The Bridesmaid (27 page)

He had to exercise all the control he could muster. He had to be calm, even maintain a light touch. “What do you mean, Senta, your enemy?”

“He asked for money. I hadn’t any money to give him. He started shouting out after me, making remarks about my clothes and my—my hair. I don’t want to say what they were, but they were very insulting.”

“Why did you think I knew?”

She said softly, moving nearer to him, “Because you know my thoughts, Philip, because we are so close now we can read each other’s minds, can’t we?”

He looked away, turned his eyes back reluctantly to look at her. The madness was gone. He had imagined it. That was what it must have been, his imagination. He refilled her glass and filled his own. She started telling him about some audition she was going to in the coming week for a part in a television serial. More fantasy, but of a harmless kind, if any of it was harmless, if it could be. They sat side by side on the bed in the airless room that was full of dusty orange sunlight. For once, he didn’t feel like opening the window. A superstitious fear had come to him that not a single word they spoke must be overheard.

“Senta, listen to me. We mustn’t ever talk about killing again, not even as a joke or a fantasy. I mean killing isn’t a joke, it never can be.”

“I didn’t say it was a joke. I never said that.”

“No, but you made up stories about it and pretended about it. I’m just as bad. I did it too. You pretended to have killed someone and I pretended to have killed someone and it doesn’t matter now because we didn’t really do it or even believe the other one had. But it’s bad for us to keep on talking about it as if it was real. Can’t you see that? It’s sort of bad for our characters.”

Just for an instant he saw the demon in there behind her eyes. The demon came and chuckled and vanished. She was silent. He prepared himself for an enraged onslaught such as had been made on him last time he questioned her word. But she was still and silent. She threw back her head and drank the wine down in one swallow, then held out the empty glass to him.

“I’ll never mention it again,” she said slowly. “I understand how it is with you, Philip. You’re very conventional still. You were glad when you found out it was my mother I lived here with, weren’t you? It made things seem respectable. You were pleased when I got a real job that paid. How could you be otherwise with that family? You were brought up to be very straight and rigid, and you aren’t going to change in a couple of months. But listen to me now. What we had to do for each other to prove our love was a terrible thing, I realise that, I realise it was terrible, and I do understand it makes it easier for you if we just bury it in the past. As long as you also know we can’t change the past. We just don’t have to talk about it.”

He said almost roughly, “If you’re going to drink so much wine, we ought to eat something. Come on, let’s eat.”

“Are you telling me I drink too much, Philip?”

The early warning signs were becoming familiar to him. He was beginning to know them and how to handle them. “No, of course I’m not. But I think you don’t eat enough. I’m trying to look after you, Senta.”

“Yes, look after me, Philip, take care of me.” She turned and clutched at him, holding on to his shoulders, her eyes suddenly wild and frightened. “We don’t want to eat yet. Please don’t let’s. I want you to love me.”

“I do love you,” he said, and he put his glass down and took the glass out of her hand and pulled her down to him in his arms onto the brown quilt.

It was another small-hours return home for him that night. He had meant to discuss their future with her. Were they going to live together in the upstairs flat? Had she thought about that as she had promised? Were they going to set a wedding date for sometime next year? Could she come up with any ideas as to how the problem of Christine—and come to that, Cheryl—could be dealt with? They had scarcely talked at all but made love all the evening. At one point he had got up and eaten something and washed himself under the tap.

Coming back to open the window and let some fresh air into the dusty staleness, he had found her sitting up, starting on the second bottle of wine, and she had welcomed him back into bed with outstretched, yearning arms.

He slept soundly. He slept like the dead, exhausted and at peace. His future with Senta looked glorious to him, a series of days of dreaming of her and of nights of love. Their lovemaking got even better as time went on, and she loved it as much as he did. It was hard to imagine that it could get better than it was now, but that was something he had said three weeks ago and it had got better. When the alarm went off and he woke up, he reached for her, but he was in his own bed and she wasn’t there and he felt bereft.

On the way to work, a reluctant visit to Olivia Brett, Philip castigated himself for imagining he had seen signs of some kind of neurosis in Senta. It was the shock of course. It was caused by the shock of finding out that John Crucifer was Joley. Poor Senta had told him a simple fact which he might have gathered for himself by this time, and he had been so upset by it that he had offloaded his hysterical feelings onto her. Didn’t the psychologists call that projection?

It was hardly surprising anyway that she believed he had killed Joley. After all, he had told her he had. He had actually told her, fantastic and unreal though this now seemed, that he had killed the old man. Of course she believed him. For a while, remember, he told himself, he had believed her story of killing Arnham. Well, off and on he had believed it. And all this really illustrated what he had said to her about this kind of talk harming them, damaging their characters. It was certainly damaging his character if it made him believe his Senta wasn’t quite sane.

But Joley … Philip found he hated to think that it was Joley who had been murdered in Kensal Green, and hated it the more because he had told Senta he was responsible for that death. Now he found it hard to understand why he had ever done that. If she really loved him, and there was no doubt she did, she would have come to realise there was no need for fantasies about proofs of love. It would only have been a matter of sticking it out till she came round, maybe bearing the brunt of a few temper tantrums. Philip having a very good idea of how she would react, had a fleeting qualm at even using the expression in connection with Senta, but how else would you describe it?

In saying he had murdered Joley, he had somehow involved himself in that death. Worse than that, he had in part made himself responsible for it, becoming a kind of accessory after the fact. He had aligned himself with Joley’s killer, put himself into the same category. With these ideas unpleasantly occupying his mind, Philip went up the steps of Olivia Brett’s house and was admitted by the actress herself. He couldn’t help remembering the complimentary things she was supposed to have said about him and he felt awkward in her company.

Stories proliferated in his kind of job about women alone at home who were simply waiting to come across for men like himself, women who invited the surveyor or site manager or fitter into their bedrooms or suddenly appeared in front of them with no clothes on. Nothing like that had ever happened to him but it was early days yet. Olivia Brett wore a dressing gown which was white with a lot of frills on it but not see-through. She smelt like a bowl of tropical fruit that has been left out in the sun.

She insisted on walking upstairs behind Philip. He wondered what he would do if he felt her hand caress his neck or a fingertip run down his spine. But she didn’t touch him. He didn’t want to think about her at all, he wanted her to be an answering machine only or to make her requests in a neutral, practical tone. She showed him into the recently gutted bathroom and stood behind him now while he made a draft chart of how he thought the electric wiring should be planned.

“Oh, darling,” she said, “I don’t know if they told you I changed my mind and I’m going to have one of those showers that squirt water out of the walls at you.”

“Yes, I’ve got a note of it.”

“I showed my friend the picture in your book and do you know what he said? He said it was a Jacuzzi standing up to pee.”

Philip was a bit shocked. Not by what she said but because she had said it and to him. He didn’t say anything, though he knew he ought to have laughed appreciatively. He got out his tape measure and pretended to measure something in the far corner. When he turned round, he could see she was looking at him with calculation, and he couldn’t help contrasting her with Senta— her lined, pinched, greasy face with Senta’s pure velvety skin, and the mottled cleavage between the broderie anglaise lapels with Senta’s white breasts. It made him smile quite pleasantly at her as he said, “That seems to be that, then. I shan’t be troubling you again until the electrician has done his stuff.”

“Have you got a girl friend?” she said.

He was astonished. Her tone was harsh and direct. He felt a hot blush redden his face. She took a step nearer.

“What are you afraid of?”

For all the times Philip had thought of things he ought to have said, perfect rejoinders, when it was ten minutes too late to say them, this paid. He didn’t know how he thought of it. It was stroke of genius. It came to him on wings of serene appropriateness.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “I got engaged to be married last week.”

With that he passed her, smiling politely, and descended the stairs, not hurrying. She came onto the landing behind him. He had a momentary qualm. But prostituting oneself for Roseberry Lawn was surely way beyond the call of loyalty.

“Goodbye for now,” he called. “I’ll let myself out, shall I?”

The interlude made him feel rather jaunty. He had acquitted himself well. It had also served to distract him from the business of John Crucifer, alias Joley. The real world, or at least a different one, had intruded. Philip could now see that Joley’s death had absolutely nothing to do with him. In fact, his gifts to Joley had probably made the old man’s last days brighter.

He put the car in the car park when he reached head office. It was ten past one. Just the sort of time when, if he went to find somewhere for lunch, he might bump into Arnham again. Philip told himself that was why he avoided leaving by the passage which led into the street of Georgian houses, but he knew it wasn’t really. The true reason was that he wanted to avoid passing the Venetian glass shop where he might see in the window the dagger of Murano glass.

All his life, probably, the name
Murano
or even the word
dagger
would evoke unpleasant memories. That was another good reason why he had to cure Senta of fantasising. There were whole areas of life he now found himself shying away from: the district of Kensal Green, the name Joley and the name John, Scottie dogs, Venice and glass daggers, little grassy glades. Of course time would change it, time would wipe the past clean of all this.

He took the other direction and came out into a busy thoroughfare where street vendors sold souvenirs to tourists. Philip wouldn’t have dreamt of buying anything from one of these stalls, he would have passed them without a glance, but as he came closer to one on which tee shirts with the Tower of London printed on them were displayed, and teddy bears in Union Jack aprons, and tea towels with pictures of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the press of the crowd slowed his pace. He was forced to stand almost still, and for a moment he thought he was going to witness some sort of assault or raid on stall and vendor.

A car pulled into the kerb, on the double yellow line, and two men jumped out. They were young and they looked thuggish—heavy-set with cropped hair and wearing studded leather jackets like Cheryl’s. Both of them came up to the stall, one standing at either end. The bigger and older one said to the vendor, “Got a licence somewhere about, then, have you?”

At once Philip knew they were not thieves or thugs but policemen.

Never before had he looked at the police with fear. And it wasn’t quite fear that he felt now, more a cautious defensiveness. As he watched them standing over the vendor of souvenirs while the man fumbled through the pockets of a coat hanging up on a pole, he thought about Joley and his death. He thought how he had actually said he had killed Joley. Of course, he had only said this to Senta, who in this respect didn’t count, but he had uttered an admission of murder aloud. It might be that these very police officers, one of whom was now scruntinising the vendor’s licence with a deep frown, might be part of the team working on the case of Joley’s murder. Why had he allowed himself to be drawn into this game of Senta’s? Why had he ever played it?

Philip had a sandwich and a cup of coffee. While he ate he kept trying to travel those few weeks back in time. He remembered how Senta had withdrawn her love from him and how, to regain it, he had confessed to a murder he hadn’t committed, wouldn’t even in his wildest nightmares have committed, he who hated these things. It was far worse than what she had done. She had simply invented a killing. He couldn’t understand now why he hadn’t done a similar thing, why he hadn’t appreciated that almost any preposterous tale would have done for her. What had made him think it necessary to claim responsibility for a real murder? He felt soiled by it, he felt that his hands were actually dirtied, and he looked down at them, spread them out in front of him on the yellow formica of the cafe table, as if he might see graveyard earth in their lines and blood under the nails.

The way Joley had called him “governor” came back to him as he went up in the lift to Roy’s room. Philip had liked the humour Joley still retained in spite of the dreadful life he led. Of course, it wasn’t so good thinking of him insulting a young girl just because she wouldn’t give him money. Philip wondered why Joley had ever gone to Kensal Green. Perhaps there was a soup kitchen up there.

Roy was working on his design for the complete remodelling of a flat. It was clear that he was in one of his bad moods.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Coming to see you, of course. You said to come in around two.”

“I said to get over to Chigwell
by
two and find out just why La Ripple is still dissatisfied with her marble whatsit. No wonder this company’s fast going down the plughole when even a little squirt on the bottom rung of the ladder can’t get to an appointment on time.”