Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

It was all true then. He felt both aghast and terribly pleased, relieved and appalled. There were more questions to be asked, but before he could ask them, Fee said, “Uncle Tom—I mean I’m supposed to call him ‘uncle’ now—he went back and fetched the baby. Her people were mad, Darren’s mother says, because they thought they’d get to keep her. Uncle Tom brought her home, and very soon after, he married Auntie Rita. She’s the one that lives with the young guy. Would you carry the case, Phil? And I’ll bring my winter coat and the two dolls.”

They loaded up the car. Philip made a cup of tea. It was so warm and sunny that they sat in the garden and drank it.

“I wish Mum hadn’t given Flora away,” Fee said. “I expect it sounds silly to you but I thought she gave the place a touch of class.”

“That’s something it needs,” said Philip.

He toyed with the idea of setting Flora up out here somewhere. Why shouldn’t he build a rookery for her? No one had done anything to the garden except mow the grass since they moved here. And that was all it was, grass with fences round it on three sides and bang in the middle the concrete bird bath. He tried to imagine Flora standing on rocks with flowers at her feet and a couple of little cypress trees behind her, but how could he explain to Christine?

“Come over and have a meal with us one night,” said Fee. “I mean, I won’t say you must miss Mum’s home cooking, but at least you don’t normally have to get it for yourself.”

He said he would and fixed on Thursday. By that time he would have seen Senta three times, so it would be reasonable to have an evening away from her the way he did when Christine was at home. After Fee had gone, he took Hardy a long walk up to Brent Reservoir, leaving by the back door and with the back door key in his pocket.

Senta’s telling him to get out, he had ruined her life, he took rather less than seriously. Certainly, he now saw, he had been at fault. She had naturally been furious at being disbelieved when she told the truth. For it was the truth, that was the amazing thing. All that must be true, for if the account of her mother’s nationality and her own birth was not fantasy, neither would her travels be nor her drama school training nor her meetings with the famous. Of course she was hurt and upset when he doubted her, when he told her so in that blatant way.

It was rather an awkward situation. He couldn’t exactly tell her he now believed her because he had questioned his sister about her. It needed some thinking out. In the light of what Fee had said, Senta’s rage was easy to understand. He had behaved like a narrow-minded clod, living up to her estimate of people as ordinary and bent on living in an ordinary world. Was it perhaps hysteria, a kind of uncontrollable angry misery at her word being disbelieved, that had led her to all that talk about proving his love for her? The difficulty was he couldn’t now remember what had come first, his declaration of disbelief or her demand that he kill someone for her. He would set it right, waste no more time. Take Hardy home and go straight back to Tarsus Street.

Falling asleep and staying asleep quite a long way into the night was something he wouldn’t have expected to happen to him. But he had had almost no sleep the night before and no more than two or three hours on Friday night. Returned from their walk, he had fed the dog, eaten a hunk of bread and some cheese, gone upstairs to change, and there lain down on the bed for what was to be a ten-minute nap. It was dark when he awoke, long dark. The illuminated green hands on his digital clock told him it was 12:31.

Their confrontation, his deep apology and request for forgiveness, must wait until tomorrow. Well, tonight really, he thought as he drifted off once more into sleep. Hardy, for once not shut up in the kitchen for the night, lay curled up on the end of the bed by his feet.

It was the little dog coming close up to his face, licking his ear, which awoke him. He had forgotten to set the alarm, but it was only seven. Soft hazy sunshine filled the room. Already, at this hour, you could feel in the air the promise of a hot and perfect day, that kind of expectant smiling serenity that breathes from a sky that is cloudless but veiled in a fine mist. It was what the older people called “settled.” Rain and cold seemed something that happened in another country.

He had a bath, shaved, put Hardy out into the garden, which was going to have to suffice for him this morning. Yesterday’s miles ought to last him a day or two. Philip put on a clean shirt and the suit which Roseberry Lawn expected its personnel to wear when visiting customers. He had a kitchen conversion to keep an eye on in Wembley and a projected bathroom installation to estimate in Croydon. Wembley wasn’t far away, but the fitters would start work at eight-thirty. He felt for his keys in the pocket of the jeans he had worn yesterday.

There were two sets, the keys to the Opel Kadett and a second ring on which he kept the key to this house, the key to the outer door of head office and, for the past month, the keys to the house in Tarsus Street. These last, he saw to his extreme dismay, were missing.

His own house key was there and the one to the office. The ring was a plain one without a fob. It was impossible for the keys to have slipped off. Could Senta have taken them off? He sat down on the bed. He felt rather cold in spite of the warmth of the day, but his hands, which held the ring with two keys on it only, were damp. It was easy to see, when he thought about it, what had happened. She had asked him to fetch her a drink of water, and while he was away, she had abstracted her own keys from the ring.

At midday, while he was taking his lunch break, he tried to phone her from a call box. Never yet had he succeeded in getting a reply from that phone in the hall in Tarsus Street and he didn’t now. He did something strictly against Roseberry Lawn rules and asked Mrs. Finnegan, the Croydon householder, if he might use her phone. Someone of Mrs. Ripple’s sort would have made a thing out of it, refused and lectured him, but Mrs. Finnegan only stipulated that he make his call through the operator and pay the cost of it. It made no difference, anyway, for no one answered.

He had measured up the tiny area of bedroom she wanted transformed into a bathroom with full-size bath, lavatory, vanity unit, and bidet, told her he doubted it would be a possibility, listened to her protests, argued very politely, smiled and agreed when she said he was very young, wasn’t he, and would he get a second opinion? She kept staring speculatively at his eye. By then it was a quarter past five. There was hardly a worse time for driving across London.

The time was twenty to seven when he got to the Harrow Road and turned off into the hinterland. In Cairo Street he stopped outside an off-licence and bought wine and crisps and after-dinner mints, the only chocolates they had. Now that he was nearly there, he was aware of a kind of sick excitement building up inside him.

The old man in the woman’s raincoat was sitting on the pavement with his back to the railings above Senta’s area. He was still wearing the raincoat, though it was very hot, the pavements white in the sun and the tar melting on the roadway. The old man, whose face was covered with a yellowish-white stubble, had fallen asleep, his head lolling against a heap of rags he had used to cushion the railings. In his lap lay an assortment of food scraps, a piece of burnt toast, a croissant in cellophane, a jam jar with about an inch of marmalade in the bottom of it. Philip thought that if he woke up, he would give him another pound coin. He didn’t know why this old vagrant, wretched and destitute, moved him so much. After all, you saw plenty like him, men and women, he wasn’t unique. They congregated here and in the neighbouring streets because of the proximity of the Mother Teresa Centre.