The Bridesmaid (3 page)

He took them in the Jaguar. It was a big car, so there was no difficulty about their all getting into it. Philip thought he ought to feel grateful to Arnham for taking them all out and paying for their dinner, but he didn’t. He felt it would have been better for him to come out with the truth, say he had only been expecting Christine, and then entertain Christine on her own as he had originally planned to do. He and Fee and Cheryl wouldn’t have minded; they would have preferred it—at any rate he would—to sitting here in the glowing dimness, the pseudo-country manor decor, of a second-rate restaurant above a supermarket, trying to make conversation with someone who was obviously longing for them to leave.

People of Arnham’s generation lacked openness, Philip thought. They weren’t honest. They were devious. Christine was the same: she wouldn’t speak her mind, she would think it rude. He hated the way she praised every dish that came as if Arnham had cooked it himself. Away from his own home Arnham had become much more expansive, talking pleasantly, drawing Cheryl out as to what she meant to do now she had left school, asking Fee about her fiancé and what he did for a living. He seemed to have got over his initial disappointment or anger. The interest he showed in her started Cheryl talking about their father, the least suitable of all possible subjects, Philip thought. But Cheryl, who had been closer to Stephen than any of his children, hadn’t, even now, begun the process of recovering from his death.

“Oh, yes, it’s quite true, he was like that,” Christine said with a shade of embarrassment after Cheryl had spoke of their father’s love of gambling. “Mind you, no one suffered. He would never have had his family go without. Really, we benefited, didn’t we? A lot of the nice things we’ve got came from his gambling.”

“Mum got her honeymoon paid for out of Dad’s Derby win,” said Cheryl. “But it wasn’t only horses with Dad, was it, Mum? He’d bet on anything. If you were with him waiting for a bus, he’d bet on which would come first, the sixteen or the thirty-two. If the phone rang, he’d say, ‘Fifty pee it’s a man’s voice, Cheryl,’ or fifty pee it’s a woman’s. I used to go to the dogs with him. I loved that—it was so exciting sitting there drinking a Coke and maybe eating a meal and watching the dogs go round. He never got cross, my dad. When he felt one of his bad moods coming on he’d say, okay, what’ll we have a bet on? There are two birds on the lawn, a blackbird and a sparrow, I bet you a pound the sparrow flies away first.”

“His whole life was gambling,” said Christine with a sigh.

“And us.” Cheryl uttered it fiercely. She had had two glasses of wine, which had gone to her head. “We were first, then the gambling.”

It was true. Even his work had been gambling, so to speak, speculation on the Stock Exchange, until one day—the result perhaps of a lifetime of anxieties and stress, chain-smoking, long days and short nights—while he was sitting with the phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his heart ruptured and stopped. The heart disease, of long standing but concealed from his wife and children, had meant there was no life assurance, very little provision of any kind, and a mortgage on the Barnet house which was covered by no insurance policy. With no reason to expect it, he had planned to live for years, to amass in that time, by speculation among other forms of gambling, a fortune to maintain his family after he was gone.

“We even got Flora through a bet,” Christine was saying. “We were on our honeymoon in Florence, walking along a street that’s full of antique shops, and I saw Flora in the window and said wasn’t she lovely? The house we’d had built had a little garden, not the big garden we had in Barnet, but a nice little garden, and I could just imagine Flora standing by our pond. You tell him what happened, Cheryl, the way Dad told you.”

Philip could see Arnham was quite interested. He was smiling. After all, he had spoken about his ex-wife, so why shouldn’t Christine talk of her dead husband?

“Mum said she’d be terribly expensive, but Dad was never one to care about things costing a lot. He said her face was like Mum’s—but I don’t really think it is, do you?”

“Perhaps a bit,” Arnham said.

“Anyway, he said he liked her because she looked like Mum. He said, ‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll have a bet on it. I bet she’s Venus, I bet she’s the goddess Venus. If she’s not, I’ll buy her for you.’”

“I thought Venus was a star,” said Christine. “Stephen said no, she was a goddess. Cheryl knows, she’s done all that at school.”

“So they went into the shop and the man in there spoke English and he told Dad she wasn’t Venus, Venus is nearly always bare above the waist, sort of topless.…”

“You needn’t tell him that, Cheryl!”

“Dad didn’t mind telling me—it’s art, isn’t it? The man in the shop said she was a copy of the Farnese Flora. She was the goddess of spring and flowers and her own flowers were may blossom. That’s what she’s holding in her hand. Anyway, Dad had to buy her after that and she cost a lot, hundreds of thousands of whatever their money’s called, and they had to have her sent home because they couldn’t carry her in the aircraft.”

The conversation had come round to its starting point in Arnham’s house where the statue had first been presented to him. It was this which was perhaps the signal for him to call for the bill. When Cheryl had finished, he said, “You make me feel I shouldn’t have accepted her.” He seemed to be doing sums in his head, converting lire perhaps. “No, I really can’t accept her. She’s much too valuable a gift.”

“Yes, Gerard, I want you to have her.” They were outside the restaurant by the time Christine said this. It was dark. Philip heard the words, though Arnham and Christine were walking a little apart from them, and Christine had taken his hand. Or he had taken Christine’s. “It means a lot to me for you to have her. Please. It makes me happy to think of her there.”

Why had he got the idea into his head that Arnham meant only to drive them as far as Buckhurst Hill station? Nothing had been said. Perhaps he really was in love with Christine and put himself out for her as a matter of course. Or it might be that he felt under an obligation on account of Flora. Philip thought the earlier awkwardness had quite passed. Christine sat in the front and chatted to Arnham about the neighbourhood and where she used to live and where she now lived and about whether or not she should take up hairdressing again, which had been her job before she was married. Because they needed “a bit more coming in,” which was all very artless but made Philip wince. It did seem as if she were throwing herself at him. She was really “waiting to see what happened” before she definitely made up her mind to start a hairdressing business from home.

Arnham talked pleasantly enough about his own plans. The house had to be sold and all the furniture. He and his ex-wife had agreed it should be auctioned with all its contents, and he hoped this might happen while he was out of the country on business. A flat wouldn’t suit him, he would have to buy himself another house, but in the same district or not far away. What did Christine think of Epping?

“I used to go to Epping Forest on picnics when I was a child.”

“You’ve been very near Epping Forest today,” Arnham said, “but I meant Epping itself. Or Chigwell even. I might stand a chance of finding a smaller place in Chigwell Row.”

“You could always come up our way,” said Christine.

Cricklewood, that was, and Glenallan Close, where Christine, newly widowed, had been obliged to move. The most optimistic of estate agents would hardly have called it desirable. Philip reminded himself that Arnham had been there before, the clumps of red-brick houses with their flat metal-framed windows, pantiled roofs, wire fences, and skimpy gardens would come as no shock to him. Darkness and the shining mist from street lamps shrouded in leaves concealed the worst. It was no slum. It was only poor and barren and shabby. Philip and Fee and Cheryl, as if by mutual understanding, hurried into the house, leaving Christine and Arnham to make their farewells. But Christine was very quick about it, running up the path just as the front door came open and Hardy rushed out, hurtling himself at her with yelps of joy.

“What did you think of him? Did you like him?” The car had scarcely gone. Christine stood watching it depart, Hardy in her arms.

“Yes, he’s okay.” Fee, on the settee, was hunting for the latest on the Rebecca Neave affair in the
Evening Standard.

“Did you like him, Cheryl? Gerard, I mean.”

“Me? Sure, yeah. I liked him. I mean, he’s okay. He’s a lot older than Dad, isn’t he? I mean, he looks older.”

“I put my foot in it, though, didn’t I? I realised as soon as we were in the door. I’d said to him, ‘You must meet my children sometime,’ and he sort of smiled and said he’d like to and the next thing he said was to come over to his house next Saturday, and I don’t know why, I took it he meant all of us. But of course he didn’t, he meant me alone. I felt awful. Did you see that little table laid for just two with the flower and everything?”

Philip took Hardy round the grid of streets before going to bed. He came in the back way and stood there for a moment, looking at the empty space by the birdbath on which light from the kitchen window was shed, where Flora had stood. By then it was too late to undo what had been done. Returning to Buckhurst Hill on the following day, for instance, and retrieving Flora—that would have been too late.

In any case, he had no feelings of that sort then, only a sense that things had been mismanaged and the day wasted.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

A postcard came with a picture on it of the White House. This was less than two weeks after the visit to Buckhurst Hill, and Arnham was in Washington. Christine had been typically vague about what job he did, but Philip found out that he was export manager for a British company in a building near the head office of Roseberry Lawn. Fee brought in the post on Saturday morning, noting the name of the addressee and the stamp but honourably not reading the message. Christine read it to herself and then read it aloud.

“‘Have come on here from New York and next week shall be in California, or “the Coast” as they call it over here. The weather is a lot better than at home. I have left Flora to look after the house! Love, Gerry.’”

She put the card on the mantelpiece between the clock and the photograph of Cheryl holding Hardy as a puppy. Later in the day Philip saw her reading it again, with her glasses on this time, then turning it over to look closely at the picture as if in the hope of seeing some mark or cross Arnham might have made there, indicative of personal occupancy or viewing point. A letter came in the following week, not an air letter but several sheets of paper in an airmail envelope. Christine didn’t open this in company, still less read it aloud.

“I think that was him on the phone last night,” Fee said to Philip. “You know when the phone went at—oh, it must have been all of eleven-thirty. I thought, who’s ringing us at this hour? Mum jumped up as if she’d been expecting it. But she went straight to bed afterwards and she never said a word.”

“It would have been half-past six in Washington. He’d have finished his day’s work and be ready to go out for the evening.”

“No, he’ll be in California by this time. I worked it all out, it would have been early afternoon in California, he’d just have had his lunch. He was on the phone for ages, it was obvious he didn’t care what it cost.”

Philip thought, though he didn’t say so, that Arnham would have put the cost of phone calls to London on his expense account. The fact that he had had plenty to talk to Christine about was more significant.

“Now Darren and I have fixed on next May for getting married,” Fee said. “If he and Mum got engaged at Christmas, why shouldn’t we be married at the same time? I don’t see why you shouldn’t have this house, Phil. Mum won’t want it, you can tell he’s rich. You and Jenny could take over this house. I mean, I suppose you and Jenny will get married one day, won’t you?”

Philip only smiled. The idea of the house was inviting and something he had never thought about before. He wouldn’t have chosen it, but it was a house, it was somewhere to live. That this was a real possibility he came to see more and more. His fears that their unexpected invasion of his house might have changed Arnham’s feelings for Christine or at least made him proceed with caution seemed unfounded. No more postcards arrived, and if there were letters, Philip didn’t see them; but another late phone call came, and a few days later Christine confided in him that she had had a long conversation with Arnham during the afternoon.

“He has to stay on a bit longer. He’s going to Chicago next.” She spoke on a note of awe, as if Arnham were contemplating a space tour to Mars or as if the Valentine’s Day massacre had taken place quite recently. “I hope he’ll be all right.”

Philip was never indiscreet enough to say anything about the house to Jenny. He managed to contain himself even when one evening, as they were walking back from the cinema along an unfamiliar street, she pointed out a block of flats where several were advertised to let.

“When you’ve finished your training …”

It was a flat ugly building, about sixty years old, with peeling art deco adornments over the front entrance. He shook his head, said something about an exorbitant rent.

She held on to his arm. “Is it because of Rebecca Neave?”

He looked at her in astonishment. A month and more had passed since the girl’s disappearance. Theories, whole articles of speculation, appeared from time to time in newspapers, outlining their authors’ ideas of what had become of her. There was no real news, there had been no leads that could be called firm. She had vanished as surely as if she had been made invisible and spirited away. The name for a second meant nothing to Philip, so securely had he banished it from his mind, hating to dwell on these things. The identity of its possessor came back to him uneasily.

“Rebecca Neave?”

“She lived there, didn’t she?” Jenny said.

“I had no idea.”

He must have spoken very coldly, for he could sense her looking at him as if she thought he was pretending to something he didn’t truly feel. But this phobia of his was real enough, and sometimes it extended to the human beings who allowed violence to occupy their minds. He didn’t want to seem smug or prudish. Because she expected him to do so, he looked up at the building, bathed in the orangeade sticky light of stilt-borne street lamps. Not a window was open on the facade. The front doors swung apart and a woman came out briskly and got into a car. Jenny was unable to say exactly which flat had been Rebecca’s, but she guessed its windows were the two in the very top right-hand corner.