Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

They seemed to have darkened, the green staining that drifted thorough their watery depths having curiously intensified. Somewhere during the course of the afternoon she had shed the wreath of flowers which had encircled her head, and her hair, unconfined, hung in two gleaming curtains between which the soft, seductive features were enclosed. Her eyes widened as they held his, and still gazing at him, she parted her lips and ran her tongue slowly and deliberately over the upper lip and then the lower. The lovely mouth was the pale pink of fruit blossom but her tongue was red. He turned sharply away, convinced she was mocking him.

Fee and Darren came back dressed as no one had ever seen them dressed before, each in a suit, his dark grey, hers white. It would be impossible for anyone they encountered on their journey tonight to a hotel, tomorrow to Guernsey, to mistake them for other than a honeymoon couple. This had been the first wedding Philip had been to since he was a child, and he was unprepared for the feeling of anticlimax he experienced as he got into the car. Once the bride and groom were gone—their trim suits smothered in confetti, their car decorated with slogans and with a tin can tied on behind—there came an immediate sense of letdown. Everyone was going. The evening yawned emptily ahead. Christine would be spending it with one of her sisters. It was left to Philip to drive the bridesmaids back to Glenallan Close, where their everyday clothes were.

All but Senta, who, standing by the bar in conversation with a man Philip didn’t know, sent him a peremptory message by Janice that she would find her own way back to the house, she would get a lift. She would need to, Philip thought aggrievedly, for after the bright start to the day and sunny afternoon, a heavy rain had begun to fall. It made returning home and entering the empty house an even more gloomy business. The three girls went up to the room that Cheryl and Fee had shared and now was Cheryl’s alone, while Philip let Hardy out of the kitchen. He changed into jeans and a sweater and, as the rain seemed briefly to have lessened, took the little dog round the block, passing the departing Stephanie and Janice on his way back.

Now was his chance to try and talk to Cheryl. She must still be upstairs. Halfway up, he heard music coming from behind her closed door, and he went into his own room. He would give her ten minutes or so. Philip’s room was very small, too small to hold more than a single bed, a clothes cupboard, desk, and narrow upright chair. And although he worked for a firm which specialised among other things in making the most of tiny, boxy rooms like this one with space-saving fitments and built-in furniture, he had never felt inspired to do something of that kind here. This was partly because he didn’t want Glenallan Close improved. Make it more attractive and Christine—and therefore himself—might be tempted to remain there for ever. On the other hand, it would have been a different story if Christine was Mrs. Arnham, living in Chigwell, and this house had been made over to him. He would have smartened it up then, all right.

He opened the clothes cupboard and lifted Flora out. She was still wrapped in the blue plastic bag with the split in it for her face to show through. Philip untied the knot in the bag and pulled it off over her head. He stood her in the corner by the window. It was interesting that just having her there immediately improved the look of the room. Her white marble skin seemed to gleam in the grey, rain-filtered light. He wondered if it would be possible to remove the green stain that mantled her neck and breast. Her eyes looked beyond him and her face seemed alight with pagan wisdom.

Arnham and his wife would have missed her as soon as they looked out into their garden. Probably the neighbour would have told them as soon as they returned about the thief he had seen carrying a log-shaped bundle, and they would have put two and two together. But Philip didn’t think they would connect the removal of Flora with him. If Arnham remembered him at all, it would be as he then was, a recent student, a newly recruited Roseberry Lawn trainee, who had presented a very different appearance from the man the neighbour would have described as short-haired and wearing a suit. Arnham might even be relieved at the loss of Flora, while perhaps superstitiously unwilling to get rid of her himself. He was wondering whether to try working on that stain with paint-stripping fluid or to talk to Cheryl first, when she spoke to him from outside on the landing. They never knocked at each other’s doors, but they didn’t walk into rooms uninvited, either.

“Phil? Are you in there?”

He hung his Moss Brothers clothes over the chair and pushed it in front of Flora to hide her. Opening the door, he found no one there, and then Cheryl came out of her room, dressed to go out in her usual uniform, the cowgirl hat in her hand. Her hair, done that morning in soft loose curls falling from a centre parting—bridesmaid’s coiffure—looked incongruous with the heavy black eye makeup and the green star she had drawn on one cheekbone.

“Will you do me a favour?” she said.

The inevitable reply to that one: “Depends what it is.”

“Would you lend me five pounds?”

“Cheryl,” he said, “I have to tell you I saw you in the Edgware Road on Wednesday. It was around six or six-thirty. You were crying and you were sort of staggering around.”

She stared at him, her underlip protruding.

“I couldn’t stop, I was stuck in the traffic. You looked like you were drunk. I’ve been thinking lately you might be on drugs, but you looked more as if you were drunk.”

“I don’t drink,” she said. “Don’t you notice anything about people? Couldn’t you see I didn’t even drink that fizzy stuff at the wedding? A glass of wine is enough to knock me sideways.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Will you lend me five pounds? I’ll give it back to you tomorrow.”

“It’s not the money,” he said, though of course up to a point it was. He had very little spare cash. “It’s not the money that’s the trouble. But what do you mean, I can have it back tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Sunday. How are you going to get money on a Sunday?” She was gazing at him, her eyes glaring with a kind of desperate intensity. “Cheryl, how do you get money? Where does it come from?”

“You sound like a policeman,” she said. “Just like a policeman would question a person.”

He said unhappily, “I think I’ve got a sort of right to ask you.”

“I don’t. I’m over eighteen. I’m as much an adult as you are. I can vote.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Please,” she said, “please just lend me five pounds. You’ll get it back tomorrow.”

“When you get your dole on Wednesday will do.” He went back into his room and took from his wallet, in the pocket of the Moss Brothers trousers, the last five-pound note he had. That left him with three pound coins and some odd pence.

She snatched it from him. Once she held it crushed in her hand up against the lapels of the leather jacket, she managed a smile, she managed a “Thanks very much, Phil.”

He could find nothing to say to her. He went back into his room and sat down on the bed. Her feet went fast down the stairs and he waited for the front door to slam. Instead, he heard her speaking to someone, a brief exchange of indecipherable words. Their mother perhaps had come back for something she had forgotten. Forgetting things—money, keys, a coat, suitable shoes—was a commonplace with Christine.

The door slammed rather less violently than usual. The house didn’t shake from foundations to roof. He took the hired clothes off the chair, emptied the pockets, placed the clothes on hangers, and hung them inside the cupboard. The rain had begun again, buffeted against the glass by the rising wind. Someone knocked at the bedroom door.