Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

Then, as the photographer commanded them all to look at the camera and smile for the last time, she turned fully to face him and gave him an unwelcome shock. Her smile was horribly forced and unnatural, a grimace rather. It was almost as if she were deliberately mocking or sending up this whole rite. But surely she couldn’t be, surely that wasn’t a purposely ugly sneering grin? If it was, no one but he seemed to notice.

The photographer called out, “Lovely! Hold it, girls, this is positively the last one.”

The picture was taken, the record made. It would have its place, no doubt, along with the rest in Fee’s wedding album. Now Fee was left to pose alone for what the photographer called “two exclusive portraits of the lovely bride.” She had scarcely settled herself into position and allowed Stephanie to arrange the folds of her train when the door was pushed open and Hardy came in.

“Oh, I must have one shot with him,” Fee exclaimed. “Look at him, he’s so sweet. It’ll be quite all right to hold him, he’s just been shampooed.”

Two of the bridesmaids had seated themselves on the settee, which was pushed back against the wall, but white-faced Senta, her strange metallic hair now cloaking her shoulders, hesitated only for a moment and then walked slowly across the room to Philip. She walked as if she were a much taller woman, up straight with her head held high, but at the same time very gracefully. Before she spoke to him he looked at her mouth and thought it was the most beautiful mouth he had ever seen in a girl’s face. What could the voice that came from that mouth be like?

The lips parted. She spoke. “What a peculiar dog,” she said. “He has orange spots. He looks like a mini-Dalmatian.”

Philip said slowly, smiling at her, noticing something for the first time, “He matches your dress.”

“Did you do it on purpose?”

That made him laugh, her seriousness. “What happened was my mother splashed him a bit while she was tinting someone’s hair. It wouldn’t come out when she washed him.”

“I thought he must be some rare breed.”

He had expected a low voice, but hers was rather high-pitched, the vowels rounded and pure, the tone cool. She sounded as if she had been taught to speak instead of picking speech up. He noticed that the hands which held her absurd Victorian posy of orange tulip heads and pink carnations were very small and blunt nailed, like a child’s. She had turned upon him almost colourless eyes, clear as water in which a single drop of dye is spreading in streaks and whorls its dark greenness.

“Are you Philip? Are you Fee’s brother?”

“That’s right.” He hesitated. “I’m got up in all this gear because I’m giving her away.”

She said, speaking very precisely as if someone were writing her name down, “Senta Pelham.”

“I’ve never met anyone called Senta before. It sounds foreign.”

Her voice took on a cool edge. “Senta is the name of the girl in The Flying Dutchman.”

Philip wasn’t sure what or who The Flying Dutchman was—something musical, an opera?—and he was glad of Christine’s voice urgently calling his name, “Philip, Philip, where are you?”

“Excuse me.”

She said nothing. He was unused to people who looked you straight in the eye without smiling. He closed the living room door behind him, found Christine in the kitchen, panicky, fraught with anxieties, but looking prettier than she had done for months. Her sudden resurgence of good looks embarrassed him, and he would have liked to close his eyes tightly. She was in blue, always her best colour, with a small round hat made of swathed silk in peacock’s feather turquoises and lavenders.

“The car is here for me and your aunties and the one for the bridesmaids!”

“That’s all right. Everyone’s ready.”

She is nicer than Arnham’s wife, he thought, she is more of a woman, sweeter and gentler—and surprised himself by his thoughts. Her sisters came down the stairs, one mushroom hat, one parrot’s wing, stilt heels, twenty-denier nylons, every ring and bracelet and necklace to be found in their jewel boxes, accompanying clouds of Tweed and Fidji.

“You won’t forget to shut Hardy up in the kitchen before you leave, will you?” Christine said to him. “Otherwise he’ll go and do a wee-wee on the white rug. You know how he always does that when he’s excited.”

He was alone with Fee. If only she had looked romantic, beautiful! There was nothing in her appearance to inspire a brother’s emotion, to raise a lump in the throat, call forth memories of a shared childhood. Her face was creased up, petulant with a myriad small anxieties. She stood in front of a mirror, seeing, or imagining she saw, dots of mascara adhering to the skin under her left eye, and rubbing at them with a finger whose cuticle she had bitten in stressful moments before the photographer turned up.

“Don’t forget to put your engagement ring on your other hand.”

She pulled it off impatiently. “I look awful, don’t I?”

“You look fine.”

“If it doesn’t work out, we can get divorced. Most people do.”

I wouldn’t get married if I thought like that. He didn’t say it aloud. It seemed to him that he had begun keeping everything from her, his views, opinions, feelings. She knew neither that Flora was upstairs in his wardrobe nor that he had seen Cheryl come weeping out of a shop in the Edgware Road. Soon she would have someone else to confide in, tell her innermost thoughts to, but who would he have?

She stepped back from the glass and turned to pick up her sheaf of arums from the table. But instead of doing this, she stopped in mid-act, as it were, and threw herself upon him and into his arms. Tense currents seemed to vibrate through her body. It was as if she were full of wires that thrilled with electricity.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on. Calm down.” He held her in a hug that wasn’t tight enough to crush the icy satin. “You’ve known him for years, he’s the one for you.” What else could he say? “The original childhood sweethearts.”

He heard the car coming, the brakes, a door close slickly, then footsteps on the front path.

“D’you know what I keep thinking?” she said, disengaging herself, drawing herself up, smoothing her waistline, “I keep thinking if only that bloody Arnham had done right by Mum, we could have been having a double wedding.”

He had made his speech, conscious while he brought out the stiff phrases of praise for Fee and Darren, of Senta Pelham’s eyes resting on him. They seemed to rest there in a cold and speculative manner. Every time he looked in her direction, which was often, he found she was looking at him. He asked himself why this should be. Did he truly, as he feared, look ridiculous or unsightly in the grey morning coat, white shirt, and silvery tie? It seemed to him, for all his fears, that the coat in fact fitted rather well. He knew—he couldn’t help knowing—that he was good-looking and attractive to girls. Luckily, wherever that gene of shortness and dumpiness came from in his family, it had passed him and Cheryl by. He looked rather the way Paul McCartney had done when young. An old record sleeve of one of the Beatles albums showed him his own face smiling.

The party would break up soon. They had St. Mary’s church hall, an ancient hut smelling of stewed tea and hymn books, only until six. The guests—uncles and aunts and cousins and school friends and workmates past and present—would leave as soon as Fee and Darren had gone. Christine was talking to a rather good-looking middle-aged man, another of Darren’s innumerable relatives. Giggling, behaving naturally for once, Cheryl stood eating wedding cake with two boys whose shoulder-length hair looked odd with their formal clothes. He accepted a piece of cake handed him by Stephanie and, raising his eyes, met those of Senta, of Flora’s double.