The Spider-Orchid Page 5

  “Who? Your grandmother?” Amelia looked across the table at the lined, yellowish face, the sparse grey hair, and her mind lurched over the unimaginable vista of years and of events that had gone into the making of this moment, here, in this kitchen…. “Your grandmother? When she was a girl? Why, that would be—” she hesitated, not wanting to be rude “—that would be—well—almost Victorian times, wouldn’t it?”

  “Victorian times? Oh, my dear, oh, bless you, yes! Way back in … now, let me see? My father was forty-one when … and so that brings us to … yes! It would have been back in the eighteen-fifties when my grandmother was growing up. Fifties and early sixties….”

  *

  Fifties and early sixties. The Fall of Sebastapol. The Charge of the Light Brigade. The shocking and blasphemous theories of Mr Charles Darwin, which the long-ago Amelia probably hadn’t been allowed even to mention! What had it felt like to be alive when all this was happening, was news, not history yet at all?

  *

  “You mean you’ve still got it—your grandmother’s diary? Oh, Dorothy, I’d love to see it—that is, if I may … if you’d let me!” Amelia burst out. “We’re doing the Factory Acts, you know, this term, and Lord Shaftesbury. I’d just love to know whether a little girl hearing about it at the time would have thought…”

  But Dorothy was hardly listening. Her eyes behind the thick lenses were shining, they had an almost greedy look, and Amelia realised that her request, far from seeming an impertinence, had for some reason been exactly what her companion had been waiting for. Had she even led the conversation in this direction deliberately, for some devious purpose of her own? Dorothy could be very devious, Amelia knew; but her motives were rarely hard to unravel if you just let her go on talking.

  The present occasion was no exception.

  “Amelia Ponsonby! That was her name!” she announced, with all the panache of a conjuror pulling the rabbit out of a hat; and when the present-day Amelia did not immediately react, she continued with undaunted showmanship (as the conjuror likewise has to when the children, who don’t know where rabbits live anyway, accept with whey-faced unsurprise the fact that they live in hats): “One of the Ponsonbys, you know: cousins to Lord Dacre….”—and then, lest anyone might accuse her of name-dropping, she hastily turned the thing into a bit of a joke:

  “Haristocracy, that’s me!” She patted her aproned bosom, and tittered a little. “True-blue Harristocracy! What d’you think of that? Married beneath her, my grandma did, and what with that, and my father being the kind of gentleman he was, always in debt, that kind of thing, well, by the time I came along he hadn’t a penny to bless himself with, and my mother had to take in Dressmaking and Alterations, and I went to the Board School like all the rest of the kids. Once in a while my father would find himself a job, but couldn’t seem to hold anything down. He finished up on the dole, queueing up at the Labour Exchange with the rest of them.

  “There was always something about him, though, my father, I remember him saying to me once, when he was quite an old man, ‘Dorothy,’ he said, ‘don’t ever forget who you are! It makes all the difference,’ he told me, ‘when they come to cut off the electricity, to know that you’ve got good blood in your veins. Really good blood. It kind of gives you the upper hand of them, while you sit there in the dark, and can’t even make a cup of tea.’ And in a way, you know, I could see what he meant, though I did wish, sometimes, that he could have kept off the gambling instead. That was what killed my poor mother in the end….”

  Amelia wriggled a little, and tried to decide if it would be rude to interrupt. She’d heard many times about Dorothy’s mother and the gambling debts and how they went to her lungs, poor soul. It was quite an interesting story, and Dorothy told it with an impassioned sense of the injustice of things which gave it all the flavour of a moral tale—though the moral, it must be admitted, was a confused one, to the effect (so far as Amelia could make out) that gambling is the most aristocratic of all the deadly sins; once a gentleman always a gentleman; and that dying wives shouldn’t scream about money out of the bedroom window, it lowers the tone.

  “The diary?” prompted Amelia, as soon as it seemed at all polite to do so; and Dorothy’s hand flew to her brow, in an elaborate pantomime of having forgotten all about it.

  Was Amelia sure she wanted to see it? Wouldn’t she get fed up with all those dead and gone people with all those long strings of names they used to go in for—The Lady Patricia Tyssen-Tucke who used to be such a regular visitor? The Honourable Mrs Moreton-Parkes, sister-in-law to the Duke of Connaught…? All the while she was protesting, Dorothy was edging her way to the door, past the big table, past the rocking-chair and the old-fashioned dresser.

  “I’ll be right back—you stay where you are,” she ordered, and, wiping her hands purposefully on her apron, she hurried out of the kitchen, her cumbersome backside quite wobbling with the urgency of it.

  She returned several minutes later with a stout leather volume with gilt clasps under one arm, and on the other…

  “Oh no, Dorothy!” Amelia cried, half-laughing. “Not again…!”

  A little sheepishly, Dorothy glanced down sidelong at the heavy, red-faced baby in the crook of her arm. She clicked her tongue at it, joggled it absently, then looked up to face Amelia.

  “Well, I know, dear, but what can you do? Brian’s back, you see, I heard Kathy crying as I came past their door, so I just peeked in, and there he was, sprawled out across the bed, rucksack and all, and his boots still on! The nerve of him! And after all these weeks without so much as a postcard, and poor Kath fit to break her heart over him! Still, it’s none of my business. She’s over the moon now, of course, she can’t stop crying, and I could see right away that Baby was never going to get any supper, not at that rate, he was yelling his head off, poor little mite, and neither of them taking a blind bit of notice! So I told Kathy, I said if she wanted I’d make up his bottle down here, just this once, so she can give her mind to the one thing at a time. Of course, I could see how it was: I reckon she’s scared that if she knocks off to feed the baby, that fellow of hers’ll be off again. You know how it is.”

  Amelia didn’t know, but was always ready to learn. With a certain distaste (because he looked damp) she allowed Dorothy to plump the baby in her lap, and then sat, clutching him inexpertly, while Dorothy busied herself at the cooker preparing the bottle.

  “You know, Dorothy,” she ventured after a minute or two, “you’re much too kind to everybody, you really are! All this babysitting for Kathy and Brian—they shouldn’t expect you to do it, it’s not fair. He’s their baby. They had him because they believed in freedom, and the Life Force, and the pulse of the universe, and all that sort of thing; but they never asked you what you believed in, did they? So why should you always be the one to give him his bottle?”

  Dorothy shook her head. Amelia’s logical mind always impressed her, but when a baby is hungry and his mother crying, and the chap with the rucksack mightn’t even be the father if all were known—well, in such a case warm milk seemed to Dorothy to be the obvious answer. She fitted the teat on to the bottle and reclaimed the baby from Amelia. No good offering to let her feed him, she was obviously ill at ease with the little creature. She just wasn’t a motherly sort of child, never had been. Dorothy could never remember her playing with dolls even when she was quite a little thing, when Mr Summers had first come to live here.

  And he was wet, it was quite true. Dorothy spread a folded towel over her black woollen skirt, and settling down with baby and bottle, her plump knees spread wide, she proceeded to give Amelia a brief run-through of her own theories about what was going on up there on the first floor, including a short but colourful resumé of what she, Dorothy, would tell that useless, big-headed oaf if she was in Kathy’s position.

  But there, what was the good of talking? “These young girls, they seem to have no fight in them, not like we used to have. I suppose it’s all these Health Foods they eat,
wheat-germ and that.”

  By the time her conversation with Dorothy was over, and she had returned upstairs, it was the hour—indeed past the hour—for Amelia to set off home. Her father stood, swinging the car-keys by one finger, while she rushed around the flat collecting her belongings and putting on her coat and scarf. Only at the last moment did Rita emerge from the bedroom to bid her good-bye, which she did in tones of such silky sweetness that Amelia felt stupid and awkward, and could not think how to reply.

  “G’bye,” she muttered to the floor at Rita’s feet; and during the drive home she wondered, for the first time in years, whether her father’s silence meant that he was cross with her? Usually, their silences were such companionable ones, betokening nothing more than the fact that they both felt more like thinking than talking; but this one was different, somehow.

  CHAPTER V

  MOTHERS OF COURSE, aren’t as easy to talk to as landladies. They are too frightened. Amelia had yet to learn that the only really satisfactory confidante for your troubles is someone who enjoys them, and this inevitably cuts out anyone who actually loves you. Particularly does it cut out your mother, who loves you very much indeed and therefore cannot possibly enjoy your troubles. She hates them, she is terrified of them, you’d have to be a sadist deliberately to impose them on her.

  Which is a pity, because of course mothers understand the way you are feeling better than anyone, they are bound to, they have so much more data to go on. Even quite stupid mothers, Amelia reflected (and Mummy wasn’t stupid at all), even stupid mothers have at their finger-tips more data about you than anyone else in the whole world. They have watched you eating, sleeping, sulking, laughing, being sick, showing off to visitors. They know every single kind of food you like and don’t like, and they know from your very footstep on the stairs whether you are going to do your practising properly or not. They have no letters after their names, but in their narrow and highly-specialised field—you—they are world experts, there is not a psychologist on earth who can touch them. A psychologist has had, at most, a seven-year training, comprising a variety of topics; and what is this in comparison with the thirteen years of non-stop specialised training to which Peggy had subjected herself in bringing up Amelia? Sitting up with her all night when she had croup; inventing a kind of rounders that could be played even with a sprained ankle; turning a painful visit to the dentist into an enchantment by sketching in the margin of Country Life caricatures of all the glum faces ranged around the waiting-room, and giving them titles like Lady Nose, and Madame Slippe-Showing, and Lord Wype-Specs—until Amelia was reduced to such giggles as to make the subsequent ordeal in the surgery something utterly trivial, leaving practically no mark on her memory at all.

  All this, and fires too. Blazing coal fires to come home to out of the wintry dusk. Tea with dripping-toast, buns … sympathy about the unfairness of the geography test. Pocket-money … Saturday shopping … summer frocks in new bright cotton rolling off Mummy’s sewing-machine into the long vista of summer time. Picnics, swimming, and long drinks of Mummy’s home-made lemonade, squeezed from real lemons, as you sat on the dry August lawn, the heat prickling your bottom through your thin summer pants.

  Mummy. Provider of all this. Provider, too, of a kitten, a tiny orange kitten, curled up on Amelia’s bed for a surprise, a few days after Daddy went away. A kitten that purred and purred, nuzzling its tiny pink nose against her giant forefinger in utter trust, as if it had known, all its tiny life long, that it was going to be Amelia’s kitten, and no one else’s.

  “Esben” she called it, because of the story of “Esben and the Witch”, in the Pink Fairy Book. Mummy re-read the story to her that same night, and Amelia had loved it, and the kitten, curled up on her lap, had loved it too.

  Fly quick, my little stick

  Carry me across the stream!

  sang Esben in the story; and only now, four years later, did Amelia recall that Mummy had been nearly crying the whole time. Mummy had tried very hard not to cry, Amelia remembered, throughout those first weeks, and Amelia had tried as best she could to help her, putting her arms round her neck, and bringing her cups of tea in bed, all slopped in the saucer. For Amelia herself, this had been a fairly happy time, but only because Mummy, in the teeth of everything, had forced it to be so: like a skilled gardener forcing strawberries out of season with the aid of artificial heat and light.

  Fly quick, my little stick,

  Carry me across the stream!

  —and across the stream they had been carried, Mummy guarding and watching over her every inch of the precarious way.

  Mummy. Mummy, guardian of the years, the gravitational centre of all that happened. Mummy, who loved her as no one else would ever love her again—how was it—how could it be?—that it was to Mummy alone that Amelia could not tell the story of her afternoon with Daddy and the girlfriend?

  She’d been able to tell it to Dorothy all right; tell her every thrilling detail, from Rita’s low-slung hairstyle to her pink, tapered finger-nails and her imitation-crocodile boots. Had told her, too (making them both laugh in the telling), how Rita had fidgeted about the room, pretending to be interested in Adrian’s books, pulling out first one and then another from the shelves in a silly, vacant sort of way, not a bit as if she wanted to read them, but rather as if she was trying to annoy them, to punish them for being beyond her, and for keeping secrets from her within their quiet covers.

  Mummy would have loved to hear all this, and would have laughed just as heartily as Dorothy did, and with a good deal more appreciation. She would have delighted, too, in Amelia’s account of the phone-call to Poor Derek, all about a chocolate-covered Swiss roll which someone had brought to Wimbledon as a present to someone else, and would now be mortally offended if it wasn’t taken round instantly (by Derek) to somewhere in Wood Green.

  “But, Derek, if you don’t take it today it’ll get stale!” Rita kept howling; and then, “But that’s not the same thing at all!” she shrieked, evidently in response to a suggestion of Derek’s that for a quarter the price of his petrol, the Someone in Wood Green could buy their own chocolate-covered Swiss roll.

  “Men!” Rita had exploded, slamming down the phone, and while Adrian continued to work on his report, she proceeded to explain the whole thing to him, including the price of chocolate-coated Swiss rolls at Tesco’s as compared with Marks and Spencer.

  “You wouldn’t have let me down like that, would you, darling?” she finished, folding her arms round Adrian’s neck from behind: and Adrian, his eyes still on his work, agreed absently and quite at random that No, of course he wouldn’t.

  “And I wish I could be there when he says ‘What chocolate-coated Swiss roll?’” Amelia would have finished her recital gaily; and Mummy would have loved it. They’d have laughed and laughed.

  Why, why, then, was it so difficult? So impossible, even? And yet it had been so easy with Dorothy—with anyone, in fact, except Mummy. Anyone else at all. The girls at school, for instance, there’d be no difficulty at all about telling them—though of course in this case she’d select from her material on a rather different basis. With them, she’d be borne along on their expectations as on an incoming tide, telling them the things they wanted to hear, throwing in facts and oddments of truth when and as convenient, but not allowing such items to take over too much and spoil the total effect.

  Yes, she would admit, with perhaps a little yawn, to show how blasé she was about the whole thing, yes, it is a bit of a responsibility being a stepdaughter. You know what stepmothers are, so inclined to be jealous and all that. The trouble is, you see, that they aren’t real blood-relations to your father the way you are, and of course they feel it, poor things. I have to be terribly careful not to let Daddy be too nice to me while she’s there. Gosh, you should have just seen the look on her face when he swung me up in his arms last time when I arrived…! I thought she’d have killed me…!

  That would be the line at school—nonchalant, detached,
and gently tolerant towards the problems of the poor tangled adults. Perhaps Mr Owen would be on playground duty, and would notice the little crowd gathering. “Why, it’s Amelia Summers!” he would say to himself, strolling a little nearer, “What a very popular girl she appears to be … I wonder what she is saying…?” And maybe he would stroll nearer still, catch snatches of her words. And then … maybe….

  *

  “Nothing much,” she heard herself saying sullenly in answer to one of her mother’s eager queries about the afternoon: and, “Not very,” was all she could think of to answer the anxious enquiry as to whether she’d thought Rita pretty.

  Was she nice? Did you like her? Can she cook? Was it a nice tea? Has she a job?

  Not very. Fairly. I don’t know. More or less. I didn’t ask her.

  The sulky monosyllables filled Amelia herself with shame, and a great sadness, yet somehow there was nothing she could do about it. Not a word of real information could be she bring herself to divulge.

  And it wasn’t a question of loyalty, not to either parent. Since the divorce, Daddy had made no secret of Rita’s association with him—if anything, he seemed rather to like the idea that people should know about it, as if it was a book he had published or something, whose success would be boosted by a bit of publicity.

  And as for Mummy, she’d known about Rita for ages—right from the very beginning, in fact, and it was years since she’d cried over it or gone around looking miserable. There was no doubt at all that, by now, Mummy would enjoy a good gossip about Rita—her hairstyle, her clothes, her table manners, her intellect, if any. Such a cosy, gossipy evening it could have been, with the drawing-room fire burning brightly, the copper bowl with the beech leaves in it dancing and flickering in the shadows like a second fire; and Esben giving the final touches to the scene by lying curled up on the hearthrug, a golden ball of satisfaction so absolute that it did not even need to purr. Such an evening it was for confidences, and laughter, and little, scandalous revelations.