Ruth Rendell: The Bridesmaid

“If that’s true,” Arnham said, “it will come out at the inquest. In this country the police don’t keep things dark.”

It was Cheryl who spoke, who hadn’t uttered a word since they came back from the garden. “Who are you trying to kid?”

Arnham made no reply to that. He said very stiffly, “Would you like a drink?” His eyes ranged over them as if they were a dozen people instead of four. “Any of you?”

“What have you got?” This was Fee. Philip had a very good idea this wasn’t a question you asked people like Arnham, though it might have gone down perfectly well in the circles Fee and Darren moved in.

“Anything you will be able to think of.”

“Then, can I have a Bacardi and Coke?”

Of course that was something he didn’t have. He dispensed second choices, sherry, gin and tonic. To Philip’s astonishment, though he knew she could be strangely insensitive, Christine seemed unaware of how frigid the atmosphere had grown. With a glass of Bristol Cream in her hand, she continued along the lines Philip himself had set and made admiring comments on various items of Arnham’s furniture and ornaments. Such and such a thing was nice, everything was very nice, the carpets were particularly nice and of such good quality. Philip marvelled at her transparency. She spoke as one humbly grateful for an unexpected, munificent gift.

Arnham said harshly, smashing all that, “Everything will have to be sold. There’s a court order that everything has to be sold and the proceeds divided between myself and my ex-wife.” He drew a long breath that sounded stoical. “And now I suggest you let me take you all out for a meal somewhere. I don’t think we can quite manage anything here. The local steakhouse—how will that suit?”

He took them in the Jaguar. It was a big car, so there was no difficulty about their all getting into it. Philip thought he ought to feel grateful to Arnham for taking them all out and paying for their dinner, but he didn’t. He felt it would have been better for him to come out with the truth, say he had only been expecting Christine, and then entertain Christine on her own as he had originally planned to do. He and Fee and Cheryl wouldn’t have minded; they would have preferred it—at any rate he would—to sitting here in the glowing dimness, the pseudo-country manor decor, of a second-rate restaurant above a supermarket, trying to make conversation with someone who was obviously longing for them to leave.

People of Arnham’s generation lacked openness, Philip thought. They weren’t honest. They were devious. Christine was the same: she wouldn’t speak her mind, she would think it rude. He hated the way she praised every dish that came as if Arnham had cooked it himself. Away from his own home Arnham had become much more expansive, talking pleasantly, drawing Cheryl out as to what she meant to do now she had left school, asking Fee about her fiancé and what he did for a living. He seemed to have got over his initial disappointment or anger. The interest he showed in her started Cheryl talking about their father, the least suitable of all possible subjects, Philip thought. But Cheryl, who had been closer to Stephen than any of his children, hadn’t, even now, begun the process of recovering from his death.

“Oh, yes, it’s quite true, he was like that,” Christine said with a shade of embarrassment after Cheryl had spoke of their father’s love of gambling. “Mind you, no one suffered. He would never have had his family go without. Really, we benefited, didn’t we? A lot of the nice things we’ve got came from his gambling.”

“Mum got her honeymoon paid for out of Dad’s Derby win,” said Cheryl. “But it wasn’t only horses with Dad, was it, Mum? He’d bet on anything. If you were with him waiting for a bus, he’d bet on which would come first, the sixteen or the thirty-two. If the phone rang, he’d say, ‘Fifty pee it’s a man’s voice, Cheryl,’ or fifty pee it’s a woman’s. I used to go to the dogs with him. I loved that—it was so exciting sitting there drinking a Coke and maybe eating a meal and watching the dogs go round. He never got cross, my dad. When he felt one of his bad moods coming on he’d say, okay, what’ll we have a bet on? There are two birds on the lawn, a blackbird and a sparrow, I bet you a pound the sparrow flies away first.”

“His whole life was gambling,” said Christine with a sigh.

“And us.” Cheryl uttered it fiercely. She had had two glasses of wine, which had gone to her head. “We were first, then the gambling.”

It was true. Even his work had been gambling, so to speak, speculation on the Stock Exchange, until one day—the result perhaps of a lifetime of anxieties and stress, chain-smoking, long days and short nights—while he was sitting with the phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his heart ruptured and stopped. The heart disease, of long standing but concealed from his wife and children, had meant there was no life assurance, very little provision of any kind, and a mortgage on the Barnet house which was covered by no insurance policy. With no reason to expect it, he had planned to live for years, to amass in that time, by speculation among other forms of gambling, a fortune to maintain his family after he was gone.

“We even got Flora through a bet,” Christine was saying. “We were on our honeymoon in Florence, walking along a street that’s full of antique shops, and I saw Flora in the window and said wasn’t she lovely? The house we’d had built had a little garden, not the big garden we had in Barnet, but a nice little garden, and I could just imagine Flora standing by our pond. You tell him what happened, Cheryl, the way Dad told you.”

Philip could see Arnham was quite interested. He was smiling. After all, he had spoken about his ex-wife, so why shouldn’t Christine talk of her dead husband?

“Mum said she’d be terribly expensive, but Dad was never one to care about things costing a lot. He said her face was like Mum’s—but I don’t really think it is, do you?”

“Perhaps a bit,” Arnham said.

“Anyway, he said he liked her because she looked like Mum. He said, ‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll have a bet on it. I bet she’s Venus, I bet she’s the goddess Venus. If she’s not, I’ll buy her for you.’”

“I thought Venus was a star,” said Christine. “Stephen said no, she was a goddess. Cheryl knows, she’s done all that at school.”

“So they went into the shop and the man in there spoke English and he told Dad she wasn’t Venus, Venus is nearly always bare above the waist, sort of topless.…”

“You needn’t tell him that, Cheryl!”

“Dad didn’t mind telling me—it’s art, isn’t it? The man in the shop said she was a copy of the Farnese Flora. She was the goddess of spring and flowers and her own flowers were may blossom. That’s what she’s holding in her hand. Anyway, Dad had to buy her after that and she cost a lot, hundreds of thousands of whatever their money’s called, and they had to have her sent home because they couldn’t carry her in the aircraft.”

The conversation had come round to its starting point in Arnham’s house where the statue had first been presented to him. It was this which was perhaps the signal for him to call for the bill. When Cheryl had finished, he said, “You make me feel I shouldn’t have accepted her.” He seemed to be doing sums in his head, converting lire perhaps. “No, I really can’t accept her. She’s much too valuable a gift.”

“Yes, Gerard, I want you to have her.” They were outside the restaurant by the time Christine said this. It was dark. Philip heard the words, though Arnham and Christine were walking a little apart from them, and Christine had taken his hand. Or he had taken Christine’s. “It means a lot to me for you to have her. Please. It makes me happy to think of her there.”