Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

“I’ll never mention it again,” she said slowly. “I understand how it is with you, Philip. You’re very conventional still. You were glad when you found out it was my mother I lived here with, weren’t you? It made things seem respectable. You were pleased when I got a real job that paid. How could you be otherwise with that family? You were brought up to be very straight and rigid, and you aren’t going to change in a couple of months. But listen to me now. What we had to do for each other to prove our love was a terrible thing, I realise that, I realise it was terrible, and I do understand it makes it easier for you if we just bury it in the past. As long as you also know we can’t change the past. We just don’t have to talk about it.”

He said almost roughly, “If you’re going to drink so much wine, we ought to eat something. Come on, let’s eat.”

“Are you telling me I drink too much, Philip?”

The early warning signs were becoming familiar to him. He was beginning to know them and how to handle them. “No, of course I’m not. But I think you don’t eat enough. I’m trying to look after you, Senta.”

“Yes, look after me, Philip, take care of me.” She turned and clutched at him, holding on to his shoulders, her eyes suddenly wild and frightened. “We don’t want to eat yet. Please don’t let’s. I want you to love me.”

“I do love you,” he said, and he put his glass down and took the glass out of her hand and pulled her down to him in his arms onto the brown quilt.

It was another small-hours return home for him that night. He had meant to discuss their future with her. Were they going to live together in the upstairs flat? Had she thought about that as she had promised? Were they going to set a wedding date for sometime next year? Could she come up with any ideas as to how the problem of Christine—and come to that, Cheryl—could be dealt with? They had scarcely talked at all but made love all the evening. At one point he had got up and eaten something and washed himself under the tap.

Coming back to open the window and let some fresh air into the dusty staleness, he had found her sitting up, starting on the second bottle of wine, and she had welcomed him back into bed with outstretched, yearning arms.

He slept soundly. He slept like the dead, exhausted and at peace. His future with Senta looked glorious to him, a series of days of dreaming of her and of nights of love. Their lovemaking got even better as time went on, and she loved it as much as he did. It was hard to imagine that it could get better than it was now, but that was something he had said three weeks ago and it had got better. When the alarm went off and he woke up, he reached for her, but he was in his own bed and she wasn’t there and he felt bereft.

On the way to work, a reluctant visit to Olivia Brett, Philip castigated himself for imagining he had seen signs of some kind of neurosis in Senta. It was the shock of course. It was caused by the shock of finding out that John Crucifer was Joley. Poor Senta had told him a simple fact which he might have gathered for himself by this time, and he had been so upset by it that he had offloaded his hysterical feelings onto her. Didn’t the psychologists call that projection?

It was hardly surprising anyway that she believed he had killed Joley. After all, he had told her he had. He had actually told her, fantastic and unreal though this now seemed, that he had killed the old man. Of course she believed him. For a while, remember, he told himself, he had believed her story of killing Arnham. Well, off and on he had believed it. And all this really illustrated what he had said to her about this kind of talk harming them, damaging their characters. It was certainly damaging his character if it made him believe his Senta wasn’t quite sane.

But Joley … Philip found he hated to think that it was Joley who had been murdered in Kensal Green, and hated it the more because he had told Senta he was responsible for that death. Now he found it hard to understand why he had ever done that. If she really loved him, and there was no doubt she did, she would have come to realise there was no need for fantasies about proofs of love. It would only have been a matter of sticking it out till she came round, maybe bearing the brunt of a few temper tantrums. Philip having a very good idea of how she would react, had a fleeting qualm at even using the expression in connection with Senta, but how else would you describe it?

In saying he had murdered Joley, he had somehow involved himself in that death. Worse than that, he had in part made himself responsible for it, becoming a kind of accessory after the fact. He had aligned himself with Joley’s killer, put himself into the same category. With these ideas unpleasantly occupying his mind, Philip went up the steps of Olivia Brett’s house and was admitted by the actress herself. He couldn’t help remembering the complimentary things she was supposed to have said about him and he felt awkward in her company.

Stories proliferated in his kind of job about women alone at home who were simply waiting to come across for men like himself, women who invited the surveyor or site manager or fitter into their bedrooms or suddenly appeared in front of them with no clothes on. Nothing like that had ever happened to him but it was early days yet. Olivia Brett wore a dressing gown which was white with a lot of frills on it but not see-through. She smelt like a bowl of tropical fruit that has been left out in the sun.

She insisted on walking upstairs behind Philip. He wondered what he would do if he felt her hand caress his neck or a fingertip run down his spine. But she didn’t touch him. He didn’t want to think about her at all, he wanted her to be an answering machine only or to make her requests in a neutral, practical tone. She showed him into the recently gutted bathroom and stood behind him now while he made a draft chart of how he thought the electric wiring should be planned.

“Oh, darling,” she said, “I don’t know if they told you I changed my mind and I’m going to have one of those showers that squirt water out of the walls at you.”

“Yes, I’ve got a note of it.”

“I showed my friend the picture in your book and do you know what he said? He said it was a Jacuzzi standing up to pee.”

Philip was a bit shocked. Not by what she said but because she had said it and to him. He didn’t say anything, though he knew he ought to have laughed appreciatively. He got out his tape measure and pretended to measure something in the far corner. When he turned round, he could see she was looking at him with calculation, and he couldn’t help contrasting her with Senta— her lined, pinched, greasy face with Senta’s pure velvety skin, and the mottled cleavage between the broderie anglaise lapels with Senta’s white breasts. It made him smile quite pleasantly at her as he said, “That seems to be that, then. I shan’t be troubling you again until the electrician has done his stuff.”

“Have you got a girl friend?” she said.

He was astonished. Her tone was harsh and direct. He felt a hot blush redden his face. She took a step nearer.

“What are you afraid of?”

For all the times Philip had thought of things he ought to have said, perfect rejoinders, when it was ten minutes too late to say them, this paid. He didn’t know how he thought of it. It was stroke of genius. It came to him on wings of serene appropriateness.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “I got engaged to be married last week.”

With that he passed her, smiling politely, and descended the stairs, not hurrying. She came onto the landing behind him. He had a momentary qualm. But prostituting oneself for Roseberry Lawn was surely way beyond the call of loyalty.