Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

He got off early. It was too late to go back to the office but too early really to stop work. He stopped work. What about all the times he had worked Saturdays without overtime? It was twenty to five and he was in West Hampstead, ten minutes’ drive away even at a bad time for traffic. She wouldn’t expect him at ten to five.

Thunder was rumbling from over the Hampstead Heath direction. Mrs. Finnegan had said to him there would have to be a storm soon to clear the air. A bright tree of lightning grew out of the roof of the Tricycle Theatre and threw branches across the purple sky. Raindrops as big as old pennies he could just remember lay black on the white pavements in Tarsus Street. The old man was back but busy in a dustbin from which red Tesco bags bulged, stuffed with rubbish. Philip stood and looked up at the house. He noticed this time that there were no curtains at any of the windows but at the window behind the box of dead plants a pair of shutters like Senta’s had been folded across.

It was possible that they had been like that last time he looked. He didn’t think so but he couldn’t really remember. Did she really live alone there? Was she perhaps a squatter? He wasn’t going to bang on that knocker today. He leaned over into the area and tapped on the glass of her window. The shutters, of course, were closed. He banged harder and shook the sash bar. A man and a woman walked by along the pavement. They took no notice of him. He might have been a real burglar, breaking in to steal or do damage, but they were indifferent, they ignored him.

Philip mounted the steps and, forgetting his resolve, knocked at the front door. He stood there, knocking and knocking. A tremendous clap of thunder seemed to shake the whole terrace of which this house was a part. Someone in the house next door closed a downstairs window. The rain came down in a sudden cascade of straight glittering silver rods of water. He stood well back under the porch, little splashes of rain hitting him with sharp cold stings. Mechanically, he went on knocking, but by now he was sure no one was in there. Because he couldn’t have done so himself, he was sure no one could have stood being in there and hearing this racket on the door knocker without doing something about it.

When the rain let up a little, he made a run for it to the car. He could see the old man sitting at the top of an even longer flight of steps than Senta’s; sheltered by a porch with pitched roof and wooden pillars, he was gnawing on chicken bones.

Senta was never out for long. Philip thought he would wait there till she came back. It amazed him that only last week he had asked himself if he was in love with her. Had he been totally blind, totally out of touch with his own deepest feelings? In love with her! If she came along the street now, he wondered how he would keep from casting himself at her feet. How could he keep from lying at her feet and embracing her legs and kissing her feet, from weeping with joy at just seeing her, at being with her again, even if she refused to speak to him?

After two hours had passed and he had just sat there thinking of her, imagining her appearing, picturing her appearing in the far distance and gradually approaching—after two hours of that, he got out of the car and went back up the steps and knocked on the door again. While at Mrs. Finnegan’s, he had considered breaking her window. There was a loose brick lying on the concrete ridge between railings and the dip down into the area. Philip climbed over on to this concrete and picked up the brick. He happened to look back along the street at that point—he was looking to see if the old bag man was watching—and that was how he saw the policeman in uniform strolling along. He dropped the brick down into the area, went back to the car, and drove up to Kilburn High Road.

There he had a hamburger in Macdonald’s and afterwards two pints of bitter in Biddy Mulligan’s. It was getting on for half-past eight but still broad daylight. The rain had stopped, though the thunder still rolled. Mrs. Finnegan had been wrong and it hadn’t cleared the air. Back in Tarsus Street he knocked on the front door again and hammered on the basement window. Looking up at the house, this time from the opposite pavement, he saw that the shutters at the window on the middle floor were still closed. Perhaps they always had been and it was an illusion of his that they had been open until that afternoon. He had begun to feel a little mad, that maybe it was all illusion that she lived here, that anyone lived here, that he had ever met her and made love to her and loved her. Perhaps he was mad and it was all part of his delusion. It could be schizophrenia. After all, who knew what it was like to have schizophrenia until you had it yourself?

At home he found the poor dog hiding from the storm under the dining table, shivering and whimpering. His water bowl was empty. Philip filled the bowl and put out Kennomeat and, when Hardy didn’t want to eat it, took him on his lap and tried to comfort him. It was plain that Hardy only wanted Christine. When the thunder growled in the distance, he trembled till his skin shook. Philip thought, I can’t go on like this. I can’t face life without her. What shall I do if I never see her again, if I never touch her, hear her voice? Carrying the dog under one arm, he went out to the phone and dialled her number.

The line was engaged.

That had never happened before. The phone was answered, then. Someone answered it. At worst, someone took the receiver off so that when people tried to get through, they heard the engaged signal. He felt a great absurd surge of hope. The last thunderclap had been at least ten minutes ago. In the darkening sky, clear areas were opening between the rolling hills of cloud. He carried Hardy into the kitchen and set him down in front of his food dish. As the little dog began cautiously to eat, the phone rang.

Philip went to the phone, closed his eyes, held his fists clenched, prayed, Let it be her, let it be her. He picked up the phone, said hallo, heard Fee’s voice. Immediately, before she had said two words, he remembered.

“Oh God, I was supposed to be coming to have a meal with you and Darren.”

“What happened to you?”

“We’ve been run off our feet at work. I was late home.” How well lately he had learned to lie! “I forgot. I’m sorry, Fee.”

“So you bloody should be. I have to work too, you know. I went shopping in my lunch hour for you and I made a pie.”

“Let me come tomorrow. I can eat it tomorrow.”

“Darren and I are going to his mum’s tomorrow. Where were you anyway? What’s happening to you? You were funny on Sunday, and that eye and everything. What have you been doing the minute Mum goes away? I’ve nearly gone mad sitting here waiting.”

You and me both, Fee. “I said I’m sorry. I really am. Can I come on Saturday?”

“I suppose so.”

It was his first experience of expecting, when the phone rang, to hear one special, loved, longed-for voice, and hearing another. He found it very bitter. To his shame, though there was no one there but Hardy, he felt his eyes fill with tears. Suppose she wasn’t holding out on him, though, suppose something had happened to her. Unwillingly he remembered Rebecca Neave, who had disappeared, who had not been there to answer phone calls when needed. Tarsus Street was a slum compared to where Rebecca had lived. He thought of the street by night and of the big empty house.

But the line had been engaged. He would try again and if the signal he had heard before still obtained, would ask the operator if the line was off the hook. The idea that in a moment or two he might actually hear her voice was almost too much for him. He sat down crouched over the phone and expelled his breath in a long sigh. Suppose he spoke to her and in five minutes, less than five minutes, he were to be back in the car, driving down to Cricklewood, down Shoot-up Hill, bound for Tarsus Street. He dialled the number.