Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

He looked at her in astonishment. A month and more had passed since the girl’s disappearance. Theories, whole articles of speculation, appeared from time to time in newspapers, outlining their authors’ ideas of what had become of her. There was no real news, there had been no leads that could be called firm. She had vanished as surely as if she had been made invisible and spirited away. The name for a second meant nothing to Philip, so securely had he banished it from his mind, hating to dwell on these things. The identity of its possessor came back to him uneasily.

“Rebecca Neave?”

“She lived there, didn’t she?” Jenny said.

“I had no idea.”

He must have spoken very coldly, for he could sense her looking at him as if she thought he was pretending to something he didn’t truly feel. But this phobia of his was real enough, and sometimes it extended to the human beings who allowed violence to occupy their minds. He didn’t want to seem smug or prudish. Because she expected him to do so, he looked up at the building, bathed in the orangeade sticky light of stilt-borne street lamps. Not a window was open on the facade. The front doors swung apart and a woman came out briskly and got into a car. Jenny was unable to say exactly which flat had been Rebecca’s, but she guessed its windows were the two in the very top right-hand corner.

“I thought that was why you didn’t fancy it.”

“I don’t fancy living all the way up here.” North of the North Circular Road, he meant. He thought of the surprise it would be telling her of his acquisition of a house rent-free, but something stayed him, some inner prudence held him back. It might be only a matter of weeks before he knew—until then he could refrain. “Anyway, I ought to wait till I’ve got a proper job,” he said.

The last time he knew Arnham had phoned Christine was at the end of November. He heard her speaking to someone quite late at night and call him Gerry. Soon after that he expected Arnham home—or Fee did. Fee watched their mother as once a mother might have watched her daughter, looking for an air of excitement, for changes in her appearance. They wouldn’t ask. Christine never questioned them about their private affairs. Fee said she seemed depressed, but Philip couldn’t see it. Christine was just the same as far as he knew.

Christmas passed and his training course came to an end. He was on the Roseberry Lawn staff now, a very junior surveyor-planner, on a salary of which he was obliged to part out with a third to Christine. When Fee went, it would be more than a third, and he must learn not to mind that, either. Christine, quite quietly and not making any fuss about it, began earning a little by doing the neighbours’ hair at home. If his father had been alive, Philip thought, he would have stopped Cheryl working at Tesco on the checkout. Not that this endured for long. She only lasted there three weeks, and afterwards, instead of trying to get another job, she went on the dole with indifferent acceptance.

In the living room in Glenallan Close, a room which had once been two—very tiny, poky rooms they must have been, for combined they measured not much more than six metres—the postcard with the White House on it remained on the mantelpiece. All the Christmas cards had been taken down but Arnham’s card remained. Philip would have liked to take it down and throw it away, but he had an uneasy feeling Christine treasured it. Once, looking at it sideways in sunlight, he saw that its glossy surface was covered with her fingermarks.

“Perhaps he just hasn’t come back yet,” Fee said.

“He wouldn’t be away on a business trip for four months.”

Cheryl said unexpectedly, “She’s tried to phone him herself but the number’s unobtainable. She told me so, she said his phone was out of order.”

“He was going to move,” Philip said slowly. “He told us—don’t you remember? He’s moved without telling her.”

At work, when he wasn’t out visiting clients and prospective clients, he divided his time between the showrooms in Brompton Road and head office, which was near Baker Street. Often, after parking his car or on his way out to lunch, he wondered if he might run into Arnham. For a while he hoped this might happen, perhaps only because the sight of her son might remind Arnham of Christine, but as he began to lose hope, he shied away from a meeting. It had begun to be embarrassing.

“Hasn’t Mum aged?” Fee said to him. Christine was out walking Hardy. In front of Fee on the table was a pile of wedding invitations. She was addressing envelopes. “She looks years older, don’t you think?”

He nodded, hardly knowing what answer to make. And yet six months before, he would have said their mother looked younger than at any time since Stephen Wardman’s death. He had concluded that she was a woman with the type of looks which only youth suited, as Fee herself would be. That white and pink skin with its velvety texture was the first kind to fade. Like rose petals, it seemed to turn brown at the edges. Pale blue eyes lost their brightness sooner than the dark sort. Golden hair turned to straw, to ash—particularly if you reserved none of the bleach you put on your customers’ hair for yourself.

Fee didn’t pursue it. She said instead, “I take it you’ve split up with Jenny? I mean, I was going to ask her to be one of my bridesmaids, but I won’t if you’ve split up.”

“It looks like it,” he said, and then, “Yes, we have. You can take it that’s all over.”

He didn’t want to explain to her. This was something he felt he wasn’t obliged to explain to anyone. There was no need for solemn announcements as if he had been in a permanent relationship and his marriage or even his engagement had broken up. In fact, it wasn’t that Jenny had tried to pressure him into marriage or even an engagement. She wasn’t like that. But they had been going out together for a year and more. It was natural that she wanted him to move in with her, or rather, for the two of them to find a place where they could live together, as on the evening when she had shown him the block where Rebecca Neave had lived. He had to refuse, he couldn’t leave Christine. Come to that, he couldn’t afford to leave Christine.

“You and Mum both,” said Fee with a sigh. “It’s a good thing Darren and me are solid as a rock.”

It was an expression that applied rather too accurately to Fee’s future husband, Philip thought. Even Darren’s undeniably handsome face had something rocklike about it. He hadn’t tried very hard to imagine why Fee could possibly want to marry him. The subject was one he shied away from. It might be that she would do anything to get away from the responsibilities of Glenallan Close and all they involved.

“Then, I expect I’ll have to ask Senta,” Fee said. “She’s Darren’s cousin, and Darren’s mother wants me to ask her, says she’ll be hurt if I don’t. And then there’ll be Cheryl and Janice and another cousin of his called Stephanie. I’m longing for you to meet Stephanie, she’s absolutely your type.”

Philip didn’t think he had a type. His girl friends had been tall and short, dark and fair. He found it hard to keep up with the ramifications of Darren’s large extended family. So many of its members had been married two or three times, producing children each time and gathering in stepchildren. His father and his mother each had an ex-wife and an ex-husband. They made the Wardmans look rather sparse and isolated. His eyes went back to the card on the mantelpiece, and without actually reading it again, he recalled the line about leaving Flora to look after the house, repeating it over and over to himself until it became meaningless. He began to notice too the empty space in the garden where Flora had formerly stood.