Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

Desire, lust if you liked, passion, an absolute overpowering need to possess and repossess her, he had all that all right. And he thought of her all the time. She occupied his thoughts on his long drives, on his visits to houses Roseberry Lawn was converting, when he was with Roy, at home with Christine and Cheryl, even in his own bed in Glenallan Close, though by that time, having come back from Kilburn in the small hours, he was usually too tired for anything but heavy sleep. Sometimes, inside his head, he talked to her. He told her his thoughts and fears as, for some reason, he couldn’t tell the real woman. The real Senta, though silent while he spoke, seemed not to listen. And when some rejoinder was due from her, as likely as not it would be a remark about mystical meanings or polarity points or some strange affirmation that he and she were united souls with no need of words for communication.

How could he be the other half of her, a twin soul, if he wasn’t sure that he loved her?

At the end of June, Christine and Cheryl went away on holiday together. Philip was glad now that when he broke up with Jenny and cancelled the package tour to Greece they had arranged to take together, he hadn’t arranged to go away with his mother and sister. He would have two weeks alone with Senta.

In a way it was unfortunate he had to stay in Glenallan Close. But someone had to be there to take charge of Hardy. And Philip admitted to himself that although he went there every night, loved going there because Senta was there, longed for the place with breath-catching excitement, he had never really got used to the house in Tarsus Street, had never accepted it. The filth and the smell continued to bother him. There was something sinister about the place too, the way you never saw anyone else, heard no sound ever but occasionally that music and those dancing feet. He ought really to have become apprehensive about her living there. If he was truly one of those wise responsible “eight” people—and it made him smile to think of it—surely it should worry him to think of his girl friend, his twin soul as she would say, having her home in that part of London, in that sordid house. There were drunks on Tarsus Street at night and gangs of boys loitering on the corners, derelicts lying on the pavement or crouched in doorways. Why didn’t it worry him? Was it because—awful thought—she seemed to belong there, to be as suited to the place as they?

Once, going to her at nine at night, as he drove into her turning, he had seen a strange girl coming towards him along the pavement, gliding along in a black dress that touched the ground, her head wrapped in a red striped cloth like an African woman’s. She had touched his arm as he got out of the car and smiled into his face before he knew it was Senta. For an awful moment he had thought it was some unappetising prostitute soliciting him.

Christine and Cheryl were going to Cornwall. Philip hadn’t given much thought to Cheryl lately—so much for being wise and responsible!—but now he wondered how she would handle this habit of hers, whatever it might be, while she and Christine were in Newquay. Drink or drugs—well, they were available anywhere, he thought. Remembering his experience in that squalid street with the disguised Senta, he wondered if his unexpressed fears were after all justified, and Cheryl raised the money for her habit by prostitution. Uneasily, he recalled the fiver she had returned to him so promptly, no more than a night and a morning after she had borrowed it.

He drove them to Paddington Station. Christine wore a dress of floral cotton with a white cardigan she had knitted herself during the long winter evenings. From a distance you couldn’t see the mistakes in the pattern. He told her she looked nice (her word), and it was true that the contrast between her and Cheryl—in jeans, Mickey Mouse tee shirt, and black leather— was almost laughable. Cheryl no longer looked young or much like a girl or even very human. The skin on her face looked stretched and rough, her eyes were bitter. She had had her hair shorn off close to the crown.

“You’ve had a crew cut,” was all Christine said.

“I don’t know what a crew cut is. This is a suede head.”

“I expect it’s very nice if you like it”—the nearest Christine would ever get to criticism.

Leaving them there on the ramp with their suitcases—it was hopeless to think of finding a place to park—he drove back up to Cricklewood wondering what would become of his sister. She was trained for nothing, had no job or prospect of one, was terrifyingly ignorant, had no boy friend or any other kind of friend, and appeared hooked on some habit whose nature he was afraid to discover. But, as was always the case now, these thoughts were soon replaced by Senta. As soon as he had taken Hardy out for a walk, he would be off to Kilburn to spend the rest of the day with her. He wanted to persuade her to return to Glenallan Close with him for the night.

Hardy got a proper walk for a change, he deserved it. The poor dog had been obliged to put up with too many quick traversings of the block lately. Philip drove him to Hampstead Heath and walked through the woodland between the Spaniards Road and the Vale of Health towards Highgate. June was being a cool month, dry and grey. The bright green of the grass, the darker, richer colour of the foliage were soothing to the eyes, curiously pacifying. Ahead of him the little dog ran along, stopping sometimes to push an excited snout into rabbit holes. Philip thought about Senta, her body as white as marble, those overlarge breasts, nipples that were neither brown nor rosy but the palest pearl pink, and that rosy bronze cluster under her belly like red flowers….

He switched his mind and its image-making onto her face, with Flora’s gaze and Flora’s pagan eyes. Onto her voice and the things she said. Now he could think quite tenderly of the silly little untruths she had told him, about dyeing her hair, for instance, about being auditioned for that film and meeting Wayne Sleep. That stuff about her mother being Icelandic and dying when she was born, that too was probably made up. Hadn’t Fee said something once about Senta’s mother having this young lover? So much for dying in childbirth.

She had fantasies, that was the truth of it. No harm in that. Some of the things she told him had been invented to impress him, and that was very very flattering. That a girl like Senta should want to impress him was an enormous compliment. Fantasies, he had read somewhere, were what people had whose lives were rather empty, for whom reality was inadequate. He felt protective towards her when he thought like that, and tenderly loving. Considering her like this, he had no doubt he loved her.

Reaching these conclusions in a very levelheaded way made Philip feel comfortably sophisticated. It almost seemed that this numerology stuff might have something in it, for perhaps he was one of those who learned by experience and grew wise. He would not care to have been taken in for long by fantasising, but as things were, he was neither duped nor disillusioned and that was fine. She wasn’t deceiving him, and to be fair, perhaps that wasn’t her intention, but only to appear to him more glamorous and exciting than she really was. It was impossible, he thought, for her to be more exciting, and as for the glamour—he liked best to think of her as the little girl with a sweet loving nature which she truly was underneath all that, the passionate lover who was at the same time an ordinary woman with an ordinary woman’s doubts and uncertainties.

On the way to Tarsus Street he went shopping. He bought Chinese takeaway. If she wouldn’t eat it, he would. He bought biscuits and fruit and two bottles of wine and a big box of Terry’s Moonlight chocolates. Senta didn’t cost him as much as Jenny had because they so seldom went out. He liked to splash out on the things he brought her.