The Spider-Orchid

by Celia Fremlin

  “Leave me alone” was the only response Peggy could extract from her. “Please, Mummy, just leave me alone!” She would eat no tea, would listen to no endearments; just lay on her bed in silent misery, occasionally making a low moaning noise, like a trapped, tortured animal.

  And so it seemed to Peggy, who had to make a lightning door-step decision on the question, that to let Daphne in with her alarming and shocking news about Rita could only do harm. Amelia just wouldn’t be able to take it.

  Not that Peggy had any idea of how Amelia would react to the shock. A little while ago—only a few days ago, in fact—she would have said that Amelia was really growing quite fond of this woman who had become for all practical purposes her stepmother; but now she was not so sure. It was very hard to tell, one way or the other, because Amelia had taken to being so very reticent about these Sunday afternoon visits. She hardly ever told her mother anything at all about what had happened, and only very occasionally did she inadvertently drop some clue as to how she was feeling: which wasn’t much to go on, really. Most of the time, Peggy felt wholly in the dark.

  At the beginning, Peggy had worried a lot about the situation, fearing, as did Adrian, that the child would be miserably jealous and resentful of this newcomer’s intrusion into her father’s life, and the happy Sunday visits would be spoiled for ever. Peggy was not the sort of ex-wife who rejoices gleefully over every setback in the relationship of her child and her ex-husband; on the contrary, she liked the people around her to be happy, ex-husbands and all. Whether this was due to any exceptional saintliness in her nature, or simply to the fact that she had discovered that happy people are on the whole less trouble than unhappy ones, she would have found it hard to decide.

  Above all, of course, she liked her daughter to be happy, and this was why—quite apart from the natural hurt to herself—she had been so perturbed by the recent changes in Amelia’s behaviour —particularly on Sunday evenings. Sulky—off-hand—almost rude: surely it meant that something must be wrong? Especially since the two of them had always been so close until now, and had had such fun together. Peggy had been worrying about it lately quite a bit, and had hoped, secretly, that her friends—particularly Maureen Denvers—hadn’t noticed the deterioration of the mother-daughter relationship. Having a “good relationship” with your children rated very high in Peggy’s circle—much higher, for instance, than expensive cars or exotic holidays—and of course, if you had a broken marriage to carry about with you everywhere (because this was what it felt like, Peggy found; you could never leave it behind and forget about it)—well, then, in that case your “good relationship” had to be better than good, it had to be visibly marvellous, for it was going to be subjected to much severer scrutiny than were all those ramshackle, bickering two-parent set-ups that managed to get by simply because they were two-parent. A married pair can get away with having a much unhappier, more neurotic child than can any single parent; it had often struck Peggy as rather unfair that this should be so, though until recently it hadn’t actually affected her personally. Amelia had up till now been a singularly satisfactory daughter to have—happy, clever, well-mannered, and a wonderful companion. It was only just lately that things had begun to go wrong; and even then Peggy had quite often been inclined to put it all down to adolescence, and to the psychological upheavals that one had been vaguely led to expect at such a time.

  But not today; today something really was the matter, something terrible; and in the face of this certainty, all the psychological theories collapsed like a house of cards. They became quite useless, it seemed, as soon as something actually went wrong, with your own actual child.

  And now, on top of all this, there was Rita’s accident! Why must the idiot woman choose today of all days for falling over her crazy built-up heels, or whatever it was she’d done? And what was Peggy supposed to do about it, anyway? What is the rôle of the ex-wife when the current mistress is lying at death’s door? The etiquette books haven’t caught up with this sort of thing yet, so Peggy had no guidance; but an uneasy instinct warned her that it was her duty to do something. She’d already phoned Adrian, phoned Derek, and phoned the school, but they’d all been line-engaged. Now she phoned them again, still with no result; and really, there seemed nothing further she could do. She didn’t even know if Rita was alive or dead, and it didn’t seem necessary, just yet, to examine her heart and see whether she cared; time enough for that when she knew whether it had happened.

  It was too much! Too much happening all at once. Filled with a sense of vague, all-embracing dread, Peggy tiptoed back into Amelia’s room, half expecting, like the nervous mother of a newborn baby, to find that she had stopped breathing.

  She hadn’t, of course. If anything, she was breathing more normally than before, and with less of a sob in her throat. Also, Esben was curled up on the end of the bed this time—always a good sign, because Esben, like most cats, hated people to be crying and writhing about, disturbing all the nice warm surfaces.

  The room was growing dark now, and looking down at the tear-sodden lump of doom under the eiderdown, unresponsive as a length of board, Peggy experienced, quite without warning, a sudden uprush of irritation. What right had the girl to cause all this anxiety, to frighten everybody out of their wits without volunteering a single word of explanation? And particularly at a time like this, when a real disaster had just struck, demanding everyone’s attention and concern. And then, with compunction, Peggy recollected that as yet Amelia knew nothing about the accident: indeed, it was Peggy herself who was deliberately keeping it from her, and so it was hardly fair to blame the child for not taking it into consideration … and just at that moment, the telephone shrilled through the house.

  *

  “Adrian? Oh, thank goodness it’s you … I’ve been trying and trying to ring you. Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry … so terribly, terribly sorry! Is she …? I mean, have you heard yet….?”

  *

  Disgruntled, and somehow a little bit scared by her reception, Daphne turned slowly away from the uncompromisingly closed front door, and retraced her steps.

  What a pig Mrs Summers was! Of course Amelia would have wanted to see her! Even if she was as much upset by her stepmother’s accident as Mrs Summers implied—and Daphne, for one, was sceptical about it—even so, she’d still have wanted to talk about it to her friends, especially a best friend like Daphne. Anyone would. Whatever happened to you, however frightful, you always wanted to talk about it to your friends, it was the very first thing you did want to do. If Amelia really was upset, then she’d be wanting more than anything to talk to Daphne. It was mean of Mrs Summers, really it was.

  Besides—and this was what was really gnawing away at Daphne’s innermost soul—besides, everyone would be expecting her to have talked to Amelia Summers! They were best friends, weren’t they? At break tomorrow, she, Daphne, would be bombarded with questions which it would be an awful come-down not to be able to answer. Was it true that the victim’s neck was broken? Flopping about on her shoulders do you mean—like this? Was she going to die? To be paralysed for life? Was her brain affected? Could she still speak? Or was she going to be like those people from the Home who came into the High Street in wheelchairs on Saturdays?

  How glorious if Daphne could have been the one with all the answers at her finger-tips! The one who could describe all the gruesome details! And to think that only the arbitrary maternal whims of the wretched Mrs Summers had stood between her and this once-in-a-lifetime glory!

  Honestly, mothers!

  *

  Actually, Daphne had been setting her hopes altogether too high, right from the beginning. Amelia or no Amelia, she wouldn’t have been able to answer her schoolmates’ questions because no one could. Even the chief surgeon at the hospital couldn’t have answered them. Not, that is, until the X-ray results had come through, and Rita herself had come out of her state of shock sufficiently to be asked to move this group of muscles or that; to answer Yes or No to whe
ther she felt the prick of a pin here … or here?

  But the prognosis, at the end of forty-eight hours, was good. Her spine had not, after all, been fractured. There were some cracked vertebrae and a cervical dislocation, which would necessitate the wearing of a spinal jacket and a neck-brace for the next few weeks, but there was every reason to suppose that she would thereafter be completely recovered. And meantime, there was no reason, barring some unforeseeable setback, why she should not leave hospital within the next week or so.

  The good news was relayed round family and friends in a matter of minutes. There were congratulations, get-well cards, flowers. And it so happened that Amelia’s friend Daphne did, after all, get her moment of glory, albeit belatedly. For as it chanced, the affair got a brief mention in the local press on the following Friday, and Daphne it was who spotted the item and brought the cutting gleefully to school, to pass round, with furtive gasps and whisperings, during the history lesson. It was a good report of its kind, concise and factual, the reporter allowing himself only one brief bit of fashionable moralising about “authorities” who permit the erection of staircases that can be fallen down. The fact that any staircase which can’t be fallen down also can’t be walked down, could be glossed over as an example of “officialdom at its worst”. After all, someone must be to blame for gravitation, and if it isn’t the I.L.E.A., then what are we paying all these taxes for?

  Or words to that effect. Anyway, having dutifully pointed the moral which would best please most of his readers the writer returned to the hard facts, including some hastily-assembled data about Rita, and a smudged but unmistakably glamorous picture of her nestled among her bandages, her black hair loose and splayed out over a lacy bed-jacket.

  “Someone pushed me” was the arresting caption to this photograph; but in the copy below she was quoted as having added warily, “but I’m naming no names!”

  “It is expected that the police will be following up these allegations,” the reporter surmised cautiously; and having thus squeezed the last drop of news-value from the thing, he brought his account briskly to an end.

  The girls loved it. It passed swiftly and furtively back and forth under the desks, until the running commentary of whispers and giggles finally reached a pitch which Mr Everard could no longer ignore. Laying down chalk and duster with a sigh, he confiscated the thing, and with a few sharp words, and a couple of detentions, brought the class back to a proper concern for Disraeli’s speeches about the Corn Laws. One girl, who just couldn’t stop giggling, he sent outside, and two others were quelled by a shaft of well-timed sarcasm.

  And to Daphne belonged the honour and glory of having started the whole thing! She got a special telling off all to herself, and when she went out to break found she had become the unquestioned authority on plaster jackets, stepmothers, slipped discs, paralysis, and brain tumours. It was wonderful.

  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.

  CHAPTER XVII

  NOTHING 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….”