The Bridesmaid (16 page)

There he had a hamburger in Macdonald’s and afterwards two pints of bitter in Biddy Mulligan’s. It was getting on for half-past eight but still broad daylight. The rain had stopped, though the thunder still rolled. Mrs. Finnegan had been wrong and it hadn’t cleared the air. Back in Tarsus Street he knocked on the front door again and hammered on the basement window. Looking up at the house, this time from the opposite pavement, he saw that the shutters at the window on the middle floor were still closed. Perhaps they always had been and it was an illusion of his that they had been open until that afternoon. He had begun to feel a little mad, that maybe it was all illusion that she lived here, that anyone lived here, that he had ever met her and made love to her and loved her. Perhaps he was mad and it was all part of his delusion. It could be schizophrenia. After all, who knew what it was like to have schizophrenia until you had it yourself?

At home he found the poor dog hiding from the storm under the dining table, shivering and whimpering. His water bowl was empty. Philip filled the bowl and put out Kennomeat and, when Hardy didn’t want to eat it, took him on his lap and tried to comfort him. It was plain that Hardy only wanted Christine. When the thunder growled in the distance, he trembled till his skin shook. Philip thought, I can’t go on like this. I can’t face life without her. What shall I do if I never see her again, if I never touch her, hear her voice? Carrying the dog under one arm, he went out to the phone and dialled her number.

The line was engaged.

That had never happened before. The phone was answered, then. Someone answered it. At worst, someone took the receiver off so that when people tried to get through, they heard the engaged signal. He felt a great absurd surge of hope. The last thunderclap had been at least ten minutes ago. In the darkening sky, clear areas were opening between the rolling hills of cloud. He carried Hardy into the kitchen and set him down in front of his food dish. As the little dog began cautiously to eat, the phone rang.

Philip went to the phone, closed his eyes, held his fists clenched, prayed, Let it be her, let it be her. He picked up the phone, said hallo, heard Fee’s voice. Immediately, before she had said two words, he remembered.

“Oh God, I was supposed to be coming to have a meal with you and Darren.”

“What happened to you?”

“We’ve been run off our feet at work. I was late home.” How well lately he had learned to lie! “I forgot. I’m sorry, Fee.”

“So you bloody should be. I have to work too, you know. I went shopping in my lunch hour for you and I made a pie.”

“Let me come tomorrow. I can eat it tomorrow.”

“Darren and I are going to his mum’s tomorrow. Where were you anyway? What’s happening to you? You were funny on Sunday, and that eye and everything. What have you been doing the minute Mum goes away? I’ve nearly gone mad sitting here waiting.”

You and me both, Fee. “I said I’m sorry. I really am. Can I come on Saturday?”

“I suppose so.”

It was his first experience of expecting, when the phone rang, to hear one special, loved, longed-for voice, and hearing another. He found it very bitter. To his shame, though there was no one there but Hardy, he felt his eyes fill with tears. Suppose she wasn’t holding out on him, though, suppose something had happened to her. Unwillingly he remembered Rebecca Neave, who had disappeared, who had not been there to answer phone calls when needed. Tarsus Street was a slum compared to where Rebecca had lived. He thought of the street by night and of the big empty house.

But the line
had
been engaged. He would try again and if the signal he had heard before still obtained, would ask the operator if the line was off the hook. The idea that in a moment or two he might actually hear her voice was almost too much for him. He sat down crouched over the phone and expelled his breath in a long sigh. Suppose he spoke to her and in five minutes, less than five minutes, he were to be back in the car, driving down to Cricklewood, down Shoot-up Hill, bound for Tarsus Street. He dialled the number.

It was no longer engaged. He heard the familiar ringing tone as he had heard it at Mrs. Finnegan’s, as he had heard it thirty, forty times in the past days. It rang six times, stopped. A man’s voice spoke.

“Hallo. This is Mike Jacopo. We are not available to speak to you right now, but if you would like to leave a message and your name and phone number, we will get back to you as soon as possible. Please speak after the bleep.”

Philip had known from almost the first word, from the stilted manner and enunciation, that these sentences were recorded for an answering machine. The tone sounded on a single shrill beep. He replaced the receiver and wondered as he did so if the long indrawn gasp he had made was recorded for Jacopo to hear.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

Fee and Darren were buying their flat on an enormous mortgage extending over forty years. They had been granted it only because they were so young. Philip, sitting in their small bright living room with its view of the entrance to a new shopping mall, wondered how they could bear it, any of it, the prospect of those forty years, like forty links in an iron chain.

The flat was in West Hendon, where there was a large Indian community and most of the grocer’s shops sold papadums and Indian spices and gram flour. Most of the building was newish but it was also mean. If it had been anywhere else, they wouldn’t have been able to afford it, even paying back the loan over more than half a lifetime. For the first few years, Darren said, they wouldn’t exactly be paying it back anyway, they would just be paying interest. There was this room and a bedroom and the kitchen, where Fee ran around like a real housewife cooking potatoes and inspecting her pie through the glass door of the new oven, and a shower room about the size of the one he had suggested Mrs. Finnegan should have. Darren said he hadn’t had a bath for a month. He laughed when he said this, and Philip could imagine him repeating it over and over to people at work, delighted by his joke.

“No, seriously, I’m hooked on showers. I wouldn’t give you a thank-you for a bath now. Indians never have them, did you know that? What was it that chap in the shop told you, Fee, what’s-his-name, one of those funny Indian names?”

“Jalal. His name’s Jalal. He said his people laugh at us slurping around in our own dirty water.”

“When you come to think of it,” said Darren, “that’s just what we do. Those of us with baths, that is.” He reeled off statistics about the number of households in Britain with baths, the number with two, and the number without any. “You want a shower while you’re here, Phil?”

Philip hadn’t been back to Tarsus Street since he heard the voice on the answering machine. Thursday night had been sleepless. Mike Jacopo, he was convinced, must be Senta’s lover. He and she lived there together, that was what that ‘we’ on the recording meant. Jacopo had gone away or they had quarrelled, and to spite him or show she didn’t care or something, she had turned to Philip and led him to that secret room down there in the basement. For three weeks. Then Jacopo came back, and she staged a quarrel with Philip to be rid of him. There were holes in this theory, but he held on to it with variations all through Friday and Saturday until, late on Saturday afternoon, it came to him that there was no reason why Jacopo shouldn’t simply be another tenant, the tenant perhaps of the ground floor. ‘We’ didn’t necessarily mean him and Senta. It could be him and anyone.

Now, at Darren and Fee’s flat, he knew he could probably get answers to this by simply asking straight out. But if he asked any more questions about Senta, if he asked one more, they would guess. He thought, the truth is I don’t want to know about Jacopo, I only want her back, I only want to see her and speak to her. Darren talked about the new Rover and football and football hooligans in Germany. They ate the pie and a very rich, sweet trifle, and then Darren got out his colour slides, at least a hundred of them, which Philip felt obliged to look at.

The wedding photographs had come, the ones taken by the elderly photographer who smelt of tobacco, and Philip found himself looking at Senta in her bridesmaid’s dress. Was that the nearest he would ever get to her, a portrait she shared with four others and which he had to share with two? Darren sat beside him and Fee looked over his shoulder. He was aware of the thudding of his heart and wondered if they could hear it too.

“You can see she’s done acting,” Darren said.

Philip’s heart seemed to beat louder and faster. “Has she?” he managed and his voice sounded hoarse.

“You can see that. When she left school, she went to this acting college. She’s a bit of a show-off, isn’t she? Look at the way she’s standing.”

Fee asked him to come back and have Sunday lunch with them, she was doing roast lamb. Philip didn’t think he could face it. He said he had things to do at home, work to catch up on. In the morning he regretted his refusal, for the empty day stretched in loneliness before him, but he didn’t phone Fee. He took Hardy up on the Heath and walked about trying to think of some way of getting into that house, short of breaking in. Later, during the long light evening, he phoned her number and once more heard Jacopo’s recorded message. Philip replaced the receiver without saying anything and tried desperately to think. After a few moments he picked it up again, redialed, and when the tone had sounded said, “This is Philip Wardman. Will you please ask Senta to phone me? It’s Senta Pelham who lives in the basement. Will you please ask her to phone me as a matter of urgency?”

Christine and Cheryl would be home on Wednesday. He couldn’t face the thought of being with other people, having to talk to them, to hear about yet another holiday. Lying awake in the dark, listening to soft rain stroking the windowpanes, he thought of Senta’s truthfulness and honesty and how he had ascribed her accounts of her experiences to fantasising. The rain fell more and more heavily throughout the night, and in the morning it was still pouring. He drove along partly flooded roads to Chigwell to see if the fitters were having any problems with Mrs. Ripple’s bathroom.

This time he didn’t even glance out of the window towards Arnham’s garden. He had lost interest in Arnham. He had lost interest in everything and everybody but Senta. She occupied his mind, she had moved into his mind and lain down on the bed, from where she stared into his inner eyes. He moved dully, he was like a zombie. Mrs. Ripple’s hard, snapping voice uttering complaints was just a noise, a nuisance. She was complaining about the marble top of her vanity unit, there was a flaw in the veining, a tiny flaw, no more than a scratch and on the underside, but she wanted the whole slab of marble renewed. He shrugged, said he would see what he could do. The fitter winked at him and he managed a wink in return.

Last time he was here, Senta had been with him. She had kissed him in the car outside Mrs. Ripple’s house, and later, out in the country, they had made love on the grass, hidden by a ring of trees. He had to have her back, he was desperate. He thought once more of breaking that window, forcing those shutters apart, sawing through them if necessary. His imagination showed him himself thus breaking and entering and her waiting there for him, crouched on the end of the bed, reflected in the great mirror. And it showed him a similar entry to the room, through smashed glass and shattered wood, to find it empty.

Tarsus Street was bad enough in sunshine, horrible in the rain. One of the ever-present rubbish bags had burst and its contents, mostly paper, exploded across pavement and roadway, scraps alighting in surreal ways. The rain had pasted a biscuit-packet wrapper round the trunk of a lamp post in the manner of some council notice. The railing spikes speared the separated leaves of a paperback book. Wet newspaper squelched in corners with matchboxes and juice cartons in its lap. Philip got out of the car and stepped across a puddle in which a yogurt pot floated. The facade of the house was unchanged except that the window-box had filled with water, which overflowed in a stream down the dark wet bricks. The shutters upstairs and her shutters remained closed.

He stood in the rain staring up at the house. There was nothing else to do. He had begun to notice all kinds of things about it that at first he had missed. There was a Greenpeace sticker in the left corner of the top left-hand window. On the painted framework of the middle-floor shutters something had been written in pencil beside a little pencil drawing. He was too far away to see what was written or drawn. Inside the middle window on the top floor a green glass wine bottle stood on the sill, a little way right of centre. The rain continued to fall steadily from a sky which was precisely the same shade as the grey slates on the roof. He noticed that from the pitched roof of the porch one tile was missing.

He went up the stairs and banged on the front door, avoiding the coiled pile of dog turd on the second step. After a while he looked through the letterbox. This time he saw the phone and the passage leading away to the basement stairs and something new. Two envelopes lay on the table beside the phone.

At home he changed out of his suit and hung it up to dry, dried his hair on a towel, remembering how, that first day, she had asked for a towel to dry her own. He cooked egg and bacon but, when it was served up on a plate with a hunk of bread and butter, couldn’t eat it. The phone rang and his heart hit his ribs. No voice would come when he lifted the receiver, he was sure of that. It was a kind of croak he gave.

“Are you OK?” Fee said. “You sound peculiar.”

“I’m fine.”

“I rang to know if you wanted me to get anything in for Mum on Wednesday. You know, a loaf and some ham or something.”

The question he longed to ask, was dying to ask, was displaced by another, seemingly less significant. “Was it RADA Senta was at? Was it the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art?”

“What?”

He repeated the question. He was starting to feel sick. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “How should I know?”

“Would you ask Darren, please?”

“Why do you want to know?”