The Spider-Orchid (14 page)

Poor Amelia! This should have been her show really, thought Daphne pityingly; but then, she should never have been absent during such a week! She, Daphne, would have had herself brought to school on a
stretcher
before she’d have missed it all.

N
OTHING IS MORE
unpredictable than the kind of invalid a person will make. Selfish, demanding egotists in ordinary life can become angels of patience and humble gratitude under the onslaught of pain: life-long paragons of self-denial and concern for others can become monsters of peevish ill-nature at the first lash of illness.

Adrian was dreading Rita’s return from hospital, though he was less scared, actually, about what sort of a patient
she
would make than about what sort of a ministering angel
he
would. At the best of times, he disliked illness, and shrank from its manifestations, in himself or others. He had always observed, with a sort of
incredulous
wonder, the extraordinary demands human beings allow illness to make on them, the sufferer no less than his attendants. Whereas in every other known mammalian species, the sick
individual
crawls off into a dark corner by itself to recover in solitude, the human mammal imposes the exact opposite on its sick
members,
setting them up into a position of glaring prominence, and floodlighting them with a multi-faceted concern from which there is no way of hiding. Propped up amid flowers, grapes and get-well cards, like an emperor among his jewels, the victim becomes,
despite
his weakness, a nerve-centre of comings and goings, a focal point of elaborate and inescapable ceremonial. Enthroned among his pillows, bound by a ritual as rigid as that of any mediaeval court, he is expected to receive state visits from all and sundry, to give audience at appointed hours to deputations from here, there and everywhere, and to sustain these encounters smilingly, with unfaltering aplomb, like royalty. In all this he is expected to play the lead, to keep his end up, to observe the elaborate protocol of
greetings
and farewells, and to show himself well versed in the formulae prescribed for the gracious acceptance of tribute in the form of chocolates, busy-lizzies, and comic pictures of bedpans.

*

All this when you are
ill
, for heaven’s sake! And even this isn’t the end of the story. There is a sort of monstrous arrogance about
illness—anyone’s illness—to which Adrian could never reconcile himself: the way it takes precedence over anything and everything, driving tank-like over all concerns other than its own. Thus by being in hospital (even though it was now clear that she was going to recover), Rita had put herself out of range of all her problems, including those she was currently causing for others. For days—maybe for weeks—no one could ask her to face up to anything, to discuss anything uncomfortable or unpleasant. Certainly, it was going to be impossible for Adrian to follow up that last conversation he’d had with her before the accident, in which it had been agreed that she was to leave him. It wasn’t an agreement you could hold her to now, or even refer to any more: her accident had released her totally, for the foreseeable future, from anything she had said or promised, and from the consequences of anything she had ever done. Nothing was her fault any more; all was perforce forgiven.

It was like a sort of mini-Millenium, only with everyone else carrying the can, instead of God.

This awful power of Rita’s illness crushed Adrian into the ground. He felt like a non-man, all his own projects and purposes suddenly obliterated. It was like waking up in the morning to find his whole life buried under a fall of snow, leaving only Rita’s sick-bed concerns visible, sticking up like telegraph poles as far as the eye could see.

Adrian wondered whether, deep in their hearts, everyone felt like this about illness? Or was he alone in his monstrous callousness? If, indeed, you could call it callousness, when he was only too ready to apply to himself the same criteria as to others? In fact, he himself had never been seriously ill; but if such a thing should happen, his desire would be to be left severely alone and, apart from necessary medical treatments (applied as impersonally as possible), to be allowed to crawl away into that dark mammalian corner. That this was what he would prefer for himself, he was absolutely certain, and indeed, to be quite honest, he would prefer it for other people, too; but luckily one was never called upon to be
that
honest. The ritual took over, and with its mighty,
centuries-old
power quelled such opinions at their source.

Nevertheless, what with one thing and another, it did seem that Adrian was not quite the man to be landed with sick-nursing on any very extensive scale. But then, neither was Rita the woman to
be landed with wearing a neck-brace for the greater part of the summer. It is a hard but inescapable fact that Fate takes no account of natural aptitude when dealing out her blows.

*

There was a brief moment, about three days before Rita was due to come out of hospital, when Adrian indulged a wild but
short-lived
vision of getting out of the thing altogether. He arrived at his office, rather later than usual, to be told by his secretary that Mr Langley had phoned twice already, and would Adrian ring him back immediately, as it was urgent?

Urgent! What glorious visions the word conjured up, of Derek indignantly demanding his rights as a husband! Insisting that his wife be sent back to
him
to convalesce! Perhaps the hospital had been on to the phone to him this morning, or he to them, to clear the matter up, and perhaps, with a sudden rush of male pride to the head, Derek had averred that over his dead body would he allow his wife, in her fragile state, to be handed over to that callous, double-dealing, sex-crazy son-of-a-bitch….

*

But as soon as he heard Derek’s mild, unemphatic voice at the other end of the wire, he realised, with a sinking of the heart, that here was no manic upsurge of outraged masculinity to be dealt with; rather, it was the very same disability that was affecting Adrian himself; an upsurge of overwhelming desire to avoid bother, by any means within the bounds of common decency.

Rita, apparently, had rung Derek from her bedside this
morning
, at an hour which for her, hospital-orientated as she had become, was just after breakfast, but which for him was practically the middle of the night, to suggest that she should come home to him in Wimbledon to convalesce. Perhaps being woken from his deepest sleep had been a factor contributing to Derek’s attitude of unqualified disfavour towards this proposal, or maybe the
disfavour
would in any case have been overwhelming; anyway, by the time Adrian was on the line to him, his attitude was crystal clear, and unshakeable.

“You see, my dear fellow,” he explained equably, “you didn’t, as I understand it, take her away from me on a sale-or-return basis. It was theft, you know, plain outright theft; and even in these days, when burglars have never had it so good, they still have not been accorded the legal right to return goods which are faulty, or
which fail to give satisfaction. In addition to which, my dear chap, you will, I am sure, appreciate that you have left it a bit late in the day, you are no longer in what one might call a sellers’ market. She’s damaged goods, isn’t she?—as one might say; in a manner of speaking….”

Adrian retorted sharply that this was no way to talk about the poor girl and her accident, which had only just escaped being a very serious one indeed; and Derek agreed that No, indeed it wasn’t, and no doubt Adrian himself had some much, much nicer things to say about it? He, Derek, was all ears.

At this, naturally, Adrian was rendered speechless. It took him several seconds to adjust to the extraordinary turn the conversation had taken, and to take in that the gist of it, so far, amounted to a quite unfounded charge against himself: an accusation of wanting to push Rita, now that she was ill, back on to Derek. This was just exactly what he did want, of course, but this was no reason for accusing him of it.

“What the hell is this all about, anyway?” he blustered, trying to capture the initiative. “When did I ever say anything about Rita’s returning to you? As a matter of fact, I’ve assumed all along that naturally
I
shall—”

“
‘Naturally
!’ Dear, dear!” Derek gave a small unpleasant laugh, and then continued: “My dear chap, don’t get me wrong: please don’t think that I’m
objecting
to your noble, gentlemanly, and very proper reluctance to throw my wife on the scrap-heap as soon as she becomes a bit of a burden. Not a bit of it. On the contrary, I applaud such a decision. But to ask me to believe that it is
natural
in you to behave like this—that is, with common decency….”

“Derek! Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere—!”

Adrian felt perturbed rather than angry. These elaborate and gratuitous insults were too blatant to be taken at face value; they seemed to indicate a bitterness run out of control rather than straightforward enmity. Had something new happened? And if so, what…?

“Listen,” he went on, “this is no time for slanging each other and trying to sort out the rights and wrongs of the thing. I’ve no doubt there’s plenty I should be apologising for. But right now, with Rita in hospital after a really very nasty accident…”

“‘Accident’? Ah yes, of course, I’d forgotten that you’d still be
using that word for it. Of course you would.
‘Naturally.’
But that’s not what the paper said, is it? And it’s not what Rita herself says. She says …”

Suddenly, light dawned. For a moment, Adrian was too astounded to speak. He, of course, like everyone else, had seen the quote in the paper, had been shocked by it; but then, when nothing further happened, and when Rita herself made no further reference to the matter, he concluded that the whole thing must have been a bit of journalistic kite-flying, or that Rita, if she had spoken the words at all, had spoken them while still in a state of shock, and not knowing what she was saying. The people at the hospital must, he judged, have reached the same conclusion, or else by now, surely, the police or someone would have taken some sort of action?

He began explaining all this to Derek, in the smiling,
throw-away
tones of a man clearing up a ridiculous little
misunderstanding
between friends. But the silence from Derek’s end of the phone was total, and went on and on. Adrian found himself beginning to ramble uneasily, to lose the thread of what he was saying.

“I mean, hang it all, Derek,” he found himself expostulating, as much to extract some sort of response from Derek’s end of the line as to defend himself, “I mean, you can’t be seriously suggesting that
I
—”

“Of course not!” Derek’s voice sprang back into the ear-piece with a suddenness that made Adrian jump. “Of course I’m not suggesting it, I wouldn’t be such a fool! It would only set you polishing up your alibi to even smoother perfection, wouldn’t it? And I’m sure it’s an excellent one already. I won’t even waste time on checking on it, whatever it is, so certain am I that it will prove watertight.
‘Naturally
’
it will. But I thought you might like to know that
if
the police should take it into their heads to come and question me, then I shall feel obliged to reveal to them the fact that Rita rang me up that very morning—the morning of the day of the “accident”—and told me that you were throwing her out. She was very distressed, poor girl, she wanted to come back to
me,
to her dreary old no-good husband! Would you credit it? Maybe if I’d agreed, if I’d said, Yes, darling, you pack your things right away and come back to your own sweetie-pie who loves you —well, if I’d said
that,
then maybe the “accident” would never have happened. Would it? Because, my dear Adrian, you only
had the two ways of getting rid of her, hadn’t you? She’s not the sort of girl to go off and stand on her own two feet, you know
that
as well as I do. She has to cling, Rita does, she’s like that special dwarf variety of wisteria of mine, which was among the plants that she destroyed so effectively—it was hanging like little black bootlaces from its trellis, did you notice? Of course you did —and of course you know that that’s what she is, too—a clinger. She’d never have left you until she was sure she could come back to me—you’d have had her on your back for ever. And so when I, selfish creature that I am, said Not B-Likely—
that
was the moment, wasn’t it, when you realised that you now had only the one other option left to you? And so really”—here Derek’s voice took on a meditative quality, as of one philisophising about Life and the Human Condition—“and so really, it was my selfishness, wasn’t it, just as much as your murderous violence, that pushed her down that flight of stairs? We murdered her together, didn’t we?—attempted it, that is to say.

“Butter-fingers, eh, both of us…?”

I
N ALL HIS
self-absorbed and unheroic dread of Rita’s homecoming, Adrian had forgotten one vital factor: Dorothy. He should have foreseen that Dorothy was going to absolutely love it, just as she’d been absolutely loving the whole thing right from the beginning—from the first horrifying phone call, right through the paralysed-for-life scare to the startling “someone pushed me” allegations. For her, Rita’s return with her back dramatically in plaster was going to be the grand finale of the most glorious
catastrophe
in all her years as a landlady, and she wasn’t for worlds going to miss out on one single detail of any of it. And of course, in the process of not missing out, she was inevitably going to make things much, much easier for Adrian. Long ago, Dorothy had discovered that only by helping people in their troubles do you get to the real, juicy core of the disaster, in all its scandalous and thrilling details; and now, true to her lifelong philosophy, she was only too willing to help Rita—
really
to help her—spending half her days up in the flat doing with generous gusto anything that needed doing.

And of course, lots of things
did
need doing, especially during those first days of all, when Rita could only walk with extreme difficulty, stiff as an upended roll of lino, and couldn’t sit down at all without assistance.

Dorothy was in her element, her kindness, her curiosity and her unquenchable delight in the horrific combining to produce just that blend of inquisitive concern and practical usefulness which is invaluable in a sick-room. She helped unstintingly, cooking, cleaning, ironing, making beds, so that when Adrian came home in the evenings there was hardly a thing left for him to do. He was
absolutely
thankful; it allowed him to get on with his work and all his usual activities almost as if nothing had happened.

*

And so it came about that it was to Dorothy, not to Adrian, that Rita first confided her fears. She felt “scared”, she said, of being right up here at the top of the house. She kept fancying she heard
footsteps on the stairs: strange shufflings and bumpings in the adjoining room.

Dorothy was sympathy itself. She could quite understand this feeling, she declared, so weak as Rita still was, and with that great heavy thing around her neck. It must make her feel, Dorothy surmised, dreadfully helpless “if anything was to happen”.

“Just how my grandma used to feel when she had her hip.”—Dorothy enlarged on the theme—“
She
was living up top of a big house at the time, too, and being used to servants and all that in her young days, you know, she couldn’t get used to the idea of being up there on her own and it’s being no one’s job to look after her. ‘Suppose there was a fire!’ she used to say. ‘Or robbers! How would I ever get down the stairs fast enough?’”

Dorothy’s grandmother—her hip, her delicate nerves and her aristocratic forbears—kept Dorothy up in the flat ironing and tidying for an entire afternoon, and by a natural enough sequence of ideas these topics led to a reference to the old diary, including all that name-dropping of long ago. Amelia Caroline Ponsonby. One of
the
Ponsonbys.

“Amelia—
our
Amelia, that’s to say—she was thrilled to bits when I let her see it,” Dorothy chatted on, slowly pushing the iron back and forth over one of Adrian’s shirts. “Funny thing, wasn’t it,
both
of them being called ‘Amelia’! And on top of that, here’s
our
Amelia keeping a diary too! She was telling me all about it, how—Why, whatever’s the matter, dear? Aren’t you feeling well? Got a funny turn, have you? It’s like that, you know, when you first come out of hospital. Very funny you can feel sometimes, all of a sudden. I remember the lady who was here—let me see—not the last one before Kathy and that lot, but the one before that—Well, she’d had this operation, you see, gall-bladder it was, dreadful pain she’d been having, and the very day she come out, she …”

But Rita, rigid in her plaster casing, was still trembling, her jaw shaking atop its rampart; and when Adrian came in that evening Dorothy took it upon herself to waylay him on the stairs and describe the whole episode to him, and to surmise, with grave looks and ecstatic head-shakings, that the poor thing’s nerves were still not right, not right at all, and that in Dorothy’s opinion she should never have …

Adrian leaned against the banisters, frowning impatiently. He
did not at all want to snub Dorothy, especially after all her kindness—which indeed had by now become indispensable to him—but he hated having to be dragged into Rita’s emotional state, being forced to consider what was, or might be, going on in her mind.

For, apart from politenesses and trivial platitudes, he and Rita had conversed hardly at all since her return from hospital, and Adrian was praying that it might go on that way. There had, it is true, been a brief spell immediately after Derek’s ridiculous phone call when it had crossed Adrian’s mind to have the whole thing out with Rita straightaway, at the very next visiting hour: to ask her what on earth she’d actually meant by that astounding statement to the press, and whom she was meaning to accuse? He had thought about doing this; had thought about just how to word it; and in the end had done nothing. It is always easier to do nothing than something, and in this case he could tell himself that he was putting the thing off for Rita’s sake—that she was still in a shaky state, and must not be upset. In the course of these reflections he began to see the point, after all, of the irritating sanctity of illness, which he had always so deplored: it seemed that it allowed other people, as well as the patient, to procrastinate and to escape responsibilities. Of course, he told himself, there would have to be a proper confrontation
some
time, not only about Rita’s mysterious accusation, but also about the question of what the hell she was doing at the school in the first place. “Amelia asked me to come”—Rita’s explanation so far—just didn’t make sense; and he couldn’t, at the moment, check it with Amelia herself because the Easter holidays had started, and Peggy on a sudden whim had taken the child down to Seaford “for a change of air”, and they wouldn’t be back for a fortnight or more.

“Yes, well, thank you, Dorothy. Thanks for telling me,” he kept saying, one hand on the banisters; but still Dorothy kept right on talking, until, mercifully, a diversion was created in the shape of a sullen, overweight youth, whom Adrian hadn’t seen before, pushing his way wordlessly past them and out through the front door. Dorothy’s ever-hungry attention was immediately caught by this new phenomenon, and the almost-talked-out subject of Rita’s nerves was temporarily forgotten.

“See?” She leaned towards Adrian confidentially. “See? I believe that’s Kathy’s new boy friend! That’s the
third
time he’s
been here! Oh, I do hope so, poor kid, she’s had such rotten luck so far! All those hippies and layabouts—but this one, he looks a different type, didn’t you think? Not good-looking of course, not like That Brian, but more sort of
steady.
Didn’t you think so?”

Adrian, who had thought nothing except that his new incumbent (if such he was) seemed just as unmannerly as his predecessors, could find nothing to say. He hadn’t been following Kathy’s love-life with sufficient attention to have an opinion of any kind. On the other hand, he had no wish to damp down any of Dorothy’s facile enthusiasms, which so often proved so beneficial to all concerned—and not least to himself at this present juncture. So he simply made an indeterminate, vaguely encouraging sound and seized the opportunity to escape.

He approached his own landing feeling unsettled and apprehensive. Despite his boredom with the conversation, Dorothy’s words had sunk in—or some of them had. He was annoyed at being made to feel anxious about Rita again just when things were beginning to be not too bad; and he began fighting back against Dorothy’s unsettling insinuations before he’d even reached his flat.

*

So Rita felt scared, did she? What the hell did she think
he
felt, coming home evening after evening to this awful anomalous situation, the two of them living here together neither as lovers nor as enemies, neither friends nor strangers, and never knowing what to say, how to behave? It was enough to scare anybody!

In default of anything more imaginative, he usually said, “Hello, my dear, how have you been today?” as soon as he got home, and then, while she told him, he would unload his briefcase, set out the papers on his desk, plan his work for the evening. Things were particularly busy in his department at this time of the year—in fact, “She
would
do it just now!” had been the very first thought that had flashed through his mind when he heard that she’d broken her neck. Flashed quite involuntarily, of course; people don’t
choose
their first reactions to shocks like this.

“Hello, my dear, how have—” he was beginning, as usual; but this time Rita was ahead of him, interrupting, cutting across the safe little bit of routine he had so painfully managed to evolve. Very regal did she look, almost awe-inspiring, standing right in his path, straight and rigid in her plaster, like the statue of an Assyrian queen. So unexpected was the apparition, that it took him
a few seconds to take in what she was saying, and a few more to realise that it was something to which he couldn’t just not listen.

*

It looked like good-bye to his evening’s work, anyway. It seemed that Rita had overheard bits of his colloquy with Dorothy on the stairs, and was wild to know the rest. What had they been saying about her? What had Dorothy been telling him? And while they ate the fish pie and baked potatoes that Dorothy had left in the oven for them, Adrian found himself cornered into satisfying her curiosity. It was against all his instincts to do so, and so he answered her questions as briefly as he could, and sulkily. It wasn’t that there was anything in that long-winded conversation with Dorothy that he considered worth hiding; it was just that it was all so tedious, and he was quite certain that at some point or other in the exchange Rita was going to start crying. He would find that he had said the wrong thing, insulted her in some complicated way, and the rest of the evening would have to be spent in sorting out the misunderstanding. A sort of weary boredom enveloped him, and he ate his baked potato almost without tasting it—not even bothering to split it open and put butter in. Usually (as dear old Dorothy well knew) he loved baked potatoes with butter; but this evening it seemed that he wasn’t to be allowed to enjoy even that.

“Nothing much—I was simply asking her how you’d been today”—he stalled: but of course it was no use. Rita wasn’t a woman to be diverted from her purpose so easily, and the ensuing interchange was like being checkmated at chess. She drove him back and back, pouncing on his every evasion, parrying every change of subject, until at last there was no way to turn, and he was cornered, compelled, against all his instincts, into asking her what it was she’d meant when she told Dorothy she was “scared”?

He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to hear a thing about it. This was exactly the sort of emotional confrontation he’d been trying to avoid all these days, but having been manoeuvred into asking the question, there was no way of not hearing the answer:

“Well—wouldn’t anyone be scared?” retorted Rita, with a short laugh. “I mean, when someone has had one try at murdering you, you really can’t help wondering when and how the next try is coming. Can you?”

Adrian gulped. He tried to count ten before answering, but only got as far as three.

“You mean, then—you seriously mean—that all that stuff you told the newspapers was supposed to be
true?
You weren’t just in a state of shock when they interviewed you—not knowing what you were saying …?”

“I was in a state of shock, all right….” A little smile played around the tip-tilted jaw-line atop the plaster. “Naturally I was. But I also knew what I was saying. I knew perfectly well. And it was true. That’s why I said it. I
was
pushed.”

She waited, lips slightly parted, for Adrian to ask the next question she had lined up for him; and something in her air of greedy expectancy made him long not to ask it. But of course he had to.

“Well, so who was it?
Who
do you think pushed you?”

The smile glinting at him over the rim of the neck-brace was horrible. From this angle, it seemed as if it, too, was supported by plaster and criss-cross metal wires. You could see that what was being led up to was something she’d been looking forward to saying for days. He watched her savouring it, the delicate tip of her tongue lightly travelling around the curved bow of her pink lips.

“
Who
? Now now, Adrian, darling, don’t let’s pretend! You know very well who it was. You
can’t
not know!”

Adrian gritted his teeth.

“You’ve been talking to Derek!” he accused her. “Well, as it happens, so have I! And let me tell you, Rita—”

“To
Derek
? Oh, but darling, I wouldn’t listen to
Derek
! He’s half crazy with jealousy, so he can’t see anything straight. Would you believe it, the poor silly man insists it was
you
who pushed me! Did you ever hear such nonsense? When he said that, I just laughed out loud, the whole ward must have wondered what the joke was!
No,
darling, of course I know it wasn’t you! You haven’t got it in you. And besides, you love me….”

She paused a moment, watching him. Then:

“Come on, darling, guess again! You can’t? You can’t
really
? Well, then, let’s give you a few clues, like in those party games. Who is it who hates me—who has always hated me? Who is so jealous of me that it’s like a sort of illness? Who? Come on: Who?
Who
?
”

Her lips smacked wetly; her eyes were alight with victory. Adrian would not speak at first, nor look at her. Then, in a sullen, harsh voice he tried one more red herring.

“Peggy?” he muttered unconvincingly, and then, raising his head, he continued clearly and decisively, “My dear Rita, you flatter yourself! If Peggy had been
that
jealous of you, she’d—”