The Spider-Orchid Read online

  But people of a literary turn of mind seemed to be thin on the ground that afternoon, no one looked at her at all. And though a number of men strolled past, some of them heavily-built and with shoulders hunched in thought, none of them were Mr Owen. Many of them were with their wives and families—and with sudden horror it occurred to Amelia that Mr Owen might have children, too! This was somehow far, far worse than a wife, it was unthinkable, and so Amelia stopped thinking about it.

  Anyway, Daphne would be sure to have said if he had; she’d never have missed out on a tit-bit of news like that.

  *

  It was cold by the time they left the bluebell wood, the sun had begun to go down, and Amelia, who had refused to wear her thick winter coat because the collar of it got in the way of her hair swinging properly, was beginning to shiver. The strollers became fewer and fewer; Daddy was bored; Rita had turned silent. Amelia found herself weighed down by a growing certainty that the whole expedition was a failure; Mr Owen just wasn’t here.

  A little dispute blew up about tea. Rita wanted to have it here, in the tea-rooms; Adrian, huddled deep into his coat collar, wanted to go home, and soon. Amelia—who was quite as cold as her father, but had a superstitious feeling that if she suffered enough then the Fates might relent and make Mr Owen appear—took Rita’s part, and they trailed back to the tea-rooms, only to find them closed.

  “Went to Kew Gardens this afternoon. Mr Owen wasn’t there.”

  Biro in hand, Amelia stared down at this bald, depressing little record of the day’s non-event. How flat it was—how disappointing!—and as she re-read it, she became aware of something akin to rebellion arising in her soul. She was noticing now, for the first time, the horrid similarities between her own diary and that of her namesake more than a century ago:

  Mr B. did not look in the direction of our pew this morning!

  Walked with Hester and Miss O. into the village, and back and forth in front of the School several times, but still Mr B. did not appear….

  To think that after all these generations of progress, it was all just as difficult as ever! In spite of Permissiveness, and the Sexual Revolution and everything, nothing had changed!

  It was ridiculous! It was humiliating! It wasn’t to be borne!

  “Mr Owen wasn’t there,” indeed!

  All at once, Amelia caught her breath; her eyes widened, and she stared unseeingly at the wall in front of her.

  Then, bending once more over the sparsely-filled page, she began to write.

  And write, and write, and write. She stopped only for tea, and for the drive home in the car; and that night, long after she should have been asleep, she was still sitting up in bed, writing, writing, writing.

  CHAPTER IX

  “ME and RITA, do you mean?” asked Adrian uneasily. Motioning his secretary to withdraw, he then pressed the receiver closer to his ear to make sure he had heard Derek Langley’s invitation aright. “Both of us—or did you just mean …?”

  “I meant just you, Adrian, as a matter of fact,” replied Derek, a little diffidently. “The second person plural in English often injects an element of embarrassment into these otherwise uncomplicated negotiations, does it not? In my opinion, we should have retained the ‘thou’ of earlier times specifically for use on this type of occasion. As it is, a certain crudity is forced upon me, in saying, in so many words, ‘No, I don’t want you to bring your mistress to dinner with me’—and yet this is what the deficiencies of our Anglo-Saxon tongue compels me to say. So perhaps you’ll allow me to go back to the beginning, and repeat my invitation in the more gracious style of an earlier age? Wilt thou, Adrian, come on Friday the seventeenth, at about six-fifteen, to partake of a modest meal such as a recently-abandoned husband may find himself able to provide? Perhaps, on some future occasion, I shall have the pleasure of entertaining you and my wife together, but just at this particular juncture, I feel it would be best if you and I could have a word or two privately. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  A word or two. The phrase rarely means that the words are going to be pleasant ones, let alone that the number of them will not exceed two. A word or two about what, anyway?

  The divorce, naturally. Adrian felt the beginnings of panic. He had a wild, totally unreasonable urge to cry out, “For God’s sake, why me? It’s none of my business!”—but of course this was such nonsense that he himself wondered that a sane and intelligent man could even have formulated the thought.

  Because, of course, it was his business—more his business than anybody’s. He, Adrian, was the prime cause of the whole damn mess-up—the whole realignment of their relationships on a more realistic basis, he hastily corrected himself. It was he, and no one else, who four years ago had fallen in love with Rita, had seduced her, and had put into her receptive little head the idea of actually leaving the husband whom she had hitherto been content to complain about in her soft, non-stop little voice. Sometimes, looking back, Adrian wondered if he hadn’t fallen in love with Derek’s failings before he’d fallen in love with Rita herself. It does something for a man’s ego to hear from a pretty woman about all the things another man can’t do in bed, about the holidays he hasn’t taken her on, the presents he hasn’t given her, the words of love he’s never murmured. Adrian had straightaway bought her a gold bracelet, told her he loved her, and taken her on holiday to Ibiza; and though she’d been ill with cystitis most of the time, and the hotel had cost more than twice as much as the brochure had indicated, and Peggy had found out about the whole escapade absolutely immediately, nevertheless it had still made Adrian feel no end of a fellow. Of course, Peggy didn’t know about the cystitis, and Adrian was damned if he’d ever tell her about that; and the tears, the jealousy, and the sudden, belated passion she’d evinced on his return had seemed like the warmest welcome he’d received in years, and had gone far to soothe his bruised marital ego. He might be no great shakes at Ludo or at reading bedtime stories, but to be able to strut around for a season as the Casanova of Acacia Drive had temporarily quite made up for being such a rotten father all these years, and such a difficult, crotchety husband. He began to feel like a new man, neither difficult nor crotchety, and not forty-three, either.

  It was a wonderful feeling, he wanted to hang on to it for ever; and of course Rita came as part of the package. Was the package, he’d hastily corrected himself; and after spending a couple more weekends with her—she was quite recovered by now—and taking her out to dinner and the theatre half a dozen times, he felt himself to be really in love. As, indeed, who wouldn’t be, watching other men’s heads turn in envy as he walked into restaurants with such a girl on his arm? Waiters greeted him as if he was a king, ushering him to the best tables, pulling chairs back with a flourish, and all because he had the Queen with him. Not the beauty queen, perhaps, but the Queen of whatever it is that makes this sort of thing happen.

  And Rita never let him down. Always, when he took her out, she was flawlessly groomed, elegantly and expensively dressed on Derek’s not inconsiderable salary, her face and hair aglow with skilled attention. She looked ravishing, and not a bit like Peggy, with her unadventurous perm and her “Should I wear my blue, Adrian, or my beige with the lace insets?” As the weeks went by Adrian, drunk with pride, became indiscreet to the point of lunacy, showing Rita off here, there and everywhere; to friends, colleagues, even neighbours; taking her deliberately to pubs and restaurants where they were bound to be recognised.

  And in the end, it was all these friends and colleagues and acquaintances who, despite their mild and generalised disapproval, finally pushed him to the point of divorce. “What a smasher!” he could almost hear them thinking as he sailed with Rita through revolving doors and across lush carpets. “Fancy—old Adrian! Didn’t know he had it in him!” And after a few weeks of this sort of thing, it dawned on him that any idea of dropping Rita had by now become absolutely untenable. The prospect of being seen, next time, with Peggy, in either her blue or her beige with the lace insets, was on
e which he simply could not contemplate: and indeed, why should he, Peggy being as snappy and ill-natured as she’d become of late?

  Besides, he loved Rita. He really did. He loved the way she picked delicately and yet greedily at her food. He loved the slow way she’d lift those heavy eyelashes of hers and look at him long and thoughtfully before saying, “You choose, darling”, when offered a choice of wines. She knew nothing about wines, any more than she knew anything about petroleum, or world affairs, or music, or even about holiday resorts or detective stories; but she had this lovely way of pausing, as if in deep thought, before saying No, I’ve never been there, no, I’ve never seen that, no, I don’t read those kind of books, no, I’ve never heard of him. And after each of these admissions she’d give a sweet, enquiring little smile, one eyebrow lilting delicately upwards, as if the one thing she’d been waiting for all her life was for Adrian to tell her all about it, whatever it was.

  “Do explain to me, darling, exactly what you do at this petroleum place,” she’d say, and then sit gazing deep, deep into his eyes while he explained, and she didn’t listen to one single word.

  In fact, she was lovely. And if he ever should want a real, actual conversation with her, there was always the subject of Derek, and how he lost his erection every time the phone went, and left the cups and glasses upside down on the draining-board collecting smears, instead of drying them and putting them away at once.

  You wouldn’t do that, would you, darling, the huge, trusting eyes seemed to say; and, No, of course I wouldn’t, his bemused smile would answer, dazzled and inattentive.

  Wouldn’t what? Luckily, she never asked. In those days, it wasn’t her way to set this sort of trap for him, this was one of the nice things about her. Or else it was that she’d forgotten herself what it was they were talking about, her fluttering mind having already settled upon something else. Hell, what did it matter which it was? He loved her fluttering mind, so different from his own—not to mention from Peggy’s, with its awful ability to remember word for word exactly what he’d said he was going to do last Wednesday week, and to compare it with what he now said he had done. He didn’t like minds like that, not in women, anyway, unless, that is, the woman in question happened to be employed by him, in which case such a mind was of course essential.

  And if, as that first wonderful autumn and winter went by, Rita’s mind began to flutter just a little bit less, and even to show on occasion traces of a talent in no way inferior to Peggy’s own for quoting back at him, word for word, exactly what he’d said in some quite different context weeks and weeks ago—well, by this time everything was amply compensated for by the fact that he was now having regular sex with her, sometimes at her place when Derek was out, and sometimes at his when Peggy was. The sessions at the Langleys’ home in Wimbledon were slightly marred, from Adrian’s point of view, by Rita’s rather complicated brand of loyalty to her husband, which involved things like not drinking whisky out of the proper glasses, and Adrian’s not lying on Derek’s side of the double bed. It so happened that Adrian always preferred to have the woman on his left to start off with, so that his right arm could encircle her, and on the non-Derek side of the bed this manoeuvre became awkward if not impossible. It was the more annoying because, by all accounts, Derek didn’t go in for much encircling at all, just in and out, Rita complained, and not even that if the telephone happened to ring.

  At Adrian’s home, on the other hand, there were other hazards, the chief one being his own constant dread that Peggy might walk in—or, even worse, Amelia. The fear was quite unrealistic; Amelia was at school, and Peggy (he always made one hundred per cent sure of this) safely spending the afternoon at her mother’s, or at her pottery class, or some such activity of pre-arranged and inescapable duration. It was not that he suspected that Peggy might deliberately slip back and catch him unawares; such a trick would be quite alien to her character. Nor, when he really thought about it, did he seriously imagine that the pottery kiln might blow up, or his mother-in-law drop dead, or Amelia’s school catch fire, necessitating a headlong and unforeseeable return home on the part of one or other of them in the early afternoon. As a scientist, he could see that the chances against any of these happenings were little short of astronomical. All the same, somewhere free-floating within this adult, rational brain of his still dwelt a child similar to that case-history little boy who wouldn’t go to bed because he was frightened of witches.

  “But witches aren’t real, dear,” the wise adults pointed out, to which the child replied: “It isn’t a real witch that I’m frightened of.”

  This was exactly how Adrian felt. He knew that neither Peggy nor Amelia was going to walk in on him at half past two in the afternoon, but the picture of them doing so never left him.

  Still, in spite of these drawbacks, it was all very enjoyable, even marvellous sometimes. As far as Adrian was concerned it could have gone on like this for ever, if Peggy hadn’t suddenly, and without any warning, declared that she couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Stand what?” had been Adrian’s first astonished reaction—and his amazement had been genuine. So accustomed had he become to the routine of the thing that for the moment he’d completely forgotten that Peggy wasn’t similarly accustomed; wasn’t, indeed, supposed to know about it at all.

  *

  With an effort, Adrian forced his attention back to the present. Derek’s voice was still going on and on down the telephone, explaining, in meticulous and utterly unnecessary detail, exactly how to get to Wimbledon, and about the one-way system which meant that you had to enter Winthrop Drive from the bottom end. Adrian had, of course, traversed the route in question something like a hundred times in the course of his affair with Rita, and for this very reason found it impossible to interrupt. Even to hint to his prospective host that he did not need all these directions seemed like the grossest piece of tactlessness, almost a breach of hospitality; and so he had to let the flow of superfluous information go on and on; and at dictation speed, too, so that he could pretend to be noting it down.

  What a farce! Did Derek really imagine that the affair had never at any stage spread its tentacles as far as Wimbledon? Or was he, perhaps, going into all this rigmarole on purpose, out of some quiet, scholarly devilment of his own? There was no way of telling, nor of cutting short any part of the tedious pantomime. By the time it came to an end, Adrian’s lips were quite dry with making little noises of assent and attentive co-operation.

  “Friday the seventeenth, then,” Derek finally repeated, in a tone indicating that he was at last bringing the thing to a conclusion, and with suitable expressions of gratitude, Adrian thankfully hung up; and having made a hasty note of the thing in his diary, he turned his attention back to his work.

  *

  At the time, nothing further in the way of preparation seemed to be necessary; but he found later that he had been guilty of a small but unfortunate oversight. Whether because of exceptional pressure of work that week, or whether it was some more subtle species of forgetfulness, it somehow came about that he omitted to tell Rita anything about the invitation at all, either that evening or the next. By the time Friday morning had come, and he still hadn’t mentioned it to her, it really seemed like asking for trouble to do so, particularly since they’d had a row only the evening before, and were still barely recovered from it.

  It had been about Rita’s oval mirror again. Adrian, comfortably ensconced in his armchair, had been reaching behind him for his copy of The Brothers Karamazov to look up a certain passage; and on his knuckles encountering not the familiar worn leather bindings, but an upstart barrier of icy glass, he had whirled round in his chair, said “Bugger!” loudly, at the same moment as the mirror crashed to the floor in a hundred fragments.

  “I told you not to put the bloody thing up there!” was the best he could manage in the way of apology to Rita for having broken one of her most cherished possessions; and Rita retaliated with tears, and accusations of having “done
it on purpose!”; and if he’d only chuck half those bloody books away, then perhaps there might be a few inches of space in the flat that she could call her own; and what he saw in Dosto-bloody-effsky anyway she’d never understand, not if she lived for a hundred years.

  The quarrel was cleared up in the end, of course, splinters of glass and all, but on the following morning—which was Friday—Rita was still wearing her sniffy, martyred look. Clearly, it was no morning for saying brightly over the breakfast table, “By the way, darling, your husband has invited me to dinner tonight, and has specially asked me not to bring you.” It seemed to Adrian that it would be an altogether better thing to put the matter more gently, like Darling, there’s a meeting of the Finance Committee this evening that I just have to go to … so don’t wait up for me … I may be pretty late….

  *

  Fancy having to tell lies like this about an assignation with a bloody husband! But there; it sometimes seemed to Adrian that life did just exactly what it liked with you, tossed you like a bit of driftwood just anywhere, simply for the fun of laughing at your contortions as you struggled comically back to safety.

  CHAPTER X

  SIX-FIFTEEN, DEREK HAD said; and as Adrian edged his car into the parking space in front of 22 Winthrop Drive, the evening light had already changed from gold to pink, and the first tinges of purple were creeping up over the roofs to the east. Derek must have been watching from the window, for he had the front door open before Adrian had finished locking the car. He stood there in the doorway, smiling hospitably, but not troubling to step an inch forward in welcome as his guest came through the gate, shutting and latching it behind him, and walked up the short gravel path towards the front door.

  “This is very good of you—” began Adrian, as he drew near, and, “Not at all, it’s a pleasure,” Derek responded, and the two men shook hands.