Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

The front doors of houses like this one where there were many tenants were often left open. But he had never found this one open and he didn’t now. There was no bell. This place was a far cry from the kind of house where there was a row of bells by the front door with the tenant’s name on a neat card above each one. The door knocker was of brass long turned quite black. Something sticky came off it on to his fingers. He banged and banged.

She had taken the keys off the ring because she didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want him to come back. That must be the truth but it was something he didn’t want to face. He bent down and looked through the letter box. All he could see was the phone on the table and the shadowy passage leading away to the basement stairs. He went back down the steps and looked over into the area. The shutters were folded across her window, and this in spite of the heat. It made him feel she must be out. Those auditions she went to, those famous people she knew, that was all true.

He stepped back across the pavement and looked up at the house. There were three floors above the basement. It was the first time he had ever looked up at it like this. In the past he had always been in too much of a hurry to pause, too eager to get into the house and find her.

The roof was shallow, of grey slates, with a kind of little railing round. This was the only ornamental thing on the forbidding facade, liver-coloured bricks punctured by three rows of windows, each one a plain flat oblong, deeply recessed. On one of the window sills on the middle floor was a broken window box that had once been gilded and flakes of gilt still adhered to it. In it were some dead plants tied up to sticks.

Philip was aware that the old man had woken up and was watching him. He had a strange superstitious feeling about the old man. If he ignored him, repudiated him, he would never see Senta again. But if he gave him something substantial, it would count in his favour in that mystical handout centre, where people received benefits according to the measure of their charity. Someone, whose opinion he had privately derided at the time, had once said to him that what we give to the poor, that is what we take with us when we die. Although he could ill afford it, he took a five-pound note out of his wallet and put it into the hand that was already stretched out to receive it.

“Get yourself a good meal,” he said, by now embarrassed.

“You’re a nobleman, governor. God bless you and your loved ones.”

It was a strange one, that term “governor,” Philip thought, getting back into his car. Where did it come from? Did it originate with the governor of a prison—or a workhouse? He shuddered a little, though the car was hot and stuffy. The old man was still sitting on the pavement, contemplating the fiver with great complacency and satisfaction. Philip drove home, made himself coffee, baked beans on toast, ate an apple, took Hardy round the block. Much later, at about nine-thirty, he tried that phone number again but there was no reply.

A postcard came from Christine next morning. It showed St. Michael’s Mount off the southern coast of Cornwall. Christine wrote: “We haven’t been to this place and don’t suppose we shall as the coach trip doesn’t go there. But it was the prettiest card in the shop. Wish you were here enjoying this heat wave with us. Much love, Mum and Cheryl.” Cheryl hadn’t signed it though. It was all in Christine’s writing. Philip suddenly remembered who it was that had said that about the money we give to the poor being all we take with us when we die. It was Gerard Arnham. The only time Philip had met him, Arnham had said that. It must have been while they were in the steakhouse and Christine had talked of Stephen, quoting him as saying, “Oh, well, you can’t take it with you ….”

When she stopped hearing from Arnham, had Christine felt the way he did now? But that was nonsense. Senta was only peeved, sulking, punishing him. She would keep it up a few days maybe; he must be prepared for a few days. It might be the best thing not to attempt to get into the house again, to leave it for today. But when he was driving home that evening from a call he had made in Uxbridge, he found the pull of Tarsus Street impossible to resist. The heat was greater than on the previous evening and more humid, sultrier. He left the car windows open. He left them open, thinking, Sod’s law will operate: if I close the windows and lock up the car, she won’t let me in, but if I leave the windows open, she will let me in and I shall have to come back to close them.

The old man was gone, all that remained of him a rag tied round one of the railings at ground level. Philip went up to the front door, banged on the knocker, banged a dozen times. As he retreated, he looked down into the area and fancied he saw the shutters move. He thought for a moment that the shutters had been open and she, or someone in there, had closed them at the sound of his feet on the stone steps. He had probably imagined it, he was probably deluding himself. At any rate, they were closed now.

On Wednesday he kept away. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. He had begun to long for her. The longing wasn’t only sexual but it was sexual. The continuing heat made it worse. He lay on his bed naked with the sheet half over him and thought of that first time when she had come to him here in this bed. He rolled over onto his face and clutched the pillow and groaned. When he went to sleep, he had the first wet dream he had had for years. He was making love to her in the basement bed in Tarsus Street, and unlike most dreams of this kind, he was really making love to her, was deep inside her, moving towards one of their triumphant shared climaxes, experiencing it and shouting out with happiness and pleasure. He woke up at once, making noises, whimpering, turning over to feel sticky wetness against his thigh.

That wasn’t the worst thing. The worst was having had the joy of it and knowing it wasn’t real, it hadn’t happened. He got up very early and changed the sheets. He thought, I’ve got to see her, I can’t go on like this, I can’t imagine another day of this. She has punished me enough, I know I was wrong, I know it was unkind of me and insensitive and cruel even—but she can’t want to go on punishing me, she has to give me the chance to explain, to apologise.

It was a joke, wasn’t it—an ordinary house in an ordinary slummy London street, that no one could get into? The place wasn’t boarded up, it had ordinary doors and windows. Driving across London to another encounter with Mrs. Finnegan in Croydon, he had the strangely unwelcome idea no one else lived there but Senta. That whole great barrack of a place was empty but for Senta living in one room in the basement. I could get in, he thought, I could break the basement window.

Tentative plans for Mrs. Finnegan, sketched by Roy, were for a shower room the area of a medium-size cupboard.

“I want a bath,” Mrs. Finnegan said.

“Then you’ll have to sacrifice half the bedroom area, not a quarter.”

“I have to have a bedroom big enough to get twin beds in or at least a double bed.”

“Have you considered bunks?” said Philip.

“That’s all very well at your age. Most of my friends are over sixty.”

Philip asked if he could use her phone. She agreed if he would reverse the charges. He phoned Roy for advice. Roy, who was being unusually happy and expansive these days, said to tell the silly old fart to move to a bigger house.

“No, better not do that. Suggest a hip bath. Actually, they’re good, a great way to have a bath, especially if you’ve got one foot in the grave and another”—he laughed a lot at his own joke—“on a bar of soap.”

Through the operator, Philip tried to put a call through to the house in Tarsus Street. She must answer sometimes, she had to. What if her agent wanted her? What if one of those auditions was successful? She didn’t answer. He suggested the hip bath to Mrs. Finnegan, who said she would have to think it over. There must be ways of getting into a house. Didn’t she ever answer the door? What about the gas man, the man who read the electricity meter, the postman with a parcel? Or was she only failing to answer because she knew it was the time he was likely to come?