Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

Fee’s hair, when finished, was a helmet of puffed-out glinting honey and cream stripes. Even Philip, who understood very little about these things, knew that Christine continued to do hair in the styles fashionable in her own early youth. She even referred to them by name sometimes, the Italian and the Beehive, as if these titles were eternal and understood by all subsequent generations, not just those who had been young in 1960. Fee seemed satisfied. If she too suspected Cheryl of stealing the contents of the PG Tips tin, she said nothing about it to Philip.

Christine began packing into her hold-all the things she needed for perming the housebound old lady’s hair. She kept up a commentary to Philip while she did this, describing her own mother’s experience of having a perm in the twenties, when you had your hair strung up to an electric machine and baked into curl, how you sat there all day attached to this curious instrument of cookery. He wished she wasn’t going out; he didn’t want to be left alone with himself and his own thoughts. It was absurd—it was like when he was a little boy and never wanted his mother to leave the house, even though there was always someone there to look after him.

Yet a month ago he heaved a sigh of relief when she said she was going out. Less than a year ago he was longing for her to marry Arnham. He said, surprising himself, using a phrase she with her curious occasional tact never used to him, “What time will you be back?”

She looked at him in astonishment, as well she might. “I don’t know, Philip. It’ll take three hours. I try to make a nice job of it for the old dear.”

He said no more. He went upstairs. The doorbell rang as he was entering his own bedroom. Christine opened the door almost immediately. She must have been standing just inside it, preparing to leave. He heard her say, “Oh, hallo, dear. How are you? Have you come to see Cheryl?”

There must have been some reply but it was inaudible. Since he heard nothing, saw nothing, how did he know? How did he know enough to come back to the head of the stairs, hold his breath, clench his hands?

His mother said, “Cheryl’s out but she’s sure to be back soon. I have to go out myself and, oh dear, I am late. Did you want to come in and wait for Cheryl?”

Philip came down the stairs. By then Senta had entered the house and was standing in the hall, looking up. Neither of them spoke and neither had eyes for anything or anyone but each other. If Christine thought this odd, she gave no sign of it, she gave no sign of having noticed but went out of the front door, closing it behind her. Still in silence, Philip approached Senta and Senta took a step towards him and they fell into each other’s arms.

Holding her, smelling her and tasting her soft, curved, moist, and salty lips, feeling the pressure of her breasts against his chest, he thought for a moment he would faint with the ecstasy of it. Instead, there came to him a surge of strength and power, of sudden enormous well-being, and he lifted her off the ground up into his arms. But halfway up the stairs she struggled and jumped down and ran on ahead up to his bedroom.

They lay in his bed as they had that first time. Lovemaking had never been so glorious, so infinitely rewarding, not that first time certainly, not even those repeated luxurious indulgent times in her basement bed. Now, as they lay side by side, his arm slack under her shoulders, he felt as if bathed in a warm and deep tenderness for her. To have reproached her for anything would have been unthinkable. Those dreadful visits to Tarsus Street, the hammering on the door, peering through windows, attempts at phoning, all took on the character of a dream; the kind of dream which while taking place was very vivid and real, which lingered in a troubling way for a little while on waking, then receded rapidly into oblivion.

“I love you, Senta,” he said. “I love you, oh, I do love you.”

She turned her head towards him and smiled. She drew one small milk-coloured fingernail down the side of his cheek to the corner of his mouth. “I love you, Philip.”

“It was wonderful of you to come here like that. It was the most wonderful thing you could have done.”

“It was the only thing to do.”

“I met Rita and Mike Jacopo, you know.”

She was unperturbed. “They gave me your letter.” She curled herself into his body in the way she had of making as much of her flesh touch as much of his as possible. It was in itself another kind of sexual act and as if she was using this means to make herself one with him. “I haven’t told them anything. Why should I? They’re nothing. They’ve gone away again anyway.”

“Gone away?”

“They go to these ballroom dancing contests. That’s how they met. They’ve won silver cups.” Her soft giggle called laughter from him.

“Oh, Senta, oh, Senta. I just want to say your name over and over. Senta, Senta. It’s funny, it’s as if you’ve never been away and at the same time it’s as if I’m just realising you’re back, I’ve got you back, and I want to laugh and shout and yell with happiness.”

When she spoke, he felt the movement of her lips against his skin. “I’m sorry, Philip. Can you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

Her head lay nestling into his chest. He looked down on to the crown of her head and saw that the red roots of hair had been bleached silver. For a moment a cold finger touched his happiness and the thought came unbidden and most unwelcome, she was all right without me, she was doing her own things, she had her hair done. She went to a party….

She lifted her head and looked at him. “We won’t talk about what we’re going to do for each other, not tonight. We won’t spoil it. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.”

Fantasising had no part in Philip’s emotional make-up. He had never while making love to one girl imagined another, more beautiful or more sexy, or lain in bed at night conjuring up visions of women in fantastic undress lounging in invented pornographic situations. He had never day-dreamed of himself as successful, rich, and powerful, the possessor of some lavish home, large fast car, or as a sophisticated world traveller or financier or tycoon. His imagination never even took him as far as the carpet in front of the Roseberry Lawn’s managing director’s desk, the recipient of congratulations and swift promotion. He had a strong sense of the present and of reality.

To create a fantasy for Senta’s satisfaction—for that was what it amounted to—would be a daunting task for him. That first week after their reunion, the necessity of this creation rather loomed over him. He felt its dark pressure even when he was most happy, when he was with her in Tarsus Street, for instance, and into the deep peace of the aftermath of lovemaking, when he should have been most free of care, intruded this silent, staring threat. For it did seem to stare at him, it did seem almost a living thing, which entered his consciousness when least welcome and stood there, arms folded, exercising its menace.

The act he must perform, albeit only a verbal act, he couldn’t put off much longer. It must be confronted and a form found for it, a scenario constructed with actors—or two actors, himself and his victim. More than once Senta had reminded him of it.

“We do need proof of each other’s love, Philip. It’s not enough that we were unhappy when we were apart. That happens to anyone, to ordinary people.” She always insisted that he and she were not ordinary, were more like gods. “We have to prove that for each other we’re prepared to transcend ordinary human laws. More than that, to set them at nothing, show they simply aren’t important to us.”

She had decided, thinking much about this while they were apart, that he and she were reincarnations of some famous pair of lovers of the past. The precise identity of these historic personages she hadn’t yet decided on, or as she put it herself, this truth hadn’t yet been revealed to her. Also while they were separated, she had auditioned for and got a part in a fringe theatre production. It was a minor part with less than twenty lines to speak, but not all that minor really, since the woman she played turned out in the end to be the secret agent the entire cast had been seeking through fifteen surrealistic scenes.