Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

“I brought a bottle of champagne.”

Fee, who necessarily stood very close to him, gave him a look of half exasperation, half mischievous conspiracy. “You’re so daft, going on like that. Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

“The champagne’s in the car, I’ll go and get it.”

Having a rare few minutes alone with Fee should have allowed him to confide in her about Cheryl. The moment seemed particularly inappropriate. He imagined her saying in her sharp way that she supposed he was just shifting his problems onto her now that he was leaving and getting married. Instead she put her arms round him and gave him a brief hug, laying her cheek against his, whispering, “Well, I’ll have to congratulate you, won’t I?”

Taking the champagne out of the car, he looked up and saw Senta. She too held cradled in her arms a bottle of wine. It was the first time he had ever met her in the open street. There was a special breathless pleasure in going up to her and kissing her in public. Not that anyone was watching, but they were there on view, on the pavement embracing, the two hard, cold glass bottles pressed between their bodies and keeping them apart like chastity devices.

She was in black. It made her skin look shell white and gave her hair a glassier, steelier brightness. She had painted her nails the same colour and put silver on her eyelids. She walked lightly on her stilt heels up the stairs ahead of him. In spite of their height she was still a head’s length shorter than he, and when she was on the step in front, he could look down on to the crown of her head. The red roots of her hair glowed with a curious pinkish luminosity under the silver strands, and he was touched with feelings of an intense tenderness for her quirky ways and her harmless vanity.

He was aware too of something else: her nervousness when off her own home ground. He noticed it because of what she had told him about her agoraphobia. It was worse in the street, fading to something that seemed like shyness when she was inside the flat and in the presence of Darren and Fee. They both seemed embarrassed, but Fee came out with it bluntly: “I’m not saying it wasn’t a surprise, but we’ll get used to it.”

Darren, the snooker concluded and a rerun of some golf tournament showing with the sound turned off, took this as an occasion for catching up on family news. “What’s Auntie Rita up to now, then?”

In near silence which was demure and diffident, Senta drank her champagne. She said a soft thank-you when Fee proposed a toast to Senta and Philip—“Not engaged yet but soon will be.” This was her first time in the flat, but when Fee asked her if she would like to see over it—a necessarily brief exercise since there were only the small bedroom and tiny shower room left to see—she shook her head and said thanks, but she wouldn’t, not this time. Darren, who worried at his joke like a dog with an old bone, said he hadn’t had a bath since he came back from his honeymoon and would she like a shower?

In the car going back to Tarsus Street, he felt as if he were bursting, choking, with his proposal. But he didn’t want her to remember, in the years ahead, perhaps twenty years ahead when they celebrated some wedding anniversary, that he had proposed to her in a car in a north London suburb.

“Where are we going?” she said. “This isn’t the way. Are you kidnapping me, Philip?”

“For the rest of your life,” he said.

He drove up on to Hampstead Heath. It wasn’t very far. There was a large round moon shining, the colour of her hair. Off the Spaniards Road where the path runs down into the back of the Vale of Health, he led her to the edge of the woodland. It amused him because she so plainly thought he had brought her there to make love in the open air on this mild, dry summer night. Docilely, her little hand soft in his, she allowed him to lead her. The moonlight turned the grass white and the bare earth of the paths to chalk, while under the trees the shadows were black. There must have been other people about, it was impossible that they were alone there, but it was as quiet as in the country and as still as indoors.

When it came to it, kneeling was an impossibility. She would have thought him mad. He held both her hands and drew them up to clasp closely in his between their bodies. He looked into her greenish eyes, which she had lifted to his and opened very wide. In each of them he could see a moon reflected. Formally, in the manner in which his great-grandfather might have spoken, in a way which he knew he must have read of in the pages of a book, he said to her, “Senta, I want to marry you. Will you be my wife?”

She smiled faintly. He knew she was thinking that this wasn’t quite what she had expected. Her voice when she replied was soft and clear.

“Yes, Philip, I’ll marry you. I want to marry you very much.” She put up her lips. He bent and kissed her full on the lips but very chastely. Her skin felt like marble. But she was a marble girl that some god was in the process of changing from a statue to a live woman. Philip could feel the warmth surging through the stone flesh. She said with gravity, drawing a little away, her eyes fixed on his, “We were destined for each other from the beginning of time.”

Then her mouth was more ardently on his, her tongue stroking the inside of his lips. “Not here,” he said. “Senta, let’s go home.”

It wasn’t until the middle of the night, the deep dark early hours, that he realised why, in the midst of that romantic scene which he had set up, at the moment when he asked her to marry him, unease had seemed to step between them, to mar everything. He understood now. It was because the scene, and even more the setting, seemed to mirror what she had described to him as happening between her and Gerard Arnham in another grassy place and under other trees. Just as he looked into her eyes, bent down and spoke gently to her, she had clutched the glass dagger and thrust it into his heart.

The yellow light from the street lamps was shed in windowpane shapes across the brown bedcover. Above his head he could hear the “Skaters’ Waltz” and the dancing feet of Rita and Jacopo circling the floor. He thought he must be neurotic, dwelling like this on the foolish past. Hadn’t he seen Arnham and spoken to him? Didn’t he know beyond a doubt the man was alive and well?

Up on the Heath, though he had felt her happiness and known she was glad to be there with him, he had sensed too her unease in the outdoors, the spacious night. How could he seriously have considered it possible for someone like her to perform a violent act while out in the open? The outdoors was her dangerous place.

Senta’s silver head lay on the pillow beside him. She was deeply asleep. The music and the dancing never disturbed her, safe down here under the ground. Philip heard the feet approach the window and, as the waltz ended, a thin little shriek and a burst of laughter, as if Jacopo had taken Rita in his arms and whirled her round and round.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

He brought Senta home to see Christine. She held out her left hand almost timidly, like a little dog lifting its paw, to display her engagement ring, a Victorian antique of silver with two moonstones. He had given it to her the day before when the announcement of their engagement appeared. In company, Senta was very quiet, answering in monosyllables or sitting in a silence she broke only to say please and thank you. He tried to remember back to Fee’s wedding, the only time he had seen her in a group of others. She had been talkative then, a different girl, going up to people and introducing herself. He could recall, just before he left to go home, how she had been talking and laughing with two or three men, all friends of Darren’s. But he didn’t mind this silent manner of hers, knowing as he did that her talk and her sweetness and all her animation were reserved for him when they got back to her room.