The Spider-Orchid (4 page)

Adrian was terrified, as only a man who is really hopeless with children
can
be terrified. The night before the first of these ordeals, he lay awake, sweating. What did she like doing? Where could he take her? What was she interested in? What would he do if she wanted to go to the lavatory and there wasn’t one? And there would no longer be Peggy there, telling him he was doing it all wrong, and thereby lifting the responsibility from his shudderingly incompetent shoulders. There would be nothing and nobody, just himself and Amelia, tongue-tied, adrift in uncharted wastelands of measureless embarrassment.

In the end, it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d envisaged.

“Hullo, Daddy,” Amelia would say, matter-of-factly, often following it up with, “Daddy, can I have…?” “Daddy, will you give me…?”—which were as good ice-breakers as any. Also, she seemed perfectly capable of locating a Ladies for herself and taking herself thither without assistance. As Sunday succeeded Sunday that first winter, he took her to the Zoo, to Madame Tussaud’s, to the various museums; and though she was bored, and he was bored, none of it was actually excruciating; indeed, after a while, their mutual boredom began to seem like a faint sort of embryonic link between them, the first he had ever experienced with his own child. He even felt, at times, a perverse little stab of pride at this shared intensity of boredom. Like father, like daughter, he’d find himself thinking with satisfaction as they stumped glumly home from these outings, hardly speaking, thankful, both of them, that it was safely over for one more week.

Still, it couldn’t go on like this indefinitely. Adrian’s store of patience was far from inexhaustible, and besides, he was getting behind with his work. Sunday had always been his big day for catching up on the technical journals and for assembling his thoughts for the coming week, and so he couldn’t go on frittering away valuable time for ever, even for Amelia’s sake. He thought, irritably, of the peaky, bored little face between the two skimpy, scraped-back plaits… recalled the dragging squeak of her sandals
traversing acre after acre of polished floor as they trailed around this or that repository of priceless treasures.

“I
hate
marvels!” he heard a little boy of about six complaining tearfully in the Science Museum one rainy afternoon; and this chance overheard remark quite suddenly decided him.

Never again. Never. If he was a bad father, then he was bloody well going to
be
a bad father, and Amelia could learn to put up with it. It was a fact of her environment, and the sooner she learned to adapt to it the better. Learning to adapt to his
environment
has surely been one of the great survival mechanisms of Homo sapiens; and Amelia could damn well learn to survive that way too. She was a member of the goddam species, wasn’t she? Well, then.

And so this, he resolved, was the finish.
Next
Sunday, he was going to stay in the flat and get on with his work; put in a real full day on it, as he’d been longing to do for weeks. And as for Amelia, she could like it or lump it. It wasn’t as if she ever enjoyed herself anyway. No matter what he did with her, she was always bored, and so she might just as well be bored in the flat as
anywhere
else. Henceforth, he was no longer going to put himself out in the least degree for her entertainment.

*

And it was on the very next Sunday—the inaugural Sunday of this new and totally selfish regime—that the miracle came into being.

I
T WAS THIS
miracle which now, four years later, he was trying to explain to Rita down the telephone, but already he knew it was hopeless. He could tell that it was by the very sound of her breathing, even before she spoke.

“Hardly a
miracle!
” she commented, with a mocking little laugh; and he wished, violently, that he’s never told her anything about it at all. “I mean,” she went on, with that lilt of affectionate raillery in her voice which had once so much excited him, but which now—particularly down the telephone—merely sounded shrill and patronising. “I mean, darling, there’s nothing exactly
miraculous,
is there, about a little girl going through a phase of Daddy-worship? How old was she at that time? Nine, wasn’t it? That’s just the age! The father-daughter thing, it’s terribly well known. It’s in all the textbooks. You know, the Oedipus thing in reverse, or do I mean Electra? Oh well, anyway, you know what I mean.”

Adrian knew what she meant all right. She meant that she had felt rebuffed and hurt by his suggestion that she shouldn’t return to the flat till Monday; and had been hurt even more by his
ill-judge
d attempt at explanation. He had been a fool, he realised now, to try to explain to Rita how much his daughter’s weekly visits meant to him. He couldn’t expect her to understand, or to feel other than jealous. Already, he sensed her hostility, before she’d even met the girl.

“Daddy-worship”; “the Oedipus thing”. Phrases like these, under their guise of casual sophistication, were calculated to smear and belittle. Their effect on a living, actual relationship was like
selective
weed-killer, attacking insidiously the sturdy, unselfconscious roots of it.

Not that Rita would have thought all this out before slinging this half-digested psychological jargon at him. She worked by instinct, Rita did, and her instincts were always one jump ahead of him. On whatever ground he tried to base an argument, he would find that these grounds had already been mined beforehand.

The present case was typical. He’d tried to explain to her how he felt about these visits of Amelia’s, which had been going on so happily and rewardingly for nearly four years now, and she didn’t wait to understand, she didn’t need to. At the first mention of the child’s name, she had made a grab for the nearest cliché, and was there waiting for him with it, before he’d even assembled the relevant data.

In a way, he couldn’t blame Rita for her resentment, or even for her mockery. The thing
did
sound soppy when it was put into words. But the whole beauty of it, with him and Amelia, was that they never
did
put it into words, had never had to. Even at the beginning—particularly, perhaps, at the beginning—it had been the very wordlessness of what was happening between them which had made it all so wonderful.

It hadn’t happened all at once. In fact, in the very beginning, on that first Sunday of his revolt against the weekly outings which he found so irksome, he’d felt nothing but an uneasy guilt about what he was doing. Poor little girl! Expecting to be taken out somewhere, and then finding herself condemned to spend an entire afternoon cooped up in the company of a silent, preoccupied father who had no attention to spare for anything but the charts and diagrams spread in front of him on the forbidding great desk. He’d had the decency to warn her, of course. “I’m going to be busy,” he’d told her the previous week, “I shan’t be able to take you out anywhere next Sunday.” And, “Yes, Daddy,” she’d said, as she always did, her blue-green eyes fixed on him, and he didn’t know whether she was listening or not. He never did.

He apologised again when the time came.

“’Im afraid it’s going to be rather boring for you, chicken,” he said, “I’ve got all this checking up to do, you see, and so you’ll just … well, you’ll just have to…”

He wished, at that point, that he’d laid in some toys, jigsaw puzzles or something, to put in front of her, like a saucer of milk in front of a cat, but he’d never thought about it.

“You’ll just have to amuse yourself,” he finished firmly,
reminding
himself again of Homo sapiens and all that; and, “Yes, Daddy,” she said again. He turned away from her and bent over his work; and from then on he heard nothing from her for an hour.

For two hours. For three hours. It was only the necessity for turning the light on at a quarter past five that reminded him once
more of her existence. Turning in his revolving chair, and
stretching
his cramped spine, Adrian experienced quite a little shock at the sight of the two straggly plaits dangling barely eighteen inches from his knees. Amelia was lying full-length on the carpet,
propped
on her elbows, chin in hands, poring over the M–P volume of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica.

He stared down at her. She was a good little thing, she really was! Not a sound out of her the whole afternoon.

“Tea, chicken?” he asked, with a twinge of belated compunction, and she looked up in a dazed, almost startled sort of a way. Then she smiled.

“What is there?” she asked; and after two or three more
similarly
laconic exchanges, the two of them were once more engrossed in their respective studies, she nibbling chocolate biscuits as she read, and he sipping a cup of Lapsang tea, pausing every now and then to check one of the digits on his chart against the notes that lay alongside.

It was seven o’clock before either of them spoke again.

“Did you know, Daddy, that Numitianus started a whole new
religion?
” remarked Amelia, as he helped her into her coat
preparatory
to taking her home, “An actual
religion,
called
Numitianianism.
And now nobody’s even heard of it any more! Isn’t that sad for him?”

Adrian suggested that since this Numitianus was dead and buried more than a thousand years, it couldn’t matter to him whether his pet religion had caught on or not; but Amelia couldn’t agree. They talked about it, on and off, all the way back in the car, and though the argument petered out quite inconclusively, Adrian went home with a strange and unfamiliar sense of accomplishment; a feeling of achievement for which he could find no adequate explanation. She really
is
a good little kid, was the nearest he could get to it: I really must try and … oh, I don’t know … well … something.

*

But by the next Sunday, he really
was
involved in a rush job, and so whatever resolutions he had made about entertaining Amelia more adequately had to go by the board. All afternoon long he worked on his report, and when, every now and again, he found a moment to glance at the child, there she was, just as she had been last week, stretched out on the carpet with her nose in a book. Only this time it wasn’t the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
, it was Sir Robert
Ball’s
Story of the Heavens
; and while they had tea—fish paste this time, on Matzo biscuits—she regaled Adrian with an account of the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, and how they had led to the discovery of Neptune. Her voice grew shrill with mounting excitement as she approached the climactic moment when Le Verrier turned his telescope towards the area of the sky where he had calculated that Neptune should be—and there
was
Neptune!

As he listened, Adrian was aware, once again, of something
happening
which was outside the range of his previous experience, and for which he could find no words.

It was several Sundays later before he realised what it was.

Amelia loved him. She loved coming here, being with him. She loved the peace, the silence, the sense of intellectual purpose in this quiet, book-lined room. She loved the way he left her alone, the way he had his own work to do, and the fact that it was more important than she was, just as Neptune’s orbit was more important than either of them.

They were two of a kind, he and Amelia. The struggle to be a “good father” was at an end. Amelia didn’t need a “good father”, had never needed one, she needed
him.

*

“Adrian? … Are you still there? … I thought you must have hung up on me!”

Rita’s voice, in spite of the little laugh, sounded anxious and accusatory. Adrian held the instrument a little away from his ear. The few inches of extra distance didn’t really solve anything, any more than burning the electricity bill sets one’s finances straight, but it did make him feel a little more in command of the situation, a little less like a puppet dancing to Rita’s insistent tune. He wished he didn’t know so exactly how she was feeling, there was nothing he could do about it, and it was both painful and boring to know it all so well. He knew exactly how she would be looking, over there in Wimbledon, sitting sideways to the telephone table,
leaning
forward from the waist, the lovely legs crossed, the tight, sullen little frown already puckering her white brow. Her pale, well-manicured fingers with their freshly-applied pink nail-varnish would by now be moving restlessly, like the quivering of poplar leaves before a storm, fidgeting with the receiver, plucking at the coiled snake of the flex. The small, neat lips would be delicately
parted, poised for the attack, ready to snatch up the argument from wherever it might fall and worry it like a bone.

“I’d have
thought
,” she was saying, stabbing at the words as was her habit when aggrieved, “I’d have
thought
that you’d be
pleased
that I’m so anxious to meet your Amelia! I don’t
under
stand
you, Adrian! Don’t you
want
us to meet…? To be friends…?”

Adrian was silent. He
didn’t
want them to meet, and some dark instinct had already told him that they would never be friends. But of course, he couldn’t say this. He wasn’t happy even thinking it, it was so prejudiced, so irrational. How could he possibly know, in advance, whether Rita and Amelia were or weren’t going to hit it off?

He just did know, that’s all. He played for time.

“Look, darling,” he said, “don’t let’s rush things. We don’t want to spoil everything by—well—you know—just when Derek is beginning to come round and everything….”

The sheer
non
sequitur
of these considerations nearly stopped him in his tracks; but he knew he must keep going, keep talking, paper over the rift widening between them.

“So come as early as you possibly can, darling, on
Monday
,” he urged, trying to put eager anticipation into his voice. “Come straight from work. Or if you like, we’ll go out to dinner. I’ll meet you at the …”

But she was not appeased.

“You’re trying to put me off!” she accused, and he heard, with horror, the beginnings of tears in her voice. He could not bear it when she cried. “You don’t
love
me any more! You don’t
want
me to leave Derek and come to you, I can tell you don’t …

This was so nearly the truth that Adrian could not think what to say. In panic and confusion, he fell back on the old, despairing clichés.

Of course he still loved her. Of course he wanted her to come to him. But not yet. It was all so sudden …

“
Sudden!
” Rita fairly spat the word back at him, and who could blame her. “It’s nearly four years since you first asked me to marry you! I was twenty-nine then, and now I’m thirty-three! Four bloody years of waiting, and working on Derek, and being faithful to you—do you realise I haven’t let Derek make love to me
once,
in all that time…?”

He did know, but only because she’d told him so, repeatedly, over the years, always wanting from him some reaction of
overpowering
gratitude which he just couldn’t dredge up. Such confidences embarrassed rather than flattered him, he didn’t
want
to know about her and Derek, one way or the other. He wanted her marriage to be her problem, nothing to do with him, he didn’t want the responsibility of it. The implicit demand that he should be spiritually in attendance in the Wimbledon bedroom, keeping Derek’s hands off her, night after night, wearied him and made him feel uncomfortable.

But of course, there was no way of explaining this. He closed his eyes, and from six inches away let her indignation flow over and past him. At this distance from his ear, her voice sounded tinny and robot-like, spending its force on the electronic
convolu
tion
s of the telephone service between here and Wimbledon.

“And what about
next
Sunday? And the Sunday after
that
… and the Sunday after
that
…?” Her distant anger was coming closer, and nothing could blot out the tears in her voice now. “…
all
the Sundays? We’re planning to live together, that’s what you said! So is
this
what it’s going to be
like
? I’m to be thrown out
every
Sunday for the rest of my
life
? Thrown out of my own
home
, to walk the
streets
…?”

“Darling, you’re getting yourself worked up over nothing,” he intervened, with exaggerated composure, knowing very well that it
wasn’t
nothing, but not knowing how else to treat it. “We’re not talking about
every
Sunday, we’re talking about
next
Sunday! Give me a chance! It may not be sudden from
your
—I mean
our
point of view, but it’s sudden for Amelia. Surely you can see that?”

She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. He’d had nearly
four
years
to prepare Amelia for this outcome! Ever since she was nine years old, in fact—nearly a third of the kid’s whole life, she was thirteen now, wasn’t she? Surely, in all that time …?

That a man could thus procrastinate, could put off a necessary but uncomfortable task week after week, month after month, for nearly four years, was beyond her comprehension. Or she claimed it was.

And why an
uncomfortable
task, anyway? Why not a delightful one? Why hadn’t he presented the thing to Amelia as something exciting, something to look forward to? He could have played down the stepmother angle, after all Rita was a lot younger than
he was, she would be more a sort of big sister to Amelia … a friend … someone to have fun with. The three of them could go on Sunday outings together….