Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

But no one in this household ever did. He thought, suppose it is the police, sent after me for taking Flora, just suppose it is. A cold thrill went down his spine. But he didn’t cover her up or put her away. He opened the door.

It was Senta Pelham.

He had forgotten she was coming back.

She was still in her bridesmaid’s dress and she was very wet. Her hair was wet, water dripping from it, and the spotted net, intended to be puffed and stiff, drooped like the petals of a rain-soaked flower. The coral satin clung to her thin, fragile-looking ribcage and to the large round breasts, incongruously big for so slight a girl. Her nipples stuck out erect at the touch of the cold wet stuff.

“Is there a towel somewhere?”

“In the bathroom,” he said. Didn’t she know that? Hadn’t she got herself up in that absurd garment in this house?

“I couldn’t get a lift after all,” she said, and he noticed she was out of breath. “I had to walk,” though it was more as if she had been running.

“Dressed like that?”

She laughed in a throaty, gasping way. She seemed tremendously nervous. She went into the bathroom and came out, rubbing her hair dry with one bath towel and with another slung over her shoulder. Philip expected her to go into Cheryl’s room, but instead she came into his and shut the door behind her.

“There’s a hair dryer somewhere.”

She shook her head—took off the towel and really shook it. The gleaming hair flew out and she ran her fingers through it. He had hardly realised what she was doing, he had hardly taken in that she was kicking off shoes, stripping off pale, wet, mud-splashed stockings, before she stood up and peeled the dress over her head. She stood there looking at him, her arms hanging by her sides.

The room was too small for two people ever to be separated by more than a few feet. As it was, he found himself at no more than arm’s length from this naked girl—her strange, thin, big-breasted body marble-white, and at the base of her flat belly, a triangle, not of silver or blond, but of flame red. Philip was in no doubt—whatever he may have felt thirty seconds before—of what was going on and what she intended. She was eyeing him with that intense yet mysterious gaze with which she had so frequently favoured him at the wedding. He took a step towards her, put out his arms, and held her shoulders with his hands. The coldness of marble was what he had strangely expected, but she was warm, hot even, her skin silky and dry.

Philip folded her slowly in his arms, savouring the slippery soft full and slender nakedness against his own body. As she moved her head to bring her mouth against his, the long wet hair slapped at his hands, making him shiver. She whispered to him between flicks of her tongue, her hands unbuttoning his shirt: “Into bed. I’m cold, I’m cold.” But she felt as hot as a body on a tropical beach, the heat shimmered from her.

It warmed the cold sheets. Philip pulled the duvet over them, and they lay pressed into each other’s body in the narrow little bed. The rain began crashing against the window. Suddenly she started to make love to him with a greedy passion. Her fingers dug into his neck, his shoulders, she moved down his body, kissing his flesh, licking him with a curious gasping savour. Bowed over him, arching up the quilt, she swept him with her curtain of hair, teased him with her tongue. Her lips felt tender and rapturous and gentle.

He gasped, “No!” and then, “No!” because it was too much, it stretched him to explosion point. Behind his head and inside his eyes was a red rolling light. Groaning, he pulled her onto him and entered her—her white body, now streaming with sweat, sinking onto his with a strange quivering rhythm. She held him in a total clutch, holding her breath, then relaxing as she expelled it, drawing breath again, gripping him, releasing herself and him with a final expulsion and a little thin scream.

Her silver hair draped his shoulders, hanging like the rain he could see falling straight and glittering beyond the glass. He felt a deep, extraordinary, profound satisfaction, as if he had found something he had always been searching for and found it finer than he expected. There were things he thought he ought to say, but all that came to mind was “Thank you, thank you,” and he sensed that to utter this aloud would be wrong. Instead, he took her face in his hand and turned it to his and kissed her mouth long and very gently.

She hadn’t spoken a word since saying she was cold and they should go to bed. But now she raised her head and laid it on the arm which held her. She took his right hand in her left one, interlocking their fingers. In that high, pure tone of hers she said, “Philip …” She uttered his name reflectively and as if she were listening to the sound of it, as if she were putting it to the test to see if she liked it. “Philip.”

He smiled at her. Her eyes were close to his, her mouth as close to his face as it could be without their lips touching. He saw every detail of its soft and tender curves, the sweetly tucked-in corners of it.

“Say my name,” she said.

“Senta. It’s a beautiful name, Senta.”

“Listen to me, Philip. When I saw you here this morning, I knew at once that you were the one. I knew you were the only one.” Her tone was deeply solemn. She had raised herself on one elbow. She was looking deeply into his eyes. “I saw you across the room and I knew you were the one for me for always.”

He was astonished. This was not at all what he had expected from her.

“I’ve been looking for you for a long long time,” she said, “and now I’ve found you and it’s wonderful.”

Her intensity had begun, slightly, to embarrass him. He could only handle this awkwardness by speaking lightly, almost facetiously. “It can’t be all that long. How old are you, Senta? Not more than twenty, are you?”

“I’m twenty-four. You see? I’m going to tell you everything, I’ll keep nothing from you. You can ask me anything.” He didn’t particularly want to ask her things, just to hold her and feel her and have this glorious pleasure. “I’ve been looking for you since I was sixteen. You see, I’ve always known there was just one man in the world for me, and I knew that when I saw him, I’d know.”

Her lips brushed his shoulder. She turned her face and printed a kiss where the muscle swelled beyond the collar bone. “I believe that souls come in pairs, Philip, but when we’re born, they are split in two and we spend all our lives trying to find our other half. But sometimes people make a mistake and get the wrong one!”

“This isn’t a mistake. Is it? It wasn’t for me.”

“This,” she said, “is for ever. Don’t you feel that? I saw you across the room and I knew you were the twin to my soul, the other half. That’s why the first thing I ever said to you, the first word I spoke, was your name.”

Philip thought he remembered the first word she had spoken was to say Hardy was a peculiar dog, but he must be mistaken. What did it matter anyway? She was in his bed, had made love with him more gloriously than any girl ever before, and would do so, almost certainly, again.

“For ever,” she whispered, a slow hieratic smile spreading across her face. He was glad of that smile, for he didn’t want her becoming too serious. “Philip, I don’t want you to say you love me. Not yet. I shan’t tell you I love you, though I do. Those words are so commonplace, everyone uses them, they’re not for us. What we have and are going to have is too deep for that, our feelings are too deep.” She turned her face into the hollow of his shoulder and ran her fingers lightly down the length of his body, quickly exciting him again. “Philip, shall I stay the night here with you?”