The Bridesmaid (30 page)

“May I speak to Tina Wendover?”

The voice said, “She’s at a read-through. Who is it speaking?”

Philip was very taken aback. Senta had said there would be a read-through of
Impatience
on Wednesday, and today was Wednesday. He gave his own name.

“Would you like to speak to her assistant?”

He said he would and, when he was put through, said in a reluctant mumble that he was speaking on behalf of Senta Pelham’s agent. He understood that Senta had been offered a part in
Impatience.

“Yes, that’s right.” She sounded astonished at his enquiry, surprised that he was in doubt, said suspiciously, “Who exactly is that?”

Feeling guilty at once because he had doubted her, he was astonished just the same. This confirmation of what she had told him restored her to him in a new light. Not as a new person, but as a fuller, rarer Senta, cleverer, more sophisticated and accomplished than he had ever supposed. Even at this moment she would be at the read-through. He hardly knew what would be happening at this preliminary gathering of the cast of a television serial, but he imagined actors and actresses, some of them famous faces, sitting round a long table with their scripts in front of them, reading their parts. And Senta was among them, one of them, knowing the correct way to behave, the proper procedures to follow. He imagined her in her long black skirt perhaps and the silvery-grey top, the silver hair spread over her shoulders, with Donald Sindon on one side of her and Miranda Richardson on the other. Philip had no idea if this actor and actress had parts in the serial, but theirs were the faces which came into his mind.

She was suddenly more real to him, more of an active, responsible human being who lived in the world, than she had ever been. He understood that because of this, he loved her more. His fears receded. They seemed neurotic suspicions, borne of his ignorance of people like her and the world of dreams and imagination they must necessarily inhabit because of their art. So much that made up their lives was unreal, or unreal to ordinary people like himself. Was it any wonder they saw the truth, not as the cut-and-dried thing which was how it presented itself to him, but as something vague and blurred at the edges, open to numberless imaginative interpretations?

When he reached home that evening he heard voices from the living room, Christine’s and a man’s. He opened the door and saw that the visitor was Gerard Arnham.

Arnham, apparently, had phoned Christine on the very day he and Philip had encountered each other. Christine had said nothing about it. His mother could also be secretive, Philip was beginning to discover. She was looking pretty and young and might easily have been taken for Fee’s elder sister. Her hair was newly blonded and newly set, and Philip had to admit that she wasn’t, after all, a bad hairdresser. She had a pale blue dress on with white spots, a dress of the kind, he somehow recognised, that men always like and women often don’t, with a full skirt and a tight waist and a low-cut square neck.

Arnham jumped up. “How are you, Philip? We’re on our way out to dinner. I just thought I’d like to wait and see you.”

Shaking hands, Philip thought immediately about the woman who had come out of their house and accused him of driving too fast. He would have to warn Christine of the existence of this woman and he disliked the prospect. It need not, however, indeed could not, be undertaken at this moment. He thought too of the presence upstairs, inside his wardrobe, of Flora.

“We could all have a glass of sherry, Phil,” Christine said, as if this were a very daring thing to do.

Philip fetched the sherry and the glasses and they made conversation rather uneasily, talking of nothing much. Before Philip came in, Arnham had apparently been giving Christine some sort of account of his move from his former home and the circumstances in which he had found his present house. He reverted to this, going into close details, while Christine listened avidly. Philip didn’t pay this much attention. He found himself speculating once again as to the prospect of Arnham as a husband for Christine. It occurred to him that the woman who had come running out at the sound of his brakes had looked unhappy. Hadn’t they been getting on, he and she? Were they on the point of parting?

He watched them go down the path, giving Christine a little wave from the window in response to her own. Arnham’s car was parked on the other side of the street, which was why he hadn’t noticed it when he came in. He handed Christine into it in a courtly, old-fashioned way, making Philip feel that if it hadn’t been a sultry summer evening he would have tucked a rug round her knees. Impossible now to keep from imagining Christine as Mrs. Arnham and living in the house in Chigwell with the may tree in the garden. Perhaps the woman he had seen was Arnham’s sister or his housekeeper.

He would be free to go. There would be no bar to his moving into the top flat in Tarsus Street with Senta. He thought about this as a likelihood, not an impossible dream, as he drove down Shoot-up Hill. Cheryl would naturally go with Christine, it would be the best thing that could happen to Cheryl, to have two parents again, to have a more attractive place to live in. He was aware that he had thought along these lines before, when Christine had first known Arnham, but things had been different then: that had been before Senta.

Joley was outside on the pavement, resting on his barrow in the warm sunshine like an old dog. Philip raised his arm to him in a salute and Joley made the thumbs-up sign. A heat wave was coming, you could feel it in the air, in the calmness of the evening, the steady dark gold of the sunset light. And Philip felt, as he let himself into the house and heard from the front room the sound of a waltz, that things had returned to what they once were, had come full circle, been restored to an earlier perfection. No, more than that—a new perfection that was the result of trial and error and subsequent full knowledge. Down there, Senta awaited him, his honourable, truthful, daydreaming love. Christine had got Arnham back. Joley was at his post. The weather would once more be glorious.

The heat was terrible and wonderful. It would have been desirable at the seaside, where Philip wished again and again he and Senta might be. In London it brought with it drought and smells and sweat. But Senta’s basement room grew cool. In the ordinary warm weather it had been stuffy, in the cold very cold. Now she opened windows he hardly knew existed at the back of the house, and let a draught blow through the cluttered subterranean rooms.

It was an outdoor time when London briefly became a European city with pavement cafés. Philip wanted to spend their evenings in the open air. As much as anything, he liked being seen with her, he liked the envy of other men. To walk about Hampstead or Highgate holding hands with Senta among the crowds of other young people seemed to him the most inviting way to pass their evenings—with, of course, the prospect of an early return to Tarsus Street. And although it was perhaps true that she preferred to stay in, she consented.

On the fourth day of the heat wave, when the weather showed no signs of breaking, he drove to Chigwell in the afternoon. Mrs. Ripple’s new marble slab had arrived, a perfect one as far as Philip could see, too smooth and flawless to seem like the real thing. He decided to take it to her himself, ask for her approval, and give her his personal undertaking that a fitter would come in to instal it that same week. It was Monday.

He and Senta had been tremendously happy during the weekend. Without of course telling her he had checked up on her, he congratulated her on her part in
Impatience
and he could tell how much she loved his praise and how happy she was to answer his rather naive questions. She showed him how she meant to act her part, altering her voice quite subtly and changing her facial expression so that she became, briefly and alarmingly, a different person. She seemed to know most of her lines already. He anticipated the pride he was going to feel when he actually saw her on screen. His emotion was powerful and he felt almost choked by it.

They were together from the Friday night until this morning. On Saturday there had been some talk of going up to the top floor and making a start on cleaning the flat, preparing it for their occupancy, which now might not be long delayed. But it was too hot. Both agreed there would be time enough for that when the weather got cool again. Their work on the flat could wait until the following Friday.

There must have been thousands of other people about in that heat, in those sunlit streets, but he hardly saw them. They were shadows or ghosts, scarcely real. They were there only to make Senta, by contrast, more real, more beautiful, more his own. Any misunderstandings were over, arguments past, quarrels forgotten, talk of death and violence melted away by the sun and the leisurely sensuous pace of life. They ate their meals in pub gardens or on the grass of the Heath, they drank a lot of wine. Hand in hand, they meandered back to the car, back to Tarsus Street, white and dusty and brittle with heat, and to bed in the underground cool. He had begun to feel he was curing her of her agoraphobia. Very little persuasion had been needed to get her out into the open air, the sunny noons and the sweet warm nighttimes.

“Just think,” she had said to him, “in a week’s time we may be together all the time.”

“Well, perhaps not a week, but very soon.”

“We won’t put it off, we’ll get started on Friday. Maybe we could move the bed up, that would be a start. I’ll ask Rita to make that horrible Mike help us, shall I? There’s just one thing I want you to help me with first, but it won’t take long and then we’ll really begin thinking how we’re going to arrange our flat. I’m so happy, Philip, I’ve never been so happy in all my life!”

Throughout that weekend she had never once fantasised. Not a tall story of the past or present had been offered him. A kind of exorcism had taken place, he thought. She was purged of the need to alter truth. How could he avoid the perhaps conceited belief that it was her love for him and his for her that had changed her? Reality had become adequate.

Grounded in a traffic jam on the way to Chigwell, he thought tenderly of Senta. He had left her lying in bed, the shutters half-closed, a breeze of early morning—that would later die— airing the room, blowing from open window to open window. Sunlight fell across the bed linen in bands but avoided her face, her eyes. He had seen to that. She had awakened for a little while and put up her arms to him. It had been more of a wrench even than usual to leave her, and she, knowing it, had held on to him, kissing him, whispering to him not to go yet, not yet.

There was such a long tail-back of cars on the approaches to the A.12 that Philip briefly thought it might be wiser to turn back when the opportunity of doing so came. Afterwards he was to wonder what sort of a difference to his life it would have made had he done so. Not much probably. Happiness would have endured for a few more days, along with the heat and the sunshine, but it would soon have passed. In the nature of things there could have been no escape for him and her, not now. If he had turned back, all that would have happened was that the bubble of illusion and self-deception and mysterious false assumptions would have been broken later and not that afternoon.

He didn’t turn back. His shirt was wet with sweat and sticking to the back of the seat. A car somewhere ahead of him, half a mile ahead for all he knew, had overheated and its radiator boiled. It was this breakdown that was causing the delay. He was glad he hadn’t given Mrs. Ripple a definite time, only said something about the middle of the afternoon, which by its vagueness had raised another of her reprimands.

Twenty minutes later he was past the stranded car that blocked the inside lane, steam coming from its raised bonnet. The marble slab fell off the backseat as he turned the corner into Mrs. Ripple’s road, and he had a momentary panic lest it was cracked. Finding it intact when he was finally parked outside the house made a fresh surge of sweat break over him. The tar was melting on the roadway, and on the camber, in the hard bright light, mirages of sheets of water danced. Lawns were yellowing, drying up. He hauled the marble slab in its cardboard container out of the back of the car.

Mrs. Ripple’s front door opened as he came up to the gate, and a woman came out with a black Scottie dog on a lead. She paused on the step as people do who spin out their leave-taking. It was Gerard Arnham’s woman, wife, sister, housekeeper, whatever she was. Inside the house were Mrs. Ripple and, visible behind her, Pearl of the black curly hair and shiny peacock-blue dress. Only, today the dress was flame pink and sleeveless, and Mrs. Ripple herself wore a flimsy garment with narrow straps which showed sunburnt shoulders and scrawny arms.

Philip didn’t know why the sight of the woman with the dog caused him such a shock. He was staggered by her. His grasp on the topmost bar of the gate had tightened until the metal dug into his flesh. The weight of the package he carried suddenly reminded him of another marble object he had once lugged about on a warm day—Flora, which he had carried to Arnham’s house when he lived in Buckhurst Hill.

Arnham’s woman came down the path towards him, the dog sniffing at his ankles. She didn’t seem to recognise him. Her hawklike face was strained, the eye sockets dark, the forehead deeply lined. She looked as if the heat had dried her out, actually physically depleted her. She passed him, staring trancelike ahead of her. Philip stared at her, he couldn’t help it. He looked back and watched her go out of the gate and turn, blindly it seemed, up along the street.

Mrs. Ripple said, “Here you are, then.” It was the mildest greeting he had ever received from her. Pearl achieved a smile without parting her bright red greasy lips.

Mechanically he began opening the cardboard carton and easing out the slab onto the cushions of Mrs. Ripple’s settee. The dog was what had shocked him, he realised, the presence of the dog, the
kind
of dog. He wanted to ask Mrs. Ripple who the woman was, yet he already knew who she was. He knew who she was and he knew who the dog was. They were Thiefie and Ebony.