The Bridesmaid (23 page)

His reluctance to see Senta increased as he returned to Tarsus Street. Why had he ever told her he had killed someone? Why had he been such a fool? It was true that he had told her in a very perfunctory way, in such a casual dismissive way that almost anybody would know he was making it all up. Surely she hadn’t really believed him. He let himself into the house slowly, almost wearily. He was like an unhappy husband coming home to noisy children and a quarrelsome wife.

Her burning joss stick scented the basement stairs. He let himself into the room. The shutters were closed, the bedlamp was on. It felt insufferably stuffy, and the heady spicy smell was almost overpowering. She lay face-downwards on the bed, her head in her arms. As he came in, she made a convulsive movement. He touched her shoulder, spoke her name. She turned slowly onto her back and looked up at him. Her face was crumpled and runnelled and squeezed with crying, pink and soggy and wet. The pillow into which her head had burrowed was actually wet, with tears or sweat.

“I thought you weren’t coming. I thought you were never coming back.”

“Oh, Senta, of course I came back, of course I did.”

“I thought I was never going to see you again.”

He took her in his arms then and held her. It was like hugging a frightened weeping child. What has happened to us? he thought. What have we done? We were so happy. Why did we spoil it with all these lies, these games?

Philip went into the library and looked Gerard Arnham up in the telephone directory which covered Chigwell. His name wasn’t there. The date on the directory was a year ago, so naturally he wouldn’t be there. It could be no more than six months since he had moved. An alternative would be to ask directory enquiries for the number, but at this point Philip wondered what he would say if someone other than Arnham answered—if, for instance, his wife answered. He could hardly ask her if her husband was still alive.

Three days had passed since Senta had told him she had killed Arnham. In that time she had been different and he had been different. The tables were turned. Now it was he who distanced himself from her and she who clung to him and wept. She said she had killed his enemy for him and that instead of being grateful, he hated her for what she had done. This was very nearly accurate except that he knew very well she hadn’t killed Arnham, had only said she had. Examining his feelings, he discovered his antipathy came from Senta’s pride in the idea of killing someone in a particularly brutal way. Or did it? Wasn’t it rather that he wasn’t sure she hadn’t done it, that there still lingered somewhere the germ of a fear that she actually had done it?

By now he had seen in a newspaper that the murdered man in Hainault Forest had been identified as Harold Myerson, aged fifty-eight, an engineering consultant from Chigweil. That was coincidence that he came from Chigweil, for there was no possibility Myerson could be Gerard Arnham. He wouldn’t have two names, and Arnham wasn’t as old as that. The only other murder which had taken place in the British Isles on the previous Sunday was the Wolverhampton one, a boy of twenty stabbed in a fight outside a pub. Philip knew that was true because he had been through three of Monday’s morning papers and the evening paper and had bought and scrutinised three more on Tuesday. This meant that Senta had done nothing on that Sunday and Arnham must be alive and Philip was being stupid, imagining crazy things. People one knew didn’t kill other people. It was outside one’s knowledge, a different world.

To account for his attitude towards her, he had tried to make her believe it stemmed from his anxiety. He made her tell him in precise detail the whole story over again, hoping to pick holes in it, to find discrepancies between the original account and this later one.

“Which morning did you go over there? You said you went over to Chigweil and watched the house in the mornings.”

“I went on the Tuesday and the Friday, Philip.”

He forced himself to say it, though he nearly gagged on the words. “That Tuesday was only the day after I told you I’d killed John Crucifer. I came here on the Monday night and told you how I killed Crucifer the night before.”

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s right. I knew I had to make a start. Once you’d done that for me, I knew I had to lay my plans. I got up very early, I didn’t get much sleep, and I got the tube out there and watched the house. I saw the woman open the door in her dressing gown and take a bottle of milk in. She’s a woman with a big nose and mouth and a lot of wild dark hair.”

Revelations like this made Philip shiver. He recalled the first time he had seen Arnham’s wife through the panes of the window patterned like a shield. Senta, sitting on the bed beside him, her legs tucked under her, her arms loosely round his neck, snuggled up to him.

“I felt good when I saw her. I thought, She’s the woman he married when he should have married Philip’s mother, and I thought how it would serve her right when he was dead and she was a widow. It’s wrong to steal other women’s men. If some woman tried to steal you from me, I’d kill her, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’ll tell you a secret about that, but not now, later. I’m not going to have any secrets from you, Philip, and you’re not going to have any from me—ever.”

“It was eight o’clock when Arnham came out with the little dog. He walked him to this bit of green where the trees were and took him in under the trees and then he walked him back. It only took about twenty minutes. I didn’t go away, though, I went on watching, and he came out again after a bit and he was dressed up in a suit and carrying a briefcase and she was with him, still in her dressing gown. He gave her a kiss and she put her arms round his neck like this.”

“And you went back on the Friday.”

“I went back on the Friday, Philip, to check up that he always did it. I thought she might sometimes do it, the thief woman. I got to give them names in my mind. Do you think that’s funny? I called him Gerry and her Thiefie and the little dog Ebony, because he was black. I thought, Suppose it turns out Thiefie takes Ebony out on Sundays. I’ll have come all the way out here for nothing, but I’d just have had to come back on the Monday, wouldn’t I?”

Philip found he couldn’t bear to hear about the stabbing again. When she reached the point where she had stepped up to Arnham under the trees and told him she had something in her eve, he stopped her by asking why she thought she might have been followed on her return journey to the tube station.

“It was just that there was this old woman on the station platform. I had ever such a long time to wait for a train, and she kept looking at me. I thought, have I got blood on me? But I couldn’t see any blood. And how could she have seen it when I was wearing that dark red tunic? And then when the train came, I was sitting in the train and I took my cap off and my hair came down. The old woman wasn’t there, she wasn’t in the same bit of the train, but other people were, and since then, Philip, I’ve been thinking, suppose she thought I was a boy but they could tell I was a girl and all of them sort of made the connection and thought it was suspicious? Don’t you think the police would have been here by now? They would, wouldn’t they?”

“You needn’t be afraid of the police, Senta.”

“Oh, I’m not
afraid.
I know the police are just agents of a society whose rules mean nothing to people like us. I’m not afraid, but I have to be on the watch, I have to have my story ready.”

If it had not been so distasteful, there would have been something ludicrous about the police tracking down Senta, who was so tiny and so innocent looking, with her big soulful eyes and her soft unmarked skin, her child’s hands and feet. Philip took her in his arms and began kissing her. He shut out the awful thoughts. He asked himself if it was not she but he who was mad, allowing himself to believe for an instant these elaborate inventions. Yet, within moments, opening their second bottle of wine, unwrapping for her a chocolate cherry encased in red silver paper, he was asking her for more details, to tell once again of following Arnham from his house to the open place where the grass and trees were.

In the underground room dusk came sooner than up above. It was gloomy and close down here where the smell of dust mingled with the scent of burning patchouli. At this hour, in the dimness, the big hanging mirror seemed like a sheet of greenish water in which their reflections could only vaguely be seen. It had a sheen on it like mother-of-pearl, thick and translucent. The bed, with its rumpled brown sheet and pillows and quilt, rather resembled some terrain of folded hills and deep valleys. Philip stopped her when she reached out to put the bed lamp on. He pulled her to him, sliding his hands inside the thin black skirt, the loose top of cheesecloth. Her skin was like warm silk, slippery and yielding. In the dark, with the shutters half-closed and only a little greyish light showing above the pavement level, he could imagine her as she had been before she made these revelations to him, he imagined her as she had been on those two occasions in his own bed.

Then and only then, with his eyes closed, was it possible for him to make love to her. He was learning how to fantasise.

In the middle of the night he woke up. He had decided long before not to go home that night. Once at least in the week he didn’t go home, and the previous evening and night he had spent at home with Christine. What had happened was that he had got into the habit of waking up, dressing, and silently letting himself out of the room and the house. He still woke up when he didn’t need to.

She lay asleep beside him. Yellow lamplight from the street fell across her face and turned the silver hair to a brassy gold. The window was open a little at the top and the shutters were ajar. In the past, often at this hour, the music had played overhead and the two pairs of feet danced, but now Rita and Jacopo were away somewhere. The old house with its weight of dirty cluttered rooms above them—a repository of stored rubbish slowly, gradually decaying—was empty but for them. Senta breathed with a silent regular rhythm, her slightly parted lips as pale as a shell.

But when he came back from closing the shutters and then fetching himself a drink from the bandaged brass tap, she was awake and sitting up. A white shawl with a fringe was around her shoulders. The light was on now, bright and uncompromising. The holes in the parchment shade made a spotted pattern on the ceiling. She must have put a more powerful bulb in the lamp since it was last on, for the higher wattage revealed the room in every aspect of its squalor, the dust on the wooden floor that showed as a clotting of grey fluff round the skirting board, the spiders’ webs and dark gritty deposits on the cornices, the chair whose wicker was coming unravelled, the dark old stains and spills on rug and cushions. He thought, I must take her out of this, we can’t live like this. Now that the light was on, a blowfly, awakened, zoomed round the sticky neck of one of the wine bottles.

Senta said, “I’m wide awake now. I want to tell you something. Do you remember I said I’d a secret to tell you and I’d tell you it later? It’s about women stealing men.”

He got back into bed beside her, wanting only sleep, aware that he had only five hours before he must get up, before he must get out of this bed and wash somehow, dress and go to work. It was ridiculous now to remember that he had forgotten to bring clean underpants and a clean shirt with him, such unimportant trivial things, doubly ridiculous in the light of what she said to him: “You know you’re not the first with me, don’t you, Philip? I wish I’d saved myself for you, but I didn’t and nothing can change the past. Even God can’t change history—did you know that? Even God can’t. I was in love with someone else once—well, I thought I was. I know I wasn’t really, now that I know what love really is.

“This man—well, he was a boy, he was just a boy—there was this girl who set herself out to steal him away and she did for a bit. Perhaps he would have come back in the end, I wouldn’t have wanted him then, not after her. Do you know what I did, Philip? I killed her. She was my first murder. I used the first Murano glass knife on her.”

He thought, is she mad? Or is she just mocking me? What went on in her mind that she had to invent these tales? What did she gain by it? He said, “Put the light out now, Senta. I have to get some sleep.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

A smell of rotten eggs crept up the stairs. That meant Christine was making an early start on a perm. Dogs had a sense of smell a million times better than that of man, Philip had read somewhere; so if it stank like this in his nostrils, what must it be like for Hardy? The little dog lay on the landing and feebly wagged his tail as Philip passed on his way to the bathroom. Each sight of him reminded Philip of the dog Senta said was Arnham’s, the dog she called Ebony.

He was tired. Given the chance, he could have gone back to bed and slept for hours. T-G-I-F, as his father used to say, Thank God it’s Friday. Cheryl had already been in the bathroom and had used his towel as well as her own. His thoughts drifted in her direction, to the night he had seen her steal whatever it was from the shop in Golders Green. He had done nothing about that, taken no action. His mind had been too full of Senta. Senta obsessed him and exhausted him.

The night before he had played with the idea of not going to Tarsus Street, but in the end he had gone. He had put himself in her shoes, remembering what it was like for him when she deserted him. He couldn’t bear her tears, her misery. Her room depressed him and he had taken her out, intending to kiss her and leave her to go back into the house alone. But the crying had begun and the pleading, so he had gone in with her and listened while she talked. It was the Ares and Aphrodite stuff again and about belonging to an elite, about power and disregarding man-made laws. They hadn’t made love.

Now, when he was alone, he kept asking himself what he was going to do. He had to rid his mind of these several obsessions, these pegs from which terrors hung: the sight of a dog, a knife, a tube station even. He had to dispel all that and think of their future, his and hers. Had they a future together? It struck him painfully that he had never carried out his intention of telling Christine and the rest of his family about Senta. Yet, until she began damaging their relationship with all this pretence of killing, the need to tell had been urgent. He had longed for everyone to know. He had wanted his love to be public, his commitment known.