Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

CHAPTER SIX

Under the may tree, from which all the flowers had long fallen, which was now just an ordinary green tree, stood a figure of Cupid with his bow and quiver of arrows. Philip couldn’t see it very clearly, for the binoculars were still missing from the room. Everything else was missing too. Mrs. Ripple had carried out Roseberry Lawn’s requirements and had the interior stripped of cookery books, fireplace, extraneous woodwork, and floor covering. It was now a shell.

The Cupid amused Philip. He knew this was the god of love, and he wondered if Arnham had chosen it for this reason or simply because he liked it. A month ago he would have been affronted, incensed by the presence of this substitute for Flora. But in those intervening weeks he had changed a lot. He could hardly remember why he had stolen Flora. He found he no longer minded about Arnham, had become indifferent to him, even felt friendly towards him. His anger was all gone. Why, if he were to meet the man now, he would say hallo to him and ask him how he was.

His mission on this Saturday, generally accepted as a day off, had simply been to come here and inspect Mrs. Ripple’s house, to check if what she had said on the phone about the room being ready—you couldn’t trust these customers—was accurate. The Roseberry Lawn fitters would be coming in on Monday. Philip closed the door behind him and went downstairs. Mrs. Ripple was waiting for him at the foot.

“I shan’t be able to make tea for them.”

“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Ripple, they won’t expect it.” They would, but what was the use of arguing? There seemed no point either in anticipating trouble by telling her that if she didn’t give them a midmorning and midafternoon drink, the fitters would take half an hour off at eleven and half an hour off at three to go down to the cafe. “You’ll find them very easy, and I think you’ll be pleased by the way they clear up after themselves.”

“I won’t tolerate smoking or transistors.”

“Of course not,” said Philip, thinking she could argue it out with the workmen. He knew who would win that battle.

The door slammed behind him. No wonder she had cracks in her ceilings. He went down the path to the car where Senta sat waiting for him in the passenger seat.

This was the first time she had been out with him since that Indian meal, which had never been repeated, though with the exception of an evening a week unwillingly spent at home with Christine, he had been with her every night. There was no point in eating out, she said, and he could tell food didn’t mean much to her, though she liked chocolates and she liked wine. Nor had she ever cooked for him. He often remembered Fee’s remark when, before he knew her, he had asked why Senta couldn’t make her own dress. Fee had said he wouldn’t have asked that if he had known Senta. Well, he knew her now and he wouldn’t ask. The same applied to cooking or any domestic task. She lay in bed most mornings, she had told him, until noon or later. Her life apart from him was a mystery. If she was in on the few occasions he had tried to phone her, she hadn’t answered the phone, though he had let it ring and ring to allow time for her to get upstairs.

Their cloistral life together, half of every night spent in her bed, was wonderful, the most marvellous experience of his life, but he sensed somehow that it wasn’t right, it wasn’t real. They should be together for talk and companionship, not just for sex. Yet when he invited her to come out with him on this trip to Chigwell, get the call on Mrs. Ripple over and then have lunch somewhere, maybe drive out into the country, he had anticipated refusal. He was surprised and pleased when she said yes. He was even more delighted to hear her echo his own thoughts and tell him they should be spending all their spare time together, all the time they weren’t working.

“But you never do work, Senta,” he had said to her, his tone half-teasing.

“I went for an audition yesterday,” she said. “It’s for quite a good part in a feature film. I didn’t get it, Miranda Richardson got it, but the director liked me, he said I was remarkable.”

“Miranda Richardson!”

Philip had been impressed. Even for Senta to be considered in the same breath, so to speak, as Miranda Richardson said a lot for her ability. He had found out a bit about RADA too since she told him she had been there. It was the drama school; it was like saying you’d been to Oxford.

But since then he had doubted. It was awful to think like that when you felt about someone the way he felt about Senta, but nevertheless, deep in his own mind, he doubted. It was her telling him that to keep herself fit and at the ready, she went down to a place in Floral Street most afternoons, worked out and did ballet, which sparked off his doubts. She met all sorts of famous people there, actors and actresses and dancers. One afternoon, she told him, she and a couple of people she knew had had a cup of tea with Wayne Sleep.

He couldn’t quite believe it. She was embroidering the truth, that was all. Probably she had walked through Covent Garden and seen Wayne Sleep across the street. Once perhaps she had been to a health club and tried out the aerobic dance class. There were people like that, people for whom the truth was too stark and bare, who needed to pretty it up. It wasn’t lying, you couldn’t call it lying. Very likely she told her friends, whoever they might be, about him. But you could bet your life she didn’t say he was a junior surveyor with a company that built new bathrooms and kitchens and who lived at home with his mother in Cricklewood. In her account he would be transformed into an interior designer from Hampstead.

Thinking this made him smile, and she, turning her head towards him as he got into the car, asked him what amused him.

“I’m just feeling happy. It’s great being out with you like this.”

For answer she leant sinuously towards him and pressed her soft warm pink lips against his. He wondered if Mrs. Ripple were watching from the window.

“We’ll soon be always together, Philip,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I believe it’s our hidden karmic destiny.”

A few days before, she had drawn his horoscope, and this morning she had told him the single key number of his name was eight. Now she began talking of numerology, telling him how his number vibrated to the planet Saturn and represented wisdom, learning through experience, stability, patience, and responsibility. Philip turned the corner into the street where Arnham’s house was and pointed it out to her.

She didn’t pay it much attention but turned to him with a displeased look. He felt guilty, for it was true what she said, that he hadn’t been listening very closely to her.

“You eight people,” she said, “often appear cold and undemonstrative with those you ought to love and trust.”

“Cold?” he said. “Undemonstrative? You must be joking. You are joking, aren’t you, Senta?”

“It’s because you’re afraid of being considered weak. To be considered weak is the very last thing you eight people want to happen.”

They had lunch in a country pub and forgot what Senta called the secret codes of the universe. Afterwards they parked the car somewhere out in a part of Essex where the lanes were narrow and few tourists came, and Senta led him in between the trees and they made love on the grass.

He asked himself if he loved her, if he was in love with her. She had told him that first time not to say he loved her, not to talk in that way. They were to be together always, they were to be one, they had found each other. But was he in love? Did he even know what that expression, so widely and constantly used, so trite and stale, really meant?