The Bridesmaid (12 page)

How could he be the other half of her, a twin soul, if he wasn’t sure that he loved her?

At the end of June, Christine and Cheryl went away on holiday together. Philip was glad now that when he broke up with Jenny and cancelled the package tour to Greece they had arranged to take together, he hadn’t arranged to go away with his mother and sister. He would have two weeks alone with Senta.

In a way it was unfortunate he had to stay in Glenallan Close. But someone had to be there to take charge of Hardy. And Philip admitted to himself that although he went there every night, loved going there because Senta was there, longed for the place with breath-catching excitement, he had never really got used to the house in Tarsus Street, had never accepted it. The filth and the smell continued to bother him. There was something sinister about the place too, the way you never saw anyone else, heard no sound ever but occasionally that music and those dancing feet. He ought really to have become apprehensive about her living there. If he was truly one of those wise responsible “eight” people—and it made him smile to think of it—surely it should worry him to think of his girl friend, his twin soul as she would say, having her home in that part of London, in that sordid house. There were drunks on Tarsus Street at night and gangs of boys loitering on the corners, derelicts lying on the pavement or crouched in doorways. Why didn’t it worry him? Was it because—awful thought—she seemed to belong there, to be as suited to the place as they?

Once, going to her at nine at night, as he drove into her turning, he had seen a strange girl coming towards him along the pavement, gliding along in a black dress that touched the ground, her head wrapped in a red striped cloth like an African woman’s. She had touched his arm as he got out of the car and smiled into his face before he knew it was Senta. For an awful moment he had thought it was some unappetising prostitute soliciting him.

Christine and Cheryl were going to Cornwall. Philip hadn’t given much thought to Cheryl lately—so much for being wise and responsible!—but now he wondered how she would handle this habit of hers, whatever it might be, while she and Christine were in Newquay. Drink or drugs—well, they were available anywhere, he thought. Remembering his experience in that squalid street with the disguised Senta, he wondered if his unexpressed fears were after all justified, and Cheryl raised the money for her habit by prostitution. Uneasily, he recalled the fiver she had returned to him so promptly, no more than a night and a morning after she had borrowed it.

He drove them to Paddington Station. Christine wore a dress of floral cotton with a white cardigan she had knitted herself during the long winter evenings. From a distance you couldn’t see the mistakes in the pattern. He told her she looked nice (her word), and it was true that the contrast between her and Cheryl—in jeans, Mickey Mouse tee shirt, and black leather— was almost laughable. Cheryl no longer looked young or much like a girl or even very human. The skin on her face looked stretched and rough, her eyes were bitter. She had had her hair shorn off close to the crown.

“You’ve had a crew cut,” was all Christine said.

“I don’t know what a crew cut is. This is a suede head.”

“I expect it’s very nice if you like it”—the nearest Christine would ever get to criticism.

Leaving them there on the ramp with their suitcases—it was hopeless to think of finding a place to park—he drove back up to Cricklewood wondering what would become of his sister. She was trained for nothing, had no job or prospect of one, was terrifyingly ignorant, had no boy friend or any other kind of friend, and appeared hooked on some habit whose nature he was afraid to discover. But, as was always the case now, these thoughts were soon replaced by Senta. As soon as he had taken Hardy out for a walk, he would be off to Kilburn to spend the rest of the day with her. He wanted to persuade her to return to Glenallan Close with him for the night.

Hardy got a proper walk for a change, he deserved it. The poor dog had been obliged to put up with too many quick traversings of the block lately. Philip drove him to Hampstead Heath and walked through the woodland between the Spaniards Road and the Vale of Health towards Highgate. June was being a cool month, dry and grey. The bright green of the grass, the darker, richer colour of the foliage were soothing to the eyes, curiously pacifying. Ahead of him the little dog ran along, stopping sometimes to push an excited snout into rabbit holes. Philip thought about Senta, her body as white as marble, those overlarge breasts, nipples that were neither brown nor rosy but the palest pearl pink, and that rosy bronze cluster under her belly like red flowers….

He switched his mind and its image-making onto her face, with Flora’s gaze and Flora’s pagan eyes. Onto her voice and the things she said. Now he could think quite tenderly of the silly little untruths she had told him, about dyeing her hair, for instance, about being auditioned for that film and meeting Wayne Sleep. That stuff about her mother being Icelandic and dying when she was born, that too was probably made up. Hadn’t Fee said something once about Senta’s mother having this young lover? So much for dying in childbirth.

She had fantasies, that was the truth of it. No harm in that. Some of the things she told him had been invented to impress him, and that was very very flattering. That a girl like Senta should want to impress him was an enormous compliment. Fantasies, he had read somewhere, were what people had whose lives were rather empty, for whom reality was inadequate. He felt protective towards her when he thought like that, and tenderly loving. Considering her like this, he had no doubt he loved her.

Reaching these conclusions in a very levelheaded way made Philip feel comfortably sophisticated. It almost seemed that this numerology stuff might have something in it, for perhaps he was one of those who learned by experience and grew wise. He would not care to have been taken in for long by fantasising, but as things were, he was neither duped nor disillusioned and that was fine. She wasn’t deceiving him, and to be fair, perhaps that wasn’t her intention, but only to appear to him more glamorous and exciting than she really was. It was impossible, he thought, for her to
be
more exciting, and as for the glamour—he liked best to think of her as the little girl with a sweet loving nature which she truly was underneath all that, the passionate lover who was at the same time an ordinary woman with an ordinary woman’s doubts and uncertainties.

On the way to Tarsus Street he went shopping. He bought Chinese takeaway. If she wouldn’t eat it, he would. He bought biscuits and fruit and two bottles of wine and a big box of Terry’s Moonlight chocolates. Senta didn’t cost him as much as Jenny had because they so seldom went out. He liked to splash out on the things he brought her.

Outside her house an old man wearing what looked like a woman’s raincoat tied round his middle with string was rooting in one of the plastic bags piled on the pavement. Despite notices on lamp posts informing them that littering the street constituted an environmental hazard, the people down here piled their rubbish bags outside the broken railings in ill-smelling mounds. The old man had retrieved half a sliced loaf in cellophane wrapping and, thrusting his hand back in again, was perhaps in search of a lump of green cheese or the leftovers from a joint. Philip saw him fumbling with the crimson sticky bones of what had once been a wing of Tandoori chicken. The luxury foods he was carrying made him feel even worse about the old man than he normally would have done. He felt in his pocket for a pound coin and held it out.

“Thanks very much, governor. God bless.”

The possession of the coin did nothing to prevent further excavations in the stack of rubbish bags. Should he have made it a fiver? Philip ran up the steps and let himself into the house. As usual, it was silent, dirty. During the previous night it had rained heavily, and someone, it was plain to see, had walked across the tiled floor towards the stairs in wet shoes whose deeply indented soles made a pattern in the dust.

The scent of her joss stick was powerful today. He could smell it on the basement stairs where it fought with the permanent, all-pervading sour reek of that dark well. She was waiting for him just inside. Sometimes, and today was one of those times, she wore an old Japanese kimono in faded blues and pinks on the back of which was embroidered a rose-coloured bird with a long curving tail. Her hair was looped up and fastened on top of her head with a silver comb. She put out her arms to him and held him in her slow, soft, all-the-time-in-the-world sensuous embrace, kissing his lips lightly, daintily, then drawing his mouth into a deep, devouring, enduring kiss.

The original painted shutters were still attached to the window frame, and these she had folded across the glass. The uneasy light of the June day, the watery sun, was excluded. Her lamp was on, the shade tilted, to shed yellow light on to the bed, which was as rumpled as if she had just got out of it. A candle was burning too beside the sandalwood incense stick smouldering in its saucer. In the mirror the whole room was reflected, a frowsty dusty purple and gold, and it might have been midnight, it might have been any time. Traffic grumbled out there, and sometimes there came the clack-clack of a woman’s heels on the pavement, the trundling sound of pram or bicycle wheels.

He opened the wine. She didn’t want to eat, she wouldn’t eat meat. She sat cross-legged on the bed, picking out of the box the chocolates she liked best, and drinking the wine out of one of a pair of cloudy bottle-green glasses she had. Philip wasn’t a wine drinker. He didn’t like the taste of it nor the effect, which left him with a swimming head and a bad taste in his mouth. Alcohol in any form he found rather distasteful with the exception of an occasional half of bitter. But Senta liked him to share the wine, and he sensed she would have felt guilty if allowed to drink alone. It was easy, though, with coloured glass. You couldn’t see if there was wine in there or water. And if it was inescapable that he pour himself a measure, he could usually also manage to get rid of it into the pot which held her only houseplant, a kind of imperishable aspidistra. This plant, having long survived darkness, drought, and neglect, was beginning to flourish on its wine diet.

She consented to go out for a walk with him, though as always she seemed reluctant to leave her room. It was about ten when they got back to Tarsus Street. They hadn’t taken the car to the restaurant, an Italian place in Fernhead Road, but had walked there and back, their arms round each other’s waists. On the way back Senta became very loving, stopping sometimes to hold him and to kiss. He could feel the urgency of her desire, like rays, like trembling vibrations. In the past Philip had often seen couples who embraced in the street, oblivious apparently of those around them, mutually absorbed, kissing, fondling, seemingly gloating over each other with an intense exclusivity. He had never done that himself and had sometimes felt a kind of prudish disapproval of it. But now he found himself a willing, an ardent, partner in one of those couples, glorying in the pleasures of kissing in the street, in the lamplight, the dusk, against a wall, in the shadowy embrasure of a doorway.

Back there in her basement room, she couldn’t wait. She was greedy for him and for love, sweat gleaming on her upper lip, her forehead, her marble white skin bearing a hectic flush. Yet when they were in bed together, she was sweeter and more generous than she had ever been, yielding instead of overwhelming, giving rather than taking. Her movements seemed all for his delight, her hands and lips and tongue for him, her pleasure held and delayed until his came. A slow tide of joy, lapping in tender tiny waves, increasing, crashing like falling towers, broke upon him and the room, making the mirror shudder, the floor move. He groaned with the glory of it, a groan that became a cry of triumph as she held him and pressed and undulated swiftly and drew from him at last her own success. He lay thinking, next time I will give her what she has given me, she shall be first, I will do for her from the fullness of my happiness what she has done for me.

Her hair spread out on the pillow beside his face in silvery points. It glittered like long brittle slivers of glass. The flush had faded from her face and it was white again, pure, lineless, the skin as smooth as the inner side of an ivory waxen petal. Her wide-open eyes were crystals with the green fluidity tinting them like weeds in water. He ran his fingers through her hair, holding the tresses of it in his fingers, feeling the sharp healthy harshness of the strands.

The lamp he had turned round, tilting the shade so that the light should fall on their faces, their passion-expressing eyes. That light was now shed onto the crown of her head. He peered more closely, lifted a silver gleaming lock, and exclaimed without thought, without pause, “Your hair’s red at the roots!”

“Of course it is. I told you I bleached it. Well, I have it bleached.” Her voice wasn’t angry, only faintly impatient. “It needs redoing. I should have had it done last week.”

“You actually have it bleached? You have it made that silver colour?”

“I told you, Philip. Don’t you remember I told you?”

He laughed a little, relaxed, easy, happy. He laughed, shaking his head. “I didn’t believe you, I honestly didn’t believe a word of it.”

What happened next was very quick.

Senta sprang up. She crouched on the bed on all fours. She was like an animal, her lips drawn back, her hair hanging. There should have been a long feline tail swinging. Her eyes were round and glittering and a hissing sound came from her between clenched teeth. He had sat up and drawn back, away from her.

“What on earth’s the matter?”

It was a different voice, low, coarse, vibrating with rage. “You don’t trust me! You don’t believe me!”

“Senta—”

“You don’t trust me. How can we be one, how can we be joined together, one soul, when you’ve no trust in me? When you’ve no faith?” Her voice rose and it was like a siren howling. “I’ve given you my soul, I’ve told you the deep things in my soul, I’ve exposed the wholeness of my spirit, and you—you’ve just shat on it, you’ve fucked it over, you’ve destroyed me!”