The Spider-Orchid (3 page)

So the reading would have to go. He would have to give it up, as people give up smoking, and with the same sense of outrage and disorientation. There was no way of conveying to any woman—least of all one who loved him—the intensity of his need for that lovely, self-absorbed interlude before he set out to face the day; an interlude of absolute peace in the company of non-judgemental, non-existent characters for whose problems he, Adrian, was in no way to blame.

Oh, those blissfully undemanding murders! Those cosy scenes of blackmail and kidnapping, whose double-crossing implications were all going to be sorted out by rival spy-rings without the smallest reference to him! How soothing they were, to a busy man! He even read science fiction at times, and whole galaxies could blow up without him having to stir a finger…!

*

“Darling! You’re in a
trance
!”

With a pink-varnished finger-nail—she must have done them specially before coming here, right in the middle of the final scene with Derek—Rita reached over and flicked him playfully under the chin. She laughed as she did it, a bit too merrily, showing all her little white teeth with practically no fillings, and asked him what his plans were for the evening?

Plans
? From now on, was he going to have to have
plans
?

“We must
celebrate,
darling!” she explained gaily. “We must do something
wonderful
with our first—our
very
first
—evening…!”

*

It wasn’t as wonderful as all that; but he hoped she hadn’t noticed; that for her, maybe, it had all been fine.

As, indeed, he pretended it had been for him.

Isn’t it marvellous not having to keep an eye on the
time,
they kept saying to each other, as they lay, afterwards, in the big bed.
Not having to get dressed … go out … say good-bye to one another. Marvellous, they kept saying…
Marvellous
.

*

He could tell that Rita knew that something was wrong; and that she knew that he knew. He knew, too, that she would never bring herself to ask him what it was; she was too afraid of the answer. And so was he.

O
F COURSE, IF
he had thought to look back at the long-drawn-out trauma of his own divorce, at the actual day-to-day mechanics of breaking a marriage of fairly long standing, Adrian would have realised that his panic over Rita’s sudden arrival had been premature. He would have recollected that someone rushing out of the house with a suitcase rarely heralds the end of the partnership. Within forty-eight hours, the runaway partner is usually slinking uneasily back again, feeding the cat, collecting laundry, leaning over the fence to put the neighbours right about the awful lies that Partner B has been feeding them these last two days.

And then—since by this time it is gone seven, and Partner B has arrived home from work—a meal is guardedly improvised, and over the take-away curry and the tinned apricots, the battle-weary pair check through their new haul of grievances, measuring them against the old, blending and interweaving them so skilfully that within an hour or two this latest outrage has become virtually indistinguishable from all the rest. Forgotten wedding anniversaries … nights spent out on the landing in tears … the awful things
he
said … the horrible things
she
said…. Before either of them quite realise what’s happening, everything has slithered
imperceptibly
back to square one, and it is as if she (or he) had never slammed out of the house yesterday (or the day before) at all.

*

Rita’s experience, it seemed, was to be no exception. Far from worrying herself about Adrian’s boiled egg, or otherwise making herself indispensable, she was on the phone to her husband before eight in the morning; by quarter past, she was repacking her suitcase, albeit tearfully, and borrowing a pound for her taxi fare. Poor Derek, it seemed, had omitted to consult his diary and remind her, when she walked out on him, of all the various engagements which she must now either cancel or else turn round and walk back in again for: chief among which was the party they were
supposed
to be giving on the twenty-fifth for Rita’s mother’s
seventieth
birthday. It was unthinkable that Mummy, who had been so
against the marriage in the first place, should be allowed now to guess that anything had gone wrong; and so they’d have to go through with the celebration, candles and all,
seventy
of them! The party wasn’t until Friday, but there was all the shopping to do, Rita explained, and the fillings for the fruit flans, and
blanching
the almonds … not to mention cleaning and polishing the whole house so that Mummy wouldn’t start about velveteen being a dust-trap before she’d even opened her presents….

Yes, said Adrian, trying to keep the relief out of his voice. Yes, he quite understood, it was a shame, darling, but never mind, I’ll be all right, you concentrate on giving the old lady a good time…. Already, his eyes were straying hungrily to his book, he kept
waiting
for the taxi to arrive, for Rita to stop running from room to room, for her to be actually
gone,
so that he could settle down to his second cup of coffee in peace and solitude. It was amazing how many reasons she found for scuttling in and out, the door banging open and shut behind her, where’s my bag, have you seen my cigarettes, phone me well before six in case Poor Derek…

But at last it was over.

“Good-bye, darling!” she cried, for the third or fourth time, while the taxi, its engine switched on, muttered impatiently at the kerbside, nibbling away at Adrian’s pound. “Good-bye, it’s only for a few days, I’ll be back by Sunday….”

“
Sunday
! Oh
no
….”

With any luck, she hadn’t heard. The tactless words had burst from his lips quite uncontrollably, as if a rock had fallen on his toe.
Sunday
!

*

Of course, she would have to be told some time; but not just now, not like this. He should have broken it to her gently, tactfully, long before the issue became urgent. He should have raised the topic tenderly, understandingly, preferably when she was already lying limp and acquiescent in his arms. “Darling,” he should have said, kissing her face, her hair, while he spoke, “darling, it’s like this. Sunday is the only day in the whole week when … well, the thing is, it’s a rather special day for me and Amelia….”

Or maybe he should approach it the other way round? Maybe he should try and explain to
Amelia
why it was that Rita would henceforth have to share their Sundays? “This friend of mine,” he’d say, as casually as he could, “I think I’ve mentioned her
before—her name’s Rita, and I’m sure you and she are going to get on famously—well, from now on when you come on Sundays, Rita will be….”

No!

The violence of his rejection took even Adrian himself by
surprise
. He stood on the front steps actually trembling while the taxi disappeared round the end of the road; then he turned, and made his way back up the three flights of stairs, his mind boiling with a sort of directionless fury, raging against this predicament of his own making.

*

Rita
mustn’t
come here on Sunday, she
mustn’t
! Whatever the cost in tears, scenes and accusations, he must keep Rita away. Sunday was sacred to Amelia (yes, sacred; this is sometimes the only word that will do, even for a hard-bitten atheist like Adrian), and he wasn’t going to curtail or postpone or modify in the very smallest degree the routine of Amelia’s visits, not for anyone in the whole wide world.

*

Strange that it should have taken a divorce, and all the attendant rows and miseries, to teach him to know his own daughter. Amelia had been nine at the time, and as remote from him, at that age, as if she had been dropped from Mars. It wasn’t that she was a particularly difficult little girl, or naturally withdrawn: it was just that she never seemed to talk to
him.
Adrian quickly realised that this was his problem, not hers; she was talkative enough with everyone else, chattering away with her mother, and with her school-friends, too, when they came to tea. He would hear them shrieking and giggling, shrill as parrots, through a thickness of two doors, while he sat in his study, trying to work. In fact, the noise could be frightful, but he was afraid to yell at her, to let himself go, as many fathers would, because he didn’t understand her well enough, and knew he didn’t. It would have been like tinkering heavy-handedly with a machine of whose purpose and workings he knew nothing.

So quite often, he would take it out on Peggy. What sort of a mother are you? Can’t you control that kid ever? It’s like living in a madhouse.
Other
mothers manage to …

Other
mothers,
other
mothers,
what
other mothers? I’m sick to death of hearing about all these Mrs-Bloody-Perfects, you should
drop in at Jean’s some Saturday afternoon, or the Drapers come to that,
then
you can talk to me about a madhouse! I suppose you’d like your daughter never to speak at all, you’d like her to be autistic, you’d like to have her incapable of making relationships with her peers and trailing off to Child Guidance all the time, like Maureen’s wretched brat! That’s “Other mothers” for you, why didn’t you marry Maureen if that’s the sort of thing you want? And she has eczema, too, in case you’re interested….

Peggy hadn’t always been like this; when he’d married her, she’d been equable and easy-going to a fault. But during that last year before they’d separated, she’d acquired the skills of a fishwife, and almost anything would set her off. Thus he only had to suggest that his daughter should be taught to lower her voice a bit, and there he’d be in the middle of a full-blown scene about Maureen Denvers, when already it wasn’t Maureen at all, never had been really, already it was Rita, or beginning to be. But since Peggy didn’t even know of Rita’s existence at that stage, she’d really had no excuse for staging such a scene; no excuse, certainly, for storming out of the room in a jealous huff and telling Amelia that Daddy was in an awful temper and so she’d have to stop the game and send her little friends home immediately. It was difficult enough being a Daddy, Adrian reflected wearily, without this sort of thing.

Not that Amelia ever seemed to bear any grudges.

“What, Daddy?” she’d say, detached and uncomprehending, when he tried, as he sometimes did, to clear up these misunderstandings; to explain that Mummy had over-stated his complaints, and that he’d never intended actually to stop them playing their game.

Playing what game? Stopped who? Which tea-time? Who did? Amelia never seemed to remember a thing about the episode by the next morning, or even later the same evening, and so Adrian couldn’t even apologise and earn the child’s forgiveness. Apology and forgiveness are perhaps not the ideal foundation for a father-daughter relationship, but at least they are something. Without them, there was nothing.

It wasn’t as if Adrian hadn’t tried. The idea of fatherhood, in the abstract, had thrilled him right from the beginning. He could think of no more fascinating hobby than the observing, at first-hand, of the miraculous unfolding of a young mind, the flowering under one’s very eyes of a new and unique personality.

But it is only fascinating, of course, if the process
does
take place under one’s very eyes, and in the case of Adrian and his daughter, this was not so. From her earliest babyhood, all Amelia’s flowering, unfolding and the rest had taken place under the eyes of her mother, while Adrian, locked at a mysterious distance, had looked on, at first with painful jealousy, and then, later, with a growing irritation towards both of them. Sometimes—and no doubt this was an outcome of his scientific training—he would set himself to analyse the problem as he would have analysed a recalcitrant chemical in his laboratory, summarising the available data and making inferences from it. Listening, with a twist of pain in his heart, to the easy, intimate exchanges between Amelia and her mother, the relaxed laughter they shared, he would try to analyse, gesture by gesture, exactly what it was that Peggy was doing, and how it differed from what he himself intermittently tried to do.

But it was no good; and as Amelia grew older, and shriller, and no longer wanted to know if octopuses can catch colds or how high a giraffe would be if it stood on the highest mountain in the world, then the thing became even more hopeless. It seemed that the harder he tried, the more painstakingly he sought ways of
relating
to this skinny, enigmatic being with the thin strands of greasy hair falling into its eyes, the worse was the trouble into which he was liable to flounder. The frustration, the humiliation, and the sheer disappointment of these occasions was hard to endure.

A passionate lover of books himself, he had at first watched, with tremulous optimism, the beginnings of a similar passion in his little daughter; and sometimes, greatly daring, he had nerved himself to read aloud to her from one or other of his own childhood favourites. But if he had hoped that these occasional bedtime sessions might form the foundation of a shared enthusiasm, he was to be disappointed. Amelia would lie there, neat and attentive under her bright blankets, and: “Say thank you to Daddy, darling!” Peggy would admonish, almost before he’d enunciated the last sentence of the story; and from his wife’s tone of voice he’d know straight away that he’d done it again: he’d chosen something too babyish (“you can’t expect a schoolgirl of nearly ten to bother with
Beatrix Potter
”) or too adult (“Rider Haggard is for
teena
gers,
dear, you can’t expect a little girl of only nine …”)

*

And he didn’t expect it. Not any longer. Apart from a vague,
theoretical satisfaction at having discharged a recognised parental duty, he expected absolutely nothing from these sessions.

And playing with Amelia was even worse. Sometimes the game in question—Snap it might be, or Ludo—would seem, superficially, to be well within the capacities of a professional man at the height of his intellectual powers: but this was an illusion. No sooner did he join in, than the fun would go out of the game, and the mother-daughter rapport would shrivel as if he’d poured poison on it. They’d go on playing, of course, dutifully, and then either he’d win, and feel guilty at having used his highly-trained adult
intelligence
to score off so small a child, or else he’d lose, and they’d both chide him for not “playing the game”.

“It’s no
fun
, Daddy, unless you really
try
!” Amelia would
protest
indignantly, and Peggy would add, gathering up the cards repressively as she spoke: “Yes, Adrian, it
is
humiliating the way you always play to lose! It’s so patronising! Children have their pride, you know….” and she’d tell Amelia that it was bedtime, in a tight sort of voice that made it perfectly clear that it
wouldn’t
have been bedtime if only Daddy hadn’t come along and mucked up the evening.

*

And so when the divorce, after all the threats, the false starts, the short-lived reconciliations, finally became a reality, Adrian felt quite stunned by how little he minded giving up Amelia. Other fathers weren’t like that. All around him, marriages among his and Peggy’s acquaintances had been disintegrating, and always the central lament, the battle-cry of both parties, the stone wall against which all other factors beat themselves into insignificance, had been The Children.
I’m
keeping the children. On no account am I letting
her
take the children. I won’t give them up, he/she won’t give them up, neither of us will give them up.

And now here was Adrian not only willing to give up Amelia, but even, in the secret depths of his heart, actually relieved at the idea of doing so. What sort of a father was he? What sort of an unnatural monster?

And then, after all this—after all the guilt, and the
heart-searchings
, and the court orders, and the sadness—after all this, it turned out that he hadn’t lost Amelia at all, not even in the most mundane and down-to-earth sense. On the contrary, it seemed that he was hereafter expected to spend more time in her exclusive
company than he had ever done in his life before—“reasonable access”, the courts called it, and what it meant, in plain English, was that he was to collect Amelia at 2.00 pm every Sunday, and take her out somewhere, do something with her, single-handed, until her bedtime some five or six hours later.