The Spider-Orchid Read online

  *

  They do, that is, if only people will let them, and not go on and on and on about them. It seemed to Adrian that the whole of the rest of the evening, after Amelia’s departure, was filled with Rita’s voice—actually, physically filled with it, the way whole valleys can be filled with the sound of a waterfall.

  “… and after all I’ve done for the miserable little creature, trying to make her look a little bit less hideous for your sake—and now what sort of thanks do I get? ‘Don’t touch her!’ you screech at me! D’you think I’ve got death-ray fingers, or something? Do I sting, like a scorpion? Or is it something more like leprosy I’ve got? Are you thinking that by my very presence I shall pollute your pure, innocent little daughter?

  “Let me tell you something, Adrian: that sly, mealy-mouthed little Miss Innocent of yours wouldn’t half take some polluting! She has a mind like a cesspool! That foul-mouthed old hag downstairs has done her work well—didn’t I warn you? Unless, of course, your darling daughter’s filthy mind is—what’s the word?—like you were saying about short sight?—Genetic! That’s it. Unless it’s genetic….”

  Adrian’s pretence of not listening could be maintained no longer.

  “Rita! Shut up! Stop it! Don’t you dare tell me …”

  “Tell you? My dear Adrian, I wouldn’t waste the breath! You don’t listen. You’ve trained yourself for years not to listen—pity there’s not a degree in it!

  “But don’t worry, Adrian dear: although you can’t listen, you can read—that you’ve made evident enough, evening after evening! And so if you’d rather read the evidence I’ve collected for you than listen to it, then read it you shall! Here—” she bent, and began scrabbling in the basket that stood by her chair “—here, let me show you what I found….”

  CHAPTER XIII

  AMELIA, MEANTIME, WAS toying sulkily with the Sunday supper Peggy had cooked—chips, beans and bacon, usually firm favourites. But this time, she was finding it heavy going. She had no appetite; and the conversation, too, was laborious.

  “All right” and “Nothing much” were all she had so far found to say about the terrible and dramatic afternoon: and it was lucky that Peggy was by now so used to these laconic, not to say downright rude, responses to her Sunday evening questions, that she attached little significance to them, and probed the matter no further.

  Which was a mercy; for nothing in the world would have induced Amelia to reveal to anyone at all—least of all to her mother—that awful scene of her father’s humiliation.

  For that was how she saw it. It wasn’t his irrational display of rage—incomprehensible though she had found it—which made her feel ashamed for him; rather, it was the lies which had followed.

  Not that Amelia was against lying in principle. She had read J. S. Mill on the subject, and extracts from G. E. Moore, and was inclined to agree with these authors that lying and not lying are largely matters of social convention; and this was what Daddy had seemed to think, too, when she’d discussed it with him one afternoon.

  So it was not the fact of his lying to her that had hurt, but rather his helpless, despairing air of having been driven to it. He was lying not voluntarily, and of set purpose, but under some awful compulsion. Her strong, self-sufficient, imperturbable father was suddenly diminished in her eyes, it was as if some power had gone out of him. For the first time in her life, she found herself having to feel sorry for him.

  No, not for the first time; and this, in a way, was what made the thing so awful. For years it had been quite forgotten, but now it came back to her, how, long long ago, when she’d been a very little girl, before Daddy had left home, she’d sometimes had this very same feeling about him, only of course then she’d had no power to analyse it. Mummy, somehow, had been at the back of it then: and now—in sudden fury, she knew this for absolute certain—now it was Rita! The moment she’d got home this evening—to her mother’s bewilderment—she’s rushed up to the bathroom and doused her pretty, floating, newly-washed hair under gallons and gallons of cold water, and then dried it in the old, bad way, in front of the electric fire, leaning so close that she almost scorched her scalp. By the time she came down to supper, it was pretty no longer, just the familiar old rats’ tails, but at least Rita had been washed out of it for good. As to the nail-polish, there was no need to do anything; it had been so smudged and messed about during the commotion caused by Daddy’s dramatic entrance that there was nothing left to be removed.

  *

  “No, we didn’t do anything much,” she answered her mother. “I just read, and did my homework. I’ve still got some left, actually. Quite a lot.”

  “You managed to find out the history questions, did you, when you went to Daphne’s this morning?” Peggy enquired conversationally—and then, suddenly reminded, she abruptly interrupted herself: “Oh, and Amelia, how did you contrive not to see the message I left you? The message from Daddy, I mean, saying to wait here for him this afternoon, and he’d pick you up? He was furious when he found you weren’t here, he thought I’d forgotten to give you the message. But I hadn’t; I’d written it down specially, in huge black writing, and left it propped against the telephone when I went over to Granny’s. I don’t know how you could have missed it.”

  Amelia didn’t know either; but she was glad of the change of subject, even though it was taking the form of a scolding.

  “I suppose I was in rather a rush,” she apologised vaguely; but already a little smile was beginning to play around her lips at the recollection.

  For she hadn’t been in a rush at all, actually. She’d been in a trance of rapture. For at Daphne’s she’d learned not only what she’d gone to find out—the history questions set for the weekend’s homework—but also a piece of wonderful incredible news, almost like something out of a fairy tale. Early next term—round about the middle of May—Mr Owen was to take a school party to visit Keats’s house in Hampstead. The list would be going round, Daphne had heard, this very next Monday, for people to put their names down if they wanted to go….

  *

  Amelia had walked home in a daze of ecstasy, nine-tenths of her being already posed romantically underneath the mulberry tree in front of Keats’s house, with Mr Owen improbably allowing the whole party to be kept waiting while Amelia Summers recited the Ode to the Nightingale, word perfect, from beginning to end.

  “Woonderful!” he would murmur, his deep north-country voice tremulous with admiration; and as she stood, her eyes modestly downcast to receive her applause, a few petals of the pink blossom would float down and settle on her shoulders and her hair. Somewhere on the Heath, a cuckoo would be calling….

  It was little wonder that no mere telephone message, however urgent, had been able to make any sort of a dent in these visions.

  “I’m sorry, Mummy, I suppose I ought to have looked,” said Amelia absently; and gathering up her belongings, she drifted upstairs to finish her homework.

  “Finish”, actually, was something of a euphemism. As a result of all the upheavals of the afternoon, there was almost all of it still to do. Dumping her school bag on the bed, Amelia proceeded to extract from it the books she would need.

  *

  Groundwork of British History, and the file of notes that went with it. Chambers’ Second Year Algebra. North and Hillard’s Latin Prose Composition … and it was only now, with the bag almost half empty, that Amelia suddenly became aware, with a horrible lurching of the stomach, that something was missing.

  Her diary! Her own private, utterly secret diary! It was gone!

  Once, twice, she scrabbled frantically through the remaining books and papers. In desperation, she tipped the whole thing upside down on her bed, biscuit-crumbs and all, and searched the pile over and over again, throwing exercise-books to left and right in her growing panic.

  It must be here! It must!

  But it wasn’t. Trying desperately to control the blind horror that was rising within her, Amelia paused and forced herself to t
hink, quietly and objectively, of what could possibly have happened.

  That the diary had been in her bag with the rest of her books when she left home, she had not the smallest doubt. She carried it with her everywhere, partly for safety’s sake, and partly because she never knew when some gem of thought worthy of immortality might not strike her. And today in particular, she remembered carefully checking that it was in the bag, because there was all this wonderful news to write in it about the outing with Mr Owen, and all the afternoon at her father’s in which to concentrate on it. Or so she had confidently expected; but of course, the way things had turned out, with all the unwonted alarms and disruptions, she hadn’t had a minute even to think about it.

  So what had happened? With fearful concentration, Amelia tried to reconstruct the events of the afternoon since she’d first arrived at the flat to find her father not there.

  *

  She’d dumped her school bag on the floor, unopened, she was sure of that. It had been there at her side all the time she’d been having that unsatisfactory conversation with Rita. And then—yes, that was what had happened next—she’d rushed down to Dorothy’s without giving it another thought, leaving it where it lay.

  And then …? And then …? After talking to Dorothy for a while, she’d come up from the basement as far as the entrance hall … she’d encountered Kathy and the baby on the front steps, had chatted for a minute or two, and then had hung around in the street, watching for Daddy’s car. After a while, she’d given it up, and had gone back upstairs to the flat, and straightaway the hair-washing business had started, and the nail-varnishing—in the midst of which Daddy had burst in, all hell had broken loose, and certainly—certainly—from then on, there hadn’t been a moment when she could even have thought of unpacking her homework.

  The school bag, then, had been standing untouched and unopened the entire afternoon, and, still unopened, she had picked it up at the end of her visit and taken it home.

  The diary couldn’t be gone.

  The diary was gone.

  And now, at long last, a slow and terrible comprehension began to take shape in her mind.

  She sat on the edge of her bed absolutely frozen, unable to move.

  CHAPTER XIV

  “BUT, RITA, IT’S all just a load of nonsense! You aren’t actually taking it seriously, are you? You can’t be!”

  While he spoke, Adrian was rapidly scanning the black, untidy scrawl that Rita had thrust in front of his eyes. It had obviously been written at top speed, without pause for consideration, judgement, or even legibility.

  As soon as the bell went [he read] I saw Mr Owen coming out of the staff-room entrance, and he walked straight towards me across the playground. “May I carry your books, Amelia?” he asked softly, in that deep, wonderful voice of his; and together we passed through the school gates and strolled down in the direction of the river. How the other girls stared! I smiled at them, and gave Daphne a little wave, but Mr Owen had no eyes for anyone but me.

  The willows were green with the first green of spring, and on the river the swans glided, keeping pace with us as we strolled along, as though they, too, would have liked to share our love, coming as close to it as they dared.

  “As the swan in the evening moves over the lake …” quoted Mr Owen in a low, throbbing voice, and I felt the vibrations of it all through me, like a thousand violins.

  “Shall we sit down?” he said presently; and there, under the budding willows, he put his arm round me and bent to give me my very first kiss.

  Oh, how can I describe it? What words are there in the whole of the English language…?

  None, apparently, because in the very next sentence (Adrian noted) the kiss is already safely over, and the couple are lying down, side by side, in the deep grass:

  His arm came round me in a grip of passion, it was so strong and yet so gentle … I thought I would die of happiness, right there in the spring sunshine.

  “I love you, Amelia,” he murmured, in that wonderful deep voice of his, “I’ve loved you ever since I first saw you, sitting in that second desk of the third row … but I could do nothing … I dared not speak. But now that my wife has left me for Another, and you and I are at last together, far beyond the imprisoning school walls, may I ask you … may I hope…?”

  What Mr Owen was to be permitted to ask or to hope must for ever remain unknown, for a great smear of ink intervened here as if the book had been slammed shut in a hurry; and when the text became legible again, the happy pair are in a forest, at nightfall, and Mr Owen (with a resourcefulness surely unusual in the average I.L.E.A. employee?) is building a little hut from twigs and grass, roofed with interwoven branches, and inside Amelia is preparing a bed of leaves and moss on which (presumably) the two of them are to spend the night. Mr Owen has lit a camp-fire, too—“The smoke of it went coiling to the topmost trees”—and here they roasted beech-huts and crab-apples and recited to one another all the poems that Amelia knew by heart, pages and pages of them, including the whole of the “Ancient Mariner” as far as the bit where the Two Voices come in, and it gets boring. In the course of this recital (and no wonder, reflected Adrian, flicking over the pages with his forefinger) night fell and the stars came out. Mr Owen’s arm came round Amelia yet again, and he gave her another of those kisses for which there are no words. They roasted yet more beech-nuts, recited yet more poetry, fetched more sticks from the darkling forest, and Mr Owen’s powerful features shone like gold in the light of the flickering flames. They did everything, in fact, except actually go inside that hut where the bed of moss and leaves awaited them—and then all at once, at the turning-over of a page, and without any warning at all, it is already morning, and here they are catching fish for breakfast at a crystal stream while the first rays of the rising sun strike through the trees….

  *

  At this point, Adrian actually laughed aloud. Rita snatched the book from his hands, scowling.

  “So it’s funny, is it?” she demanded. “Funny-ha-ha, I suppose? Well, funny-peculiar is what I’d call it! Very peculiar indeed—for a married man in a responsible job, and the child only thirteen! I wonder if the headmistress would find it quite so funny if you were to show her—”

  Adrian laughed again.

  “My dear Rita! Don’t be so idiotic! No headmistress in her senses would give a second look at such stuff! Can’t you see it’s fantasy from beginning to end? Well—not quite from the beginning —these first pages are dear old reality all right, I’d know it anywhere! Listen—”

  Mr Owen has not marked our homework yet, so I still don’t know if my essay will be one of the ones he reads aloud. I shan’t know till Monday!!! Oh, doom, doom! How can I live through the whole weekend….

  That has the unmistakable ring of truth, wouldn’t you say? Or how about this?—

  Mr Owen walked past the netball courts this afternoon, and I missed a goal trying to see whether he was watching me or not. Alas he wasn’t; or perhaps on second thoughts not alas, since I made such a very boss-shot. I’d like to get marvellous at netball, so that the next time he will stop, and watch me shoot a super goal.

  Resolution: I’m not going to miss any more netball practises ever again, not even when it’s Miss Dodds taking them.

  Signed,

  Amelia J. Summers.

  “See what I mean?” Adrian’s eyes lingered smilingly on the painstaking little non-event recorded for all posterity in his daughter’s slapdash hand. “Don’t you see what’s happened, Rita? The poor kid got sick of all this “Mr Owen wasn’t …” “Mr Owen didn’t …” sort of stuff, and thought she’d see if she couldn’t improve on it a bit. Can you blame her?”

  He smiled again, caressingly, as he re-read the passage; and when Rita remained ominously silent, he continued:

  “Honestly, darling, kids do this sort of thing! It’s nothing to get worked up about!”

  At this, Rita’s whole body grew tense and taut, as if preparing for a spring. She whipped
the volume from Adrian’s hand and flicked forward through the pages with the confidence of one to whom the contents were thoroughly familiar.

  “Listen to this!” she said, between clenched teeth:

  His arms tightened about me, and the poppies were great scarlet moons above us. Ecstasies beyond words throbbed between us, and our souls drank the nectar of the Gods.

  “Well, Daddy-dear, doesn’t that make you wonder whether your innocent little virgin-child may not know just a teeny bit more about the details than she should?”

  “Well, of course she knows! They all do, these days. She reads novels, magazine articles. For all I know, she may have read the whole of Havelock Ellis, and Alex Comfort into the bargain. And in any case, they have these sex talks and stuff at school from the age of nine or thereabouts; she’d have to be a moron not to know most of the facts by now. But, Rita, no matter how many facts she may know, this—here”—he jabbed at the page with his thumb—“this is nevertheless fantasy. Well, look at it! Use your sense. Look at what she’s actually written! All this strolling down towards the river, for a start. Hasn’t it occurred to you that there isn’t a river within miles of the school, let alone one with swans on it? And then all this about the poppies: see the date? March 12th! When have you ever seen poppies flowering in March?”

  “When have you ever seen poppies flowering in March!” mimicked Rita. “Darling, you sound just exactly like Derek! I might have guessed you’d be more interested in the time of year poppies come out than in whether your daughter is a whore or not…! All right, Adrian, laugh if you like, but it’s my opinion that the whole thing should be reported to the headmistress immediately, if only for the sake of the other girls who have anything to do with this Mr Owen! I think you should ring her up straightaway tomorrow morning and tell her that …”