Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

“And you went back on the Friday.”

“I went back on the Friday, Philip, to check up that he always did it. I thought she might sometimes do it, the thief woman. I got to give them names in my mind. Do you think that’s funny? I called him Gerry and her Thiefie and the little dog Ebony, because he was black. I thought, Suppose it turns out Thiefie takes Ebony out on Sundays. I’ll have come all the way out here for nothing, but I’d just have had to come back on the Monday, wouldn’t I?”

Philip found he couldn’t bear to hear about the stabbing again. When she reached the point where she had stepped up to Arnham under the trees and told him she had something in her eve, he stopped her by asking why she thought she might have been followed on her return journey to the tube station.

“It was just that there was this old woman on the station platform. I had ever such a long time to wait for a train, and she kept looking at me. I thought, have I got blood on me? But I couldn’t see any blood. And how could she have seen it when I was wearing that dark red tunic? And then when the train came, I was sitting in the train and I took my cap off and my hair came down. The old woman wasn’t there, she wasn’t in the same bit of the train, but other people were, and since then, Philip, I’ve been thinking, suppose she thought I was a boy but they could tell I was a girl and all of them sort of made the connection and thought it was suspicious? Don’t you think the police would have been here by now? They would, wouldn’t they?”

“You needn’t be afraid of the police, Senta.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid. I know the police are just agents of a society whose rules mean nothing to people like us. I’m not afraid, but I have to be on the watch, I have to have my story ready.”

If it had not been so distasteful, there would have been something ludicrous about the police tracking down Senta, who was so tiny and so innocent looking, with her big soulful eyes and her soft unmarked skin, her child’s hands and feet. Philip took her in his arms and began kissing her. He shut out the awful thoughts. He asked himself if it was not she but he who was mad, allowing himself to believe for an instant these elaborate inventions. Yet, within moments, opening their second bottle of wine, unwrapping for her a chocolate cherry encased in red silver paper, he was asking her for more details, to tell once again of following Arnham from his house to the open place where the grass and trees were.

In the underground room dusk came sooner than up above. It was gloomy and close down here where the smell of dust mingled with the scent of burning patchouli. At this hour, in the dimness, the big hanging mirror seemed like a sheet of greenish water in which their reflections could only vaguely be seen. It had a sheen on it like mother-of-pearl, thick and translucent. The bed, with its rumpled brown sheet and pillows and quilt, rather resembled some terrain of folded hills and deep valleys. Philip stopped her when she reached out to put the bed lamp on. He pulled her to him, sliding his hands inside the thin black skirt, the loose top of cheesecloth. Her skin was like warm silk, slippery and yielding. In the dark, with the shutters half-closed and only a little greyish light showing above the pavement level, he could imagine her as she had been before she made these revelations to him, he imagined her as she had been on those two occasions in his own bed.

Then and only then, with his eyes closed, was it possible for him to make love to her. He was learning how to fantasise.

In the middle of the night he woke up. He had decided long before not to go home that night. Once at least in the week he didn’t go home, and the previous evening and night he had spent at home with Christine. What had happened was that he had got into the habit of waking up, dressing, and silently letting himself out of the room and the house. He still woke up when he didn’t need to.

She lay asleep beside him. Yellow lamplight from the street fell across her face and turned the silver hair to a brassy gold. The window was open a little at the top and the shutters were ajar. In the past, often at this hour, the music had played overhead and the two pairs of feet danced, but now Rita and Jacopo were away somewhere. The old house with its weight of dirty cluttered rooms above them—a repository of stored rubbish slowly, gradually decaying—was empty but for them. Senta breathed with a silent regular rhythm, her slightly parted lips as pale as a shell.

But when he came back from closing the shutters and then fetching himself a drink from the bandaged brass tap, she was awake and sitting up. A white shawl with a fringe was around her shoulders. The light was on now, bright and uncompromising. The holes in the parchment shade made a spotted pattern on the ceiling. She must have put a more powerful bulb in the lamp since it was last on, for the higher wattage revealed the room in every aspect of its squalor, the dust on the wooden floor that showed as a clotting of grey fluff round the skirting board, the spiders’ webs and dark gritty deposits on the cornices, the chair whose wicker was coming unravelled, the dark old stains and spills on rug and cushions. He thought, I must take her out of this, we can’t live like this. Now that the light was on, a blowfly, awakened, zoomed round the sticky neck of one of the wine bottles.

Senta said, “I’m wide awake now. I want to tell you something. Do you remember I said I’d a secret to tell you and I’d tell you it later? It’s about women stealing men.”

He got back into bed beside her, wanting only sleep, aware that he had only five hours before he must get up, before he must get out of this bed and wash somehow, dress and go to work. It was ridiculous now to remember that he had forgotten to bring clean underpants and a clean shirt with him, such unimportant trivial things, doubly ridiculous in the light of what she said to him: “You know you’re not the first with me, don’t you, Philip? I wish I’d saved myself for you, but I didn’t and nothing can change the past. Even God can’t change history—did you know that? Even God can’t. I was in love with someone else once—well, I thought I was. I know I wasn’t really, now that I know what love really is.

“This man—well, he was a boy, he was just a boy—there was this girl who set herself out to steal him away and she did for a bit. Perhaps he would have come back in the end, I wouldn’t have wanted him then, not after her. Do you know what I did, Philip? I killed her. She was my first murder. I used the first Murano glass knife on her.”

He thought, is she mad? Or is she just mocking me? What went on in her mind that she had to invent these tales? What did she gain by it? He said, “Put the light out now, Senta. I have to get some sleep.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A smell of rotten eggs crept up the stairs. That meant Christine was making an early start on a perm. Dogs had a sense of smell a million times better than that of man, Philip had read somewhere; so if it stank like this in his nostrils, what must it be like for Hardy? The little dog lay on the landing and feebly wagged his tail as Philip passed on his way to the bathroom. Each sight of him reminded Philip of the dog Senta said was Arnham’s, the dog she called Ebony.

He was tired. Given the chance, he could have gone back to bed and slept for hours. T-G-I-F, as his father used to say, Thank God it’s Friday. Cheryl had already been in the bathroom and had used his towel as well as her own. His thoughts drifted in her direction, to the night he had seen her steal whatever it was from the shop in Golders Green. He had done nothing about that, taken no action. His mind had been too full of Senta. Senta obsessed him and exhausted him.