The Bridesmaid (28 page)

Roy hadn’t said anything about going to Mrs. Ripple’s, Philip was sure of that. But there was no point in arguing. He wasn’t hurt by being called a little squirt. What went sharply home was the bit about the bottom of the ladder.

The drive to Chigwell took a long time. It had begun to pour with rain. Heavy rain always slowed up the traffic. The cars and trucks crawled along through Wanstead, and by the time he was on the doorstep ringing Mrs. Ripple’s bell, it was five to three. She had a friend with her, a woman she called Pearl. The two of them somehow managed to open the front door together, as if they had simultaneously and ritually put hands to latch. He had the impression they were waiting just inside it, and had been waiting there for some time.

“We’d just about given you up, hadn’t we, Pearl?” said Mrs. Ripple. “I suppose we’re behind the times. We’re naive. We’ve just got this old-fashioned idea in our heads that when someone says two o’clock he means two o’clock.”

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Ripple. There was a misunderstanding about that, nobody’s fault, but I didn’t actually know I was supposed to be here until an hour ago.”

She said very sourly, “Now that you are here at last, you’d better come straight up. You’d better see if you can explain why I have to put up with the shoddy rubbish you’ve seen fit to instal in my bathroom.”

Pearl came up too. She looked enough like Mrs. Ripple to be her sister, but somehow a more richly furnished, more ornate version. It was as if Mrs. Ripple were the standard model and Pearl the de luxe. She had black curly hair like an uncut poodle’s and her tight-fitting silk dress was shiny peacock blue. She stopped on the threshold and said in a theatrical way, “How much did you say you had to pay for this job, dear?”

Mrs. Ripple didn’t hesitate. The little scene had probably been rehearsed while they waited for him. “Six thousand five hundred and forty-two pounds ninety-five.”

“Highway robbery,” said Pearl.

Mrs. Ripple pointed with a quivering finger at the marble top of the vanity unit. She looked like a character in an amateur dramatic production indicating the presence of a ghost offstage. Philip examined the marble, the minute fissure in one of the white veins of the marbling. To his alarm and intense displeasure, Pearl took hold of his wrist and moved his hand so that the tip of his forefinger just touched the fissure.

“But that isn’t a fault or damage, Mrs. Ripple,” he said, doing his best to disengage his hand without giving offence. “That’s the character of the stone. This is a natural substance. It isn’t as if it’s plastic which could be made with a perfectly smooth surface.”

“I should just hope it isn’t plastic,” said Mrs. Ripple, “considering what I paid for it.”

Philip would have liked to tell her that she had not only chosen the vanity unit from a selection of illustrated brochures but had actually examined samples of the marble they proposed to use. That would only have caused more trouble and in any case have been ineffective. Instead he tried to convince her that any visitor would at once appreciate the quality and taste of her bathroom from the undeniable evidence of that tiny flaw in the marble, which would never have occurred in a synthetic material. Mrs. Ripple wasn’t having any of that. She wanted marble—of course she did, she had always known what she wanted and that was marble—but she wanted a piece which had all the veining and the proper look of marble without any flaws.

Not daring to promise that they could get it for her, still less instal it free of extra charge, Philip said he had the matter in hand and she would hear from him personally in a day or two.

“Or a week or two,” said Pearl nastily!

The rain had stopped. Water lay across the roadway in pools, which the sun turned into blazing mirrors. You could see the steam rising. Philip drove down the road and round the corner, heading for where Arnham lived. His wheels made fountains of water splash up, the sun was in his eyes, and if he hadn’t slowed to pull the visor down, he might have killed the running cat or the little dog which came rushing across the road in pursuit of it. As it was, swerving, braking as hard as he could with his foot slammed onto the floor of the car, skidding on the wet surface, his nearside wing must have struck the dog a glancing blow. It yelped and rolled over.

It was a Sealyham, white and fluffy. Philip picked it up. He didn’t think it was hurt, for now that he held it, feeling its body for broken bones or painful areas, it reacted by a rapturous licking of his face. Arnham’s wife or girl friend had come down the steps and was standing at the gate. She looked older than when he had last seen her, and thinner, but on previous occasions he had only seen her through glass. Out here in the sunshine she looked thin and ugly and middle-aged.

“He ran straight out in front of me,” Philip said. “I don’t think he’s come to any harm.”

She said coldly, “I suppose you were going too fast.”

“I don’t think so.” He was getting rather tired of being accused of things of which he wasn’t guilty. “I was driving at about twenty miles an hour because of the wet road. Here, you’d better take him.”

“He’s not my dog. What made you think he was mine?”

What had? The fact that she and she alone had come out? Or because he somehow connected Arnham with a dog? That had been a Scottie, he remembered,
that had been Senta’s invention.
Arnham disliked dogs, had never had a dog.

“I heard your brakes,” she said. “I came out to see what was going on.” She went back up the steps and into the house and closed the door.

Philip, in whose arms the Sealyham was now comfortably snuggled, read the tag on its collar which proclaimed it to be Whisky, the property of H. Spicer, who lived three houses down from Mrs. Ripple. He carried the dog home and was offered a five-pound note as reward, which he refused.

But returning to his car, he thought what confusion deception causes, what a muddle in the mind, so that facts are mixed up with truth and truth distorted. Because of what Senta had said he had made certain assumptions based on her story. The story was proven false but the assumptions still held.

He got into the car and glanced up at the house again as he switched on the ignition. All you have to hang on to, he told himself, is that Arnham lives there and Arnham is alive. Now forget everything else and be happy.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

“I just wonder if maybe she’s only been getting money together and saving it up. What do you think? I mean she’s unemployed and likely to go on being and she’s no skills, poor little love, and maybe she thought if she got a nice bit of money behind her … ? I don’t know. Am I being silly?”

Philip had brought himself to tell his mother what had happened on the evening he had followed Cheryl, only to find his story not believed. Christine was aware that Cheryl pilfered from the members of her own family and had learned not to leave sums of money about the house unless she expected to lose them. But that she would steal from a shop was too much for her mother to digest. Philip only thought he had witnessed a theft. What he had really seen was Cheryl’s retrieval of her own property that she had somehow left behind there earlier that day.

“It wasn’t very nice of you to suspect your own sister of something like that.” This was the nearest she would ever get to a reproach, and her tone was gentle rather than reproving.

Philip could tell there was no point in arguing. “All right. Perhaps it wasn’t. But if you know she steals from you, why does she?”

But Cheryl’s purpose in stealing was beyond her. It was as if Christine’s mind stopped short at the stealing itself, giving no thought to what Cheryl stole/or Philip’s suggestion that it might be for drink or drugs made her stare. Drugs were something that happened to other people’s children. Besides, she had seen Cheryl in the bath only two days before and there had been no needle marks on her thighs or upper arms.

“Are you sure you’d have noticed if there had been?”

Christine thought she would have. She would have known if Cheryl drank. While they were away on holiday, other guests in the small private hotel they had stayed in had missed sums of money. The police had been called in, but Cheryl hadn’t even been questioned. Christine seemed to think this must imply her innocence. Stealing from one’s own mother was different, hardly stealing at all really, one had a sort of half right to it already.

“The unemployment benefit she gets doesn’t amount to much, you know, Phil.” She was pleading for her daughter with a kind of wide-eyed piteousness, as if Philip were determined on condemning her. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “I’ll speak to my friend that’s the social worker, the one who works with teenagers.”

That would be Audrey. Inwardly Philip reproached himself for finding it hard to believe his mother could know anyone with that sort of job, counted among her friends someone in a responsible caring position. He said firmly, “That might be a very good idea. And you can explain what I saw. I did see it and it
was
stealing. It isn’t going to help anyone to pretend otherwise.”

That evening he had resolved to stay at home with her, but Christine seemed anxious for him to go out. He could tell it wasn’t just selflessness. She really wanted the house to herself. It made him wonder if Arnham had fulfilled his promise to phone her, if he had made a reappearance in her life and was due this evening. Philip smiled to himself when he thought of Arnham in this house, talking to Christine, perhaps telling her of his loss of Flora, while all the time the statue was upstairs, no more than a few feet above their heads.

Thinking like this made him look at Flora, standing there in the recesses of the cupboard. Senta’s face looked out at him from the shadows and the way the soft vague evening sunlight fell on it gave the illusion of a smile. Philip couldn’t resist putting out a finger to touch one cool marble cheek and then stroking it lightly with the back of his hand. Had he stolen Flora? Was he then as much a thief as Cheryl? Something, some unlooked-for intuition, brought him to Cheryl’s bedroom door. He hadn’t been into the room or even seen inside it since the day Fee had found the crumpled bridesmaid’s dress lying on the wardrobe floor. Now he opened the door, surprised to find it unlocked, and stepped inside.

Three transistor radios, a portable television with a screen the size of a playing card, a tape player, two hair dryers, some kitchen thing, a food processor probably, other electrical equipment—it was all stacked on top of a chest of drawers, and Philip knew at once it had been stolen. One of the radios still had a scarlet band of some sort of sticky tape round it. He wondered how she had managed to take these large bulky objects without being detected. Ingenuity born of despair and desperation, he thought. This store of stolen goods was like someone else’s savings or investments, waiting to be turned into cash—for what?

His sister was a criminal, but he couldn’t see what there was to be done about it. A fatalistic acceptance was all that was possible now. Appealing to the police or the social services would lead to Cheryl’s being charged with theft, and because she was his sister, he couldn’t give her away to some outside authority. He could only hope for the best, pin his faith to some help or advice coming from the social worker friend of Christine’s. He closed the bedroom door behind him, knowing he would never go in there again.

As soon as he got to Tarsus Street that evening, he told Senta what he had seen. She looked at him. Most people, when they say they look into the eyes of another, in fact look into only one eye. Senta actually looked into both his eyes and, because this always made her squint, gave her an expression of concentrated intensity. Her lips were parted a little, her clear, green-flecked eyes very wide open, with the pupils turned towards one another.

“It doesn’t matter so long as she’s not found out, does it?”

He tried laughing at her. “That’s not a very moral way of looking at things.”

She was deadly serious. She spoke pedantically. “But we don’t subscribe to conventional morality, Philip. After all, in that sort of morality the very worst thing anyone can do is kill someone. Don’t you think you’re being a hypocrite condemning poor Cheryl for a very trifling thing when you’ve done murder yourself?”

“I’m not condemning her,” he said for something to say, something to express, because his thoughts were inexpressible: did she really believe he had killed John Crucifer while knowing her own confession was a fantasy? “I only want to know what to do. What shall I do?”

He meant what should he do about Cheryl. Senta was indifferent, he could tell that, absorbed with herself and him. She was smiling.

“Come and live here with me.”

It had the effect she must have wanted, and brought temporary forgetfulness of Cheryl. “Do you mean that, Senta? In the top flat? Can we?”

“I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Of course I’m pleased. But you—you don’t feel comfortable up there. I don’t want you making yourself miserable for me.”

“Philip, I have to tell you something.” Again the bracing of his nerves, the tensing of muscles, as he awaited revelations. But quite suddenly he knew it would be all right, what she was going to say. And it was all right, it was more than that. “I love you so much,” she said. “I love you far, far more than I ever thought I would when we first met. Isn’t that funny? I knew I’d been looking for you and I’d found you, but I didn’t know I was capable of loving anyone the way I love you.”

He took her in his arms and held her close against him. “Senta, you’re my love, you’re my angel.”

“So you see I couldn’t feel uncomfortable anywhere with you. I couldn’t be miserable when I’m with you. Wherever I am with you I’d be happy. I’m happy all the time I know you love me.” She put up her face and kissed him. “I asked Rita about the flat and she said she didn’t see why not. She says she wouldn’t want rent. Of course, that means she could throw us out when she wanted, we wouldn’t have a proper tenancy.”

He was surprised at Senta’s unusual practicality, her actually knowing about things like that. Then he understood what it also meant: he would be able to go on paying Christine without continuing to live in her house. This might be his release from Christine and Cheryl and Glenallan Close, and an honourable release.