The Bridesmaid (29 page)

It was a long time now since he had even glanced at a newspaper. Newspapers he had avoided along with television and the radio, but had he avoided them because he was afraid of what he might see? He hardly knew what he meant by that himself. Surely not that if he knew a hunt was mounted for Joley’s killer, it would make him afraid?

Sometimes he imagined that his confession to Senta had been overheard, that there were people walking about the streets who had heard him admit to killing John Crucifer. He half expected Christine to tell him the police had called, or to hear from Roy that they had been enquiring for him at head office. These things worried him for moments at a time, and then he would come to himself and see what folly all this was, the stuff of nightmares and fantasies. But when he went to the warehouse at Uxbridge to search through the marble tops they had in stock, in the hope of finding one which had no fissures anywhere in its veining, a motorcycle policeman was outside. This man was only taking the name and particulars of some traffic offender, but for a moment Philip experienced a gut fear that had nothing to do with reason.

The first thing he heard when he got in was that Roy was off sick “with a bug” and that Mr. Aldridge wanted to see him “the minute he arrived if not sooner.” Mr. Aldridge was the managing director of Roseberry Lawn.

Philip didn’t feel nervous about it. He was sure he hadn’t stepped out of line. He went up in the lift, and Mr. Aldridge’s secretary, who sat by herself in the outer office, said to go straight in. He expected to be asked to sit down. By now he had some optimistic ideas that he might have been called there to be congratulated or even that promotion was coming.

Aldridge was seated, but he let Philip stand on the other side of the desk. His glasses had slipped halfway down his nose, and he looked rather sour. What he wanted to tell Philip was that Olivia Brett had complained about his behaviour, had described him as insufferably rude and insulting, and would Philip like to explain?

“What does she say I said?”

“You’re getting this firsthand, I hope you realise that. She phoned and spoke to me personally. Apparently, you made a disgusting remark, something lavatorial, about the shower she’s having installed, and when she didn’t laugh at this famous joke of yours, you told her you were afraid you couldn’t waste any more time on her, you had more important things to do.”

“It isn’t true,” Philip said hotly. “I thought, she led me to think—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. But she was the one made the remark about the shower, not me.”

Aldridge said, “I’ve always admired her. When I’ve seen her on TV, I’ve always thought her one of our loveliest actresses, a real English lady. If you imagine I could for a moment credit that a beautiful and refined woman like her would make a cheap joke of that sort—and she brought herself to tell me explicitly exactly what was said, though I needn’t repeat it—you’re thicker than I take you for. Frankly, I don’t think you’re thick, I think you’re devious and underhand. I don’t think you’ve begun to understand the kind of unwavering courtesy and consideration to our customers which is the highest aim of Roseberry Lawn. Now you can go away and never—repeat, never—give any lady or gentleman cause to make a complaint like that again.”

It upset him because he hadn’t known that people can be as bad as that. He had never supposed that a successful, good-looking, famous, and rich woman, with everything going for her, would take such a mean revenge on a man simply because that man had backed out of making love to her. It made him feel sick and sore. But there was no use in giving in to it. He got back into the car and drove to Uxbridge where, searching through twenty marble vanity unit tops encased in flat cardboard cartons, he at last found one that was free of fissures.

On his way back to London he bought an evening paper. He hadn’t expected there to be anything in it about Joley’s death, but he was surprised to see a photograph of frogmen searching the Regent’s Canal for the weapon police believed might have been used to kill John Crucifer.

“I’ve got the part, I’ve got the part,” she sang to him, rushing into his arms. “I’m so happy, I’ve got the part!”

“What part is that?”

“I heard this morning. My agent phoned me. You remember the part I auditioned for? I told you about it. It’s the part of the mad girl in
Impatience.”

“You’ve got a part in a TV serial, Senta?”

“It’s not the lead, but it’s more interesting than the lead. This is my really big chance. It’s going to be in six episodes, and I’m to be in every episode except the first one. The casting director said I’ve got a fascinating face. Aren’t you pleased for me, Philip, aren’t you pleased?”

He simply didn’t believe her. It was impossible for him to force a smile, simulate pleasure. For a while she didn’t seem to notice. Upstairs in Rita’s fridge she had a bottle of pink champagne.

“I’ll fetch it,” he said.

Going up the stairs, making his way into Rita’s dirty kitchen that smelt of sour dairy foods, he wondered what to do. Take a stand now, confront her, challenge her with her lies—or else live in her fantasy world, never deceived but playing up to the deceiver, for the rest of his life. He walked back into her room, set the bottle down, and began the work of carefully freeing the wires from the cork. She held a glass out to catch the first gush of foam, exclaimed with delight as the cork popped.

“What toast shall we say? I know, we’ll say: ‘To Senta Pelham, a great actor of the future!’ ”

He raised his glass. He had no choice but to repeat her words. “To Senta Pelham, a great actor of the future!” In his own ears his voice rang very coldly.

“I’ll be doing the read-through next Wednesday.”

“What’s a read-through?”

“All the cast sits round a table and reads through the script. I mean you all read your own parts but without actually acting.”

“What’s the name of the company that’s making it?”

Her hesitation was brief but there was hesitation. “Wardville Pictures.” She looked down at her hands and the glass of champagne held in both her hands on her lap. Her head fell forward like a flower on a stalk and the silver hair fell across her cheeks. “The casting director’s called Tina Wendover and their address is Berwick Street in Soho.”

She spoke calmly, coolly, as if replying somewhat defiantly to precise questions. It was as though he had challenged her. He was uncomfortably aware that she was able to read, at least up to a certain point, what went on in his mind. In saying they could read each other’s thoughts, she had been right in respect of herself. He looked at her and found that her eyes were on his. Once again she was playing that disconcerting trick of looking into both his eyes.

Was she inviting him to check up on her? Because she knew he wouldn’t? Her fantasising would have been easier to accept, he thought, if she deceived herself, if she believed these tales of hers. The disquieting thing was that she didn’t believe them and often didn’t expect others to believe them either.

She refilled their glasses. She said to him, still fixing him with her eyes, “The police aren’t very clever, are they? It’s a dangerous world where a young girl can go up to someone in daylight, in the open, and kill him and no one know.”

Was she doing this to him because he so plainly disbelieved her first story? When she talked like this, he had a sensation of a kind of internal falling, a dropping of the heart. He could find no words.

“I’ve wondered sometimes if Thiefie might have noticed me outside their house on those other mornings. I was careful, but some people are very observant, aren’t they? Suppose I went there again and Ebony knew me? He might smell me and starting howling, and then everyone would guess.”

Still he said nothing. She persisted.

“It was very early,” she said, “but a lot of people did see me, a boy delivering papers and a woman with a baby in a buggy. And when I was in the train again, I saw someone staring really hard at me. I think it was because the bloodstains showed, though I was wearing red. I took my tunic to the launderette and washed it, so I don’t know if there were any stains or not.”

He turned away from her and contemplated them both in the mirror. The only colour in the picture they made, subdued in the dim subfuse light, their clothes shadowy, their skin pallid and shimmering, was that of the wine, the pale bright rose-pink that the green glass turned to blood red. His love for her, in spite of the things she said, in spite of everything, caught at him and seemed to wrench at the inside of his body. He could have groaned aloud for what they might have had if she hadn’t persisted in flawing it.

“I’m not afraid of the police. It’s not the first time anyway. I know I’m cleverer than they are. I know we’re both too clever for them. But I have wondered. We both did those tremendous things and no one even suspected. I thought they might come and ask me about you, and I suppose they might yet. You mustn’t worry, Philip. You’re quite safe with me, they’ll never learn anything about your movements from me.”

He said, “Let’s not talk about it,” and put his arms round her.

The night was gloomy and overcast. To Philip it seemed curiously quiet, the traffic rumble very distant, the street empty. Perhaps that was only because he was later than usual in leaving Senta. It was past one.

He looked over the low wall as he came down the steps and saw that her shutters were open a crack. He had meant to close them before he left. But no one in the street could have seen her, sleeping naked on the big mirrored bed. Her self-appointed guardian, he put it to the test and satisfied himself, peering over railings into the gloom. What had she meant, “not the first time”? He hadn’t asked her because what she said had taken a while to sink in. It surfaced starkly now. Had she meant there had been a previous occasion when the police had reason to suspect her of some terrible thing?

The lamplight, dim and greenish, and the thin hanging mist created an underwater look as of a drowned town, the houses reeflike, the trees branched seaweed stretching upwards through the cloudy darkness to some invisible light. Philip found himself walking carefully to the car, keeping his footfalls soft, so as not to disturb the heavy, unusual silence. It was not until he had started the car—a shockingly loud noise, the engine springing into life with a lion’s roar—and turned the corner into Caesarea Grove that he noticed the leaflet someone had stuck under his windscreen wipers while he was in Senta’s house. The wipers, switched on to clear the mist, dragged shreds of paper across the wet screen. Philip pulled in, stopped, and got out.

He crushed the wet paper into a ball. It had been an advertisement for a carpet sale. A droplet of icy water from one of the churchyard trees fell onto his neck and made him jump. It was dark in there, with a kind of cold clammy steaminess. Philip put his hand on the gate. The rusty ironwork was wet to the touch. He felt a colder trickle on the back of his neck than the drop of water had made, a shiver that fingered all the way down his spine.

A single candle was burning on one of the steps that led up to the porch on the side of the church. He drew a long breath. The gate opened with a creak that was like a human groan. He took a few steps on the stones, the drenched grass, led by the bluish aureole, the yellow ring, that encircled the flame.

There was someone lying on a bed of blankets and rags inside the porch. Joley’s face reared up like a ghost’s and revealed itself in the candlelight.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

He hated doing it. Deviousness was alien to his nature. The idea of pretending to be someone else, of telling a false story to gain information, all that was so distasteful as to make him feel an actual physical sickness at the thought of it. He had postponed doing it for four days. Now, alone in Roy’s room with Roy out at lunch and the secretary doing Mr. Aldridge’s letters because his secretary was off sick, an opportunity presented itself which he would be cowardly to refuse.

Encountering Joley was the event that made this act imperative. For some reason, though now he could hardly imagine what reason, he had utterly believed Senta when she told him Joley and the murdered man John Crucifer were one. He had believed her and been brought to feel terrible things, almost that Joley’s death was somehow his fault; if not quite that he had murdered him, that but for his own existence and presence there, Joley would still be alive.

Joley was live. His month-long absence was due to his having been in hospital. Philip had never considered vagrants leading lives which in any way approximated to those led by more conventional humanity—that they might have doctors, for instance; that they might sometimes penetrate, when in need, the world of the respectable house-dwelling classes.

“I been having me prostrate done,” Joley had said, welcoming him round the hearth the candle made and offering him a cushion of a scarlet Tesco bag stuffed with newspapers. “In my mode of living, as you might say, it’s not desirable having a urgent need to pee every ten minutes. Mind you, I was going bonkers in that hospital.”

“Always washing you, were they?”

“It wasn’t that, governor. It wasn’t so much that as the doors. It’s doors being shut what I can’t stomach. We was six in this room like, five others and me, and it’s okay by day, but come the night, they shuts the door. I sweat like a pig when the door’s shut. Then I had to go convalescent. I had to, they forced me. You’re not going straight out of here back on the streets, they said. Made me sound like a whore, I should be so lucky.”

Philip gave him a five-pound note.

“Many thanks, governor. You’re a gentleman.”

Since then he had seen Joley twice more. He had said nothing about any of this to Senta. What was there to say? All he could have done was reproach her once more for lying to him. Besides, she might genuinely have believed John Crucifer was Joley. Now, in the office, he gave directory enquiries the address of Wardville Pictures and was surprised when they came up with an actual phone number. Bracing himself, taking a deep breath, he dialled.