Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

Smoky had slept on Philip’s bed. He lay in Philip’s lap in the evening while Philip did his homework. He was very much Philip’s cat, petted and pampered and almost hourly caressed. Then, as he grew old, he became ill. Years and years had passed and Smoky was probably fourteen or fifteen. His teeth were bad and his breath smelt, his fur fell out and bald patches appeared on his coat, he stopped washing. And Philip lost his affection for him. He ceased to love him. He pretended to care still but it was a poor pretence. Awful though his guilt was, he came to avoid poor Smoky and his basket in the corner of the kitchen, and when his parents, fearful of telling him, at last made themselves suggest to him that Smoky should out of kindness be put to sleep, he was relieved, a load was lifted from him.

Had he then loved the cat only for his beauty? Had he loved Senta only for her beauty? And what he thought of as the beauty of her mind, her self—her soul, if you like? Now he knew that those areas of her being were not beautiful but ill, foul, sick, distorted. They were evil and they stank. Because of this, had he ceased to love her? It wasn’t as simple as that. It wasn’t simply that he flinched from her madness either, more that the person he had loved was imaginary, not the strange little wild animal with a twisted human brain that awaited him in Tarsus Street.

He opened his clothes cupboard and looked at Flora standing in the dimness within, her face framed between a pair of tweed trousers and the raincoat he had bought to replace the stolen one. The curious thing was that she no longer resembled Senta. Perhaps she never had and the likeness lay in his all too willing imagination. Her stone face looked blind and bland, the eyes empty of expression. She wasn’t even a she but an it, a thing made of marble, perhaps not even modelled from life, the work of an indifferent sculptor. He lifted her out, laid her on the bed. The idea came to him to replace her in the garden before he went out. There could be no reason not to do this, now that he knew Arnham had parted from her long ago, now that Christine knew it all, now that Myerson, who had owned her, was dead. He carried her downstairs.

Gerard Arnham was leaving. The front door was open and Christine was down at the gate watching as he got into the Jaguar. Philip took Flora into the back garden and set her up in her old position beside the birdbath. Had she always looked so tawdry, so scruffy? The green stain which disfigured her bosom and the folds of her robe, the chip out of her ear, and new hitherto unnoticed damage—a may flower missing from the bouquet—changed her into a fitting ornament for a ruin. He turned away and, looking back, saw that a sparrow had come to perch on her shoulder.

In the kitchen Christine was drinking a second cup of tea.

“I called out to see if you wanted some, dear, but you weren’t about. Poor Gerard was rather upset, wasn’t he?”

Philip said, “You were pretty upset when he didn’t come near you for months and months.”

“Was I?” She seemed puzzled, as if the effort of memory yielded nothing. “I don’t think he’ll be back and I can’t say I’m sorry. Audrey wouldn’t have liked it.”

At any rate Philip thought she said Audrey. He had always thought she said Audrey, only perhaps he had never listened very closely. “What has it got to do with her?”

“Not her, dear, Aubrey. My friend, Aubrey. You know who I mean, Tom’s brother, Tom Pelham.”

The world floated a little, the floor floated. “You mean, Senta’s father?”

“No, Philip. He’s Tom. This is his brother, Aubrey Pelham, he’s Darren’s mother’s brother and he’s never been married, I met him for the first time at Fee’s wedding. Philip dear, I’m sure I’ve never been secretive about this, I’ve never kept it dark, I always said I was going out with Aubrey, seeing a lot of Aubrey. You can’t deny it, now can you?”

He couldn’t deny it. He had been too occupied with his own affairs to pay it much attention. Audrey was the name he had heard, a woman’s name. But it hadn’t been for a woman that Christine had bought new clothes, bleached her hair, grown youthful.

“He wants to marry me, as a matter of fact. You—would you—would you mind if I married him?”

This was what he had wished for, longed for, a man into whose safe keeping he could entrust her. How could the world be so full of things that were of paramount importance one day and meant less than nothing the next?

“Me? No, of course I wouldn’t mind.”

“I just thought I’d ask. When your children are grown up, I think you ought to ask them if they mind you getting married, though you don’t expect them to ask you.”

“When is it going to be?”

“Oh, I don’t know that, dear. I haven’t told him yes yet. I thought it would be good for Cheryl if I married him.”

“Why good for Cheryl?”

“I told you, Philip, he’s a social worker, he works with teenagers with problems, like her.”

Philip thought, she’s got it all worked out, she has arranged her life without me. And I always thought she was helpless, I thought she would need to lean on me for life. Suddenly he saw something else: his mother was the kind of woman men would always want to marry, there would always be men anxious to marry her. Being married, that was what she was good at in her strange, loving, scatty way, and they could sense it.

It embarrassed him to do it, it wasn’t like him, but just the same he put his arm round her and gave her a kiss. She looked up into his face and smiled.

“I may not be back for a while,” he said. “I’m going to Senta’s.”

She said vaguely, “Have a good time, dear.” She was moving towards the phone in the hall, transparently waiting for him to leave so that, in private, she could transmit his permission and his reaction to Aubrey Pelham. He got into the car but didn’t immediately start the engine. The unwillingness to rejoin Senta which he had felt while in the house was growing stronger. He was beginning to understand that a violent antipathy could be the reverse, of which the obverse was passion. He saw her as evil; he saw her eyes looking at him, very green and glittering. The idea came to him of how it would be never to see her again—the relief, the peace. Somehow he knew that once he went back there, he would be lost, but to write—why shouldn’t he write and tell her it was all over, it had been a temporary insanity, bad for both of them?

He knew he couldn’t. But he couldn’t go straight back there either. His need was to put it off until long into the night. Darkness would make their reunion easier. There was a strange vision he had of shutting themselves up together, he and she, down in that basement room, admitting no one, never venturing out, keeping themselves safe. But it was a hateful prospect.

He drove slowly away from his mother’s house. Going in the general direction of Tarsus Street, heading for it as if drawn by a magnet, he nevertheless knew the point must come when he left the destined route and digressed, at least for a little while. He couldn’t face her now, immediately.

That point came when he would in the usual course of things have left the Edgware Road and turned into the back reaches of Kilburn. Instead, he drove on. He was thinking of what Christine had said about Cheryl, and he began to feel angry at this facile solution to her unknown trouble. A stepfather who was some sort of probation officer—that was to solve everything. Philip was remembering how once, before he had even met Senta, he had seen Cheryl down here, coming out of a shop in tears.

Except that it hadn’t been a shop. Slowing to a stop, parking the car where he shouldn’t have parked it, on a double yellow line, he got out and stared at the glittering place which, without doors or windows, revealed openly to the street its sparkling, strobe-lit interior, its rank temptation bathed in flickering red and yellow. He had never been into such a place before, for he had never wanted to. At the seaside, occasionally in a pub, he had had a go and lost and been indifferent. Once, he remembered now, on a Channel crossing from Zeebrugge after a family holiday, his father had played a machine called Demon Dynamo. The name had stuck in his mind, it was so ridiculous.