Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

Joley was live. His month-long absence was due to his having been in hospital. Philip had never considered vagrants leading lives which in any way approximated to those led by more conventional humanity—that they might have doctors, for instance; that they might sometimes penetrate, when in need, the world of the respectable house-dwelling classes.

“I been having me prostrate done,” Joley had said, welcoming him round the hearth the candle made and offering him a cushion of a scarlet Tesco bag stuffed with newspapers. “In my mode of living, as you might say, it’s not desirable having a urgent need to pee every ten minutes. Mind you, I was going bonkers in that hospital.”

“Always washing you, were they?”

“It wasn’t that, governor. It wasn’t so much that as the doors. It’s doors being shut what I can’t stomach. We was six in this room like, five others and me, and it’s okay by day, but come the night, they shuts the door. I sweat like a pig when the door’s shut. Then I had to go convalescent. I had to, they forced me. You’re not going straight out of here back on the streets, they said. Made me sound like a whore, I should be so lucky.”

Philip gave him a five-pound note.

“Many thanks, governor. You’re a gentleman.”

Since then he had seen Joley twice more. He had said nothing about any of this to Senta. What was there to say? All he could have done was reproach her once more for lying to him. Besides, she might genuinely have believed John Crucifer was Joley. Now, in the office, he gave directory enquiries the address of Wardville Pictures and was surprised when they came up with an actual phone number. Bracing himself, taking a deep breath, he dialled.

“May I speak to Tina Wendover?”

The voice said, “She’s at a read-through. Who is it speaking?”

Philip was very taken aback. Senta had said there would be a read-through of Impatience on Wednesday, and today was Wednesday. He gave his own name.

“Would you like to speak to her assistant?”

He said he would and, when he was put through, said in a reluctant mumble that he was speaking on behalf of Senta Pelham’s agent. He understood that Senta had been offered a part in Impatience.

“Yes, that’s right.” She sounded astonished at his enquiry, surprised that he was in doubt, said suspiciously, “Who exactly is that?”

Feeling guilty at once because he had doubted her, he was astonished just the same. This confirmation of what she had told him restored her to him in a new light. Not as a new person, but as a fuller, rarer Senta, cleverer, more sophisticated and accomplished than he had ever supposed. Even at this moment she would be at the read-through. He hardly knew what would be happening at this preliminary gathering of the cast of a television serial, but he imagined actors and actresses, some of them famous faces, sitting round a long table with their scripts in front of them, reading their parts. And Senta was among them, one of them, knowing the correct way to behave, the proper procedures to follow. He imagined her in her long black skirt perhaps and the silvery-grey top, the silver hair spread over her shoulders, with Donald Sindon on one side of her and Miranda Richardson on the other. Philip had no idea if this actor and actress had parts in the serial, but theirs were the faces which came into his mind.

She was suddenly more real to him, more of an active, responsible human being who lived in the world, than she had ever been. He understood that because of this, he loved her more. His fears receded. They seemed neurotic suspicions, borne of his ignorance of people like her and the world of dreams and imagination they must necessarily inhabit because of their art. So much that made up their lives was unreal, or unreal to ordinary people like himself. Was it any wonder they saw the truth, not as the cut-and-dried thing which was how it presented itself to him, but as something vague and blurred at the edges, open to numberless imaginative interpretations?

When he reached home that evening he heard voices from the living room, Christine’s and a man’s. He opened the door and saw that the visitor was Gerard Arnham.

Arnham, apparently, had phoned Christine on the very day he and Philip had encountered each other. Christine had said nothing about it. His mother could also be secretive, Philip was beginning to discover. She was looking pretty and young and might easily have been taken for Fee’s elder sister. Her hair was newly blonded and newly set, and Philip had to admit that she wasn’t, after all, a bad hairdresser. She had a pale blue dress on with white spots, a dress of the kind, he somehow recognised, that men always like and women often don’t, with a full skirt and a tight waist and a low-cut square neck.

Arnham jumped up. “How are you, Philip? We’re on our way out to dinner. I just thought I’d like to wait and see you.”

Shaking hands, Philip thought immediately about the woman who had come out of their house and accused him of driving too fast. He would have to warn Christine of the existence of this woman and he disliked the prospect. It need not, however, indeed could not, be undertaken at this moment. He thought too of the presence upstairs, inside his wardrobe, of Flora.

“We could all have a glass of sherry, Phil,” Christine said, as if this were a very daring thing to do.

Philip fetched the sherry and the glasses and they made conversation rather uneasily, talking of nothing much. Before Philip came in, Arnham had apparently been giving Christine some sort of account of his move from his former home and the circumstances in which he had found his present house. He reverted to this, going into close details, while Christine listened avidly. Philip didn’t pay this much attention. He found himself speculating once again as to the prospect of Arnham as a husband for Christine. It occurred to him that the woman who had come running out at the sound of his brakes had looked unhappy. Hadn’t they been getting on, he and she? Were they on the point of parting?

He watched them go down the path, giving Christine a little wave from the window in response to her own. Arnham’s car was parked on the other side of the street, which was why he hadn’t noticed it when he came in. He handed Christine into it in a courtly, old-fashioned way, making Philip feel that if it hadn’t been a sultry summer evening he would have tucked a rug round her knees. Impossible now to keep from imagining Christine as Mrs. Arnham and living in the house in Chigwell with the may tree in the garden. Perhaps the woman he had seen was Arnham’s sister or his housekeeper.

He would be free to go. There would be no bar to his moving into the top flat in Tarsus Street with Senta. He thought about this as a likelihood, not an impossible dream, as he drove down Shoot-up Hill. Cheryl would naturally go with Christine, it would be the best thing that could happen to Cheryl, to have two parents again, to have a more attractive place to live in. He was aware that he had thought along these lines before, when Christine had first known Arnham, but things had been different then: that had been before Senta.

Joley was outside on the pavement, resting on his barrow in the warm sunshine like an old dog. Philip raised his arm to him in a salute and Joley made the thumbs-up sign. A heat wave was coming, you could feel it in the air, in the calmness of the evening, the steady dark gold of the sunset light. And Philip felt, as he let himself into the house and heard from the front room the sound of a waltz, that things had returned to what they once were, had come full circle, been restored to an earlier perfection. No, more than that—a new perfection that was the result of trial and error and subsequent full knowledge. Down there, Senta awaited him, his honourable, truthful, daydreaming love. Christine had got Arnham back. Joley was at his post. The weather would once more be glorious.