adrian, because you don’t want to believe it, but your daughter intends to kill me. Each night she grows more daring—I dare not stay here any longer.

  I know, Adrian, what you are thinking. You are thinking that I’m deluded, that Amelia can’t be creeping about the flat at night because she’s away at Seaford with her mother.

  But is she? How do you know? Have you heard from her? Or from her mother? How do you know that they ever went away at all?

  I sometimes wonder, Adrian, whether you know anything about anybody! That�
��s the trouble with being as selfish as you are—you never think about other people, and so of course you never learn anything about them. So you end up not knowing anything at all, about any of us.

  Rita.

  CHAPTER XXII

  SHEER, INCREDULOUS RELIEF at first blotted out all other considerations.

  She was gone! She was actually gone! Such luck, so soon, had been beyond his wildest dreams. Crumpling the note into a tight ball, he tossed it into the air for the sheer joy of it, and batted it with the flat of his hand into the newly-emptied waste-paper basket.

  It landed dead centre. Perfect! He laughed aloud, and flung himself full-length on the spacious, unmade bed, his own again at last!

  Freedom! Freedom! At last, after all these weeks, the bed was his, the flat was his. His very life was his own again, to live exactly as he chose. It was like being let out of prison, it was like recovering from a long illness—and with the Easter weekend just coming up too, so that on top of all this freedom, he would be having a holiday as well.

  Tomorrow was Good Friday. It would be succeeded by Saturday, Sunday and Monday, all official holidays. For four whole days he would not have to drive to work, to keep his temper, to suffer fools, to agree with nonsense, or to consider anyone’s convenience at all except his own! Just as some men need to go on the bottle every so often in order to get a break from ordinary life and ordinary civilised behaviour, so did Adrian need an occasional orgy of pure, uncomplicated solitude. With four whole days ahead of him, he could go on a real bender, going to bed when he liked, getting up when he liked, reading all night with the light on and no one to complain about it. Reading all day, too, if he chose, without anyone saying, “But I thought you said that after lunch we were going to …?” He could do what he liked without anyone arguing; he could think what he liked without anyone saying “You mean you don’t love me?”