Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

He simply didn’t believe her. It was impossible for him to force a smile, simulate pleasure. For a while she didn’t seem to notice. Upstairs in Rita’s fridge she had a bottle of pink champagne.

“I’ll fetch it,” he said.

Going up the stairs, making his way into Rita’s dirty kitchen that smelt of sour dairy foods, he wondered what to do. Take a stand now, confront her, challenge her with her lies—or else live in her fantasy world, never deceived but playing up to the deceiver, for the rest of his life. He walked back into her room, set the bottle down, and began the work of carefully freeing the wires from the cork. She held a glass out to catch the first gush of foam, exclaimed with delight as the cork popped.

“What toast shall we say? I know, we’ll say: ‘To Senta Pelham, a great actor of the future!’ ”

He raised his glass. He had no choice but to repeat her words. “To Senta Pelham, a great actor of the future!” In his own ears his voice rang very coldly.

“I’ll be doing the read-through next Wednesday.”

“What’s a read-through?”

“All the cast sits round a table and reads through the script. I mean you all read your own parts but without actually acting.”

“What’s the name of the company that’s making it?”

Her hesitation was brief but there was hesitation. “Wardville Pictures.” She looked down at her hands and the glass of champagne held in both her hands on her lap. Her head fell forward like a flower on a stalk and the silver hair fell across her cheeks. “The casting director’s called Tina Wendover and their address is Berwick Street in Soho.”

She spoke calmly, coolly, as if replying somewhat defiantly to precise questions. It was as though he had challenged her. He was uncomfortably aware that she was able to read, at least up to a certain point, what went on in his mind. In saying they could read each other’s thoughts, she had been right in respect of herself. He looked at her and found that her eyes were on his. Once again she was playing that disconcerting trick of looking into both his eyes.

Was she inviting him to check up on her? Because she knew he wouldn’t? Her fantasising would have been easier to accept, he thought, if she deceived herself, if she believed these tales of hers. The disquieting thing was that she didn’t believe them and often didn’t expect others to believe them either.

She refilled their glasses. She said to him, still fixing him with her eyes, “The police aren’t very clever, are they? It’s a dangerous world where a young girl can go up to someone in daylight, in the open, and kill him and no one know.”

Was she doing this to him because he so plainly disbelieved her first story? When she talked like this, he had a sensation of a kind of internal falling, a dropping of the heart. He could find no words.

“I’ve wondered sometimes if Thiefie might have noticed me outside their house on those other mornings. I was careful, but some people are very observant, aren’t they? Suppose I went there again and Ebony knew me? He might smell me and starting howling, and then everyone would guess.”

Still he said nothing. She persisted.

“It was very early,” she said, “but a lot of people did see me, a boy delivering papers and a woman with a baby in a buggy. And when I was in the train again, I saw someone staring really hard at me. I think it was because the bloodstains showed, though I was wearing red. I took my tunic to the launderette and washed it, so I don’t know if there were any stains or not.”

He turned away from her and contemplated them both in the mirror. The only colour in the picture they made, subdued in the dim subfuse light, their clothes shadowy, their skin pallid and shimmering, was that of the wine, the pale bright rose-pink that the green glass turned to blood red. His love for her, in spite of the things she said, in spite of everything, caught at him and seemed to wrench at the inside of his body. He could have groaned aloud for what they might have had if she hadn’t persisted in flawing it.

“I’m not afraid of the police. It’s not the first time anyway. I know I’m cleverer than they are. I know we’re both too clever for them. But I have wondered. We both did those tremendous things and no one even suspected. I thought they might come and ask me about you, and I suppose they might yet. You mustn’t worry, Philip. You’re quite safe with me, they’ll never learn anything about your movements from me.”

He said, “Let’s not talk about it,” and put his arms round her.

The night was gloomy and overcast. To Philip it seemed curiously quiet, the traffic rumble very distant, the street empty. Perhaps that was only because he was later than usual in leaving Senta. It was past one.

He looked over the low wall as he came down the steps and saw that her shutters were open a crack. He had meant to close them before he left. But no one in the street could have seen her, sleeping naked on the big mirrored bed. Her self-appointed guardian, he put it to the test and satisfied himself, peering over railings into the gloom. What had she meant, “not the first time”? He hadn’t asked her because what she said had taken a while to sink in. It surfaced starkly now. Had she meant there had been a previous occasion when the police had reason to suspect her of some terrible thing?

The lamplight, dim and greenish, and the thin hanging mist created an underwater look as of a drowned town, the houses reeflike, the trees branched seaweed stretching upwards through the cloudy darkness to some invisible light. Philip found himself walking carefully to the car, keeping his footfalls soft, so as not to disturb the heavy, unusual silence. It was not until he had started the car—a shockingly loud noise, the engine springing into life with a lion’s roar—and turned the corner into Caesarea Grove that he noticed the leaflet someone had stuck under his windscreen wipers while he was in Senta’s house. The wipers, switched on to clear the mist, dragged shreds of paper across the wet screen. Philip pulled in, stopped, and got out.

He crushed the wet paper into a ball. It had been an advertisement for a carpet sale. A droplet of icy water from one of the churchyard trees fell onto his neck and made him jump. It was dark in there, with a kind of cold clammy steaminess. Philip put his hand on the gate. The rusty ironwork was wet to the touch. He felt a colder trickle on the back of his neck than the drop of water had made, a shiver that fingered all the way down his spine.

A single candle was burning on one of the steps that led up to the porch on the side of the church. He drew a long breath. The gate opened with a creak that was like a human groan. He took a few steps on the stones, the drenched grass, led by the bluish aureole, the yellow ring, that encircled the flame.

There was someone lying on a bed of blankets and rags inside the porch. Joley’s face reared up like a ghost’s and revealed itself in the candlelight.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He hated doing it. Deviousness was alien to his nature. The idea of pretending to be someone else, of telling a false story to gain information, all that was so distasteful as to make him feel an actual physical sickness at the thought of it. He had postponed doing it for four days. Now, alone in Roy’s room with Roy out at lunch and the secretary doing Mr. Aldridge’s letters because his secretary was off sick, an opportunity presented itself which he would be cowardly to refuse.

Encountering Joley was the event that made this act imperative. For some reason, though now he could hardly imagine what reason, he had utterly believed Senta when she told him Joley and the murdered man John Crucifer were one. He had believed her and been brought to feel terrible things, almost that Joley’s death was somehow his fault; if not quite that he had murdered him, that but for his own existence and presence there, Joley would still be alive.