The Spider-Orchid (8 page)

S
HYLY
, A
MELIA TOOK
a step in the direction of the oval gilt mirror which (to her father’s annoyance) Rita had insisted on propping up against one of the bookshelves, thereby at a single stroke replacing the entire works of Dostoevsky by her own smooth, delicately-moulded features.

“Well, where
can
I have it, then?” she’d demanded when Adrian registered his outrage.

“What about
here?
”
he’d sulkily suggested, “what about
there
…?” But either the light was wrong, or the plaster wouldn’t take rawlplugs, or it would mean taking down Adrian’s set of horse-brasses; and over the whole discussion had hung like a dark raincloud the fact that Adrian didn’t want the damn thing anywhere. There was a mirror in the bathroom, wasn’t there? And one alongside the shelf in the hall? Well, then.

Rita hadn’t gone on arguing. She had begun to learn that Adrian’s selfishness was a weapon which, in skilled hands, could often be used against him, and so she just kept putting the mirror where she wanted it, and moving it away again the moment he asked her to, until one of them got tired of it, which of course was him. Quietly, she notched up the victory, and went on to bigger things.

“There—have a look!” she now said to Amelia, motioning the child towards a chair in front of the mirror on its improvised dressing-table. “Sit down, and tell me how you like it”—and then she stood back, and watched, with a little flicker of triumph at the corners of her mouth, while Amelia turned her head this way and that, tossed the loose hair back and then let it fall forward again; at last allowing a wondering, incredulous smile to spread across her face.

“Oh …
Rita
!”
was all she said; but it didn’t really need words. They could both see with their own eyes that the sallow, rather small-featured face had been absolutely transformed by this frame of gleaming luxuriant hair, touched here and there with golden lights.

“A special shampoo for greasy hair, with conditioner,” Rita
had ordained, with good-humoured firmness, brandishing the specially purchased bottles and escorting the dazed and as yet reluctant Amelia towards the bathroom. “You see, you first have to rub it in thoroughly—like this—and then … no, not like that! You have to
really
rinse it, three or four times, until the water runs absolutely clean. And then, if you fancy a few highlights—we mustn’t overdo it, though, you’re very young….”

The blow-drier, of course, had been part of the magic. Mummy didn’t have a blow-drier at home, and Amelia had never really come across one before, and at first she backed away a little warily. She didn’t want to end up looking
silly.

“My goodness, I couldn’t
live
without my blow-drier!” Rita had cried—having already proved the point by leaving the thing around here, there and everywhere among Adrian’s most treasured belongings, ever since she came here. “A blow-drier is an absolute
must!
You see, Amelia, your hair is very fine as well as greasy. It’s
difficult
hair, and the worst thing you can possibly do with difficult hair is to dry it the way
you
do—crouched right up against an electric fire reading a book. It dries out all the oils and drains the colour. Now, with a blow-drier….”

And now, looking in the mirror, Amelia could see that Rita had been absolutely right about absolutely everything. The stringy, damp-looking straggles of mouse were gone as if they had belonged to another life, and in their place fell these new, luxuriant locks which swung as she moved, full of bounce and highlights, flashes of blonde and chestnut setting off the pale, not-quite-straw colour of the whole.

Amelia could not speak. And when Rita approached with the suggestion of a broad blue band to hold the weight of hair back from her forehead, she just swallowed, and sat like Cinderella with the fairy godmother, letting the wonders happen.

She was beautiful! Well, practically. What
was
Daddy going to say!

She wriggled off the chair excitedly—and then paused,
remembering
that Daddy was cross. Not
very
cross, and no doubt she could get him out of it. In fact, she was sure she could, because she knew, in this case, exactly what it was that had made him cross. It had made
her
cross too, at the time, but then that had been before the magic transformation. It was like looking back on another world.

It was only an hour ago, actually; or maybe even less. She had burst into her father’s flat a little before two, looking forward to a nice long afternoon of writing, reading and dreaming. She had a small amount of geography homework to finish first, though, and she decided to get it out of the way at once. Unpacking her school bag, she spreadeagled herself in her usual fashion on the carpet, with atlas, text-book and notes in front of her.

*

“Now, Amelia”—Rita’s voice had broken into those very first minutes of concentration—“it’s not worth getting out all those books just now. We’re going out.”

“
Out
?”

“OUT?”

The united outrage of father and daughter would have made most women quail.

“Yes,
out
,”
repeated Rita firmly. “It’s terribly boring staying cooped up in here like this. And on such a lovely day! Look at it! The sun’s come out! It’s
spring
!”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then:

“Oh
no,
Rita,
please
! Daddy and I
never
…”

“Oh, now, Rita, for heaven’s sake! I’ve
explained
to you that on Sundays I have to …”

“‘
Have
to
!’
To hell with ‘have to’! I tell you, the sun’s
shining!
The daffodils are out! Why, we could go to
Kew
….”

Kew. Kew was near Gunnersbury. And Gunnersbury, according to the fourth-form bush-telegraph, was where Mr Owen lived! Lived, alas, with his wife, but even so they might not spend
all
their time together. Maybe the wife was boring? Not his
intellectual
equal? Maybe he sought opportunities for getting away from her for an hour or two? What more likely than that he might decide to go for a walk in Kew Gardens by himself this bright afternoon? Wandering along the paths, musing gloomily, maybe, on the boring domestic scene to which he had so soon to return, he might suddenly chance to look up, and there, stepping lightly alongside a bank of daffodils, he would catch sight of …”

“My
hair
!”
had wailed Amelia despairingly at this point, “I haven’t washed it for
days
!
How can I go
anywhere
when my hair’s all …”

Her father had looked at her in amazement; Rita as a cat looks
at a whole roast chicken left miraculously unattended: and that was the way it began.

The hasty trip to the chemist’s that was always open on
Sundays:
the earnest discussion with the girl about the exact shade and texture of Amelia’s hair … and then … and then … the magic being set in motion.

*

“Daddy … Daddy, look!” she said now, coming a little hesitantly round the side of his desk.

“Look, Daddy, do you notice anything?”

“Ye Gods!” Adrian’s astonishment was all Amelia could have hoped—perhaps indeed more, for to show himself so utterly dumbfounded at the fact that his daughter was looking pretty
could
have been interpreted an unflattering.

Amelia, however, did not interpret it thus. She giggled
delightedly,
and blushed a lovely rose-pink, thereby unwittingly completing the transformation.

Her father seemed quite at a loss for adequate comment. “Oh, I say,
chicken!
”
was the best he could manage, and then he swept her into his arms in a great bear’s hug.

Fifteen minutes later, they were all three in the car, on the way to Kew Gardens.

*

They didn’t, of course, meet Mr Owen; but the first part of the afternoon was almost as exciting as if they had. Round every corner of the winding paths he might have appeared; in every one of the hot-houses he might have popped out from behind a great fern. Every heavily-built figure in the far distance might have turned out to be him as it approached; and every swarthy face with horn-rimmed glasses looked, for a millionth of a second, like his face.

For half an hour—for nearly three-quarters—these joys were sufficient. In front of budding azaleas Amelia posed herself
hopefully,
her new, wonderful hair lifting in the spring wind; beside beds of narcissus she loitered; and in among the bare, leafless birches of the bluebell wood—no bluebells yet, of course—she wandered expectantly, keeping all the time a few careful paces behind her father and Rita so as to give
the impression of being alone. Lightly, driftingly, she stepped between the trees, putting spring into each step so that her hair would lift and bounce against
her shoulders. A dryad, anyone of a literary turn of mind might have thought, a dryad dreaming her woodland dreams….

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.

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:

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.

“
M
E
and
R
ITA
, 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 one 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.