Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

The night before he had played with the idea of not going to Tarsus Street, but in the end he had gone. He had put himself in her shoes, remembering what it was like for him when she deserted him. He couldn’t bear her tears, her misery. Her room depressed him and he had taken her out, intending to kiss her and leave her to go back into the house alone. But the crying had begun and the pleading, so he had gone in with her and listened while she talked. It was the Ares and Aphrodite stuff again and about belonging to an elite, about power and disregarding man-made laws. They hadn’t made love.

Now, when he was alone, he kept asking himself what he was going to do. He had to rid his mind of these several obsessions, these pegs from which terrors hung: the sight of a dog, a knife, a tube station even. He had to dispel all that and think of their future, his and hers. Had they a future together? It struck him painfully that he had never carried out his intention of telling Christine and the rest of his family about Senta. Yet, until she began damaging their relationship with all this pretence of killing, the need to tell had been urgent. He had longed for everyone to know. He had wanted his love to be public, his commitment known.

Philip went downstairs. The house reeked of the sulphurous stuff Christine was using, even though the kitchen door was shut. No one could imagine eating breakfast in this atmosphere. He opened the door, said hallo to an elderly woman whose snow white hair Christine was engaged in winding round blue plastic rollers.

“It isn’t a very nice smell, dear, I know that, but it’ll be gone in ten minutes.”

“So will I,” said Philip.

He found the coffee jar stuck amidst giant cans of hair lacquer and two tubes of relaxing gel. What did she want relaxant for? She hadn’t any black customers. It was made, he noticed—of course he noticed—by a company called Ebony. The old woman, who had been talking almost ceaselessly since he came in, now embarked on an anecdote about her granddaughter’s exchange visit to a French family who couldn’t speak. Neither the mother nor the father could speak. It was needless to say that the grandparents couldn’t and even the children could manage only a few words.

“Were they deaf too, poor things?” said Christine.

“No they weren’t deaf, Christine, I never said they were deaf. I said they couldn’t speak.”

Philip, who half an hour before had thought he would never laugh again, was choking over his scalding hot Nescafe. “She means they couldn’t speak English, Mother. Come on, get a grip on yourself.”

Christine began to giggle. She looked so pretty when she laughed that Philip couldn’t help remembering Arnham and understood why he had been attracted by her. He finished his coffee, said good-bye, and left the house. Recalling Arnham had plunged him back once more into the pit of anxiety and doubt. He hardly noticed the sunshine, the scent from a hundred little gardens in bloom, the relief from sulphur stench. He sat in the car, moving off, automatically going through the motions. Head office today for his first call, which meant joining the sluggish queue of cars crawling down the hills to London.

How could you say people you knew didn’t kill other people? Murderers were just ordinary, weren’t they, till they murdered? They weren’t all gangsters or mad. Or if they were their madness or indifference to society rules was concealed under an exterior of normalcy. In company they were just like anyone else.

How many times had he read in books and newspapers of a murderer’s wife or girl friend who said she’d had no idea what he was like, had never dreamed that he did those things while he was away from her? But Senta was so small, so sweet, so childish. Sometimes, when she wasn’t lecturing him on power and magic, she talked like a child of seven or eight. Her hand nestled in his like a little girl’s. He imagined her going up to a man, whimpering with pain and fear, lifting her face to his, asking him to see what was hurting her eye. It was a sight he saw when he closed his eyes. Opening a newspaper, that vision superimposed itself over the photographs and the print. He remembered her coming into that room in her cap and red tunic, and now he thought he could also remember stains on that tunic. Surely there had been a bloodstain high up on the shoulder.

The man bent his kindly head, peered into her eye. Perhaps he asked Senta’s permission to touch her face, to pull down the lower eyelid. As he came closer, looking for the speck of grit, she drew the dagger of glass from her tunic pocket and thrust it with all her childish force into his heart….

Had he cried out? Or had he only groaned and crumpled up, sagged at the knees, given her a last look of terrible bewilderment, of agonised enquiry, before he collapsed onto the grass? The blood had spurted onto her, splashing her shoulder. And then the little dog, the small black Scottie dog, had come running up, barking until its barks changed to whimpers.

Stop it, stop, Philip said to himself, as he did unavailingly each time his imagination turned in this direction. Harold Myerson was his name, Harold Myerson. He was fifty-eight. He happened to live in Chigwell but that was coincidence. Thousands of people live in Chigwell. Philip thought how it would be possible to go to the police and actually ask about Harold Myerson. Where he lived, for instance, his full address. Newspapers never gave that. It would look very strange going to the police, making an enquiry like that. They would want to know why he asked. They would take his name and they would remember him. And that might in the end lead them to Senta.

You do believe she killed him, his inner voice said. You do. You’re just unable to face the fact. There is no rule that murderers have to be big and strong and tough. Murderers can be small and delicate, children have done murder. As in certain tactics of martial arts, the perpetrator’s own weakness is made use of to take advantage of the victim’s strength. Tenderness and pity deflect that victim from his guard when an appeal is made, a wounded place proffered, help asked.

There was something else that hadn’t occurred to him till now. He got it out and confronted it, with the traffic paused and the light red. Suppose Gerard Arnham hadn’t been called that at all? Suppose his real name had been Harold Myerson but he had given Christine a false name the better to get away from her when he needed to? Unscrupulous people did that, and Arnham had been unscrupulous, telling Christine lies about the length of time he would be in America and then, on his return, abandoning her.

The more Philip considered this the more he believed it. After all, he had never put it to the test. He had never seen Arnham’s name in any phone directory, had never heard anyone but Christine call him by it. Philip began to feel sick. He had an urge to jump out of the car, leaving it where it stood halfway down the Edgware Road, and run away. Run where? There was nowhere to go he wouldn’t have to come back from. There was nowhere he could hide and dissociate himself from Senta.

Arnham might be fifty-eight. Some people looked young for their age, and the fact that Arnham had told Christine he was fifty-one meant nothing. It was known that he had lied to her. He had lied when he said he would be in touch with her when he returned from America. A man of five foot eight would seem tall to tiny Senta. He, Philip, at six feet and more, towered over her. And the dog? He had been through that one before. It was Mrs. Arnham’s dog. Mrs. Myerson’s dog.

It was Ebony, the property of Thiefie.

Roy was in another of his good moods. This seemed largely brought about by the fact that Olivia Brett had twice phoned and asked for Philip.