Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

She weakened and collapsed like something dying, like an animal whose neck has been wrung. And as she shuddered and yielded, so she began to weep, great sobs tearing through her, roaring out of her, as she caught her breath on gasps like an asthmatic, breaking afresh into sobs of passionate misery. He held her in his arms, horribly distressed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

He couldn’t leave her. He stayed the night. There was some wine left and he gave her the rest of it in one of the green glasses. She hardly spoke, only cried and clung to him. But she surprised him by falling immediately asleep once the wine had been drunk and the duvet pulled over her.

Sleep came less easily to him. He lay awake hearing the feet begin their dancing above his head. One-two-three, one-two-three, and the tune throbbed, the “Tennessee Waltz,” something of—Léhar, was it?—he seldom knew the names but Christine had records. The room always grew cold at night. It was summer and had felt like a warm muggy night outside, but in here a dank chill crept from the walls. Of course, it was below ground. After a while he got up, folded back the shutters, and opened the window at the top. With the extinguishing of the incense stick, the sour smell of the house always returned.

Their faces and curled bodies, their shapes under the lumpy bundled purple cotton, showed in the dimness of the mirror so that it appeared not like a reflecting glass but an old, soiled, dark oil painting. Overhead the feet danced on, one-two-three, one-two-three, pim-pom-pom, pim-pom-pom, from the window wall across the floor to make the mirror tremble, then over to the door, back to the window. Their rhythm and the music sent him, at last, to sleep.

In the morning he had to go home to see to the dog. Things were always so different in the morning. A freshness had come in through the open window, a light green scent perhaps from one of the rare back gardens that weren’t filled with dismembered motor vehicles and builders’ junk. Philip made instant coffee, set out bread and margarine and oranges. She was sullen and quiet. Her eyes were heavy with a swollen look. He feared he had a black eye where one of her flying fists had got him, and the cloudy spotted mirror showed him a bloodshot white and a blue bruise starting. His wrist was swollen where she had bitten him, and the teeth marks had turned purple.

“I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Are you sure you want to come back?”

“Senta, of course I want to. You know I want to. Look, I’m sorry I said that about not believing you. It was tactless and stupid.”

“It wasn’t tactless. It showed me you don’t understand me at all. You don’t feel at one with me. I searched all my life for you, and when I found you, I knew this was my karma. But it isn’t for you, I’m just a girl friend to you.”

“I’ll convince you if it takes me all day. Why don’t you come back with me? That’s a better idea. We don’t want to stay in this room all day. Come back with me.”

She wouldn’t. He thought resentfully as he climbed the stairs that he was the injured party, not she. A dentist had once told him, while filling one of his molars, that a human bite is more dangerous than an animal’s. Of course it was ridiculous thinking like that, he wouldn’t come to any harm from the bite. He just wondered how he could hide it from view until it healed.

Hardy got his walk and, because Philip felt guilty about him, rather more Kennomeat than was strictly correct for a dog of his size. He had a bath, put a piece of sticking plaster on the bite, and then took it off again. If Senta saw that, she would think he was making an unnecessary fuss or trying to draw attention to what she had done. Anyway, he couldn’t put a plaster on his eye. Roy would have some comments to make in the morning, but Philip couldn’t think about that now.

He considered buying more wine. It might please Senta, but on the other hand, if he took nothing with him, they would have a reason for going out. It was a beautiful day, the sky cloudless, the sun already hot. He contemplated spending the whole day in that underground room with dismay. For the first time since that first time they had been together, he was without desire for her, could think of her without that image being accompanied by a need to make love to her. Perhaps that was natural after the excesses of the day before.

Arriving at the house, he paused to look down at the basement window before climbing the steps. She had closed the shutters once more. He let himself in and went down the basement stairs. Inside her room there was no joss stick burning today. She was back in bed, deeply asleep. He felt disappointed and rather impatient. If he had known, he could have stayed out longer, done some “Sunday thing,” played tennis with Geoff and Ted as he sometimes did or gone for a swim at Swiss Cottage. At any rate he could have brought a Sunday paper back with him.

He sat on the single chair the room boasted and watched her. Gradually a tenderness for her, a kind of pity, brought a yearning to touch her. He took off his clothes and lay down beside her, holding one arm round her curled body.

It was past one when she woke up. They dressed and went out to a wine bar. Senta was calm and quiet, preoccupied by something and inattentive to the things he said. His desire for her was still in abeyance, but his enjoyment in being with her seemed to have increased. It continually surprised him that there had been a time when he hadn’t thought her beautiful. There was no other woman they saw while they were out who could touch her. She had put on the silvery grey dress with the drooping rose at the bosom and silver shoes with enormously high heels that made her suddenly tall. Her hair was pushed behind her ears, from which hung long pendent earrings of crystal drops like chandeliers. Men turned to stare covertly at her bare white legs and thin waist and large breasts in the clinging stuff. Philip felt proud to be with her and, for no known reason, rather nervous.

On their way back she talked of the curious occult and astrological things that interested her, of harmonics and multiple-layered vibrational frequencies, of the beautiful synchronicity of the universe, and of discordant patterns. He listened to the sound of her voice rather than to what she said. It must have been at drama school that she had learned to speak in that accent and with that timbre, the voice that spoke like a soprano singing. Then he remembered he couldn’t really credit her having been at drama school. How hard it all was, how complicated when you didn’t know what to believe and what not to!

A little fear came to him as they went into the house as to how they would pass the rest of the day. Could you be ordinary with her, could you just sit and be together and do things, not lovemaking, with her—as his mother and father, for example, had been together? She would want to make love, and he thought, fearfully, that he might be incapable. It was almost a relief when she sat down on the bed and motioned him to the old wicker chair and said she wanted to talk, she had something to say to him.

“What do I mean to you, Philip?”

He said simply, truthfully, “Everything.”

“I love you,” she said.

It was so simple and gentle the way she said it, so natural and childlike, that it went to his heart. She had told him not to say it, said she would not, so he knew that now the time had come when saying it was right. He leant towards her and put out his arms. She shook her head, seeming to look past him and beyond, with Flora’s gaze. She touched his hand, moved her finger softly to the injured wrist.

“I said we mustn’t say that till we were sure. Well, I’m sure now. I love you. You are the other half of me, I was incomplete till I found you. I’m sorry I hurt you last night, I was mad with misery, I just struck you and bit you because it was a way of releasing my misery, my unhappiness. Can you understand that, Philip?”