Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

She got up, approached him. He found himself, to his own humiliation, shielding his face. “I won’t hurt you.” She spoke with contempt. With her little hands, her child’s hands, she took him by the upper arms. She looked into his face. The stilt heels had elevated her so that she had only a little way to look up. “Are you refusing to do this, Philip? Are you?”

“Of course I am. You may not know it, you don’t really know me yet, but I hate the whole notion of killing and any sort of violence, come to that. It doesn’t just make me feel sick, it bores me. I can’t even watch a violent film on TV, and I don’t want to either, it doesn’t interest me. And now you say you want me to kill someone. What kind of a criminal do you think I am?”

“I thought you were the other half of our united souls.”

“Oh, don’t talk such rubbish! It’s such a load of shit, all this balls about souls and karmas and destinies and rubbish. Why don’t you grow up and live in the real world? You talk about living—do you think you’re living stuck in this filthy dump sleeping half the day? Making up tales to convince people how clever and amazing you are? I thought I’d heard it all, all that about going to Mexico and India and wherever, and your Icelandic mother and the Flying Dutchman, but now I get told I’ve got to kill some poor old bloody vagrant to prove I love you!”

She made that hissing cat’s sound and with both hands shoved him so hard that he staggered. He grabbed the edge of the gilded frame to steady himself, thought for a moment the whole great swinging dangerous sheet of mirror would come crashing down. But it was only shivering on the chain which fastened it to the wall, and it stilled as he leaned against it, grasping it with both hands. When he turned round, she had flung herself face-downwards on the bed, where she lay making curious convulsive jerks down the length of her body. As he touched her tentatively, she rolled on to her back, sat up, and began to scream. The sounds were terrible, mechanical seemingly, short staccato shrieks tearing out of her wide-open mouth, from which the lips curled back in a snarl like a tigress.

He did what he had heard and read about and slapped her face. It had an instant silencing effect. She went white as paper, gagged, gasped, put her hands up to cover both cheeks. Her whole body trembled. After a moment she spoke to him through her fingers, whispered, “Get me some water.”

She sounded weak and breathless, as if she were ill. For a moment he was afraid for her. He went out of the room and along the passage past the other basement rooms to where the lavatory was, and next to it the relic and ruin of a bathroom. Here the single brass tap, wrapped in rags, stuck out of the green and fungus-coated wall over the bathtub. He filled the mug, drank it down himself, and refilled it. The water had a dead metallic taste. He made his way back to where she was. She was sitting on the bed with the purple duvet wrapped round her, as if it were a winter’s day. Behind and above her, outside the window, the old woman’s back, covered now by some sort of khaki-coloured jacket, could still be seen beyond the railing. She had given no sign of having heard the screams from below, having perhaps heard so much of life that she had become detached.

Philip held the mug to Senta’s lips and helped her drink, as if she really was ill. He put his other arm round her and rested his hand tenderly on her neck. He could feel tremors passing through her body and a feverish heat on her skin. She sipped the water quietly until she had finished it. Her neck extricated itself from his fondling hand, her head ducked away from him, and she took from him the mug the water had been in. It was all done very quietly and gently, which made the next thing she did shocking because it was so unexpected. She hurled the mug across the room where it crashed against the wall.

“Get out of here!” she screamed at him. “Get out of my life! You’ve ruined my life, I hate you, I never want to see you again.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Darren’s car, an ancient banger just this side of vintage value, was parked by the kerb and the front door was open. On the step, in the sunshine, Hardy lay asleep, but he woke up when Philip appeared, and ran to make a fuss of him. Now Philip remembered that Fee had said she would come on Sunday afternoon to take away the rest of her things, and as he entered the house, she came downstairs with a pile of clothes over one arm and a teddy bear clutched in the other.

“Whatever’s happened to your eye? Have you been in a fight?”

“Someone hit me,” he said, trying to be truthful; then, untruthfully, “They mistook me for someone else.”

“I’ve phoned about fifty times since yesterday morning.” “I’ve been out,” he said. “I’ve been out quite a bit.” “I realise that. I thought you must have gone away. That looks awful, that eye. Was it in a pub it happened?”

His mother didn’t question and check up on him, so he didn’t see why he should put up with it from a sister. She went out to the car, came back saying rather shrilly, “How long’s that poor dog been on his own?”

He didn’t answer. “Shall I give you a hand with that stuff?”

“All right. I mean, thanks. I thought you’d be here, Phil.”

She preceded him up the stairs. In the room that was now Cheryl’s alone, the doors of a clothes cupboard were open, one of the twin beds piled with dresses and coats and skirts. But the first thing he saw, the first thing he really took in, was the garment that lay in a heap on the floor of the cupboard. It was the bridesmaid’s dress which Senta had stripped off that day they first made love.

“She must really have liked that dress, mustn’t she?” said Fee. “She must really have appreciated it. You can see she just took it off and dumped it there. By the look of it, it somehow got soaking wet first.”

He said nothing. He was remembering. Fee picked up the ruined dress, the satin stained with water spots, the net creased, and the skirt torn at the hem. “I mean, I can understand if she didn’t like it. It was my taste, not hers. But you’d think she’d think of my feelings, wouldn’t you? I mean, finding it there sort of just discarded. And poor old Stephanie. She sat up nights to finish making that.”

“I suppose she just didn’t think.”

Fee pulled a suitcase down from the top of the cupboard. She began folding things up and putting them in the case. “Mind you, she’s very peculiar. I only asked her to be my bridesmaid because Darren’s mother specially asked me to. She said Senta would feel left out. I’m sure she wouldn’t have. They’ve really split off from the rest of the family, that lot. I mean, we asked Senta’s father and her mother, but they didn’t come, they didn’t even answer the invitations.”

With seeming indifference, he said, “Someone said Senta had a foreign mother but that she was dead. I suppose they’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

It gave him an odd little thrill to speak her name so casually. He waited for Fee’s denial, watched her, expecting her to turn round to him, her upper lip raised, her nose wrinkled up, the face she made when something she found incredible was said to her. She folded the bridesmaid’s dress up, said, “I may as well take it with me. I suppose I can have it cleaned, someone might want it. It’s miles too small for me.” She closed the lid of the case, fastened it. “Yes, there was something like that,” she said. “Her mother died when she was born. She came from some funny place. Greenland? No, Iceland. Darren’s uncle was in the merchant navy and they put in there or whatever the expression is, and he met her but her family were funny about it because he wasn’t an officer or anything. Anyway, they did get married and he had to go back to sea and she had his baby—I mean, Senta—and died of some awful complications or whatever.”