The Bridesmaid (26 page)

“No good making a fuss now, I suppose. It’s too late for that. And now you say she’s supposed to be coming here to see us?”

He began to regret he had ever arranged it. “We thought it would be best for me to tell you first and for her to come over after about half an hour. Fee, she
is
supposed to be a friend of yours, she
is
Darren’s cousin.”

Darren, who had stopped laughing, put one hand up and snapped his thick fingers. “Can we have a bit of hush while the snooker’s on?”

Philip and Fee squeezed themselves into the kitchen, which was the size of a moderately spacious cupboard.

“Are you engaged or something?”

“Not exactly but we will be.” He thought, I will propose to her. I will make her a formal proposal, I might even go down on my knees. “When we are,” he said rather grandly, “we’ll put an announcement in the paper. In
The Times.
”

“No one ever does that sort of snobby stuff in our family. It’s just showing off. Will she want things to eat? Will she want a drink? There isn’t any drink in the place.”

“I brought a bottle of champagne.”

Fee, who necessarily stood very close to him, gave him a look of half exasperation, half mischievous conspiracy. “You’re so daft, going on like that. Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

“The champagne’s in the car, I’ll go and get it.”

Having a rare few minutes alone with Fee should have allowed him to confide in her about Cheryl. The moment seemed particularly inappropriate. He imagined her saying in her sharp way that she supposed he was just shifting his problems onto her now that he was leaving and getting married. Instead she put her arms round him and gave him a brief hug, laying her cheek against his, whispering, “Well, I’ll have to congratulate you, won’t I?”

Taking the champagne out of the car, he looked up and saw Senta. She too held cradled in her arms a bottle of wine. It was the first time he had ever met her in the open street. There was a special breathless pleasure in going up to her and kissing her in public. Not that anyone was watching, but they were there on view, on the pavement embracing, the two hard, cold glass bottles pressed between their bodies and keeping them apart like chastity devices.

She was in black. It made her skin look shell white and gave her hair a glassier, steelier brightness. She had painted her nails the same colour and put silver on her eyelids. She walked lightly on her stilt heels up the stairs ahead of him. In spite of their height she was still a head’s length shorter than he, and when she was on the step in front, he could look down on to the crown of her head. The red roots of her hair glowed with a curious pinkish luminosity under the silver strands, and he was touched with feelings of an intense tenderness for her quirky ways and her harmless vanity.

He was aware too of something else: her nervousness when off her own home ground. He noticed it because of what she had told him about her agoraphobia. It was worse in the street, fading to something that seemed like shyness when she was inside the flat and in the presence of Darren and Fee. They both seemed embarrassed, but Fee came out with it bluntly: “I’m not saying it wasn’t a surprise, but we’ll get used to it.”

Darren, the snooker concluded and a rerun of some golf tournament showing with the sound turned off, took this as an occasion for catching up on family news. “What’s Auntie Rita up to now, then?”

In near silence which was demure and diffident, Senta drank her champagne. She said a soft thank-you when Fee proposed a toast to Senta and Philip—“Not engaged yet but soon will be.” This was her first time in the flat, but when Fee asked her if she would like to see over it—a necessarily brief exercise since there were only the small bedroom and tiny shower room left to see—she shook her head and said thanks, but she wouldn’t, not this time. Darren, who worried at his joke like a dog with an old bone, said he hadn’t had a bath since he came back from his honeymoon and would she like a shower?

In the car going back to Tarsus Street, he felt as if he were bursting, choking, with his proposal. But he didn’t want her to remember, in the years ahead, perhaps twenty years ahead when they celebrated some wedding anniversary, that he had proposed to her in a car in a north London suburb.

“Where are we going?” she said. “This isn’t the way. Are you kidnapping me, Philip?”

“For the rest of your life,” he said.

He drove up on to Hampstead Heath. It wasn’t very far. There was a large round moon shining, the colour of her hair. Off the Spaniards Road where the path runs down into the back of the Vale of Health, he led her to the edge of the woodland. It amused him because she so plainly thought he had brought her there to make love in the open air on this mild, dry summer night. Docilely, her little hand soft in his, she allowed him to lead her. The moonlight turned the grass white and the bare earth of the paths to chalk, while under the trees the shadows were black. There must have been other people about, it was impossible that they were alone there, but it was as quiet as in the country and as still as indoors.

When it came to it, kneeling was an impossibility. She would have thought him mad. He held both her hands and drew them up to clasp closely in his between their bodies. He looked into her greenish eyes, which she had lifted to his and opened very wide. In each of them he could see a moon reflected. Formally, in the manner in which his great-grandfather might have spoken, in a way which he knew he must have read of in the pages of a book, he said to her, “Senta, I want to marry you. Will you be my wife?”

She smiled faintly. He knew she was thinking that this wasn’t quite what she had expected. Her voice when she replied was soft and clear.

“Yes, Philip, I’ll marry you. I want to marry you very much.” She put up her lips. He bent and kissed her full on the lips but very chastely. Her skin felt like marble. But she was a marble girl that some god was in the process of changing from a statue to a live woman. Philip could feel the warmth surging through the stone flesh. She said with gravity, drawing a little away, her eyes fixed on his, “We were destined for each other from the beginning of time.”

Then her mouth was more ardently on his, her tongue stroking the inside of his lips. “Not here,” he said. “Senta, let’s go home.”

It wasn’t until the middle of the night, the deep dark early hours, that he realised why, in the midst of that romantic scene which he had set up, at the moment when he asked her to marry him, unease had seemed to step between them, to mar everything. He understood now. It was because the scene, and even more the setting, seemed to mirror what she had described to him as happening between her and Gerard Arnham in another grassy place and under other trees. Just as he looked into her eyes, bent down and spoke gently to her, she had clutched the glass dagger and thrust it into his heart.

The yellow light from the street lamps was shed in windowpane shapes across the brown bedcover. Above his head he could hear the “Skaters’ Waltz” and the dancing feet of Rita and Jacopo circling the floor. He thought he must be neurotic, dwelling like this on the foolish past. Hadn’t he seen Arnham and spoken to him? Didn’t he know beyond a doubt the man was alive and well?

Up on the Heath, though he had felt her happiness and known she was glad to be there with him, he had sensed too her unease in the outdoors, the spacious night. How could he seriously have considered it possible for someone like her to perform a violent act while out in the open? The outdoors was her dangerous place.

Senta’s silver head lay on the pillow beside him. She was deeply asleep. The music and the dancing never disturbed her, safe down here under the ground. Philip heard the feet approach the window and, as the waltz ended, a thin little shriek and a burst of laughter, as if Jacopo had taken Rita in his arms and whirled her round and round.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

He brought Senta home to see Christine. She held out her left hand almost timidly, like a little dog lifting its paw, to display her engagement ring, a Victorian antique of silver with two moonstones. He had given it to her the day before when the announcement of their engagement appeared. In company, Senta was very quiet, answering in monosyllables or sitting in a silence she broke only to say please and thank you. He tried to remember back to Fee’s wedding, the only time he had seen her in a group of others. She had been talkative then, a different girl, going up to people and introducing herself. He could recall, just before he left to go home, how she had been talking and laughing with two or three men, all friends of Darren’s. But he didn’t mind this silent manner of hers, knowing as he did that her talk and her sweetness and all her animation were reserved for him when they got back to her room.

They stayed in Glenallan Close for about an hour. It was Sunday and Cheryl was also at home. Philip had glanced at the newspaper’s colour supplement and seen an article in it on Murano glass daggers. There was a huge photograph of a dagger very like the ones he had seen in the shop and another picture of people at the Venice Carnival in the snow. He closed the magazine as quickly as he might have done if it was hard pornography which was displayed and which the women might have seen. Christine kissed Senta when they left. Philip hardly knew why it was that he was afraid Senta would draw back. She didn’t. She pleased him tremendously by presenting her cheek to Christine, her head tilted a little to one side, a small sweet smile on her lips.

His suggestion that they should visit her father met with a stubborn refusal. She took the line that Tom Pelham was lucky to get his name in the paper in a respectable way without having to pay a penny for it. Rita had brought her up, not he. Often she hadn’t seen him for months on end. It was Rita who gave her a home rent-free. Not that she wanted to impart the news to her stepmother, either. Let her find out for herself. Rita had changed since she took up with Jacopo.

At the first open wineshop that they came to, Senta wanted to get out of the car and go in and buy supplies. She had had enough of being out, she said. Philip had wanted to take her for a meal and then to meet Geoff and his girl friend in Jack Straw’s Castle. He had it all planned, a further protracted celebration of their engagement with a meal in Hampstead, then the pub, where he thought it likely some old college friends of his would be on a Sunday night.

“You’re trying to cure me of my phobia by overexposure,” she said to him, smiling. “Haven’t I been good? Haven’t I really tried for you?”

He had to give in, only stipulating that they get hold of some proper food to take back with them. It worried him sometimes, the way she seemed to live on air and wine with the occasional chocolate. She waited in silence, standing with clasped hands, while he foraged in a Finchley Road supermarket, buying bread and cheese and fruit. He had noticed how, out in the open, she mostly looked down at the ground or kept a kind of discreet custody of the eyes.

They approached Tarsus Street from the Kilburn end. There were rather a lot of people about, sitting on walls, lounging, standing, gossiping, leaning out of windows to talk to people leaning on windowsills, as there are on fine summer evenings in London streets such as this one. A strong odour of diesel, melted tar, and cooking spices filled the air. Philip looked for Joley the way he always did and for a brief moment thought he had spotted him on the corner where the street met Caesarea Road. But it was a different man, younger, thinner, who wandered aimlessly along the pavement with his possessions contained in carpet bags.

She asked him, as they got out of the car with their load of food and heavier load of wine bottles, who he was looking for.

“Joley,” he said. “The old man with the barrow. The tramp, I suppose you’d call him.”

She gave him a strange sidelong glance. Her eyelashes were very long and thick and they seemed to sweep the fine white skin under her eyes. The hand with the moonstone ring was lifted to hold back a long lock of silver hair which had fallen to cover her cheek.

“You can’t mean the old man who used to sit on our steps? The one who was sometimes in the churchyard round the corner?”

“Why can’t I? That’s the one I do mean.”

They were in the house now, going down the basement stairs. She unlocked the door. That room only had to be shut up for a few hours for it to become intolerably close and stuffy. Senta took one of the bottles of wine out of the bag he had put down on the bed, and reached for the corkscrew.

“But that was John Crucifer,” she said.

For a moment the name meant nothing to him. “Who?”

She laughed. It was a light, rather musical laugh. “You ought to know, Philip. You killed him.”

The room seemed to shift a little. The floor rose up the way it does when you feel faint. Philip put two fingers, which were surprisingly cold, up to touch his forehead. He sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Do you mean the old man who said he was called Joley and used to have his beat down here was really the man who was murdered in Kensal Green?”

“That’s right,” she said. “I thought you knew.” She poured a large measure of wine into a glass which hadn’t been washed since the last Riesling had been drunk from it. “You must have known it was Crucifer.”

“The man who was murdered …,” he was speaking slowly, abstractedly,”… his name was John.”

She was impatient in a smiling way. “John, Johnny, Joley—so what? It was a sort of nickname.” A bead of wine trembled on her lower lip like a diamond drop. “I mean, didn’t you pick on him because it was Crucifer?”

His own voice sounded feeble to him, as if he had suddenly become ill. “Why would I?”

“Have some wine.” She passed him the bottle and another dirty glass. He took it mechanically and sat there holding glass in one hand and bottle in the other, staring at her. “I thought you picked him because he was my enemy.”

A terrible thing happened. Her face was the same, white and soft, the pale lips slightly parted, but he saw madness staring out of her eyes. He couldn’t have said how he knew, for he had never seen or known a person even slightly mentally disturbed, but this was madness, stark and real and awful. It was as if a demon sat inside there and looked out of her eyes. And at the same time it was Flora’s look he saw, remote, predating civilisation, heedless of morality.