The Bridesmaid (11 page)

They disappeared to the kitchen. Philip heard his mother compliment Fee on the navy blue jumper she was wearing and say wasn’t it funny to buy a guernsey actually in Guernsey. Fee’s patient explanation that the garment took its name from the island, as jersey did, gave rise to cries of wonderment.

Cheryl, as usual, was out somewhere. Philip was left alone with his brother-in-law. Denied further television, Darren was talkative on the subjects of international sport, the new Fiat, and congestion on the roads, and expansive on his honeymoon location. The cliffs of Guernsey were the highest he had ever seen, they must surely be the highest in the British Isles, he couldn’t begin to estimate their height. And the currents in the Channel were particularly treacherous. He wondered how many swimmers had come to grief through those currents. Philip, who had been abroad on several package tours, thought Darren would be one of those tourists who are always asking the guide how old or new something is, how deep this water, how high this mountain, how many bricks did it take to build this cathedral, how many men to paint this ceiling.

Photographs were produced, though no colour slides yet, thank God. Philip longed to speak to Darren about Senta. Here, he had thought, while the women were absent, was his opportunity. Of course, he didn’t intend to break his word to Senta and reveal their relationship. In a way there would be something delightful in speaking of her while concealing that she was any more than an acquaintance. But so far, Darren—talking nonstop, entranced by his chosen subject of conversation—gave him no chance. Philip had to bide his time. He had already discovered the joys of speaking her name to others and had mentioned her, in a lighthearted, indifferent sort of way, to his mother and Cheryl.

“Senta, that girl with the sort of silvery blond hair, who was Fee’s bridesmaid, I bet she’ll come out well in the photographs,” and, rather more daringly, “You wouldn’t think that girl Senta who was Fee’s bridesmaid was related to Darren, would you?”

Her father was his mother’s brother. It was hard to believe. They had no feature, no shade of skin, hair, or eye in common. They were of totally different build and might have belonged to different races. Darren’s hair was yellow and thick and rather rough, like new thatch. He had blue eyes and strong handsome features and ruddy skin. One day wine-coloured jowls would hang down over his shirt collar and his nose would become an outsize strawberry. He was a square man, the jack on a playing card.

Philip said suddenly, filling the brief silence which fell while Darren was putting all his photographs back into the yellow envelope, “I’d never met your cousin Senta till the wedding.”

Darren looked up. For a moment he didn’t say anything and it seemed to Philip that he was staring in astonishment. Philip had the extraordinary notion, coupled with the start of panic, that he was going to deny having a cousin or even say, “Who? You mean Jane, don’t you? She only says she’s called that.”

But it wasn’t astonishment. It wasn’t wonder or indignation or anything like that, just Darren’s habitual slowness at comprehension. Gradually a sly smile spread across his face.

“You fancy her, then, do you, Phil?”

“I don’t know her,” Philip said. “I’ve only met her once.” He realised he had told his first lie for Senta and he wondered why he had done it. But he plunged on. “She’s your first cousin?”

This was too much for Darren who said with some bewilderment, “First, second, I don’t reckon I’ve been into all that. All I know is my mum is her auntie and her dad is my uncle, and that makes us cousins in my book. Right?” He returned to safer and better-known ground. “Come on now, Phil, you do fancy her.”

The knowing look and sophisticated smile were all Darren required, and these Philip, without too much strain, supplied. Darren responded with a wink. “She’s a funny piece, Senta. You should see the place she lives in, a real rat hole, a dump. Fee wouldn’t set foot there when they were fixing up about the dresses and whatnot, and I don’t know as I blame her. And she could have a nice home with Uncle Tom in Finchley, she must want her head tested.”

Although he felt he was betraying himself with every word, Philip couldn’t stop yet. “Fee doesn’t know her very well, then?”

“Don’t let that worry you, old lad. I know her. I can get you in there if that’s what you’re after.”

He wasted no more words on Senta but reverted to Guernsey and his passion for heights, depths, weights, measures, and extremes of temperature. Philip let him run on, then excused himself. He was due at Senta’s at nine. Before leaving the house, he had something to see to upstairs. It had occurred to him that Fee might go into his room if she was still in the house after he had gone out. She never had gone in there during the days when she lived in Glenallan Close and there was no reason for her to do so now. But he had been struck by some kind of premonition or simple apprehensiveness. The marble girl still stood, uncovered, in the corner between clothes cupboard and window wall.

It was ten to nine but not dark yet and the glimmering light made her marble skin very radiant, pearllike yet human too, as if she lived. She was Senta to the life. Was not that calm yet starry gaze at distant horizons hers alone? Those folded lips set in exquisite proportion to the straight delicate nose? She had even done her hair like that when they went out together, bound closely around her head in little waves from where the plaits had crimped it. He had a sudden desire, which he recognised as absurd and to be quickly suppressed, to kiss that marble mouth, to press his own lips against the lips that looked so soft. He wrapped the statue up again, not in the cold slippery plastic, but in an old Aran sweater and thrust her into the back of the cupboard.

Talking of Senta, hearing her declarations confirmed—he felt treacherous there, but it was true: he had doubted and feared—tasting her euphonious name on his lips, and hearing it spoken so idly by another fired him somehow with a newer, fiercer ardour. He could hardly wait to be with her and he was breathless in the car, cursing at red traffic lights. Down the dirty stairs he ran, his body taut and tense with longing for her, his fingers fumbling the key in the lock, the scent of smoking joss stick coming to him as the door slid open and admitted him to her pungent, dusty, mysterious domain.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

Under the may tree, from which all the flowers had long fallen, which was now just an ordinary green tree, stood a figure of Cupid with his bow and quiver of arrows. Philip couldn’t see it very clearly, for the binoculars were still missing from the room. Everything else was missing too. Mrs. Ripple had carried out Roseberry Lawn’s requirements and had the interior stripped of cookery books, fireplace, extraneous woodwork, and floor covering. It was now a shell.

The Cupid amused Philip. He knew this was the god of love, and he wondered if Arnham had chosen it for this reason or simply because he liked it. A month ago he would have been affronted, incensed by the presence of this substitute for Flora. But in those intervening weeks he had changed a lot. He could hardly remember why he had stolen Flora. He found he no longer minded about Arnham, had become indifferent to him, even felt friendly towards him. His anger was all gone. Why, if he were to meet the man now, he would say hallo to him and ask him how he was.

His mission on this Saturday, generally accepted as a day off, had simply been to come here and inspect Mrs. Ripple’s house, to check if what she had said on the phone about the room being ready—you couldn’t trust these customers—was accurate. The Roseberry Lawn fitters would be coming in on Monday. Philip closed the door behind him and went downstairs. Mrs. Ripple was waiting for him at the foot.

“I shan’t be able to make tea for them.”

“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Ripple, they won’t expect it.” They would, but what was the use of arguing? There seemed no point either in anticipating trouble by telling her that if she didn’t give them a midmorning and midafternoon drink, the fitters would take half an hour off at eleven and half an hour off at three to go down to the cafe. “You’ll find them very easy, and I think you’ll be pleased by the way they clear up after themselves.”

“I won’t tolerate smoking or transistors.”

“Of course not,” said Philip, thinking she could argue it out with the workmen. He knew who would win that battle.

The door slammed behind him. No wonder she had cracks in her ceilings. He went down the path to the car where Senta sat waiting for him in the passenger seat.

This was the first time she had been out with him since that Indian meal, which had never been repeated, though with the exception of an evening a week unwillingly spent at home with Christine, he had been with her every night. There was no point in eating out, she said, and he could tell food didn’t mean much to her, though she liked chocolates and she liked wine. Nor had she ever cooked for him. He often remembered Fee’s remark when, before he knew her, he had asked why Senta couldn’t make her own dress. Fee had said he wouldn’t have asked that if he had known Senta. Well, he knew her now and he wouldn’t ask. The same applied to cooking or any domestic task. She lay in bed most mornings, she had told him, until noon or later. Her life apart from him was a mystery. If she was in on the few occasions he had tried to phone her, she hadn’t answered the phone, though he had let it ring and ring to allow time for her to get upstairs.

Their cloistral life together, half of every night spent in her bed, was wonderful, the most marvellous experience of his life, but he sensed somehow that it wasn’t right, it wasn’t
real.
They should be together for talk and companionship, not just for sex. Yet when he invited her to come out with him on this trip to Chigwell, get the call on Mrs. Ripple over and then have lunch somewhere, maybe drive out into the country, he had anticipated refusal. He was surprised and pleased when she said yes. He was even more delighted to hear her echo his own thoughts and tell him they should be spending all their spare time together, all the time they weren’t working.

“But you never do work, Senta,” he had said to her, his tone half-teasing.

“I went for an audition yesterday,” she said. “It’s for quite a good part in a feature film. I didn’t get it, Miranda Richardson got it, but the director liked me, he said I was remarkable.”

“Miranda Richardson!”

Philip had been impressed. Even for Senta to be considered in the same breath, so to speak, as Miranda Richardson said a lot for her ability. He had found out a bit about RADA too since she told him she had been there. It was
the
drama school; it was like saying you’d been to Oxford.

But since then he had doubted. It was awful to think like that when you felt about someone the way he felt about Senta, but nevertheless, deep in his own mind, he doubted. It was her telling him that to keep herself fit and at the ready, she went down to a place in Floral Street most afternoons, worked out and did ballet, which sparked off his doubts. She met all sorts of famous people there, actors and actresses and dancers. One afternoon, she told him, she and a couple of people she knew had had a cup of tea with Wayne Sleep.

He couldn’t quite believe it. She was embroidering the truth, that was all. Probably she had walked through Covent Garden and seen Wayne Sleep across the street. Once perhaps she had been to a health club and tried out the aerobic dance class. There were people like that, people for whom the truth was too stark and bare, who needed to pretty it up. It wasn’t lying, you couldn’t call it lying. Very likely she told her friends, whoever they might be, about him. But you could bet your life she didn’t say he was a junior surveyor with a company that built new bathrooms and kitchens and who lived at home with his mother in Cricklewood. In her account he would be transformed into an interior designer from Hampstead.

Thinking this made him smile, and she, turning her head towards him as he got into the car, asked him what amused him.

“I’m just feeling happy. It’s great being out with you like this.”

For answer she leant sinuously towards him and pressed her soft warm pink lips against his. He wondered if Mrs. Ripple were watching from the window.

“We’ll soon be always together, Philip,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I believe it’s our hidden karmic destiny.”

A few days before, she had drawn his horoscope, and this morning she had told him the single key number of his name was eight. Now she began talking of numerology, telling him how his number vibrated to the planet Saturn and represented wisdom, learning through experience, stability, patience, and responsibility. Philip turned the corner into the street where Arnham’s house was and pointed it out to her.

She didn’t pay it much attention but turned to him with a displeased look. He felt guilty, for it was true what she said, that he hadn’t been listening very closely to her.

“You eight people,” she said, “often appear cold and undemonstrative with those you ought to love and trust.”

“Cold?” he said. “Undemonstrative? You must be joking. You are joking, aren’t you, Senta?”

“It’s because you’re afraid of being considered weak. To be considered weak is the very last thing you eight people want to happen.”

They had lunch in a country pub and forgot what Senta called the secret codes of the universe. Afterwards they parked the car somewhere out in a part of Essex where the lanes were narrow and few tourists came, and Senta led him in between the trees and they made love on the grass.

He asked himself if he loved her, if he was in love with her. She had told him that first time not to say he loved her, not to talk in that way. They were to be together always, they were to be one, they had found each other. But was he in love? Did he even know what that expression, so widely and constantly used, so trite and stale, really meant?

Desire, lust if you liked, passion, an absolute overpowering need to possess and repossess her, he had all that all right. And he thought of her all the time. She occupied his thoughts on his long drives, on his visits to houses Roseberry Lawn was converting, when he was with Roy, at home with Christine and Cheryl, even in his own bed in Glenallan Close, though by that time, having come back from Kilburn in the small hours, he was usually too tired for anything but heavy sleep. Sometimes, inside his head, he talked to her. He told her his thoughts and fears as, for some reason, he couldn’t tell the real woman. The real Senta, though silent while he spoke, seemed not to listen. And when some rejoinder was due from her, as likely as not it would be a remark about mystical meanings or polarity points or some strange affirmation that he and she were united souls with no need of words for communication.