Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

But look what happened when he protested, when he resisted. She had refused to see him. But would he really mind now if she refused to see him? The idea turned him cold, the enormity of it. You couldn’t love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you?

It didn’t occur to him not to go to Tarsus Street that evening. He told himself as he drove down Shoot-up Hill that he knew now why lying and fantasising was wrong. Because it brought so much trouble and misery and pain. He bought wine and chocolates for her. They were bribes and he knew it.

Entering the street from Caesarea Grove, he was assailed by a sudden anxiety over Joley. This was the longest period of time since the first time Philip had seen him that Joley had been absent from his regular beat. Again the church gates had been locked and the church porch empty. This time a week ago, nothing would have delayed Philip from rushing to Senta as soon as he could. Things had changed. He was quite prepared, even content, to put off seeing her for half an hour while he went in search of Joley.

Ilbert Street was his other haunt, he had told Philip. This long street linked Third Avenue with Kilburn Lane. He drove the length of it between the parked cars. It was a sultry, still evening, which certainly presaged a warm night, the sort of night on which Joley would contentedly sleep outdoors with no more than benefit of a doorway or patch of waste ground. Philip found it impossible to see much of the pavement because of the nose-to-tail parking. He managed to park his own car and then he set off to walk the street. Joley was nowhere. Philip left the main street and made a foray into the shabby dull little hinterland. By now the sun had set and feathers of red were uncurling all over the smoky grey sky. The feeling came back that his luck depended on Joley and now Joley was gone.

His reluctance to see Senta increased as he returned to Tarsus Street. Why had he ever told her he had killed someone? Why had he been such a fool? It was true that he had told her in a very perfunctory way, in such a casual dismissive way that almost anybody would know he was making it all up. Surely she hadn’t really believed him. He let himself into the house slowly, almost wearily. He was like an unhappy husband coming home to noisy children and a quarrelsome wife.

Her burning joss stick scented the basement stairs. He let himself into the room. The shutters were closed, the bedlamp was on. It felt insufferably stuffy, and the heady spicy smell was almost overpowering. She lay face-downwards on the bed, her head in her arms. As he came in, she made a convulsive movement. He touched her shoulder, spoke her name. She turned slowly onto her back and looked up at him. Her face was crumpled and runnelled and squeezed with crying, pink and soggy and wet. The pillow into which her head had burrowed was actually wet, with tears or sweat.

“I thought you weren’t coming. I thought you were never coming back.”

“Oh, Senta, of course I came back, of course I did.”

“I thought I was never going to see you again.”

He took her in his arms then and held her. It was like hugging a frightened weeping child. What has happened to us? he thought. What have we done? We were so happy. Why did we spoil it with all these lies, these games?

Philip went into the library and looked Gerard Arnham up in the telephone directory which covered Chigwell. His name wasn’t there. The date on the directory was a year ago, so naturally he wouldn’t be there. It could be no more than six months since he had moved. An alternative would be to ask directory enquiries for the number, but at this point Philip wondered what he would say if someone other than Arnham answered—if, for instance, his wife answered. He could hardly ask her if her husband was still alive.

Three days had passed since Senta had told him she had killed Arnham. In that time she had been different and he had been different. The tables were turned. Now it was he who distanced himself from her and she who clung to him and wept. She said she had killed his enemy for him and that instead of being grateful, he hated her for what she had done. This was very nearly accurate except that he knew very well she hadn’t killed Arnham, had only said she had. Examining his feelings, he discovered his antipathy came from Senta’s pride in the idea of killing someone in a particularly brutal way. Or did it? Wasn’t it rather that he wasn’t sure she hadn’t done it, that there still lingered somewhere the germ of a fear that she actually had done it?

By now he had seen in a newspaper that the murdered man in Hainault Forest had been identified as Harold Myerson, aged fifty-eight, an engineering consultant from Chigweil. That was coincidence that he came from Chigweil, for there was no possibility Myerson could be Gerard Arnham. He wouldn’t have two names, and Arnham wasn’t as old as that. The only other murder which had taken place in the British Isles on the previous Sunday was the Wolverhampton one, a boy of twenty stabbed in a fight outside a pub. Philip knew that was true because he had been through three of Monday’s morning papers and the evening paper and had bought and scrutinised three more on Tuesday. This meant that Senta had done nothing on that Sunday and Arnham must be alive and Philip was being stupid, imagining crazy things. People one knew didn’t kill other people. It was outside one’s knowledge, a different world.

To account for his attitude towards her, he had tried to make her believe it stemmed from his anxiety. He made her tell him in precise detail the whole story over again, hoping to pick holes in it, to find discrepancies between the original account and this later one.

“Which morning did you go over there? You said you went over to Chigweil and watched the house in the mornings.”

“I went on the Tuesday and the Friday, Philip.”

He forced himself to say it, though he nearly gagged on the words. “That Tuesday was only the day after I told you I’d killed John Crucifer. I came here on the Monday night and told you how I killed Crucifer the night before.”

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s right. I knew I had to make a start. Once you’d done that for me, I knew I had to lay my plans. I got up very early, I didn’t get much sleep, and I got the tube out there and watched the house. I saw the woman open the door in her dressing gown and take a bottle of milk in. She’s a woman with a big nose and mouth and a lot of wild dark hair.”

Revelations like this made Philip shiver. He recalled the first time he had seen Arnham’s wife through the panes of the window patterned like a shield. Senta, sitting on the bed beside him, her legs tucked under her, her arms loosely round his neck, snuggled up to him.

“I felt good when I saw her. I thought, She’s the woman he married when he should have married Philip’s mother, and I thought how it would serve her right when he was dead and she was a widow. It’s wrong to steal other women’s men. If some woman tried to steal you from me, I’d kill her, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’ll tell you a secret about that, but not now, later. I’m not going to have any secrets from you, Philip, and you’re not going to have any from me—ever.”

“It was eight o’clock when Arnham came out with the little dog. He walked him to this bit of green where the trees were and took him in under the trees and then he walked him back. It only took about twenty minutes. I didn’t go away, though, I went on watching, and he came out again after a bit and he was dressed up in a suit and carrying a briefcase and she was with him, still in her dressing gown. He gave her a kiss and she put her arms round his neck like this.”