Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

“Of course I can.”

“And do you love me like I love you?”

It seemed a solemn occasion. Gravity and an intense seriousness were called for. He said in a steady, deliberate way, as if making a vow, “I love you, Senta.”

“I wish it were enough, saying it. But it isn’t enough, Philip. You have to prove your love for me and I have to prove mine for you. I thought about that all the time you were away this morning. I lay here thinking about it, how we each have to do some tremendous thing to prove our love for each other.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll do that. What would you like me to do?”

She was silent. Her crystalline greenish eyes had shifted their gaze from some unknown horizon and returned to meet his. It won’t be Jenny’s thing of getting engaged, he thought, that’s not Senta’s style, and it won’t be buying her something. Squeamishly he hoped she wasn’t going to ask him to cut a vein and mingle his blood with hers. It would be like her and he would do it, but he felt distaste for it.

“I believe life is a great adventure, don’t you?” she said. “We feel the same about these things, so I know you do. Life is terrible and beautiful and tragic, but most people make it just ordinary. When you and I make love, we have a moment of heightened consciousness, a moment when everything looks clear and brilliant, we have such an intensity of feeling that it’s as if we experience everything fresh and new and perfect. Well, it ought to be like that all the time, we can learn the power of making it that way, not by wine or drugs but by living to the limit of our consciousness, by living every day with every fibre of our awareness.”

He nodded. She had been saying something like that on the way back here. The awful thing was he had begun to feel sleepy. He had eaten a heavy lunch and drunk a pint of beer. What he would best have liked would have been to lie down on the bed with her and cuddle her until they fell asleep. Her telling him she loved him had made him very happy, and with that knowledge a sleepy desire was returning, the kind of mild lust which can be pleasantly delayed until sleep has come and gone and the body lies warm and easy. He smiled at her and reached for her hand.

She withdrew her hand and held the index finger up at him. “Some say that to live fully you have to have done four things. Do you know what they are? I’ll tell you. Plant a tree, write a poem, make love with your own sex, and kill someone.”

“The first two—well, the first three really—don’t seem to have much in common with the last.”

“Please don’t laugh, Philip. You laugh too much. There are things that shouldn’t be laughed at.”

“I wasn’t laughing. I don’t suppose I’ll ever do any of those things you said, so I hope that won’t mean I haven’t lived.” He looked at her, taking a deep pleasure in her face, her large clear eyes, the mouth that he could never tire of gazing at. “When I’m with you, I think I’m really living, Senta.”

It was an invitation to love but she ignored it. She said very quietly and with an intense dramatic concentration, “I shall prove I love you by killing someone for you, and you must kill someone for me.”

He was aware for the first time since they got back of the stuffiness of the room, the close raunchy smell of the bed and the bag overflowing with dirty washing, and he got up to unfold the shutters and open the window. Standing there with his hands on the sash bar, breathing such fresh air as penetrated Tarsus Street, he said to her over his shoulder, “Oh, sure. Who have you got in mind?”

“It doesn’t have to be anyone in particular. In fact, it’d be better if it’s not. Someone in the street at night. She’d do.” She pointed past Philip out of the window to where one of the street people, an elderly bag woman, had seated herself on the pavement with her back to the railings above the basement area. “Someone like that, anyone. It’s not who it is that matters—it’s doing it, it’s doing this terrible deed that puts you outside ordinary society.”

“I see.”

The old woman’s back looked like a sack of rags someone had dropped there to be collected by the council refuse men. It was hard to grasp that there was a human being inside there, a person with feelings, who could experience joy and suffer pain. Philip turned slowly from the window but he didn’t sit down. He leaned against the mirror’s bruised and broken frame. Senta’s face wore its intense expression, blank yet concentrated. He thought she spoke like someone—and someone not very talented—uttering lines learned for a play.

“I would know what you’d done for me and you would know what I’d done for you, but no one else would. We should share these terrible secrets. We should really know each of us meant more than all the world besides to the other, if you could do that for me and I could do it for you.”

“Senta,” he said, trying to keep his patience, “I know you aren’t serious. I know these things are fantasies with you. You may think you’re deceiving me but you’re not.”

Her face changed. Her eyes shifted and returned to look into both of his. She spoke in a still, cold voice, but warily, “What things?”

“Oh, never mind. I know and you know.”

“I don’t know. What things?”

He hadn’t wanted to say it, he didn’t want a confrontation, but perhaps there was no help for it. “Well, if you must have it, about your mother and going to all those foreign places and going to auditions for parts with Miranda Richardson. I know they’re daydreams. I didn’t want to say it, but what else can I do when you talk about killing people to prove we love each other?”

All the time he was speaking, he was bracing himself to repel the same sort of attack as she had made on him the night before. But she was calm, statuelike, her hands folded and her eyes fixed on them in hieratic pose. She raised her eyes to his face. “You don’t believe what I say, Philip?”

“How can I when you say things like that? I believe some things.”

“All right. What don’t you believe?”

He didn’t quite answer her. “Look, Senta, I don’t mind you having fantasies, lots of people do, it’s just a way of making life more interesting. I don’t mind you inventing things about your family and about your acting, but when you get to talk about killing people—it’s so ugly and pointless and it’s a waste of time too. It’s the weekend, it’s Sunday, we could be having a nice time, out somewhere, it’s a lovely day, and here we are sitting in this-well, frankly, disgusting hole, while you talk about killing that poor old creature sitting out there.”

She became a muse of tragedy, sombre, grave. She might have been imparting terrible news of his family to him or telling him all those she loved were dead. “I am absolutely, utterly, profoundly serious,” she said.

He felt he was contorting his face, screwing up his eyes and frowning in an effort to understand her. “You can’t be.”

“Are you serious about loving me, about doing anything for me?”

“Within reason, yes,” He said it sulkily.

“Within reason ! How sick that makes me! Don’t you see that what we have has to be without reason, beyond reason? And to prove it we have to do the thing that is outside the law and beyond reason.”

“You really are serious,” he said bitterly. “Or you think you are, which in your present mood comes to the same thing.”

“I am willing to kill someone to prove my love for you, and you must do the same for me.”

“You’re mad, Senta, that’s what you are!”

Her voice was stony now, remote. “Don’t ever say that.”

“I won’t say it, I don’t really mean it. Oh God, Senta, let’s talk about something else, please. Let’s do something. Can’t we forget all this? I don’t even know how we got into it.”