The Bridesmaid (17 page)

“Just ask him, please, Fee.”

He heard his question relayed to Darren in a tone stiff with sarcasm. They seemed to be arguing. Had it taken marriage to show Fee her childhood sweetheart was somewhat slow on the uptake? She came back to the phone.

“He says he went there once with his brother to see something she was in. It wasn’t like a building, you know what I mean, it was just a big house. Out west somewhere, Ealing, Acton.”

“RADA is near the British Museum, it’s in Bloomsbury. Is he sure it wasn’t there?”

“He says Ealing definitely. What is all this, Phil? What’s going on? You’re always asking questions about Senta.”

“I’m sure I’m not.”

“Darren says, ‘Do you want her phone number?’”

The irony! He knew that phone number better than his own, better than his own birth date, his address. He said, “No to that and yes to the first question. If you could get a loaf in and something for their supper, Fee.”

She was laughing as she said good-bye.

He sat there, pondering. It was new to him, this revelation that someone could both tell the truth and fantasise, for that was what it amounted to. She had told him true things and she had embroidered the truth. Where the truth was adequate, she had offered it to him, and where it fell short of glamour or drama, she had invented. Did he do that? Do we all? And where in this scheme of things did her request that he prove his love for her find its place? Was it a fantasy or a real demand for a real act?

Presently he dialled her number. This time the answering machine wasn’t on and the phone rang and rang unanswered.

It was late at night. The sky was dull and without visible stars, moonless, faintly misty, a smoky red where a horizon of roofs could be seen. Dampness was palpable in the cool, still air. On the corner where Tarsus Street met Caesarea Road stood three men about Philip’s own age, one of them a Rastafarian, the others white, nondescript, one wearing several rings in the lobe of his right ear. Philip noticed the rings because they glinted in his car lights. The men turned to stare at him, watched the car, watched him get out of it. They did nothing.

The old bag man was nowhere to be seen. Philip hadn’t seen him since the weather changed. The street was still littered with rags of paper, cardboard boxes, cuboid juice cartons with straws still sticking out of them. A greenish lamplight glazed the moist sticky pavements, the railings, the gleaming humpbacks of parked cars. A dog came along the pitted concrete from Samaria Street, busy in pursuit of some unknown goal, perhaps the same dog which had deposited the heap of turds on the step. It disappeared down into the area next door. An occasional drop of water trickled and fell from the leaves on the plane trees.

Philip, momentarily, had a strange feeling that came quite unbidden. It was as if a voice within him asked him what he was doing seeking love, passion, perhaps a life’s partner, in this awful place. For what woman who had any choice about it, and alternative, would choose to live in this filthy sink of northwest London, this rancid hole? This unwelcome reflection fled as fast as it had come, for looking up wearily by now at the house, he saw the shutters had been closed at the middle window on the ground floor and between their boards, where the wood had warped, light showed in bright lines.

He ran up the steps. The front door was open. That is, it was unlocked, on the latch. He could hardly believe it. From somewhere inside came the sound of music in waltz time, the same kind of music as he had sometimes heard late at night lying in bed beside Senta. The “Blue Danube.” As he stood there, it stopped and he heard laughter and hands clapping. He pushed the door open and went in. The music, which was coming from inside the room on the left where the light showed through the shutters, began again, this time a tango, “Jealousy.” On all his visits to this house he had scarcely noticed that there were doors opening off this hallway, had never conjectured that there must be rooms behind. He had thought of nothing but going to Senta. This room, of course, would be directly above hers.

He must have made a sound, though he was unaware of it. Perhaps he had drawn in his breath sharply or his footsteps had made a floorboard creak, for the door was suddenly flung open and a man shouted, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Philip was silenced and in fact stricken statuelike as much by the sight of the two people who stood just inside the room as by the man’s violent and abusive tone. The pair of them were in evening dress. They reminded him of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in one of those thirties films you sometimes saw on television, and then he saw that they were not really like that at all. The woman was in her fifties, with a mane of long grey hair and a coarse, lined, though lively face and a sleek sinuous figure to which her shabby red silk dress clung. A bunch of bruised artificial flowers on the bodice, red and pink, trembled as she drew breath. Her partner was smart enough, though unshaven and with ragged hair. His face was white and thin, his hair yellow, and he was no more than four or five years older than Philip himself.

Finding a voice, Philip said, “I’m sorry. I was looking for Senta—Senta Pelham, she lives downstairs. The front door was open.”

“Christ, she must have left it open again,” the woman said. “She’s always doing that, it’s bloody careless.”

Her partner went over to the tape player and turned the sound down. “She’s gone to a party,” he said. “Who are you anyway?”

“Philip Wardman. I’m a friend of hers.”

For some reason the woman laughed. “You’re the one who left the message on our answer-phone.”

So this was Mike Jacopo. Philip said, stammering a bit, “Are you—do you—do you live here?”

The woman said, “I’m Rita Pelham and this is my house. We’ve been away a bit lately with the competitions up north.”

He had no idea what she meant, but he understood this was Senta’s mother, or the woman she called mother, and Jacopo the young lover Fee had talked about. Confusion robbed him of words. All that mattered anyway was that she wasn’t here, she was out, she had gone to a party.

Jacopo had turned the sound up again. The tango played. They moved into each other’s arms, hands stiff, heads erect. Rita swayed backwards, in the loop of Jacopo’s arms, her grey hair sweeping the floorboards. Jacopo moved into the stylised steps of the dance. As they passed the door, he kicked it shut. They had forgotten Philip. He went out through the front door, pushed up the latch, closed the door behind him.

Tarsus Street was empty. The Rastafarian and the two white men had gone. So had the radio from his car, which he had left unlocked, and the raincoat from the backseat.

It was only when he was home and in bed that he thought how he should have stayed there. He should have sat in the car until she came back, all night if necessary. He hadn’t thought of it because the theft of his radio and the raincoat, which was a Burberry, which he had bought with his Visa card and still hadn’t finished paying for, had shaken him rather a lot. Perhaps he could have persuaded Rita Pelham or Jacopo to let him into Senta’s room and stay the night there. Of course they wouldn’t have agreed to that, of course not.

That Rita owned the house and lived there somehow changed the aspect of things. It meant that Senta, like him, lived at home with her mother. It wasn’t quite like that, he could see it wasn’t, but it was a similar state of affairs. Things somehow became less sordid when seen in that light. Senta lived with her mother; she wasn’t responsible for the decay of the place and the dirt and the smell.

He slept and dreamed of her. In the dream he was in her room, or rather he was inside the mirror, watching the room through the glass: the bed that was piled with purple pillows and quilt, the wicker chair with her discarded clothes on it, the shutters folded across the window, the door that led to those corridors and caverns of rubbish, closed and with a chair set against it. He sat inside the mirror and it was like sitting in a tank of greenish water in which tiny specklike organisms swam, in which thin green fronds faintly swayed and a crawling snail left its silver trail on the other side of the glass. She came into the room, forcing the door open and knocking the chair over. She came close up to the glass and looked into the green speckled translucence without seeing him; she didn’t even see him when their faces were pressed together with the wet glass between.

Out with Hardy in the morning, along Glenallan Close, round Kintail Way, and back by way of Lochleven Gardens, he met the postman who handed him his own mail. There was another postcard from Christine, though she was coming home today, and a letter for her from one of her sisters. The postcard was of a street in Newquay this time and said: “I may be home before you get this so won’t give you any news. The X is supposed to mark our room but Cheryl says it is wrong because we are on the third floor. Much love, Mum.”

Philip put Christine’s letter on the mantelpiece. They seldom got letters, any of them. The people they knew and their relatives phoned if they wanted to communicate. But why shouldn’t he write to Senta? He could type the envelope at work so that she wouldn’t know who it was from. Yesterday morning he wouldn’t even have considered this, but things had changed. Rita and Jacopo were there and they got letters. He had seen two envelopes lying by the phone when he looked through the letter box. If a letter came for Senta, one of them would probably take it down to her and she would at least open it. When she saw it was from him, would she throw it away?

Bereft of his radio, he was driven back onto his own thoughts as he drove down to the West End to the head office. The difficulty would be in knowing what to say to her that would stop her throwing it away. Philip hardly ever wrote personal letters. He couldn’t remember the last time he had, and he had never written a love letter, which this must be. Normally, when he put pen to paper or, more often, dictated something to Lucy, the typist he shared with Roy and two others, the result was on the lines of: “Dear Mrs. Finnegan, This is to confirm receipt of your cheque for a deposit on the agreed work in the sum of £1,000. If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me at the above showroom at any time …” Still, he could write a love letter, he knew he could, phrases from the fullness of his heart and his longing were already coming to him, and he could apologise and beg forgiveness. He wouldn’t mind that, he wouldn’t find it humiliating. But she had asked him to prove his love for her….

Roy, still in a good mood, caught him doing the envelope on Lucy’s typewriter. “Writing your love letters on the company’s time now, I see.”

It was uncanny how near the bone people could get, and all unwittingly. Philip pulled the envelope off the roller. No doubt Roy really thought it was to Mrs. Ripple, for he said, “The order for that new bit of marble’s come through. Can you give the old bag a ring and tell her it’ll be with her by midday?”

He tried to do so on Lucy’s phone. The line was engaged for the first couple of attempts. While he waited, he had a look at Lucy’s
Daily Mail,
read a story about the IRA, one about a dog rescuing its owner from drowning in the Grand Union Canal, another which was an account of the murder of an old woman in Southall. He picked up the phone again and dialled Mrs. Ripple’s number.

“Hallo, who is it?”

Her voice came out of the receiver in a sharp blast, the sentence as if one polysyllabic word, not four. He told her who it was and passed on Roy’s message.

“About time too,” she said, and then, “I shan’t be here. I’m going out.”

He said he would get back to her. An idea had come to him out of the air, out of nothing, an idea of stupendous magnitude, a total solution. It felled him, so that he spoke to her in a tone of vagueness, hesitantly, unable to find the ordinary simple words.

“What did you say?”

He pulled himself together, said, “I have to talk to my colleague, Mrs. Ripple. With your permission, I’ll come back to you within five minutes.”

As if an observer or listener could read his thoughts, he shut the door. He picked up the newspaper again and looked once more at the account of the murder of the Southall woman. Why hadn’t he thought of this way out before? It was so simple, it was only another move in the game. For that was all it was to Senta, a game, but one that he also had to play. He even liked the idea of that, of a private secret game they both played, even when neither quite knew the truth of the other’s strategy. That only made it more exciting.

She was a fantasist who also told the truth about her own history. He still found that hard to get used to, but he knew it was an accurate analysis of her. Another aspect of her character was now revealed to him. She would want a lover—a
husband?
—to have an equally fantastic dream life. Even in the short time they had known each other, he might already have disappointed her by his failure to relate adventures and exploits of his own past. The point was that
she would know he was inventing and expect him to do this.
She did it herself, it was a way of life with her. He saw himself suddenly as stupid and insensitive. Because he had been too thick to respond to her invitation, a simple and innocent invitation to a shared fantasy, he had caused them all this misery, the worst ten days of his life.

The door opened and Lucy came in. It was she who picked up the receiver when the phone rang and held it at arm’s length to defend herself from Mrs. Ripple’s ear-shattering blast.

The letter he composed sitting at the table in the living room, where he was subject to a series of interruptions. First Hardy wanted a walk. Philip took him as far as the end of Kintail Way and began again: “Dear Senta …”

It looked cold. He wrote “Darling Senta,” and though he had never in his life called anyone “darling,” liked it better. “Darling Senta, I have missed you so terribly, I didn’t know what it was to miss anyone before. Please don’t let us ever be apart like that.” He would have liked to write about the sex they had, about making love to her, and the terrible deprivation not making love to her had been, but some deep inner shyness held him back. The act was lovely and open and free but the words embarrassed him.