The Bridesmaid (20 page)

It was rather worse than he had imagined.

He went home first for his evening meal and got to Tarsus Street at about half-past seven. For by no means the first time that day, he found himself on the way carefully rehearsing the story he had prepared for Senta. He also had the piece from the
Standard,
which he had snipped out with Christine’s hair-cutting scissors, and a pound coin in his pocket for the old man called Joley.

His feelings about Joley remained superstitious. It was as if he had been appointed both the guardian of Senta and of their love, and yet it was not that in any real sense but more as if the old man had to be placated with gifts to keep Philip’s relationship with Senta secure. Some sort of malevolence would make itself felt if these pound coins were not forthcoming, a malice that might positively harm him and Senta. He had tentatively said something of this to her the night before—he was trying to supply flights of fancy of his own to match hers—and she talked of fees for a ferryman and sops for a dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld. This was mostly incomprehensible to Philip but he was glad to see Senta pleased.

Joley wasn’t there this evening. There was no sign of him or his trolley laden with coloured cushions. It seemed somehow a bad omen. A terrible temptation visited Philip to put off for another day the story he had to tell Senta. But when would the opportunity come again? There might not be another chance of this kind for weeks. He would have to do it, to stop thinking of it in this self-examining, excruciatingly analytical way, but just do it.

In a cold tone, quite unlike the usual way he spoke to her, he said abruptly that he had done what she wanted. Her face became alive with expectancy. The sea-wave eyes, green and water white, flashed. She took hold of his wrists. He found it impossible to say the words baldly. He gave her the cutting.

“What’s this?”

He spoke as if testing his knowledge of a foreign language, listening to each word. “It will tell you what I did.”

“Aaah!” It was a long, satisfied indrawing of breath. She read the paragraph two or three times, gradually smiling. “When did you do it?”

He hadn’t supposed too many details would be required. “Last night.”

“After you left me?”

“Yes.”

It reminded him of an amateur production of
Macbeth
he had seen while still at school.

“You took up my suggestion, I see,” she said. “What happened? You left here and drove to the Harrow Road, did you? I suppose you had a piece of luck and just found him there hanging about?”

He experienced a tremendous revulsion of feeling, not from her but from the subject itself, a physical distaste as strong as the recoil would be from the dog’s turds on the step, from a seething mass of maggots. “Let’s just take it that I did it,” he managed to say. His throat was constricted.

“How did you do it?”

He would have shunned the idea if he could. He would have escaped from the knowledge, absolute and indisputable, that she was excited, was revelling in a kind of lustful, pleasurable prurient interest. She moistened her lips, parted them as if a little breathless. The hands that held his wrists moved up his arms drawing him to her. “How did you kill him?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Senta, I can’t.” And he shuddered as if he had actually committed some terrible act of violence, as if he remembered a knife going in, a gush of blood, a scream of agony, a struggle and a final helpless yielding to death. He hated these things and other people’s gloating fascination with them. “Don’t ask me, I can’t.”

She took his hands and held them out, palms upwards. “I know. You strangled him with these!”

It was no better than contemplating the knife and the blood. He fancied he could feel his hands tremble in hers. He forced himself to nod, to answer. “I strangled him, yes.”

“It was dark, was it?”

“Of course. It was one in the morning. Don’t ask me any more about it.”

He could see she didn’t understand why he refused to give details. She expected him to furnish her with a description of the night, the empty silent street, the victim’s helpless trust—and his own predatory seizing of opportunity. Her face blanked as it sometimes did when she was disappointed. All animation departed, all feeling, and it was as if those eyes turned inwards to contemplate the workings of her mind. With her little girl’s hands she took hold of two thick locks of her silver hair and drew them down across her shoulders. Her eyes seemed to turn outwards and fill with light.

“You did it for me?”

“You know it. That’s what we agreed.”

A long shudder, that might have been real or equally might have been contrived, shook her body from head to foot. He reminded himself that she was an actress. This kind of thing was necessary to her and he would have to live with it. She laid her head against his chest as if to listen to his heartbeat and she whispered, “Now I shall do the same for you.”

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

To follow Cheryl had been far from his intention when they set out. It was the first time he had actually been out with his sister since the day they had all gone to Arnham’s house, and Christine and Fee had been with them then. Not since before his father’s death had he and Cheryl gone out alone.

It was Saturday evening and he was on his way to Tarsus Street. It was somehow harder to tell a mother who never asked questions that you wouldn’t be back till the following evening than if she probed and pried. But he had told her, in a casual way, and she had given him her innocent, unsuspecting smile. “Have a nice time, dear.”

Soon it would all be out in the open. Once he was engaged there would be no problem about saying he would be staying overnight at Senta’s. He was getting into the car when Cheryl came running out and asked for a lift.

“I’m going down the Edgware Road, that way.” “Go on, make a detour and take me to Golders Green.” It would be a hefty detour but he agreed; he was curious. There was something disquieting in the idea that while she had a secret from him, he also had one from her. No sooner had they turned the corner into Lochleven Gardens than she was asking him for a loan.

“Just a fiver, Phil, then you could take me straight down the Edgware Road.”

“I’m not lending you money, Cheryl, not anymore.” He waited a moment and when she didn’t say anything, “So what’s going to happen in Golders Green? What’s the big deal there?”

“A friend I can borrow it from.” She said it airily enough.

“Cheryl, what’s going on? I’ve got to ask. I know you’re into something. You’re never home except at night, you don’t have any friends, you’re always alone, and you’re always trying to get money. You’re in some kind of bad trouble, aren’t you?”

“It’s nothing to do with you.” The old brooding sulky note was back in her tone but there was indifference too, an edge of don’t-care to it that told him questioning didn’t bother her, interference amounted to nothing because she could parry it by admitting nothing.

“It’s to do with me if I lend you money, you must see that.”

“Well, you’re not going to, are you? You’ve said you’re not, so you might as well shut up.”

“You can at least tell me what you’re going to do this evening.”

“Okay, you tell me what you’re doing first. Only don’t bother. I know. You’re seeing that Stephanie, aren’t you?”

Her conviction, quite erroneous, as to what he had been and would be doing made him wonder fleetingly if his own certainty that she was addicted to drugs or drink might be equally mistaken. If she could be wrong—and she
was
wrong—so could he. He didn’t even bother to deny what she had said, and he was aware of her triumphant nodding. At Golders Green, by the station where the buses turned round, he dropped her. It was his intention to drive down the Finchley Road, but as he watched Cheryl move off in the direction of the High Road, the idea came to him to follow her and watch what she did. It struck him as very odd that she was carrying an umbrella.

It had been raining and looked as if it would rain again. The few people he saw about were carrying umbrellas, but for Cheryl to do so seemed to him unprecedented. What could she want to protect from the rain? Not her short spiky hair surely. Not her jeans or the shiny plastic jacket. It was as incongruous seeing her with an umbrella as it would be if Christine were to put on jeans. He parked the car in a side turning. When he emerged into the main street again, he thought he had lost her and then he spotted her quite a long way away in the curve of the High Road, walking along the rather wide pavement.

When the green figure of the marching pedestrian lit up, he ran across the Finchley Road. It was midsummer light and would be for two hours yet, but the light was gloomy from rain and a threatening dark overcast. This place would be crowded when the shops were open, cars double-parked on the roadway and the passage of buses between them slow. It was a shopping centre only, and now, without cinemas or pubs, with scarcely a wine bar, the street was deserted but for Cheryl walking along close to the windows. Not quite deserted. Philip realised rather unhappily that what he meant was, it was empty of a responsible, conventional, orderly sort of people. There were three punk boys looking into the window of a motorcycle accessories store. A man walked alone on the other side, Cheryl’s side, a tall thin man in leather and with his hair in a pigtail.

For a moment Philip thought Cheryl was going to accost this man. He was walking towards her but much nearer the kerb, and as he approached, she seemed to veer out from the shelter of the shop windows. By this time Philip had stationed himself in the doorway of a building society’s office on the same side as the punk boys. He had wondered from time to time if it were some kind of prostitution Cheryl engaged in. The idea was extraordinarily distressingly distasteful. It would account for her sudden accessions of money but not for her desperate need of small temporary loans. And now he saw that he had been wrong—at least in this instance—for Cheryl walked past the leather-clad man with head averted. She had let him pass by and now she stood, looking warily about her. There was no doubt she was looking to see if the street was as empty as it appeared to be.

Him she couldn’t detect, he was sure of that. She stared directly at the punk boys who had come away from the window and looked across the street at her, but without interest, without thought of involvement. And Philip realised something. Before Cheryl performed the act that was to overthrow all his guesses as to what she had come here for, he realised that she didn’t care if she was observed by the punk boys, for they and she were of a kind, not only heedless of the law but joined in a silent pactless conspiracy against it. They were the last people who would tell on her.

Tell on her for what misdeed?

Satisfied that she was unobserved, she slipped into the entry of one of the shops. It was a clothes boutique with a plate glass door. Philip saw her crouch down in front of this door and apparently insert something through the large letterbox of silver-coloured metal. Was she breaking in? A cry of protest sprang up in him and he suppressed it, hand over his mouth.

It was impossible for him to see from this distance and in this light what she was doing. He could only see her back and bent head and the action she performed, which was that of a person spearing something. The street remained empty, though a car passed in the direction of the station. Philip was aware of a purring silence, the purr being the distant, eternal, regular throb of traffic. Suddenly Cheryl gave a sharp tug with her right arm, backed, still on her haunches, sprang to her feet, and drew something out through the letterbox. Then Philip saw it all, understood it all.

The umbrella, used as a hook, had withdrawn a garment from some rack or counter inside the shop. It might have been a sweater or a blouse or a skirt. He couldn’t tell. She gave him no chance to see but rolled whatever it was up and thrust it inside her jacket. He was stunned by what he had seen, his feelings temporarily deadened, but he was also fascinated. It wouldn’t be true that he wanted her to do it again, but he wanted to see it done again.

For a moment he thought this would happen, for she approached another boutique a few shops along and stood there with her nose pressed to the glass. But then, shocking him once more with the suddenness of it, she spun round and began to run. She ran, not in the direction he expected—that is, back to the Finchley Road—but the opposite way, crossing the road and plunging down a side street near a railway bridge. Philip considered following her but very quickly dismissed this idea and returned to his car.

Was that what it was about? Was that all it was about, a kind of crazy addiction to stealing things from shops? He had read somewhere that kleptomania was nonsense, it didn’t really happen. What did she do, anyway, with the things she stole?

When he first considered telling Senta about it, he dismissed the idea almost at once. Second thoughts, surfacing as he drove across north London and down West End Lane, made him confront this proposition again. Wasn’t that what a relationship like theirs ought to be about, confiding in each other, telling each other their doubts and fears? If they were going to be together always, in a lifelong partnership, they must unburden themselves to each other, they must share their troubles.

He drove to Senta’s by way of Caesarea Grove, passing the big gloomy church of rough-hewn grey stone in whose west porch Joley sometimes encamped himself for the night. But the porch was empty and the iron gates into the graveyard fastened with chains and a padlock. When he was a child, Philip had been afraid to pass places of this sort, churches or houses built to look like some grim edifice of the Middle Ages, and would have made a detour or gone by at a run with eyes averted. He remembered this now, the memory of his fear strongly felt, though not the fear itself. A dozen gravestones, no more, remained under the trees with their black trunks and pointed leathery leaves. He had slowed for some reason to look in there, but now he accelerated, turned the corner, and parked outside Senta’s house.