The Bridesmaid (22 page)

First, she would have a bath in their bathroom. She didn’t think there was any blood on her, but whether there was or not, she felt less than clean after what she had done. That was why she had worn the dark red tunic, so that blood wouldn’t show if it splashed on to her. If there were any splashes, they must be tiny ones. She had conducted a thorough search of her clothes while in the train.

Philip followed her upstairs, up on to the first, then to the second floor. He had never been into the upper regions of the house before. It was uniformly shabby, dusty, and with a kind of dreary squalor. He glanced into a room where an unmade bed was piled with plastic sacks from whose open tops clothes spilt. Cardboard crates that had once contained tins of food were stacked against the walls. There were a lot of flies, buzzing about pendent light bulbs without shades. Senta went into a bathroom where the walls and ceiling were a shiny bright green, the floor composed of patches of variously coloured linoleum. She stripped off her clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor.

An unexpected thing had happened. He felt no desire for her. He could looked at her naked, undeniably beautiful, and feel nothing. She was less than a picture, far less than a photograph, as unerotic as stone Flora. He closed his eyes, rubbed his closed eyes with his fists, opened them again, and watched her step into the water—and felt nothing. From the bath she talked to him about coming back in the train, her initial fear that she was followed, her later obsessive search for a spot of blood somewhere, her examination of her fingers and her nails. He felt afraid, out of control. It was the kind of thing he especially hated, crime, the stuff of thrillers, an absorption with hideous violent things.

He couldn’t stay in the bathroom with her. He wandered aimlessly in and out of rooms. She called after him in that sweet, rather high-pitched tone of hers, as if nothing had happened, as if he were a casual visitor.

“Go and have a look at the top floor. I used to live up there.”

He went up. The rooms were smaller and narrower, the ceilings sloping under the roof. There were three rooms, no bathroom, but a lavatory and a small kitchen with a very old oven in one corner and a space where perhaps a refrigerator had once stood. All the windows were closed and on one of the sills stood the green wine bottle he had seen from the street. It felt and smelt as if no window had been opened for months, years. Outside, the sun was shining, but it seemed remote, barriers of dirty glass like a fog hanging between here and that distant sunlight. Through the grey encrusted panes the roofs of Queens Park and Kensal were a faded photograph or one overexposed.

Philip had come up here for something to do. He had come to be alone with pain and with fear. But now he was distracted from those emotions. He walked about in a kind of wonderment. The rooms were dirty with the kind of dirt he was growing used to in this house, and the smell was thick, like burning rubber in places, in others sweet and fishy, in the lavatory, where the pan was dark brown, as sharp and yellow-sour as rotting onions. But these were rooms, this was
accommodation.
He found himself noting the kind of things it was his job to note, the big cupboards with their panelled doors, the floorboards, the sink of stainless steel, the curtain rails, the few pieces of furniture.

She was calling him. He came down to her and said, “Why did you move down to the basement?”

She burst out laughing, a long musical trill. “Oh, Philip, your face! You look so disapproving.” He tried to smile. “I didn’t like climbing all those stairs,” she said. “What did I want with all those rooms anyway?”

She dried herself and put on the silver dress with the grey flower, and they went out to a pub for lunch. He drove her to Hampstead and they sat in a pub garden and he ate chicken and chips in a basket while she had soup and salad and drank sparkling rosé Lambrusco. They went for a walk on the Heath, Philip spinning out the time, delaying their return to Tarsus Street. The way he felt, he thought it unlikely he would be able to make love to her. A terrible desolation had taken hold of him. What he thought of as his great love for her was all gone, vanished. The more she talked—and she talked of everything, of gods and men and magic, or murder, or what society calls crime, of herself and him and their future, of her past and her acting—the worse it became. She held his hand, and his cold hand lay inert in her warm one.

He suggested they go to the cinema, the Everyman or the Screen on the Hill, but she wanted to go home. She always wanted to go home. She liked indoors, underground. It made him wonder if she had moved down from that top flat because it was too exposed and vulnerable for her up there. They lay down side by side on the bed, and to his relief—a very temporary, unhappy relief—she fell asleep. He put his arm round her then and felt the warm aliveness of her, the rise and fall of her breath. But there was no more desire than if it were a stone girl that lay there, life-size in marble.

She had written him a note and now he would write her one. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night.” She hadn’t written “love” but he would. “All my love, Philip.” He got up carefully without disturbing her, closed the window and folded the shutters. She looked very beautiful lying there, her eyes shut, the long coppery lashes resting mothlike on the white skin. The closed lips were Flora’s, sculpted in marble, indented at their corners. He kissed her lips and felt with a shudder that he was kissing a mortally sick woman or even a corpse.

Before he left he checked that the keys were safe in his pocket. For all that, there seemed something final about the hollow clang with which the front door closed behind him, though he knew of course it wasn’t final, he was still only at the beginning.

Arnham wasn’t really a short man. You couldn’t call five feet eight short. It was only he who saw it this way because he was himself so tall. Arnham had been unfamiliar with dogs, but Arnham was married now. Suppose it was his wife’s dog? It might be that his wife was fond of dogs, already had a dog, this Scottie, before they were married. If Arnham had married Christine, they would have kept Hardy, of course they would. Philip thought about this all the way home. He walked into the living room and found Fee and Darren there with Christine, watching television.

The news was just coming on, in shortened form for a Sunday evening. Philip felt a bit sick. He wouldn’t have actually put the news on, he didn’t want to know, but as it was on, had started, he had to stay and know. His suspense was made worse by Darren’s constant interjections, urging the news reader to get on with it and come to the sport. But there was no item about a murder, a murder of any sort, and Philip felt better. He had begun asking himself how he could have been so stupid as even for a moment to think Senta could have killed someone—tiny, slight, child-fingered Senta.

“Cheryl says you’ve been taking Stephanie about,” said Fee, lighting a cigarette. The smoke brought him another flicker of nausea. “Is that a fact?”

“That’s all in Cheryl’s head,” he said, and, “you’ve seen Cheryl, then?”

“Why shouldn’t I have seen her? She lives here.”

He was going to have to talk to Fee about Cheryl. Fee would be the best person. But not now, not tonight. He got himself something to eat, a cheese sandwich and a cup of instant coffee, and offered to take Hardy round the block. Walking along with Hardy on the lead made him think of Arnham again, of Arnham lying dead and his own little dog whimpering over his body. The trouble was that Senta had described it all too vividly, had gone on and on about it. It was he who was going on and on about it now, his consciousness dominated by it. He was unable to alter the trend of his thoughts, and that night he dreamed of glass daggers. He was in Venice—or he was at any rate walking along by a canal in a city—when, turning a corner, he saw a man set upon by another in cloak and mask, a dagger of perfect and wicked transparency flash in the moonlight. The assassin fled; Philip rushed up to the victim who lay on his back with one pendent hand trailing in the dark water. He searched for the wound but found nothing where the dagger had gone in, only the kind of scratch a cat’s claw might make. But the man was dead and the body fast cooling.

During the previous week Philip had avoided newspapers. He hadn’t wanted to know if the police had found the murderer of the vagrant, John Sidney Crucifer. Blotting out the whole business from his mind, he had avoided everything that might be associated with it, every medium that might reveal more details of it. Television he had scarcely watched anyway since his reunion with Senta. Now he realised he had done nothing about replacing the radio in his car because he didn’t want to have to hear its news broadcasts.

This ostrichlike behaviour was possible only when it was a minor matter which was at stake. Today he couldn’t afford to ignore newspapers. He had to know for sure. On his way to Highgate, where Roseberry Lawn were putting two new bathrooms into an actress’s house, he stopped off and bought three morning papers from a newsagent’s. The car was parked on a double yellow line, but he couldn’t wait any longer before knowing. It was just a matter of keeping on the alert for an approaching traffic warden.

Two murders had taken place during Sunday, one in Wolverhampton, one in a place called Hainault Forest in Essex. All three newspapers had details, though none was leading on these stories. It would have been different had the victims been women, particularly young women, but both were men. Murdered men are less newsworthy. The Hainault Forest one wasn’t named, was described as being in his fifties. A forest ranger had found the body. There was nothing in any of the papers about the cause of death or the murder method.

Philip drove on to the actress’s house. She was a young woman called Olivia Brett who had had a phenomenal success in a television series. Now she was in constant demand. She was very thin, emaciated, and her hair was bleached to the same shade as Senta’s but it was shorter than Senta’s and much less thick and shiny. She was ten years older than Senta and the heavy pancake makeup she wore made her look older than that. She wanted to know Philip’s first name and called him by it, called him “darling” too, and asked him to call her Ollie, which everyone did, she said. She adored Roseberry Lawn bathrooms, they were better than anything she had seen in Beverly Hills. She adored colour, colour was what made life worthwhile. Would he like a drink? She wouldn’t have one, she would only have Perrier, because she was getting so enormously fat that soon the only parts open to her would be those of obese grandmothers.

Reeling somewhat under all this, refusing the drink, Philip made his way upstairs to look at the two rooms designated as bathrooms. This was to be simply a preliminary survey, too soon even for measuring up. Philip stood in the first of these rooms, already in use as a bathroom with very old-fashioned, shabby fitments, and stared out of the window. London lay below him, spread out at the foot of the northern hills. Chigwell was London, wasn’t it, not Essex? He was remembering now that there was a station on the Central Line called Hainault. In “confessing” to him, she had spoken of woods. Was that what she had meant, Hainault Forest? Was that the open wooded countryside near where Arnham lived?

The man was the right sort of age. A man of five feet eight might seem tall to Senta, who was so small. Oh, stop it, he said to himself, stop it. It’s all fantasy with her, it’s all invention. You might as well say that dream you had last night about the man stabbed with the glass dagger was real. Where would a girl like Senta get a glass dagger anyway? They’re not the kind of thing that are going to be on open sale. A small voice whispered to him: Ah, but she makes some of it up and some of it is real, you know that. She did go to drama school. It just wasn’t RADA she went to. She did travel, only not as far and widely as she said.

Olivia Brett had disappeared and a hard-faced housekeeper was waiting downstairs to show him, as she put it, off the premises. Philip said to himself, It’s obviously not Arnham, you know it’s not, you’re becoming neurotic over nothing. The only thing to do now is to put it all out of your head the way you did Crucifer. Don’t buy an evening paper, don’t watch the news. If you’re going to make a go of this, you have to show her fantasising isn’t on, fantasising is childish, and you’re not going to do that by going along with her fantasies like this. You should never have let any of it get started.

But look what happened when he protested, when he resisted. She had refused to see him. But would he really mind now if she refused to see him? The idea turned him cold, the enormity of it. You couldn’t love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you?

It didn’t occur to him not to go to Tarsus Street that evening. He told himself as he drove down Shoot-up Hill that he knew now why lying and fantasising was wrong. Because it brought so much trouble and misery and pain. He bought wine and chocolates for her. They were bribes and he knew it.

Entering the street from Caesarea Grove, he was assailed by a sudden anxiety over Joley. This was the longest period of time since the first time Philip had seen him that Joley had been absent from his regular beat. Again the church gates had been locked and the church porch empty. This time a week ago, nothing would have delayed Philip from rushing to Senta as soon as he could. Things had changed. He was quite prepared, even content, to put off seeing her for half an hour while he went in search of Joley.

Ilbert Street was his other haunt, he had told Philip. This long street linked Third Avenue with Kilburn Lane. He drove the length of it between the parked cars. It was a sultry, still evening, which certainly presaged a warm night, the sort of night on which Joley would contentedly sleep outdoors with no more than benefit of a doorway or patch of waste ground. Philip found it impossible to see much of the pavement because of the nose-to-tail parking. He managed to park his own car and then he set off to walk the street. Joley was nowhere. Philip left the main street and made a foray into the shabby dull little hinterland. By now the sun had set and feathers of red were uncurling all over the smoky grey sky. The feeling came back that his luck depended on Joley and now Joley was gone.