The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

  The Spider-Orchid

  CELIA FREMLIN

  Contents

  Title Page

  Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Copyright

  Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch

  Celia Fremlin was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 June 1914, to Heaver and Margaret Fremlin. Her father was a doctor, and she spent her childhood in Hertfordshire before going on to study at Oxford. Between 1958 and 1994 she published sixteen novels of suspense and three collections of stories, highly acclaimed in their day. Sadly, Fremlin’s work had largely fallen out of print by the time I discovered her for myself in the mid-1990s. But I was captivated by the elegant, razor-sharp quality of her writing and – as often when one finds an author one is passionate about – keen to learn more about the writer’s life. Then, in early 2005, I had the great good fortune of having several conversations with Celia Fremlin’s elder daughter Geraldine Goller. Geraldine was a charming woman and I found our discussions enlightening, helping me to understand Celia Fremlin better and to appreciate why she wrote the kind of books she did.

  One noteworthy thing I gathered from Geraldine was that her mother (highly academic as a young woman, even before she found her vocation in fiction) was invariably to be found immersed in her latest writing project – to the exclusion, at times, of her family. Geraldine also told me that her mother was notorious within the home for embroidering the truth, and was quite often caught out by her family for telling ‘little white lies’. Geraldine, however, read no badness into this trait: she simply put it down to her mother’s creative streak, her ability to fabricate new identities for people – even for herself.

  Who, then, was the real Celia Fremlin? The short biographies in her books tended to state that she was born in Ryarsh, Kent. Geraldine, however, informed me that her mother was raised in Hertfordshire, where – we know for a fact – she was admitted to Berkhamsted School for Girls in 1923; she studied there until 1933. Ryarsh, then, was perhaps one of those minor fabrications on Fremlin’s part. As a fan of hers, was I perturbed by the idea that Fremlin may have practised deceit? Not at all – if anything, it made the author and her works appear even more attractive and labyrinthine. Here was a middle-class woman who seemed to delight in re-inventing herself; and while all writers draw upon their own experiences to some extent, ‘reinvention’ is the key to any artist’s longevity. I can imagine it must have been maddening to live with, but it does suggest Fremlin had a mischievous streak, evident too in her writing. And Fremlin is hardly alone in this habit, even among writers: haven’t we all, at one time or another, ‘embellished’ some part of our lives to make us sound more interesting?

  Even as a girl, Celia Fremlin wrote keenly: a talent perhaps inherited from her mother, Margaret, who had herself enjoyed writing plays. By the age of thirteen Celia was publishing poems in the Chronicle of the Berkhamsted School for Girls, and in 1930 she was awarded the school’s Lady Cooper Prize for ‘Best Original Poem’, her entry entitled, ‘When the World Has Grown Cold’ (which could easily have served for one of her later short stories). In her final year at Berkhamsted she became President of the school’s inaugural Literary and Debating Society.

  She went on to study Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with a second. Not one to rest on her laurels, she worked concurrently as a charwoman. This youthful experience provided a fascinating lesson for her in studying the class system from different perspectives, and led to her publishing her first non-fiction book, The Seven Chars of Chelsea, in 1940. During the war Fremlin served as an air-raid warden and also became involved in the now celebrated Mass Observation project of popular anthropology, founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, and committed to the study of the everyday lives of ordinary people. Fremlin collaborated with Tom Harrisson on the book War Factory (1943), recording the experiences and attitudes of women war workers in a factory outside Malmesbury, Wiltshire, which specialised in making radar equipment.

  In 1942, Fremlin married Elia Goller: they would have three children, Nicholas, Geraldine and Sylvia. According to Geraldine, the newlyweds moved to Hampstead, into a ‘tall, old house overlooking the Heath itself’, and this was where Geraldine and her siblings grew up. Fremlin was by now developing her fiction writing, and she submitted a number of short stories to the likes of Women’s Own, Punch and the London Mystery Magazine. However she had to endure a fair number of rejections before, finally, her debut novel was accepted. In a preface to a later Pandora edition of said novel Fremlin wrote:

  The original inspiration for this book was my second baby. She was one of those babies who, perfectly content and happy all day, simply don’t sleep through the night. Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by, I found myself quite distracted by lack of sleep; my eyes would fall shut while I peeled the potatoes or ironed shirts. I remember one night sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, my baby awake and lively in my arms it dawned on me: this is a major human experience, why hasn’t someone written about it? It seemed to me that a serious novel should be written with this experience at its centre. Then it occurred to me – why don’t I write one?

  The baby who bore unknowing witness to Fremlin’s epiphany was, of course, Geraldine. It would be some years before Fremlin could actually put pen to paper on this project, but the resulting novel, The Hours Before Dawn (1959), went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Crime Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and remains Fremlin’s most famous work.

  Thereafter Fremlin wrote at a steady pace, publishing Uncle Paul in 1960 and Seven Lean Years in 1961. Those first three novels have been classed as ‘tales of menace’, even ‘domestic suspense’. Fremlin took the everyday as her subject and yet, by introducing an atmosphere of unease, she made it extraordinary, fraught with danger. She succeeded in chilling and thrilling her readers without spilling so much as a drop of blood. However, there is a persistent threat of harm that pervades Fremlin’s writing and she excels at creating a claustrophobic tension in ‘normal’ households. This scenario was her métier and one she revisited in many novels. Fremlin once commented that her favourite pastimes were gossip, ‘talking shop’ and any kind of argument about anything. We might suppose that it was through these enthusiasms that she gleaned the ideas that grew into her books. Reading them it is clear that the mundane minutiae of domesticity fascinated her. Moreover, The Hours Before Dawn and The Trouble-Makers have a special concern with the societal/peer-group systems that adjudge whether or not a woman is rated a ‘good wife’ and ‘good mother.’

  *

  By 1968 Celia Fremlin had established herself as a published author. But this was to be a year for the Goller family in which tragedy followed hard upon tragedy. Their youngest daughter Sylvia committed suicide, aged nineteen. A month later Fremlin’s husband Elia killed himself. In the wake of these catastrophes Fremlin relocated to Geneva for a year.

  In 1969 she published a novel entitled Possessio
n. The manuscript had been delivered to Gollancz before the terrible events of 1968, but knowing of those circumstances in approaching Possession today makes for chilling reading, since incidents in the novel appear to mirror Fremlin’s life at that time. It is one of her most absorbing and terrifying productions. Aside from the short-story collection Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (1970) Fremlin did not publish again until Appointment With Yesterday (1972), subsequently a popular title amongst her body of work. The novel deals with a woman who has changed her identity: a recurrent theme, and one with which Fremlin may have identified most acutely in the aftermath of her terrible dual bereavements. The Long Shadow (1975) makes use of the knowledge of the Classics she acquired at Oxford; its main character, Imogen, is newly widowed. Again, we might suppose this was Fremlin’s way of processing, through fictions, the trials she had suffered in her own life.

  Fremlin lived on in Hampstead and married her second husband, Leslie Minchin, in 1985. The couple remained together until his death in 1999. She collaborated with Minchin on a book of poetry called Duet in Verse which appeared in 1996. Her last published novel was King of the World (1994). Geraldine believed that her mother’s earlier work was her best, but I feel that this final novel, too, has its merits. Fremlin marvellously describes a woman who has been transformed from a dowdy, put-upon frump to an attractive woman of stature. The reason Fremlin gives for this seems to me revealing: ‘Disaster itself, of course. However much a disaster sweeps away, it also inevitably leaves a slate clean.’

  Though Geraldine did not admit as much to me, she did allude to having had a somewhat mixed relationship with her mother. This, in a way, explained to me the recurrence of the theme of mother–daughter relations explored in many of Fremlin’s novels, from Uncle Paul, Prisoner’s Base and Possession right up to her penultimate novel The Echoing Stones (1993). One wonders whether Fremlin hoped that the fictional exploration of this theme might help her to attain a better understanding of it in life. Thankfully, as they got older and Celia moved to Bristol to be nearer Geraldine, both women managed finally to find some common ground and discovered a mutual respect for each other. Celia Fremlin was, in the end, pre-deceased by all three of her children. She died herself in 2009.

  To revisit the Celia Fremlin oeuvre now is to see authentic snapshots of how people lived at the time of her writing: how they interacted, what values they held. Note how finely Fremlin denotes the relations between child and adult, husband and wife, woman and woman. Every interaction between her characters has a core of truth and should strike a resonant note in any reader. Look carefully for the minute gestures that can have devastating consequences. Watch as the four walls of your comforting home can be turned into walls of a prison. Above all, enjoy feeling unsettled as Fremlin’s words push down on you, making you feel just as claustrophobic as her characters as they confront their fates. Fremlin was a superb writer who has always enjoyed a core of diehard fans and yet, despite her Edgar Award success, was not to achieve the readership she deserved. As Faber Finds now reissue her complete works, now is the time to correct that.

  Chris Simmons

  www.crimesquad.com

  CHAPTER I

  “DARLING, WE’RE TOGETHER at last!” cried Rita, shaking the rain from her hair and spilling a suitcase, a bulging plastic carrier bag, and a clanking tangle of metal coat-hangers into the circle of lamplight at his feet. “Together! In our very own home!”

  My very own home, Adrian found himself thinking uncontrollably, even while he folded her in his arms, murmuring into her ear all the appropriate words of welcome. My flat. Mine. And now the woman I love is moving into it, bag and baggage, and there is nothing in the wide world I can do to stop it, because it was my idea.

  “If only we could be together always!” he’d said to her, not once but dozens of times over the past four years. Had said it, and had meant it.

  But of course, he’d never thought for one moment that it would ever actually happen.

  Aloud he said:

  “Yes, darling, marvellous! I can still hardly believe it’s really happening….”

  This, at least, was the truth. As with any major shock, his mind was refusing to take in, all at one go, the full enormity of the situation; it was letting the realisation get to him a little bit at a time, inch by inch, as much as his shrinking spirit could bear.

  The plastic bag of groceries? He could face that. She often brought food when she came for the evening. The suitcase? That, too, was not totally unfamiliar; they had been away together occasionally. But the coat-hangers…? His eye slid past them as if they were a nasty street-accident piled up on the side of the road. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, just yet, take in their terrible implications—the dreadful glittering threat they posed to the very core of his comfortable, self-sufficient existence. His imagination simply blocked out, it refused, as yet, to envisage his well-pressed suits, his jackets, trousers and ties relegated to the darkest recesses of the wardrobe; squeezed back and back, in helpless retreat before the victorious tide of dresses, blouses, fur jackets, matching handbags, platform sandals, knee-length boots … the lot.

  And that would only be the beginning. Already he could see her eyes darting round the room, altering things, getting rid of things, planning where her things were to go.

  “Marvellous, darling,” he repeated, as if he had learned the words by rote and was checking that he’d got them right. “Marvellous! I think this calls for a little celebration, don’t you?”

  Diving into the drinks cupboard by the fireplace, he tried to compose his face a little before facing her again.

  “Well, cheers, darling!” he heard himself saying a minute later. “To us!” And as they touched glasses, his neat whisky against her gin and tonic, he found himself staring not into Rita’s sloedark, expectant eyes, but into the shining yellow liquid in his glass. How long, he was desperately wondering, could the drink be made to last? Because once the drinking was over, then the thing would really have to start.

  Drinking to future happiness is one thing; embarking on it quite another.

  “Darling, I’m so happy!” cried Rita, as she had every right to do: and, “Darling, so am I!” he responded, with an awful sinking of the stomach. Over the glittering rim of the whisky, he fixed his eyes on the black, springy hair through which his fingers had so often ruffled; on the white, untroubled brow which had once seemed to betoken such serenity of spirit; and he tried to feel the old, melting enchantment. But all he could feel was a sort of sick paralysis of the will; a sense of having lost control over his own life; the helpless terror of one who has sold his soul to …

  *

  What an unfair and terrible thought! Anyone less like the devil than Rita, with her pale, oval face, her big, pathetic eyes and tremulous mouth, it would be difficult to imagine. “Angel” would have been a fairer comparison—especially now, with that halo of raindrops round her hair … and only now did he realise, with compunction, that he had not yet invited her to take her coat off. She was sitting there, sipping gin and tonic, in wet shower-proof nylon.

  “Darling, your coat … I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed, leaning over the back of the settee and slipping it from her shoulders. “It’s soaking, I’ll just …”

  He stopped, brought up short as if by a sudden blow. The coat belonged here now. No good just throwing it over the rack in the bathroom to dry off in time for her to go home. She wasn’t going home. The coat was going to live here. There would have to be a place for it, a peg in the hall allotted to it. Its peg.

  For several seconds Adrian just stood there, like a man in shock, the limp, damp, rust-coloured thing hanging over his arm like a dead animal, trophy of a hunt now disbanded.

  “I’ll just … hang it up,” he muttered; and when he came back into the living-room he poured himself another whisky, holding it up against the light, screwing his eyes up as if to enjoy the golden radiance of it.

  How the hell did I get into this, he was asking himself. How th
e hell did I?

  *

  But of course, he knew the answer. Knew, too, that it was no use blaming Rita. Even this morning—even in those first awful moments of hearing her babbling the glorious news down the telephone before he’d even had his breakfast—even then, he’d recognised that the blame was not hers. Those awful feelings that rose in his gorge as he listened to her ecstatic chatter were his, and his alone. Not her fault at all.

  “Darling, you’ll never guess!” she’d cried excitedly; but of course he’d guessed at once, guessed without any shadow of doubt, taken aback only by the violence of his own dismay. He had no right to be dismayed, absolutely no right at all, he should have been over the moon with joy, because what she was doing was only what he had asked her to do—begged her, indeed—over and over again during the long, happy years when it was impossible. They’d agreed long ago—agreed jointly, and without acrimony or argument—that if only Derek would agree to a divorce, then she’d come and live with Adrian.

  And now, this very day, Derek had agreed. In the first shock of hearing the news, Adrian had felt, for a moment, as if he had been betrayed by his dearest friend.

  Which was ridiculous. He and Derek Langley had only met a couple of time in all these years, both times, naturally, in the role of enemies. In the circumstances, there was no other role open to them.

  Which was a pity, in a way, for Adrian had felt no hostility at all to Derek as a person. In fact, he had rather liked him; the sensation he remembered most clearly from that first encounter had been one of vague, foolish gratitude towards the man for being nearly a decade older than himself, with grey, thinning hair and gold-rimmed bifocals. It had seemed to simplify things; and though, in fact, the assumption was to prove illusory, Adrian still retained in his recollections the pleasant sense of easy superiority it had engendered in him at the time. The ensuing conversation had, in the nature of things, been somewhat prickly and uncomfortable; but Adrian had nevertheless formed a mildly favourable impression of his rival. Derek Langley seemed a quiet, inoffensive sort of man, sensible and well-balanced, and with an intriguingly expert knowledge of wild flowers in Britain. Few subjects could be more remote from Adrian’s own special interests, but all the same, Adrian liked expertise in no matter what sort of field; liked and admired it, and recognised it when he saw it.