The Spider-Orchid (11 page)

That Amelia’s hands could do with something amazing
happening
to them could hardly be doubted. Inky, stubby, and with unevenly bitten nails … Rita set to work on this unpromising material with both skill and patience, gently pushing back the cuticles, filing down the rough edges, and even achieving some sort of rounded shapeliness in the case of those nails which weren’t too severely bitten.

“It’s a pity we’re having to make them so short,” murmured Rita, bending over her work. “We could have shaped them into really pretty ovals if only you didn’t bite them so much. Still, it
has
made a difference, hasn’t it? Now, then….” and a minute or two later she was embarked on the final and most exciting stage of the whole operation: painting on the colour.

*

Amelia watched, fascinated. It was obvious that Rita had a real talent for this sort of thing, and it was enthralling to see how the delicate little pink-tipped brush followed with its feather-touch the exact curve of each nail, shaping the paler half-moons with expert care.

Little finger … fourth finger … middle finger—and then,
suddenly,
the whole room rocked to a violent slam of the door, which sent the little brush skittering in pink zig-zag streaks right across Amelia’s hand.

“Leave that child alone!” Adrian was shouting, from right across the room. “Leave her alone! Let go of her hand instantly! Don’t touch her! I won’t have you touch her!”—and a moment later he was across the room and gathering his shocked and bewildered young daughter into his arms.

“
W
HAT
I
SHALL
never understand, Adrian, is how you could be such a
fool
,” Rita was expostulating later that evening, when they were at last on their own. “Fancy you, a grown man, letting poor Derek stuff you up with all those fantasies and lies! Don’t you realise he’s mad? Not properly, mental-hospital mad, I don’t mean—just mad where
I’
m
concerned. It’s ever since he found out about
you,
actually, Adrian, it really seemed to send him round the bend for a while, and since then, every so often he gets fits of being downright paranoic about me. When he’s like that he’ll accuse me of just any crazy thing that comes into his head. This weed-killer nonsense, for example; it’s typical.”

“You mean you
didn’t
do it, then?” By now, Adrian was
beginning
to feel quite at sea, and did not know what to believe. Derek’s quiet, bitter revelations had been painfully convincing at the time; but now here was Rita being equally convincing to the contrary. What she said was perfectly plausible; a man as hurt and humiliated as Derek appeared to have been might well over-react to minor disagreements and mishaps, building them up in his mind into something quite out of proportion to the original facts.

On the other hand, he, Adrian, had seen the black, devastated garden with his own eyes. He would never forget the shock, the sense of nightmare, that had overwhelmed him in those first seconds. If Rita hadn’t done it, then who had?

“You mean—” he started again carefully “—you mean, Rita, that it wasn’t you who put weed-killer on the things at all? Not at any time?”

“Oh. Well….” Rita pouted, and made a little face. “Well, naturally, I used weed-killer now and again, everyone does, you have to, to keep the weeds under. And poppies
are
weeds. They’re
wild
flowers, and wild flowers are
weeds.
Anyone knows
that
!”

“I see. And so—now, let’s get this straight, Rita—you admit now that you
did
put weed-killer on them, just as Derek said …?”

Rita made an angry little movement.

“Oh, well, Adrian, if you’re going to start taking Derek’s side
against me …! I tell you I used the wretched stuff for weeds—damn it all, that’s what it’s for! That’s why it’s called ‘weed-killer’! Is it my fault that the whole damn garden was weeds …? It was a disgrace to the neighbourhood, I was ashamed to take anyone out there! I wanted a
proper
garden, Adrian—with geraniums and things!”

The little-girl pathos of this modest aspiration might have won over Adrian totally and brought the quarrel to an end then and there, if Rita hadn’t at that same moment recalled her other, and far more substantial, grievance. She turned on him agrily.

“Where the hell have you
been,
anyway? And why, in the name of common decency, didn’t you tell me you were going to Derek’s in the first place? Then I could have come with you, and none of this would have happened. Here I’ve been, going mad with worry the whole weekend, and you never even bothered to phone me! It’s worse than being married to Henry VIII—he did at least take the trouble to let his wives know before he cut their heads off!”

In vain did Adrian point out that he
wasn’t
planning to cut Rita’s head off, and that actually she wasn’t his wife either; this well-meant attempt to put the argument on a more logical basis simply seemed to make matters worse. So he apologised yet again for his thoughtlessness in not phoning; and explained once more that his mind had been in such a turmoil after the evening with Derek that he’d “just kept driving around”.

What, for two days on end?

Adrian sighed and realised that there was no other option than to tell her the truth: how, on a sudden, desperate impulse he had turned the car southwards and gone to visit Rita’s mother in Kent.

“
Mummy
!
But you couldn’t have!” shrieked Rita. “She doesn’t even know you exist!”

“Well, she does now,” said Adrian complacently. “In fact, she appears to have known about me all along, despite your efforts. She seemed very pleased, actually. She says she’s been wanting to meet me and have a talk for years. She says …”

“But Adrian! She
can’t
have! She thinks I’m still happily married to Derek…. That’s why we had to go through with that awful birthday party. So she wouldn’t suspect anything …”

“Yes, she told me,” agreed Adrian. “She says she thought you carried it off very well, all things considered. And the way you kept the guests from finding out about the garden—she thought
that was masterly. Though of course it did make it easier it being such a wet day, and dusk before they arrived. The closely-drawn curtains at every window made it look very cosy, your mother said, though of course
she
knew what you were hiding. We talked quite a bit about that garden, actually; that was what I went down for originally, to get her angle on it; sort of check on Derek’s story, you know. And she told me that yes, you were like that, always had been; and she’d come to the conclusion that you couldn’t help it. She told me that once, when you were about eleven, your grandmother came to stay, bringing her beloved budgerigar with her. And …”

Rita burst into loud and furious sobbing, beating her fists on the table.

“I might have known it! You hate me! You want to stir up my enemies against me! You’ve spent the whole weekend listening to filthy lies about me, and enjoying it all so much you couldn’t even drag yourself away for a moment to telephone and say where you were! I haven’t slept for two nights, I’ve almost worried myself into a nervous breakdown about you! My god, I wish you
had
been with another woman, or dead, or all the things I’ve been thinking! I wish you’d crashed the car …!”

“So do I,” said Adrian with sudden, uncharacteristic bitterness. “Then my poor little Amelia would at least have been spared …”

“‘
Your
poor
little
Amelia
’
!
That’s all you think about, isn’t it? Not ‘poor little Rita’, is it? What
she
suffers doesn’t count! But I’m glad to hear that you’re ashamed anyway. So you should be! Making an exhibition of yourself like that in front of your own daughter, and all because you couldn’t bear to see the two of us having a good time together, without you! It’s jealousy, that’s what it is, Adrian; plain, spiteful jealousy. You can’t bear to see your precious Amelia showing any affection for anyone but yourself! You were hoping she’d despise me, weren’t you? That she’d look down on me for not being so bloody clever as you two are, for not having read all those bloody books and not being able to quote all that bloody poetry! It didn’t occur to you, did it, that we might find ways of getting on together which had nothing to do with being clever …? Interests which you can’t share, and which shut you out in the cold? That’s come as a shock to you, hasn’t it? You were hoping for the good old stepmother thing, weren’t you—both of us fighting over you, wounding one another, while your ego
grew fat on our blood!
I
know you, Adrian, I’ve known you for years; just one great bloated ego with a cheque-book …!”

*

Adrian made no attempt to refute these charges. Instead, he passed his hand across his eyes in a gesture of utter weariness. Couldn’t she shut up about it all? Hadn’t they had enough for one evening? He was indeed ashamed of his uncontrolled outburst this afternoon, and the look of incredulous shock it had brought to his daughter’s face. It was awful. Still, no one could say that he hadn’t done what he could to make amends. He had apologised, he’d hugged and kissed the child, explaining to her that he’d been tired —worried—up all night; that he’d always had this peculiar aversion to nail-varnish, especially on very young girls … that he didn’t want her to grow up too soon … to miss what can be the best part of childhood…. He told her everything, in fact, which his quick and fertile intelligence could assemble at short notice, except the plain truth, for this was something that he could not tell to anyone: how the sudden sight of Rita, curved like a crow over the body of his precious daughter, peck-peck-pecking at it with little dabs of movement, had filled him with a blind, primitive terror and revulsion which even now he could not understand, and would certainly never divulge, not to anyone in the wide world.

*

Amelia had listened, quiet and non-committal, to his hastily assembled barrage of explanations. How much of it she had actually believed, he had no idea, but she had made no attempt to call his bluff, either then or later. On the drive home she asked no questions, indeed she spoke hardly at all; but then they often didn’t speak much, he and she, both of them being given to spells of profound and concentrated thinking. It didn’t mean there was anything amiss between them. By next Sunday, the whole thing would have blown over. These things do.

*

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….”

A
MELIA, 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 think, 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.