Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

They stayed in Glenallan Close for about an hour. It was Sunday and Cheryl was also at home. Philip had glanced at the newspaper’s colour supplement and seen an article in it on Murano glass daggers. There was a huge photograph of a dagger very like the ones he had seen in the shop and another picture of people at the Venice Carnival in the snow. He closed the magazine as quickly as he might have done if it was hard pornography which was displayed and which the women might have seen. Christine kissed Senta when they left. Philip hardly knew why it was that he was afraid Senta would draw back. She didn’t. She pleased him tremendously by presenting her cheek to Christine, her head tilted a little to one side, a small sweet smile on her lips.

His suggestion that they should visit her father met with a stubborn refusal. She took the line that Tom Pelham was lucky to get his name in the paper in a respectable way without having to pay a penny for it. Rita had brought her up, not he. Often she hadn’t seen him for months on end. It was Rita who gave her a home rent-free. Not that she wanted to impart the news to her stepmother, either. Let her find out for herself. Rita had changed since she took up with Jacopo.

At the first open wineshop that they came to, Senta wanted to get out of the car and go in and buy supplies. She had had enough of being out, she said. Philip had wanted to take her for a meal and then to meet Geoff and his girl friend in Jack Straw’s Castle. He had it all planned, a further protracted celebration of their engagement with a meal in Hampstead, then the pub, where he thought it likely some old college friends of his would be on a Sunday night.

“You’re trying to cure me of my phobia by overexposure,” she said to him, smiling. “Haven’t I been good? Haven’t I really tried for you?”

He had to give in, only stipulating that they get hold of some proper food to take back with them. It worried him sometimes, the way she seemed to live on air and wine with the occasional chocolate. She waited in silence, standing with clasped hands, while he foraged in a Finchley Road supermarket, buying bread and cheese and fruit. He had noticed how, out in the open, she mostly looked down at the ground or kept a kind of discreet custody of the eyes.

They approached Tarsus Street from the Kilburn end. There were rather a lot of people about, sitting on walls, lounging, standing, gossiping, leaning out of windows to talk to people leaning on windowsills, as there are on fine summer evenings in London streets such as this one. A strong odour of diesel, melted tar, and cooking spices filled the air. Philip looked for Joley the way he always did and for a brief moment thought he had spotted him on the corner where the street met Caesarea Road. But it was a different man, younger, thinner, who wandered aimlessly along the pavement with his possessions contained in carpet bags.

She asked him, as they got out of the car with their load of food and heavier load of wine bottles, who he was looking for.

“Joley,” he said. “The old man with the barrow. The tramp, I suppose you’d call him.”

She gave him a strange sidelong glance. Her eyelashes were very long and thick and they seemed to sweep the fine white skin under her eyes. The hand with the moonstone ring was lifted to hold back a long lock of silver hair which had fallen to cover her cheek.

“You can’t mean the old man who used to sit on our steps? The one who was sometimes in the churchyard round the corner?”

“Why can’t I? That’s the one I do mean.”

They were in the house now, going down the basement stairs. She unlocked the door. That room only had to be shut up for a few hours for it to become intolerably close and stuffy. Senta took one of the bottles of wine out of the bag he had put down on the bed, and reached for the corkscrew.

“But that was John Crucifer,” she said.

For a moment the name meant nothing to him. “Who?”

She laughed. It was a light, rather musical laugh. “You ought to know, Philip. You killed him.”

The room seemed to shift a little. The floor rose up the way it does when you feel faint. Philip put two fingers, which were surprisingly cold, up to touch his forehead. He sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Do you mean the old man who said he was called Joley and used to have his beat down here was really the man who was murdered in Kensal Green?”

“That’s right,” she said. “I thought you knew.” She poured a large measure of wine into a glass which hadn’t been washed since the last Riesling had been drunk from it. “You must have known it was Crucifer.”

“The man who was murdered …,” he was speaking slowly, abstractedly,”… his name was John.”

She was impatient in a smiling way. “John, Johnny, Joley—so what? It was a sort of nickname.” A bead of wine trembled on her lower lip like a diamond drop. “I mean, didn’t you pick on him because it was Crucifer?”

His own voice sounded feeble to him, as if he had suddenly become ill. “Why would I?”

“Have some wine.” She passed him the bottle and another dirty glass. He took it mechanically and sat there holding glass in one hand and bottle in the other, staring at her. “I thought you picked him because he was my enemy.”

A terrible thing happened. Her face was the same, white and soft, the pale lips slightly parted, but he saw madness staring out of her eyes. He couldn’t have said how he knew, for he had never seen or known a person even slightly mentally disturbed, but this was madness, stark and real and awful. It was as if a demon sat inside there and looked out of her eyes. And at the same time it was Flora’s look he saw, remote, predating civilisation, heedless of morality.

He had to exercise all the control he could muster. He had to be calm, even maintain a light touch. “What do you mean, Senta, your enemy?”

“He asked for money. I hadn’t any money to give him. He started shouting out after me, making remarks about my clothes and my—my hair. I don’t want to say what they were, but they were very insulting.”

“Why did you think I knew?”

She said softly, moving nearer to him, “Because you know my thoughts, Philip, because we are so close now we can read each other’s minds, can’t we?”

He looked away, turned his eyes back reluctantly to look at her. The madness was gone. He had imagined it. That was what it must have been, his imagination. He refilled her glass and filled his own. She started telling him about some audition she was going to in the coming week for a part in a television serial. More fantasy, but of a harmless kind, if any of it was harmless, if it could be. They sat side by side on the bed in the airless room that was full of dusty orange sunlight. For once, he didn’t feel like opening the window. A superstitious fear had come to him that not a single word they spoke must be overheard.

“Senta, listen to me. We mustn’t ever talk about killing again, not even as a joke or a fantasy. I mean killing isn’t a joke, it never can be.”

“I didn’t say it was a joke. I never said that.”

“No, but you made up stories about it and pretended about it. I’m just as bad. I did it too. You pretended to have killed someone and I pretended to have killed someone and it doesn’t matter now because we didn’t really do it or even believe the other one had. But it’s bad for us to keep on talking about it as if it was real. Can’t you see that? It’s sort of bad for our characters.”

Just for an instant he saw the demon in there behind her eyes. The demon came and chuckled and vanished. She was silent. He prepared himself for an enraged onslaught such as had been made on him last time he questioned her word. But she was still and silent. She threw back her head and drank the wine down in one swallow, then held out the empty glass to him.