Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

Outside her house an old man wearing what looked like a woman’s raincoat tied round his middle with string was rooting in one of the plastic bags piled on the pavement. Despite notices on lamp posts informing them that littering the street constituted an environmental hazard, the people down here piled their rubbish bags outside the broken railings in ill-smelling mounds. The old man had retrieved half a sliced loaf in cellophane wrapping and, thrusting his hand back in again, was perhaps in search of a lump of green cheese or the leftovers from a joint. Philip saw him fumbling with the crimson sticky bones of what had once been a wing of Tandoori chicken. The luxury foods he was carrying made him feel even worse about the old man than he normally would have done. He felt in his pocket for a pound coin and held it out.

“Thanks very much, governor. God bless.”

The possession of the coin did nothing to prevent further excavations in the stack of rubbish bags. Should he have made it a fiver? Philip ran up the steps and let himself into the house. As usual, it was silent, dirty. During the previous night it had rained heavily, and someone, it was plain to see, had walked across the tiled floor towards the stairs in wet shoes whose deeply indented soles made a pattern in the dust.

The scent of her joss stick was powerful today. He could smell it on the basement stairs where it fought with the permanent, all-pervading sour reek of that dark well. She was waiting for him just inside. Sometimes, and today was one of those times, she wore an old Japanese kimono in faded blues and pinks on the back of which was embroidered a rose-coloured bird with a long curving tail. Her hair was looped up and fastened on top of her head with a silver comb. She put out her arms to him and held him in her slow, soft, all-the-time-in-the-world sensuous embrace, kissing his lips lightly, daintily, then drawing his mouth into a deep, devouring, enduring kiss.

The original painted shutters were still attached to the window frame, and these she had folded across the glass. The uneasy light of the June day, the watery sun, was excluded. Her lamp was on, the shade tilted, to shed yellow light on to the bed, which was as rumpled as if she had just got out of it. A candle was burning too beside the sandalwood incense stick smouldering in its saucer. In the mirror the whole room was reflected, a frowsty dusty purple and gold, and it might have been midnight, it might have been any time. Traffic grumbled out there, and sometimes there came the clack-clack of a woman’s heels on the pavement, the trundling sound of pram or bicycle wheels.

He opened the wine. She didn’t want to eat, she wouldn’t eat meat. She sat cross-legged on the bed, picking out of the box the chocolates she liked best, and drinking the wine out of one of a pair of cloudy bottle-green glasses she had. Philip wasn’t a wine drinker. He didn’t like the taste of it nor the effect, which left him with a swimming head and a bad taste in his mouth. Alcohol in any form he found rather distasteful with the exception of an occasional half of bitter. But Senta liked him to share the wine, and he sensed she would have felt guilty if allowed to drink alone. It was easy, though, with coloured glass. You couldn’t see if there was wine in there or water. And if it was inescapable that he pour himself a measure, he could usually also manage to get rid of it into the pot which held her only houseplant, a kind of imperishable aspidistra. This plant, having long survived darkness, drought, and neglect, was beginning to flourish on its wine diet.

She consented to go out for a walk with him, though as always she seemed reluctant to leave her room. It was about ten when they got back to Tarsus Street. They hadn’t taken the car to the restaurant, an Italian place in Fernhead Road, but had walked there and back, their arms round each other’s waists. On the way back Senta became very loving, stopping sometimes to hold him and to kiss. He could feel the urgency of her desire, like rays, like trembling vibrations. In the past Philip had often seen couples who embraced in the street, oblivious apparently of those around them, mutually absorbed, kissing, fondling, seemingly gloating over each other with an intense exclusivity. He had never done that himself and had sometimes felt a kind of prudish disapproval of it. But now he found himself a willing, an ardent, partner in one of those couples, glorying in the pleasures of kissing in the street, in the lamplight, the dusk, against a wall, in the shadowy embrasure of a doorway.

Back there in her basement room, she couldn’t wait. She was greedy for him and for love, sweat gleaming on her upper lip, her forehead, her marble white skin bearing a hectic flush. Yet when they were in bed together, she was sweeter and more generous than she had ever been, yielding instead of overwhelming, giving rather than taking. Her movements seemed all for his delight, her hands and lips and tongue for him, her pleasure held and delayed until his came. A slow tide of joy, lapping in tender tiny waves, increasing, crashing like falling towers, broke upon him and the room, making the mirror shudder, the floor move. He groaned with the glory of it, a groan that became a cry of triumph as she held him and pressed and undulated swiftly and drew from him at last her own success. He lay thinking, next time I will give her what she has given me, she shall be first, I will do for her from the fullness of my happiness what she has done for me.

Her hair spread out on the pillow beside his face in silvery points. It glittered like long brittle slivers of glass. The flush had faded from her face and it was white again, pure, lineless, the skin as smooth as the inner side of an ivory waxen petal. Her wide-open eyes were crystals with the green fluidity tinting them like weeds in water. He ran his fingers through her hair, holding the tresses of it in his fingers, feeling the sharp healthy harshness of the strands.

The lamp he had turned round, tilting the shade so that the light should fall on their faces, their passion-expressing eyes. That light was now shed onto the crown of her head. He peered more closely, lifted a silver gleaming lock, and exclaimed without thought, without pause, “Your hair’s red at the roots!”

“Of course it is. I told you I bleached it. Well, I have it bleached.” Her voice wasn’t angry, only faintly impatient. “It needs redoing. I should have had it done last week.”

“You actually have it bleached? You have it made that silver colour?”

“I told you, Philip. Don’t you remember I told you?”

He laughed a little, relaxed, easy, happy. He laughed, shaking his head. “I didn’t believe you, I honestly didn’t believe a word of it.”

What happened next was very quick.

Senta sprang up. She crouched on the bed on all fours. She was like an animal, her lips drawn back, her hair hanging. There should have been a long feline tail swinging. Her eyes were round and glittering and a hissing sound came from her between clenched teeth. He had sat up and drawn back, away from her.

“What on earth’s the matter?”

It was a different voice, low, coarse, vibrating with rage. “You don’t trust me! You don’t believe me!”

“Senta—”

“You don’t trust me. How can we be one, how can we be joined together, one soul, when you’ve no trust in me? When you’ve no faith?” Her voice rose and it was like a siren howling. “I’ve given you my soul, I’ve told you the deep things in my soul, I’ve exposed the wholeness of my spirit, and you—you’ve just shat on it, you’ve fucked it over, you’ve destroyed me!”

Then she came at him with pounding fists, aiming for his face, his eyes. He was a man and he had a foot of height advantage over her and weighed half as much again as she. But for all that, it took him a while to subdue her. She writhed in his grip, tossing herself this way and that, hissing, twisting to bite his hand. He felt sharp teeth break the skin and the blood come. He was surprised she was so fit. Her strength was wiry, like electrically charged wire. And like wire when the current is switched off, it suddenly died.