The Bridesmaid (14 page)

“All right. What don’t you believe?”

He didn’t quite answer her. “Look, Senta, I don’t
mind
you having fantasies, lots of people do, it’s just a way of making life more interesting. I don’t mind you inventing things about your family and about your acting, but when you get to talk about killing people—it’s so ugly and pointless and it’s a waste of time too. It’s the weekend, it’s Sunday, we could be having a nice time, out somewhere, it’s a lovely day, and here we are sitting in this-well, frankly, disgusting hole, while you talk about killing that poor old creature sitting out there.”

She became a muse of tragedy, sombre, grave. She might have been imparting terrible news of his family to him or telling him all those she loved were dead. “I am absolutely, utterly, profoundly serious,” she said.

He felt he was contorting his face, screwing up his eyes and frowning in an effort to understand her. “You
can’t
be.”

“Are you serious about loving me, about doing anything for me?”

“Within reason, yes,” He said it sulkily.

“Within
reason
! How sick that makes me! Don’t you see that what we have has to be without reason, beyond reason? And to prove it we have to do the thing that is outside the law and beyond reason.”

“You really are serious,” he said bitterly. “Or you think you are, which in your present mood comes to the same thing.”

“I am willing to kill someone to prove my love for you, and you must do the same for me.”

“You’re mad, Senta, that’s what you are!”

Her voice was stony now, remote. “Don’t ever say that.”

“I won’t say it, I don’t really mean it. Oh God, Senta, let’s talk about something else, please. Let’s do something. Can’t we forget all this? I don’t even know how we got into it.”

She got up, approached him. He found himself, to his own humiliation, shielding his face. “I won’t hurt you.” She spoke with contempt. With her little hands, her child’s hands, she took him by the upper arms. She looked into his face. The stilt heels had elevated her so that she had only a little way to look up. “Are you refusing to do this, Philip? Are you?”

“Of course I am. You may not know it, you don’t really know me yet, but I hate the whole notion of killing and any sort of violence, come to that. It doesn’t just make me feel sick, it
bores
me. I can’t even watch a violent film on TV, and I don’t want to either, it doesn’t interest me. And now you say you want me to kill someone. What kind of a criminal do you think I am?”

“I thought you were the other half of our united souls.”

“Oh, don’t talk such rubbish! It’s such a load of shit, all this balls about souls and karmas and destinies and rubbish. Why don’t you grow up and live in the real world? You talk about living—do you think you’re living stuck in this filthy dump sleeping half the day? Making up tales to convince people how clever and amazing you are? I thought I’d heard it all, all that about going to Mexico and India and wherever, and your Icelandic mother and the Flying Dutchman, but now I get told I’ve got to kill some poor old bloody vagrant to prove I love you!”

She made that hissing cat’s sound and with both hands shoved him so hard that he staggered. He grabbed the edge of the gilded frame to steady himself, thought for a moment the whole great swinging dangerous sheet of mirror would come crashing down. But it was only shivering on the chain which fastened it to the wall, and it stilled as he leaned against it, grasping it with both hands. When he turned round, she had flung herself face-downwards on the bed, where she lay making curious convulsive jerks down the length of her body. As he touched her tentatively, she rolled on to her back, sat up, and began to scream. The sounds were terrible, mechanical seemingly, short staccato shrieks tearing out of her wide-open mouth, from which the lips curled back in a snarl like a tigress.

He did what he had heard and read about and slapped her face. It had an instant silencing effect. She went white as paper, gagged, gasped, put her hands up to cover both cheeks. Her whole body trembled. After a moment she spoke to him through her fingers, whispered, “Get me some water.”

She sounded weak and breathless, as if she were ill. For a moment he was afraid for her. He went out of the room and along the passage past the other basement rooms to where the lavatory was, and next to it the relic and ruin of a bathroom. Here the single brass tap, wrapped in rags, stuck out of the green and fungus-coated wall over the bathtub. He filled the mug, drank it down himself, and refilled it. The water had a dead metallic taste. He made his way back to where she was. She was sitting on the bed with the purple duvet wrapped round her, as if it were a winter’s day. Behind and above her, outside the window, the old woman’s back, covered now by some sort of khaki-coloured jacket, could still be seen beyond the railing. She had given no sign of having heard the screams from below, having perhaps heard so much of life that she had become detached.

Philip held the mug to Senta’s lips and helped her drink, as if she really was ill. He put his other arm round her and rested his hand tenderly on her neck. He could feel tremors passing through her body and a feverish heat on her skin. She sipped the water quietly until she had finished it. Her neck extricated itself from his fondling hand, her head ducked away from him, and she took from him the mug the water had been in. It was all done very quietly and gently, which made the next thing she did shocking because it was so unexpected. She hurled the mug across the room where it crashed against the wall.

“Get out of here!” she screamed at him. “Get out of my life! You’ve ruined my life, I hate you, I never want to see you again.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

Darren’s car, an ancient banger just this side of vintage value, was parked by the kerb and the front door was open. On the step, in the sunshine, Hardy lay asleep, but he woke up when Philip appeared, and ran to make a fuss of him. Now Philip remembered that Fee had said she would come on Sunday afternoon to take away the rest of her things, and as he entered the house, she came downstairs with a pile of clothes over one arm and a teddy bear clutched in the other.

“Whatever’s happened to your eye? Have you been in a fight?”

“Someone hit me,” he said, trying to be truthful; then, untruthfully, “They mistook me for someone else.”

“I’ve phoned about fifty times since yesterday morning.” “I’ve been out,” he said. “I’ve been out quite a bit.” “I realise that. I thought you must have gone away. That looks awful, that eye. Was it in a pub it happened?”

His mother didn’t question and check up on him, so he didn’t see why he should put up with it from a sister. She went out to the car, came back saying rather shrilly, “How long’s that poor dog been on his own?”

He didn’t answer. “Shall I give you a hand with that stuff?”

“All right. I mean, thanks. I thought you’d
be
here, Phil.”

She preceded him up the stairs. In the room that was now Cheryl’s alone, the doors of a clothes cupboard were open, one of the twin beds piled with dresses and coats and skirts. But the first thing he saw, the first thing he really took in, was the garment that lay in a heap on the floor of the cupboard. It was the bridesmaid’s dress which Senta had stripped off that day they first made love.

“She must really have liked that dress, mustn’t she?” said Fee. “She must really have appreciated it. You can see she just took it off and dumped it there. By the look of it, it somehow got soaking wet first.”

He said nothing. He was remembering. Fee picked up the ruined dress, the satin stained with water spots, the net creased, and the skirt torn at the hem. “I mean, I can understand if she didn’t like it. It was my taste, not hers. But you’d think she’d think of my feelings, wouldn’t you? I mean, finding it there sort of just discarded. And poor old Stephanie. She sat up nights to finish making that.”

“I suppose she just didn’t think.”

Fee pulled a suitcase down from the top of the cupboard. She began folding things up and putting them in the case. “Mind you, she’s very peculiar. I only asked her to be my bridesmaid because Darren’s mother specially asked me to. She said Senta would feel left out. I’m sure she
wouldn’t
have. They’ve really split off from the rest of the family, that lot. I mean, we asked Senta’s father and her mother, but they didn’t come, they didn’t even answer the invitations.”

With seeming indifference, he said, “Someone said Senta had a foreign mother but that she was dead. I suppose they’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

It gave him an odd little thrill to speak her name so casually. He waited for Fee’s denial, watched her, expecting her to turn round to him, her upper lip raised, her nose wrinkled up, the face she made when something she found incredible was said to her. She folded the bridesmaid’s dress up, said, “I may as well take it with me. I suppose I can have it cleaned, someone might want it. It’s miles too small for me.” She closed the lid of the case, fastened it. “Yes, there was something like that,” she said. “Her mother died when she was born. She came from some funny place. Greenland? No, Iceland. Darren’s uncle was in the merchant navy and they put in there or whatever the expression is, and he met her but her family were funny about it because he wasn’t an officer or anything. Anyway, they did get married and he had to go back to sea and she had his baby—I mean, Senta—and died of some awful complications or whatever.”

It was all true then. He felt both aghast and terribly pleased, relieved and appalled. There were more questions to be asked, but before he could ask them, Fee said, “Uncle Tom—I mean I’m supposed to call him ‘uncle’ now—he went back and fetched the baby. Her people were mad, Darren’s mother says, because they thought they’d get to keep her. Uncle Tom brought her home, and very soon after, he married Auntie Rita. She’s the one that lives with the young guy. Would you carry the case, Phil? And I’ll bring my winter coat and the two dolls.”

They loaded up the car. Philip made a cup of tea. It was so warm and sunny that they sat in the garden and drank it.

“I wish Mum hadn’t given Flora away,” Fee said. “I expect it sounds silly to you but I thought she gave the place a touch of class.”

“That’s something it needs,” said Philip.

He toyed with the idea of setting Flora up out here somewhere. Why shouldn’t he build a rookery for her? No one had done anything to the garden except mow the grass since they moved here. And that was all it was, grass with fences round it on three sides and bang in the middle the concrete bird bath. He tried to imagine Flora standing on rocks with flowers at her feet and a couple of little cypress trees behind her, but how could he explain to Christine?

“Come over and have a meal with us one night,” said Fee. “I mean, I won’t say you must miss Mum’s home cooking, but at least you don’t normally have to get it for yourself.”

He said he would and fixed on Thursday. By that time he would have seen Senta three times, so it would be reasonable to have an evening away from her the way he did when Christine was at home. After Fee had gone, he took Hardy a long walk up to Brent Reservoir, leaving by the back door and with the back door key in his pocket.

Senta’s telling him to get out, he had ruined her life, he took rather less than seriously. Certainly, he now saw, he had been at fault. She had naturally been furious at being disbelieved when she told the truth. For it
was
the truth, that was the amazing thing. All that must be true, for if the account of her mother’s nationality and her own birth was not fantasy, neither would her travels be nor her drama school training nor her meetings with the famous. Of course she was hurt and upset when he doubted her, when he told her so in that blatant way.

It was rather an awkward situation. He couldn’t exactly tell her he now believed her because he had questioned his sister about her. It needed some thinking out. In the light of what Fee had said, Senta’s rage was easy to understand. He had behaved like a narrow-minded clod, living up to her estimate of people as ordinary and bent on living in an ordinary world. Was it perhaps hysteria, a kind of uncontrollable angry misery at her word being disbelieved, that had led her to all that talk about proving his love for her? The difficulty was he couldn’t now remember what had come first, his declaration of disbelief or her demand that he kill someone for her. He would set it right, waste no more time. Take Hardy home and go straight back to Tarsus Street.

Falling asleep and staying asleep quite a long way into the night was something he wouldn’t have expected to happen to him. But he had had almost no sleep the night before and no more than two or three hours on Friday night. Returned from their walk, he had fed the dog, eaten a hunk of bread and some cheese, gone upstairs to change, and there lain down on the bed for what was to be a ten-minute nap. It was dark when he awoke, long dark. The illuminated green hands on his digital clock told him it was 12:31.

Their confrontation, his deep apology and request for forgiveness, must wait until tomorrow. Well, tonight really, he thought as he drifted off once more into sleep. Hardy, for once not shut up in the kitchen for the night, lay curled up on the end of the bed by his feet.

It was the little dog coming close up to his face, licking his ear, which awoke him. He had forgotten to set the alarm, but it was only seven. Soft hazy sunshine filled the room. Already, at this hour, you could feel in the air the promise of a hot and perfect day, that kind of expectant smiling serenity that breathes from a sky that is cloudless but veiled in a fine mist. It was what the older people called “settled.” Rain and cold seemed something that happened in another country.

He had a bath, shaved, put Hardy out into the garden, which was going to have to suffice for him this morning. Yesterday’s miles ought to last him a day or two. Philip put on a clean shirt and the suit which Roseberry Lawn expected its personnel to wear when visiting customers. He had a kitchen conversion to keep an eye on in Wembley and a projected bathroom installation to estimate in Croydon. Wembley wasn’t far away, but the fitters would start work at eight-thirty. He felt for his keys in the pocket of the jeans he had worn yesterday.