Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

The heat was terrible and wonderful. It would have been desirable at the seaside, where Philip wished again and again he and Senta might be. In London it brought with it drought and smells and sweat. But Senta’s basement room grew cool. In the ordinary warm weather it had been stuffy, in the cold very cold. Now she opened windows he hardly knew existed at the back of the house, and let a draught blow through the cluttered subterranean rooms.

It was an outdoor time when London briefly became a European city with pavement cafés. Philip wanted to spend their evenings in the open air. As much as anything, he liked being seen with her, he liked the envy of other men. To walk about Hampstead or Highgate holding hands with Senta among the crowds of other young people seemed to him the most inviting way to pass their evenings—with, of course, the prospect of an early return to Tarsus Street. And although it was perhaps true that she preferred to stay in, she consented.

On the fourth day of the heat wave, when the weather showed no signs of breaking, he drove to Chigwell in the afternoon. Mrs. Ripple’s new marble slab had arrived, a perfect one as far as Philip could see, too smooth and flawless to seem like the real thing. He decided to take it to her himself, ask for her approval, and give her his personal undertaking that a fitter would come in to instal it that same week. It was Monday.

He and Senta had been tremendously happy during the weekend. Without of course telling her he had checked up on her, he congratulated her on her part in Impatience and he could tell how much she loved his praise and how happy she was to answer his rather naive questions. She showed him how she meant to act her part, altering her voice quite subtly and changing her facial expression so that she became, briefly and alarmingly, a different person. She seemed to know most of her lines already. He anticipated the pride he was going to feel when he actually saw her on screen. His emotion was powerful and he felt almost choked by it.

They were together from the Friday night until this morning. On Saturday there had been some talk of going up to the top floor and making a start on cleaning the flat, preparing it for their occupancy, which now might not be long delayed. But it was too hot. Both agreed there would be time enough for that when the weather got cool again. Their work on the flat could wait until the following Friday.

There must have been thousands of other people about in that heat, in those sunlit streets, but he hardly saw them. They were shadows or ghosts, scarcely real. They were there only to make Senta, by contrast, more real, more beautiful, more his own. Any misunderstandings were over, arguments past, quarrels forgotten, talk of death and violence melted away by the sun and the leisurely sensuous pace of life. They ate their meals in pub gardens or on the grass of the Heath, they drank a lot of wine. Hand in hand, they meandered back to the car, back to Tarsus Street, white and dusty and brittle with heat, and to bed in the underground cool. He had begun to feel he was curing her of her agoraphobia. Very little persuasion had been needed to get her out into the open air, the sunny noons and the sweet warm nighttimes.

“Just think,” she had said to him, “in a week’s time we may be together all the time.”

“Well, perhaps not a week, but very soon.”

“We won’t put it off, we’ll get started on Friday. Maybe we could move the bed up, that would be a start. I’ll ask Rita to make that horrible Mike help us, shall I? There’s just one thing I want you to help me with first, but it won’t take long and then we’ll really begin thinking how we’re going to arrange our flat. I’m so happy, Philip, I’ve never been so happy in all my life!”

Throughout that weekend she had never once fantasised. Not a tall story of the past or present had been offered him. A kind of exorcism had taken place, he thought. She was purged of the need to alter truth. How could he avoid the perhaps conceited belief that it was her love for him and his for her that had changed her? Reality had become adequate.

Grounded in a traffic jam on the way to Chigwell, he thought tenderly of Senta. He had left her lying in bed, the shutters half-closed, a breeze of early morning—that would later die— airing the room, blowing from open window to open window. Sunlight fell across the bed linen in bands but avoided her face, her eyes. He had seen to that. She had awakened for a little while and put up her arms to him. It had been more of a wrench even than usual to leave her, and she, knowing it, had held on to him, kissing him, whispering to him not to go yet, not yet.

There was such a long tail-back of cars on the approaches to the A.12 that Philip briefly thought it might be wiser to turn back when the opportunity of doing so came. Afterwards he was to wonder what sort of a difference to his life it would have made had he done so. Not much probably. Happiness would have endured for a few more days, along with the heat and the sunshine, but it would soon have passed. In the nature of things there could have been no escape for him and her, not now. If he had turned back, all that would have happened was that the bubble of illusion and self-deception and mysterious false assumptions would have been broken later and not that afternoon.

He didn’t turn back. His shirt was wet with sweat and sticking to the back of the seat. A car somewhere ahead of him, half a mile ahead for all he knew, had overheated and its radiator boiled. It was this breakdown that was causing the delay. He was glad he hadn’t given Mrs. Ripple a definite time, only said something about the middle of the afternoon, which by its vagueness had raised another of her reprimands.

Twenty minutes later he was past the stranded car that blocked the inside lane, steam coming from its raised bonnet. The marble slab fell off the backseat as he turned the corner into Mrs. Ripple’s road, and he had a momentary panic lest it was cracked. Finding it intact when he was finally parked outside the house made a fresh surge of sweat break over him. The tar was melting on the roadway, and on the camber, in the hard bright light, mirages of sheets of water danced. Lawns were yellowing, drying up. He hauled the marble slab in its cardboard container out of the back of the car.

Mrs. Ripple’s front door opened as he came up to the gate, and a woman came out with a black Scottie dog on a lead. She paused on the step as people do who spin out their leave-taking. It was Gerard Arnham’s woman, wife, sister, housekeeper, whatever she was. Inside the house were Mrs. Ripple and, visible behind her, Pearl of the black curly hair and shiny peacock-blue dress. Only, today the dress was flame pink and sleeveless, and Mrs. Ripple herself wore a flimsy garment with narrow straps which showed sunburnt shoulders and scrawny arms.

Philip didn’t know why the sight of the woman with the dog caused him such a shock. He was staggered by her. His grasp on the topmost bar of the gate had tightened until the metal dug into his flesh. The weight of the package he carried suddenly reminded him of another marble object he had once lugged about on a warm day—Flora, which he had carried to Arnham’s house when he lived in Buckhurst Hill.

Arnham’s woman came down the path towards him, the dog sniffing at his ankles. She didn’t seem to recognise him. Her hawklike face was strained, the eye sockets dark, the forehead deeply lined. She looked as if the heat had dried her out, actually physically depleted her. She passed him, staring trancelike ahead of her. Philip stared at her, he couldn’t help it. He looked back and watched her go out of the gate and turn, blindly it seemed, up along the street.

Mrs. Ripple said, “Here you are, then.” It was the mildest greeting he had ever received from her. Pearl achieved a smile without parting her bright red greasy lips.