The Spider-Orchid (13 page)

*

He slept no more that night. Presently, the darkness gave way to the grey light of dawn; and by the time the first pink of sunrise filtered through the curtains, he knew what he had to do.

Knew, too, though helpless as a zombie to prevent it, how cruel and unfair he was being.

R
ITA WAS TAKING
it quite extraordinarily well: no tears, no scenes, no recriminations. In fact, she spoke hardly at all. She just sat quietly on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched a little as though against a shower of rain, and allowed the clichés to pour over her.

“Nobody’s fault …” “neither of us really to blame …” “just one of those things …” “better now than later …” “will always treasure the good times we had together …”—and only when Adrian had quite run out of these stock phrases and manufactured sentiments did Rita look up at him, and enquire meekly, like an au-pair girl who has failed to give satisfaction, how soon he wanted her to go?

The guilt was awful. Adrian did not know what to say or where to look. He had been counting, he realised now, on a blazing row, a scene of savage mutual recrimination to oil the wheels of parting. Faced instead by acquiescence on this monstrous and wholly
unprecedented
scale, he simply did not know what to do next. All the tortured resolutions of the night seemed to be crumbling beneath the weight of Rita’s non-resistance, leaving him bereft of motivation. He stared at her helplessly, as if waiting for her instructions; but her meekness seemed impregnable, she turned the other cheek relentlessly, like some sort of battering-ram.

“This morning, did you mean?” she persisted humbly. “Did you want me to pack up and go right now? I could, if you like”—and by the time Adrian had expressed his outrage at this suggestion, and had assured her that he’d never meant to hurry her in the very least, that of course she must take her time, make plans at leisure, and that the last thing he wanted to do was to put any pressure on her—by his time it was quite unclear, even to Adrian, whether he was persuading her to go or to stay. With a wild, unseeing glance at his watch, and a meaningless mutter of sheer desperation, he made a dive for the bathroom, slammed and bolted the door, and turned on all the taps to their fullest extent, as if to drown under the gushing water the tumult of his indecision.

There was no tumult really; and certainly not one of indecision. The decision had been made during the night; and it had been a right one. The harsh clarity of that sleepless dawn had shown him things about himself, and about his relationship with Rita, which he had not wanted to face; but they were true things. Lying now in the hot, enveloping water, Adrian realised that though Rita’s response to his ultimatum had startled him almost out of his senses, it hadn’t, in fact, changed anything, or modified in the very least degree any of the factors which had made him resolve to break with her.

“Factors”? There was only one factor really, and Adrian thought about it, sadly, while slowly and luxuriously soaping himself. It was difficult, now, to remember exactly when it was that he had stopped loving Rita, because he had refused to admit it, even to himself, for such a very long time. It is pleasanter to be in love than not to be; and to think that you are is at least better than nothing. And so the weeks and months had gone by, and he hadn’t wanted to notice that there was any change, and anyway, it had all been so very gradual. The whole thing, of course, had been brought to a head by this foolhardy attempt to live together. Many a good love affair has foundered on this rock, and Rita must surely have been aware of the risk she was taking in moving in on him the way she did. Admittedly, he’d sometimes asked her to do just this, and had told her how enchanting he would find it; but surely a grown woman, past thirty, should have known better than to put faith in vague protestations of devotion? Surely a lover is
entitled
to tell a certain number of lies, some of the time? It simply isn’t
fair
to believe every word a man says….

But hardly had this comfortably self-justifying thought taken shape in Adrian’s brain than another, even better, one followed hot on its heels, and with an exultant swirl of water around shoulders and knees, he allowed it to take possession of his mind.

What a fool he’d been! What a blind, conceited idiot! Why hadn’t it occurred to him before that all the time he’d been
reluctantly
falling out of love with Rita,
she
had probably been falling out of love with him likewise? And meanwhile both of them, out of the usual mixture of cowardice, vanity and sentimentality, had been refusing to admit it.

The more Adrian reflected on this new possibility, the more he approved of it. It explained everything, which satisfied his scientific
temperament, and it also released him from all further guilt and heart-searching. All that farrago of apologies and explanations that he’d spent half the night concocting, in a sweat of compunction and guilt—it had all been unnecessary! Rita hadn’t minded!
That’s
why she hadn’t cried and stormed and made a scene—it was because she hadn’t minded!

How simple things can be! Adrian felt that there was a moral in this somewhere, but before he’d had time to work it out, his
attention
was caught by the “ping” of the telephone being replaced. He hadn’t heard Rita’s voice at all—the sitting-room door must have been shut as well as the bathroom one—and he wondered, vaguely, who she could have been ringing so early in the morning. But he quickly decided that, whoever it was, it was a Good Thing. It meant that she was taking action—making plans of one sort or another. Arranging to go and stay with her mother, maybe? Or even with Derek? Not that this last seemed at all likely, in the circumstances; but anyway, she was phoning
somebody,
that was the main thing. With a vague sense of accomplishment, of having brought things to a satisfactory conclusion, Adrian lurched upwards from the cooling water and reached for a towel.

*

Far away across London, Amelia laid down the receiver, and stood staring at it, as if she still could not believe what she had heard.

And indeed she could not. The thing was so monstrous, so unspeakably appalling, that she simply could not take it in. At first, she had not even recognised Rita’s voice, so soft was it, and so carefully pitched; and when, after some seconds, she did begin to recognise it, she still could not believe what she was hearing.

She’d thought, at first, that it must be some obscene kind of a joke. That Rita had discovered her precious and most private diary —this she gathered quite early on; that Rita had read it, too, and been “disgusted” by it—this, also, she managed to take in, bewildered, and speechless with fury. But when Rita went on to inform her, softly, and in dead earnest, that she intended to take the diary up to the school this very day and show it to the headmistress—“and
then
what will happen to your precious Mr Owen?” —at this point, Amelia’s thought processes simply blacked out: the horror of the thing was beyond what her mind could grasp. She simply stood there, unable to move or speak, while Rita’s low,
careful
voice purred on and on, and finally came to a stop; and even then, with the dead phone buzzing on and on in her ear, she still went on standing there. No one interrupted her, or broke into her trance of horror, for Peggy had already just left for work when the call came. Rita had timed it well; and even if Amelia had retained the presence of mind to try and ring her father, she would not have been able to get through. Rita had the thing well in hand; she had been planning it since quite early this morning.

And so the minutes ticked by, until presently half an hour had passed. Already, Amelia was late for school. She couldn’t go, of course, she could never go again, she would stay at home and kill herself, but even that wouldn’t do any good, because it wouldn’t stop Mr Owen seeing the awful things she’d written, wouldn’t stop him being shocked and revolted … merely being dead is no
protection
against this sort of thing.

Might there, though, be some way of averting the catastrophe? Amelia’s numbed mind was beginning, a little bit at a time, to function again, and she set herself to devising desperate measures of counter-attack. Like capturing Rita, and tying her up somewhere? Or waylaying her outside the school, and taking the diary by force, knocking her down in the street if necessary?

But outside which entrance should Amelia lie in wait? While she hovered near the staff-room steps, Rita could be slipping down through the Middle School basement cloakroom; while Amelia mounted guard by the main entrance, Rita could be gaining
admittance
through the porter’s lodge—oh, there were a dozen ways! And besides, how could Amelia hope to hang about unnoticed for any length of time? “Pst! Amelia! I say, Amelia, Music’s started! Miss Lucas’ll be
furious
!” or, “Amelia Summers! May I enquire what you think you’re doing out here in the street during school hours…?” Oh, it would be hopeless! Worse than hopeless, for it would call everyone’s attention to her before she’d had any chance to do anything.

Of course, if she’d only known when Rita intended to go, it would have been easier; but naturally Rita hadn’t given her any inkling at all, she was far too cunning. At some unknown hour, from some unknown direction, Rita was going to slip along by some
unpredictable
route, and gain admission to the school. It was all planned, specially, evilly planned, so that Amelia should have all the agony
of knowing what was about to happen, and yet no opportunity of averting it.

*

There was no way. No way at all.

“I’ll kill her!” screamed Amelia into the empty house. “I will! I’ll kill her! KILL her, KILL her, KILL her!”

*

And that evening, just after six, news came from the school that Rita had been found lying at the foot of the Art Room stairs with her neck broken.

T
HIS, AT LEAST
, was the substance of the story brought by Daphne, arriving hot-foot from the scene of the disaster. Or if not precisely the scene itself, at least straight from the thrilling presence of a girl whose sister’s best friend actually
had
been there, right on the spot. Well, practically on the spot: she’d heard the screams, anyway, and had watched the ambulance driving away.

It had happened like this. This girl, Rosemary Something, a Fifth-Former, had chanced to be staying on after school for a final rehearsal of the Upper School play; and just as the final tragic scene was coming up, with the chorus of Greek women all tearing their hair and bewailing their destiny almost without a slip—just at this juncture, there’d been these awful screams. It was hard to tell just where they were coming from; in the deserted school building everything echoed so, up and down the empty stairs and corridors. Anyway, they’d all rushed along, pell mell, just as they were, clutching at their safety-pinned Grecian robes, head-dresses and myrtle wreaths all awry, but by the time they’d located the scene of the accident, most of the excitement was already over. A little knot of cleaners, and a teacher or two, were still gathered by the front entrance, watching the departing ambulance; and from the buzz of excited talk Rosemary gleaned what titbits of information she could with which to regale her family at the tea-table; from which, in turn, her young sister collected random earfuls to share with such friends and class-mates as lived nearby. And so now here was Daphne, hopping from one leg to another with impatience, and well-nigh collapsing under her surfeit of undivulged news.

But Peggy was adamant. Amelia was very much upset, she said primly, and wouldn’t want to see anyone just now. She did not feel it necessary to add that none of this had anything to do with Rita’s accident; that Amelia did not even know about it yet, and whatever was the cause of her distress it could not be
that,
as it had been going on all day, long before Rita had so much as set foot on those fateful stairs.

This, at least, was how Peggy read the situation. She had come home from work to find her daughter already quite worn out with grief and despair, her face so swollen with crying as to be hardly recognisable. Nothing Peggy could do—no persuasions, no loving cajolery, not even a sharp, last-resort scolding—would induce her to say one single word in explanation.

“Leave me
alone
”
was the only response Peggy could extract from her. “
Please,
Mummy, just leave me alone!” She would eat no tea, would listen to no endearments; just lay on her bed in silent misery, occasionally making a low moaning noise, like a trapped, tortured animal.

And so it seemed to Peggy, who had to make a lightning door-step decision on the question, that to let Daphne in with her
alarming
and shocking news about Rita could only do harm. Amelia just wouldn’t be able to take it.

Not that Peggy had any idea of how Amelia would react to the shock. A little while ago—only a few days ago, in fact—she would have said that Amelia was really growing quite fond of this woman who had become for all practical purposes her stepmother; but now she was not so sure. It was very hard to tell, one way or the other, because Amelia had taken to being so very reticent about these Sunday afternoon visits. She hardly ever told her mother anything at all about what had happened, and only very occasionally did she inadvertently drop some clue as to how she was feeling: which wasn’t much to go on, really. Most of the time, Peggy felt wholly in the dark.

At the beginning, Peggy had worried a lot about the situation, fearing, as did Adrian, that the child would be miserably jealous and resentful of this newcomer’s intrusion into her father’s life, and the happy Sunday visits would be spoiled for ever. Peggy was not the sort of ex-wife who rejoices gleefully over every setback in the relationship of her child and her ex-husband; on the contrary, she liked the people around her to be happy, ex-husbands and all. Whether this was due to any exceptional saintliness in her nature, or simply to the fact that she had discovered that happy people are on the whole less trouble than unhappy ones, she would have found it hard to decide.

Above all, of course, she liked her daughter to be happy, and this was why—quite apart from the natural hurt to herself—she had been so perturbed by the recent changes in Amelia’s behaviour
—particularly on Sunday evenings. Sulky—off-hand—almost rude: surely it meant that something must be wrong? Especially since the two of them had always been so close until now, and had had such fun together. Peggy had been worrying about it lately quite a bit, and had hoped, secretly, that her friends—particularly Maureen Denvers—hadn’t noticed the deterioration of the mother-daughter relationship. Having a “good relationship” with your children rated very high in Peggy’s circle—much higher, for instance, than
expensive
cars or exotic holidays—and of course, if you had a broken marriage to carry about with you everywhere (because this was what it felt like, Peggy found; you could never leave it behind and forget about it)—well, then, in that case your “good relationship” had to be better than good, it had to be visibly marvellous, for it was going to be subjected to much severer scrutiny than were all those ramshackle, bickering two-parent set-ups that managed to get by simply because they
were
two-parent. A married pair can get away with having a much unhappier, more neurotic child than can any single parent; it had often struck Peggy as rather unfair that this should be so, though until recently it hadn’t actually affected her personally. Amelia had up till now been a singularly satisfactory daughter to have—happy, clever, well-mannered, and a wonderful companion. It was only just lately that things had begun to go wrong; and even then Peggy had quite often been inclined to put it all down to adolescence, and to the psychological upheavals that one had been vaguely led to expect at such a time.

But not today; today something really
was
the matter, something terrible; and in the face of this certainty, all the psychological theories collapsed like a house of cards. They became quite useless, it seemed, as soon as something
actually
went wrong, with your own
actual
child.

And now, on top of all this, there was Rita’s accident! Why must the idiot woman choose today of all days for falling over her crazy built-up heels, or whatever it was she’d done? And what was Peggy supposed to do about it, anyway? What
is
the rôle of the ex-wife when the current mistress is lying at death’s door? The etiquette books haven’t caught up with this sort of thing yet, so Peggy had no guidance; but an uneasy instinct warned her that it was her duty to do
something.
She’d already phoned Adrian, phoned Derek, and phoned the school, but they’d all been line-engaged. Now she phoned them again, still with no result; and really, there seemed
nothing further she could do. She didn’t even know if Rita was alive or dead, and it didn’t seem necessary, just yet, to examine her heart and see whether she cared; time enough for that when she knew whether it had happened.

It was too much! Too much happening all at once. Filled with a sense of vague, all-embracing dread, Peggy tiptoed back into Amelia’s room, half expecting, like the nervous mother of a newborn baby, to find that she had stopped breathing.

She hadn’t, of course. If anything, she was breathing more normally than before, and with less of a sob in her throat. Also, Esben was curled up on the end of the bed this time—always a good sign, because Esben, like most cats, hated people to be crying and writhing about, disturbing all the nice warm surfaces.

The room was growing dark now, and looking down at the tear-sodden lump of doom under the eiderdown, unresponsive as a length of board, Peggy experienced, quite without warning, a sudden uprush of irritation. What right had the girl to cause all this anxiety, to frighten everybody out of their wits without volunteering a single word of explanation? And particularly at a time like this, when a
real
disaster had just struck, demanding everyone’s attention and concern. And then, with compunction, Peggy recollected that as yet Amelia knew nothing about the accident: indeed, it was Peggy herself who was deliberately keeping it from her, and so it was hardly fair to blame the child for not taking it into consideration … and just at that moment, the telephone shrilled through the house.

*

“Adrian? Oh, thank goodness it’s you … I’ve been trying and trying to ring you. Oh, my dear, I’m
so
sorry
… so terribly, terribly sorry! Is she …? I mean, have you heard yet….?”

*

Disgruntled, and somehow a little bit scared by her reception, Daphne turned slowly away from the uncompromisingly closed front door, and retraced her steps.

What a pig Mrs Summers was!
Of
course
Amelia would have wanted to see her! Even if she
was
as much upset by her stepmother’s accident as Mrs Summers implied—and Daphne, for one, was sceptical about it—even so, she’d still have wanted to talk about it to her friends, especially a best friend like Daphne. Anyone
would. Whatever happened to you, however frightful, you always wanted to talk about it to your
friends,
it was the very first thing you did want to do. If Amelia really
was
upset, then she’d be wanting more than anything to talk to Daphne. It was
mean
of Mrs Summers, really it was.

Besides—and this was what was really gnawing away at Daphne’s innermost soul—besides, everyone would be
expecting
her to have talked to Amelia Summers! They were best friends, weren’t they? At break tomorrow, she, Daphne, would be bombarded with
questions
which it would be an awful come-down not to be able to answer. Was it true that the victim’s neck was
broken
?
Flopping about on her shoulders do you mean—like
this
?
Was she going to
die
?
To be paralysed for life? Was her brain affected? Could she still speak? Or was she going to be like those people from the Home who came into the High Street in wheelchairs on Saturdays?

How glorious if Daphne could have been the one with all the answers at her finger-tips! The one who could describe all the gruesome details! And to think that only the arbitrary maternal whims of the wretched Mrs Summers had stood between her and this once-in-a-lifetime glory!

Honestly,
mothers
!

*

Actually, Daphne had been setting her hopes altogether too high, right from the beginning. Amelia or no Amelia, she wouldn’t have been able to answer her schoolmates’ questions because no one could. Even the chief surgeon at the hospital couldn’t have answered them. Not, that is, until the X-ray results had come through, and Rita herself had come out of her state of shock sufficiently to be asked to move this group of muscles or that; to answer Yes or No to whether she felt the prick of a pin here … or here?

But the prognosis, at the end of forty-eight hours, was good. Her spine had not, after all, been fractured. There were some cracked vertebrae and a cervical dislocation, which would necessitate the wearing of a spinal jacket and a neck-brace for the next few weeks, but there was every reason to suppose that she would thereafter be completely recovered. And meantime, there was no reason, barring some unforeseeable setback, why she should not leave hospital within the next week or so.

The good news was relayed round family and friends in a matter
of minutes. There were congratulations, get-well cards, flowers. And it so happened that Amelia’s friend Daphne did, after all, get her moment of glory, albeit belatedly. For as it chanced, the affair got a brief mention in the local press on the following Friday, and Daphne it was who spotted the item and brought the cutting
gleefully
to school, to pass round, with furtive gasps and whisperings, during the history lesson. It was a good report of its kind, concise and factual, the reporter allowing himself only one brief bit of fashionable moralising about “authorities” who permit the erection of staircases that can be fallen down. The fact that any staircase which can’t be fallen down also can’t be walked down, could be glossed over as an example of “officialdom at its worst”. After all,
someone
must be to blame for gravitation, and if it isn’t the I.L.E.A., then what are we paying all these taxes for?

Or words to that effect. Anyway, having dutifully pointed the moral which would best please most of his readers the writer returned to the hard facts, including some hastily-assembled data about Rita, and a smudged but unmistakably glamorous picture of her nestled among her bandages, her black hair loose and splayed out over a lacy bed-jacket.

“Someone pushed me” was the arresting caption to this
photograph
; but in the copy below she was quoted as having added warily, “but I’m naming no names!”

“It is expected that the police will be following up these
allegations
,” the reporter surmised cautiously; and having thus squeezed the last drop of news-value from the thing, he brought his account briskly to an end.

The girls loved it. It passed swiftly and furtively back and forth under the desks, until the running commentary of whispers and giggles finally reached a pitch which Mr Everard could no longer ignore. Laying down chalk and duster with a sigh, he
confiscated
the thing, and with a few sharp words, and a couple of detentions, brought the class back to a proper concern for Disraeli’s speeches about the Corn Laws. One girl, who just couldn’t stop giggling, he sent outside, and two others were quelled by a shaft of well-timed sarcasm.

And to Daphne belonged the honour and glory of having started the whole thing! She got a special telling off all to herself, and when she went out to break found she had become the unquestioned
authority on plaster jackets, stepmothers, slipped discs, paralysis, and brain tumours. It was wonderful.