The Spider-Orchid (12 page)

“
B
UT
, R
ITA, IT’S
all just a load of nonsense! You aren’t actually taking it
seriously,
are you? You can’t be!”

While he spoke, Adrian was rapidly scanning the black, untidy scrawl that Rita had thrust in front of his eyes. It had obviously been written at top speed, without pause for consideration, judgement, or even legibility.

None, apparently, because in the very next sentence (Adrian noted) the kiss is already safely over, and the couple are lying down, side by side, in the deep grass:

What Mr Owen was to be permitted to ask or to hope must for ever remain unknown, for a great smear of ink intervened here as if the book had been slammed shut in a hurry; and when the text became legible again, the happy pair are in a forest, at nightfall, and Mr Owen (with a resourcefulness surely unusual in the average I.L.E.A. employee?) is building a little hut from twigs and grass, roofed with interwoven branches, and inside Amelia is preparing a bed of leaves and moss on which (presumably) the two of them are to spend the night. Mr Owen has lit a camp-fire, too—“The smoke of it went coiling to the topmost trees”—and here they roasted beech-huts and crab-apples and recited to one another all the poems that Amelia knew by heart, pages and pages of them, including the whole of the “Ancient Mariner” as far as the bit where the Two Voices come in, and it gets boring. In the course of this recital (and no wonder, reflected Adrian, flicking over the pages with his
forefinger
) night fell and the stars came out. Mr Owen’s arm came round Amelia yet again, and he gave her another of those kisses for which there are no words. They roasted yet more beech-nuts, recited yet more poetry, fetched more sticks from the darkling forest, and Mr Owen’s powerful features shone like gold in the light of the flickering flames. They did everything, in fact, except actually go inside that hut where the bed of moss and leaves awaited them—and then all at once, at the turning-over of a page, and without any warning at all, it is already morning, and here they are catching fish for breakfast at a crystal stream while the first rays of the rising sun strike through the trees….

*

At this point, Adrian actually laughed aloud. Rita snatched the book from his hands, scowling.

“So it’s
funny,
is it?” she demanded. “Funny-ha-ha, I suppose? Well, funny-
peculiar
is what
I’
d
call it! Very peculiar indeed—for
a married man in a responsible job, and the child only thirteen! I wonder if the headmistress would find it quite so funny if you were to show her—”

Adrian laughed again.

“My
dear
Rita! Don’t be so idiotic! No headmistress in her senses would give a second look at such stuff! Can’t you see it’s fantasy from beginning to end? Well—not quite from the beginning —these first pages are dear old reality all right, I’d know it anywhere! Listen—”

That
has the unmistakable ring of truth, wouldn’t you say? Or how about this?—

“See what I mean?” Adrian’s eyes lingered smilingly on the
painstaking
little non-event recorded for all posterity in his daughter’s slapdash hand. “Don’t you see what’s happened, Rita? The poor kid got sick of all this “Mr Owen wasn’t …” “Mr Owen didn’t …” sort of stuff, and thought she’d see if she couldn’t improve on it a bit. Can you blame her?”

He smiled again, caressingly, as he re-read the passage; and when Rita remained ominously silent, he continued:

“Honestly, darling, kids
do
this sort of thing! It’s nothing to get worked up about!”

At this, Rita’s whole body grew tense and taut, as if preparing
for a spring. She whipped the volume from Adrian’s hand and flicked forward through the pages with the confidence of one to whom the contents were thoroughly familiar.

“Listen to this!” she said, between clenched teeth:

“Well, Daddy-dear, doesn’t
that
make you wonder whether your innocent little virgin-child may not know just a teeny bit more about the details than she should?”

“Well, of course she knows! They all do, these days. She reads novels, magazine articles. For all I know, she may have read the whole of Havelock Ellis, and Alex Comfort into the bargain. And in any case, they have these sex talks and stuff at school from the age of nine or thereabouts; she’d have to be a moron not to know most of the facts by now. But, Rita, no matter how many facts she may know,
this
—here”—he jabbed at the page with his thumb—“
this
is nevertheless fantasy. Well, look at it! Use your sense. Look at what she’s actually written! All this strolling down towards the river, for a start. Hasn’t it occurred to you that there isn’t a river within miles of the school, let alone one with swans on it? And then all this about the poppies: see the date? March 12th! When have you ever seen poppies flowering in March?”

“When
have
you
ever
seen
poppies
flowering
in
March!”
mimicked Rita. “Darling, you sound just exactly like Derek! I might have guessed you’d be more interested in the time of year poppies come out than in whether your daughter is a whore or not…! All right, Adrian, laugh if you like, but it’s my opinion that the whole thing should be reported to the headmistress
immediately,
if only for the sake of the other girls who have anything to do with this Mr Owen! I think you should ring her up straightaway tomorrow morning and tell her that …”

“Oh, Rita, don’t be so utterly absurd! She’d think I was nuts! Don’t you realise that kids with crushes on their English teachers are two a penny, and if the schools were to be expected to take action about every daft symptom of these adolescent passions, they’d have no time left for teaching! Here, give the thing to me, and I’ll put it away safely for her till she next comes. We should
never have looked at it really, not either of us; but I suppose there’s no harm done so long as she never finds out….”

He pulled open a drawer of his desk and, quite unaware of Rita’s eyes following his every movement, he pushed the volume out of sight under a yellow folder of press-cuttings.

“There!” he said, slamming the drawer shut. “Now let’s stop worrying about it and go to bed. I’ve had just about enough of today myself, and I should think you have too.”

*

Adrian lay awake for a long time that night, feeling Rita’s soft body nestled up against him like a small child begging to be
forgiven.
Although he could not bring himself to make love to her, or to feel any of that protective tenderness which usually follows a quarrel and a reconciliation, he was intensely aware of her, his brain prickly with a sort of uneasy pity. And as he lay there, restless and wakeful, he became aware not merely of a lack of tenderness, but of a growing sense of actual physical revulsion against this slender, fine-boned body which had once given him such delight.

He was appalled at the feeling. It was unjust as well as heartless. After all, he didn’t
know
that those horrid anecdotes he’d been hearing about her over the weekend were true—indeed, there was substantial reason to suppose that they were not—or at least that they were greatly exaggerated. Rita herself had in effect denied them; had pointed out, very plausibly, that Derek had plenty of motive for both conscious and unconscious distortion of the truth. And as for Rita’s mother, well, it was the commonest thing in the world for a grown-up daughter and her mother to be at loggerheads. The daughter is liable to be bossy and inconsiderate; and the mother, her erstwhile power gone for ever, retaliates by fishing up grievances out of the past which the daughter cannot refute because her memory does not go back that far. No doubt, Rita
had
been a horrid little girl, and a troublesome and ungrateful teenager; but the shocking and lurid anecdotes currently retailed by Mrs Fayers were doubtless exaggerated out of all recognition, having gathered to themselves over the years new and ever more colourful accretions of wickedness every time the adult Rita seriously annoyed or upset her mother: “the mother-daughter thing”, as Rita herself would doubtless have labelled it. Looking back over the weekend, Adrian felt quite ashamed at having allowed his judgement to be swayed
by such a jumble of tittle-tattle and hearsay evidence. In the morning, he would admit this to Rita, and tell her he was sorry.

*

How hot it was, though, how unbearably hot! He’d never get to sleep like this. He longed to move over to his own side of the bed, to turn over and lie with his back to her on the cool, unrumpled part of the sheet. But he dared not do so for fear of waking and upsetting her. Her limp, sleeping body felt sticky in his arms, and alien somehow, almost as if it wasn’t mammalian at all; a bird, perhaps, a great sticky bird, or even a vegetable—one of those exotic, tropical plants they’d seen at Kew the other day, all spines and dark fleshy leaves, mysteriously thriving in the artificial, steamy heat of the great hot-house….

And a few minutes later, despite the heat, and the discomfort, and the cramp in his left arm, Adrian was asleep.

*

Not soundly asleep, though. His rest was broken by uneasy dreams … Rita, with her beautifully-manicured fingers, counting off numbers on some white-and-chrome machine of whose purpose, in the dream, he had no idea.

“Ten,” he heard her clear, purposeful voice enunciating. “Ten … nine … eight… seven …” Although there seemed to be no change in the cool, dispassionate tones as the digits crept downwards, Adrian felt the beginnings of nightmare steal over him … and he knew that
something
… something terrible … was just about to happen. But before it happened he was somehow already in another dream, not a terrible one at all this time, not in its beginnings, though perhaps with a slight sense of anxiety about it. He dreamed that it was evening, and that he had come home to the flat carrying in his briefcase some piece of work which was very much on his mind—an emergency report to look over, something like that. There was some piece of information urgently needed for the work —some fact or date that he had to look up—and he walked in his dream over to the bookshelves and pulled out a volume of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
It seemed heavier than he remembered, and as he braced his muscles against the unexpected weight, he was aware once again of the onset of nightmare. With a sort of dreadful inevitability, the volume fell open, and there, squashed between the pages, like a book-marker, like a pressed flower for
remembrance
, lay the budgerigar: dead, pressed out flat to three or four
times its natural size, its blood-stained feathers partially plucked and oozing on to the page.

“I thought I’d mark the place for you, darling,” said the dream-Rita, smiling down at him, with an air of intelligent interest in his work which she had never shown in life; “I thought that if I—”

*

Adrian awoke, certain that he was screaming at the very top of his lungs, rousing the whole house. But of course he wasn’t: only the very tiniest little catch in his breath marked his awakening, and his whole soul was flooded with thankfulness at the realisation that the whole ghastly experience was at an end.

Or was it? He lay there, sweating and panting, trying to recover from the dream as one recovers from a sudden attack of illness. Even now, wide awake and fully conscious, the feel of Rita’s soft skin pressed against his own made his flesh crawl. He was aware, with his rational mind, of how utterly unfair to her this was; but there was nothing he could do about it.