The Bridesmaid (25 page)

“It’s a wonder we haven’t come across each other before.”

Philip explained that his visits to head office were not very frequent but said nothing about his own knowledge of precisely where Arnham worked. Rather tentatively Arnham said, “How’s your mother?”

“She’s well. Fine.” Why shouldn’t he pile it on a bit? Delighted as he might be to see Arnham, he needn’t lose sight of the fact that this was the man who had jilted Christine, had slept with her—Philip could face this quite equably now—and deserted her. “She’s got quite a profitable business going, as a matter of fact,” he said and proceeded to glib invention, “and a man who’s very keen on her.”

Was he imagining it or did Arnham really look a bit upset? “My sister Fee got married.” As he spoke the words, he seemed to see Senta in her bridesmaid’s dress, her silver hair spread across the coral satin, and a surge of love for her rose in him and choked the rest of what he meant to say.

Arnham didn’t seem to notice. “Have you got time for a quick drink? There’s a pub I sometimes go to just round the corner.”

But for the drive ahead of him Philip might have said yes. Anyway, he didn’t especially want to spend any more time with Arnham. The man had served his purpose, had proved his existence, had brought the total glorious peace of mind Philip thought he might never attain again.

“I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a rush.” It was funny how his appetite had entirely gone. Food would have choked him. Alcohol would have made him sick. “I’m running late as it is.”

“Some other time, then.” Arnham seemed disappointed. He hesitated, said almost shyly, “It would be—would it be all right if I gave your mother a ring sometime? Just for old time’s sake?”

Philip said, rather coldly now, “She’s still at the same place.”

“Yes, I’ve got her number. I’ve moved, of course.”

Philip didn’t say he already knew that. “Give her a ring if you want to.” He added, “She’s out a lot but you may catch her.” An urge to run seized him, to dance and shout proclamations of joy to the skies, to the world. He could have grabbed Arnham and danced him down the street, waltzing like Rita and Jacopo waltzed, singing with happiness the tra-la-las of merry widows and Vienna woods. Instead, he held out his hand to Arnham and said good-bye.

“Good-bye, Philip, it was good seeing you again.” Keeping himself from running, marching like a soldier with a banner, like a trumpeter, he had a feeling the man still stood there on the pavement behind him, following with a long disappointed gaze the jaunty departing figure. But when at the corner he looked back to wave, Arnham was gone.

Philip got into his car and immediately drove to the garage Roseberry Lawn used to ask them about replacing the radio in his car.

To make things perfect, Joley should have been there in Tarsus Street, seated on his barrow, munching his dustbin retrievings. Philip was sure he would be and even had a five-pound note ready to give him. But when he turned the corner out of Caesarea Grove, he saw at once in the clear evening light, as bright as noon, that Joley hadn’t returned. In spite of his need to see Senta, a longing which all afternoon he had believed couldn’t be postponed for a second longer than was necessary, he parked the car and walked back to look for Joley in the environs of the church.

The gates were unlocked and the church door itself stood half open. Philip walked round back over bleached grass that was permanently deprived of light, between mossy half-buried gravestones, in the deep shade of an ilex and a pair of great ragged cypresses. The smell here was of mould, like stale, damp mushrooms. It would have been easy, if you were fanciful, to imagine this was the smell of the dead. He could hear from the interior of the church an organ mournfully playing a hymn tune. There was no sign of Joley anywhere nor even of those remnants he sometimes left behind him as evidence of his sojourn in some sheltered corner, screwed-up bits of paper and a bone or two.

Philip came back and went into the church. It was empty but for the organist, who was invisible. The windows were of stained glass, darker and heavier glass than that in the Venetian shop, and the only light was from an electric bulb in a kind of censer that hung in the apse. The summer evening was warm but the cold in here was bitter. It was a disproportionate relief to come out once more into the mild, hazy sunshine. As he approached the house, he saw Rita come down the steps from the front door. She was dressed very showily in a short dress of flowered silk. Her stockings were white lace and her shoes scarlet with high heels. Jacopo followed, slamming the front door behind him. He took her arm and they walked off in the opposite direction. Tonight, in the small hours, Philip thought, they would dance above his head, waltzing to “La Vie en Rose” and tangoing to “Jealousy.” He didn’t care. He wouldn’t have cared if two hundred people had come to a ball up there.

He let himself into the house and ran down the basement stairs. As she had done once or twice before, as she had done in the way that delighted him beyond expression, she opened the door to him before his key turned in the lock. She was dressed in something new—or new to him. It was a long dress, nearly ankle length, of silky semitransparent pleated stuff, sea green with silvery green beads sewn into it. The thin slippery material clung to the voluptuous curves of her breasts, seeming to drip from them like slowly cascading water and trickle over her hips to stroke her thighs in a wave’s caress. Her bright silver hair was like needles, like the blades of knives. She put her mouth up to his, her little hands on his neck. Her tongue darted into his mouth, a little warm fish, withdrew itself with delicate slowness. He gasped with pleasure, with happiness.

How did she know there was nothing to say? Words were for later. But how did she know of the earthquake which had taken place, of his enormous change of feeling and of heart? She was naked under the green dress. She drew it over her head, pulled him gently onto the bed with her. The shutters were half-closed, the light that came in a distant dazzlement. In a saucer a joss stick of cinnamon and cardamon smouldered. Why had he ever thought he hated this room, found squalor in this house? He loved it, it was his home.

“Then you’ll come and live here with me,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about that, Senta. You once told me you used to live in the top flat.”

She sat on the bed, her arms clasped round her knees. Her face had become very thoughtful. It was as if she was calculating. If it had been anyone else, any other girl—Jenny, say—he would have thought she was considering rates and services bills and furniture, but that wasn’t Senta’s way.

“I know it’s a mess,” he said, “but we could clean it up and paint it. We could get some furniture.”

“Isn’t it good enough down here for you, Philip?”

“Basically, it’s too small. Doesn’t it seem a bit silly for two of us to try and live here when that top flat’s going begging? Or is it that you think Rita wouldn’t like it?”

She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “Rita wouldn’t mind.” She seemed to hesitate. “The thing is I
like
it down here.” Childishly diffident, her face took on its shy look. She said softly, “I’m going to tell you something.”

Momentarily he felt a tautening, the bracing of nerves that was preparatory now to hearing her tell some new lie or make some grotesque confidence. She moved close up to him, held on to his arm with both her hands, snuggled her face into his shoulder. “I do have a little bit of an agoraphobia problem, Philip. Do you know what that is?”

“Of course I do.” It rather irritated him, the way she sometimes had of treating him as if he were ignorant.

“Don’t be cross. You must never be cross with me. It’s why I don’t go out very much, you know, and why I like living below ground. Psychiatrists say it goes with schizophrenia. Did you know that?”

He tried a light approach. “I hope we’re going to live together all our lives, Senta, and I can tell you I don’t intend to spend fifty years in a burrow. I’m not a rabbit.”

It wasn’t very funny but it made her laugh. She said, “I’ll think about the flat. I’ll ask Rita. How will that do?”

It did wonderfully. Everything was at once made smooth. He marvelled, but in a calm and simply interested way, that things could have been tragic and terrible yesterday and that today, only because he had seen and spoken to a man who was the merest acquaintance, they were restored to perfection. He took her in his arms and kissed her.

“I want everyone to know about us now.”

“Of course you can tell them, Philip. It’s time to tell.”

As soon as he got Christine alone, he told her about Senta.

She said, “That’s nice, dear.”

What response had he expected? While Christine pottered about the kitchen, getting their evening meal, he thought about that. The truth was that Senta was so beautiful in his eyes, so wonderful, so utterly different from any other girl he had ever known, that he expected awe first, then amazed congratulations. Christine had received his announcement in a rather preoccupied way, or as if he had said he had been going about with some ordinary girl. He would have got more enthusiasm, he thought, if he had said he’d taken up with Jenny again. Doubtful if she had really taken it in, he said, “You do know who I mean, don’t you? Senta who was one of Fee’s bridesmaids?”

“Yes, Philip, Tom’s girl. I said it was nice. So long as you’re fond of each other, I think it’s very nice.”

“Tom?” he said, surprised she could place Senta in this way, as if her parentage were the most remarkable thing about her.

“Tom Pelham, Irene’s other brother, the one with an ex-wife that dances and lives with a young boy.”

What did she mean, “other” brother? He didn’t ask. “That’s right. Senta’s got a flat in their house.”

“Flat” was a bit over the top, he thought, but in a month or two it might be true. Should he also tell Christine about meeting Arnham?

No, it would only upset her. Somewhere, treasured among other mementoes, he had no doubt she still kept that postcard with the White House on it. Arnham would never phone, anyway; Arnham would have been put off by what he had told him of another man in Christine’s life. Now that his euphoria was past, Philip wondered if he had spoiled his mother’s chances by inventing that other man. Still, Arnham was married himself or at least living with a woman. It was all too late.

They sat down to one of Christine’s specialities, rounds of toast topped with scrambled egg into which flakes of tuna and a spoonful of curry powder had been stirred. Philip didn’t want to have to think about the future, about how she was going to manage on her own and with no one but the ghostly flitting presence of Cheryl. But sooner or later he would have to think about it.

“I’m popping over to Audrey’s for a couple of hours,” Christine said, reappearing in a floral cotton dress Philip couldn’t remember having seen before but which she had probably resurrected from some summer wardrobe of the past. “It’s such a nice evening.”

She beamed at him. She looked happy. It was her innocence and her ignorance that made that sunny temperament, he thought. He would have to support her financially, emotionally, companionably for the rest of her life. The world out there was no place for her, even its manifestation in the shape of a job in a hairdresser’s salon would overwhelm her. It was as if his father had sheltered her under his great sweeping protective wings. A fledgling that never grew up, she peeped about her in amazement. He wondered sometimes how, on her own, she managed such ordinary things as paying her bus fare.

Cheryl, coming in, must have passed her on the doorstep. Philip would have been surprised if she had come into the living room. She didn’t come in. He heard her feet dragging their way up the stairs. It was more than a week since he had spoken a word to her. Her reaction to any news he might give about himself and his future would be met, he knew, with blank indifference.

Her footsteps sounded above his head. She was in Christine’s bedroom, walking about. He heard the creak the wardrobe door made when it was opened. No longer worrying about Cheryl’s welfare, he found himself seeing her only as an added burden. As a minder for his mother, she would be worse than useless.

The bedroom door slammed, and standing just inside the living room with the door open a crack, he listened to her descent of the stairs. She was indifferent, he realised, to whether he heard her or not, to whether he knew or not. Only a fool would fail to understand that she had been in Christine’s bedroom to take whatever money was concealed there, to rob the handbag in whose zip pocket Christine kept her hairdresser’s tips or open the china teddy bear with detachable head that usually contained ten- and twenty-pee pieces.

The front door closed. He waited a few moments for her to have disappeared, and then he drove to Senta’s.

“I don’t believe it,” Fee said. “You’re kidding.” It was such a shock that she had to light a cigarette from the stub of the last one.

“He’s pulling our legs, Fee,” said Darren.

Philip was very taken aback. He had expected his announcement to be greeted with rapturous pleasure. Senta was Darren’s cousin and had been Fee’s bridesmaid. You would have thought they would be overjoyed to welcome a member of Darren’s extended family into their immediate circle.

“You were always teasing me about Senta,” he said. “You must have realised how I felt about her.”

Darren started laughing. He was sitting, as usual, in an armchair in front of the television. Fee snapped at him.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

It was rude and it was also disconcerting. Fee made things no better.

“Do you mean that all the time we were sort of making cracks about you fancying Senta and asking you if you wanted her phone number and all that, all that time you were actually meeting her and going about with her?”

“She didn’t want people to know, not then.”

“Well, I must say I do think it’s very underhand, Phil. I’m sorry but I do. It makes you feel such a fool when people deceive you like that.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you’d take it this way.”