Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

Would he ever be able to forget what she had done and that he had loved her? It might grow faint and vague but it would always be there. A man had lost his life because of her. Before that, someone else had died because of her. She would kill others as time went on. She was made that way, she was mad. For all the rest of his life he would be marked by it, he thought. Even if he never spoke to her again, never saw her, it would scar him.

Seeing her was something he was fully resolved on. After all, he had prepared the way. He had told her they had to talk, and the fear in her voice showed him she went some way to guessing what he had to say. He would tell her all the truth, that he hated violence and violent death. Even talking or reading about these things was a horror to him. He would tell her how knowing what she had done had destroyed his love for her or, rather, that he now saw her as a different person—she wasn’t the girl he had loved, that girl was illusory.

But how was he to handle her love for him?

Joley was among the men and women in the queue at the Mother Teresa Centre. Philip superstitiously noted his presence there. He had been saying to himself, as he approached Tarsus Street, that if he saw Joley, he would go in and speak to Senta; if not, he would leave it and drive home. The old man with his barrow and his plastic carrier cushions constituted a sign, which Joley reinforced himself by waving to Philip as he passed.

Philip parked the car. He sat at the wheel for a long time, thinking about her, remembering how he had used to rush up the steps and into the house, as often as not in too much of a hurry to lock the car behind him. And there had been the time when she took his keys away and he had thought of breaking in, so great was his misery and his longing for her. Why was it impossible to put his mind and his feelings back into that time? She was still the same girl really, she looked and sounded the same. Surely he could go into the house and down the basement stairs and into that room and take her in his arms and forget?

He started the car and turned round and drove home. He didn’t know whether he was being weak or strong, purposeful or cowardly. Cheryl was out, Christine was out. He later came to know they were out together, had gone to Fee and Darren’s with Aubrey Pelham. The phone began ringing at eight and he let it ring. It rang nine times between eight and nine. At nine o’clock he put the little dog on the lead and walked him two or three miles about the streets. Of course he imagined the phone ringing while he was out and he imagined her in the dirty, sour-smelling hall at Tarsus Street, dialling, dialling. He thought of how it had been for him when she had expelled him from the house and he had tried to phone her.

The phone was ringing as he came in. He picked up the receiver. It was as if he suddenly understood he couldn’t avoid answering the phone for the rest of his life.

She was incoherent, sobbing into the phone, drawing breath to cry to him: “I saw you in the street. I saw the car. You turned away and left me.”

“I know. I couldn’t come in.”

“Why couldn’t you? Why?”

“You know why, Senta. It’s over. We can’t see each other again. It’s better never to see each other. You can go back to your life and I’ll start mine again.”

She said in a small still voice, suddenly calm, “I haven’t any life except with you.”

“Look, we only knew each other for three months. It’s nothing out of a lifetime. We’ll forget each other.”

“I love you, Philip. You said you loved me. I must see you, you must come here.”

“It won’t do any good. It won’t make any difference.” He said good night to her and put the phone down.

It rang again almost immediately and he answered it. He knew he would always answer it now. “I must see you. I can’t live without you.”

“What’s the use of it, Senta?”

“Is it Martin Hunt? Is it because of him? Philip, I’m not making this up, this is for real, the uttermost absolute truth. I never slept with him, I only went out with him once. He didn’t want me, he wanted that girl . He wanted her more than me.”

“It isn’t that, Senta,” he said. “It’s nothing to do with that.”

As if he hadn’t spoken, she went on feverishly, “That’s why the police never came near me. Because they didn’t know. They didn’t know I even knew him. Isn’t that proof? Isn’t it?”

What sort of a woman was she that she thought a man would mind more about a sexual relationship than an act of murder?

“Senta,” he said, “I won’t end this without seeing you again, I won’t do that. I promise. That would be cowardly. I promise I won’t do it. I’ll see you and we’ll end it.”

“Philip, if I said I’d never done it, if I said I’d made it all up?”

“I know it’s only the little things you tell lies about, Senta.”

She didn’t phone again. He lay in bed sleepless for hours. Among other things, he missed her physical presence, but when he thought how he had made love to someone who had killed a man in cold blood, when he relived that, he had to get up and go to the bathroom to be sick. Suppose she killed herself? He suddenly thought how unsurprised he would have been had she suggested a suicide pact. That would have been like her. Dying together, going on hand-in-hand to some glorious afterlife, Ares and Aphrodite, immortals in white robes….

The fine weather came back next day. He woke up to early hot sunshine, a bright band of light across his pillow from the window where he had neglected to draw the curtains. A sparrow sat on Flora’s outstretched hand. There was dew thick on the grass and the long densely blue shadows. It was a dream, he thought, all of it was a dream. Flora has always stood there, she was never removed to other owners, other gardens. Fee still lives here. I never met Senta. The murders didn’t happen, I dreamed them. I dreamed Senta.

Downstairs the woman called Moorehead had arrived to have her hair permed. It was the first perm Christine had done for several weeks. The rotten egg smell, seeping everywhere and making breakfast impossible, evoked earlier times, the time before Senta. It helped to keep the illusion going. He made a pot of tea and gave a cup to Mrs. Moorehead, and Christine said what a treat it was for two old women to have a young man wait on them. Mrs. Moorehead bristled up, and Philip knew that when the perm was done and she was leaving, she would tell Christine it was against her principles to tip the boss.

Cheryl came down. It was months since she had been up so early. She sat at the kitchen table drinking tea. Philip sensed that she wanted to catch him alone and borrow money from him. He escaped before she got the chance.

The car was going into the garage today to have the new radio put in. He left it there and was given a promise it would be ready by three. On the way back to head office he bought a newspaper. The evening paper had just come on to the streets and the front page headline told of a man charged with the murder of John Crucifer. Philip walked along reading the story. There was little to it but the basic facts. The alleged killer was Crucifer’s own nephew, an unemployed welder, Trevor Crucifer, aged 25.

It was extraordinary the feeling Philip had, as if he had finally and absolutely been exonerated. Someone else had killed the man and it was known. Officialdom and authority knew it. It was as if his own stupid, ill-considered confession had never been made. It seemed to set him free of guilt as his own knowledge of his innocence never could. Suppose he were to open the paper and on an inside page find that Harold Myerson’s true killer had also been found? That Senta’s involvement was illusory and everything she had told him the result only of a series of coincidences and circumstantial parallels?