The Bridesmaid (31 page)

“Well, I suppose that’s an improvement,” Mrs. Ripple was saying.

Pearl ran a red-nailed finger over the surface of the marble. “At least you won’t get soap and goodness knows what else trapped in the cracks. Imagine with that other one, the gunge that would have built up. I mean it doesn’t bear thinking of.”

“They don’t think of it, Pearl. They’re men who design them, you see. We’d see some changes if it was women who had a say in it.”

Philip would have liked to tell her that, in fact, this particular series of vanity units had all been designed by a woman. Once, that is, he would have liked to tell her. Now his mind had curiously blanked, emptied but for the presence in it of a small black Scottie dog that Senta had named Ebony and heard whimpering as its master died.

“Well, if you’re happy with it,” he heard himself saying, “I’ll take it upstairs for you. The fitter will be along before the end of the week.”

“Have you noticed, Pearl, how it’s always the same with these people? The beginning of the week is Wednesday morning but ‘before the end of the week’ is late Friday afternoon.”

He scarcely heard her. He carried the marble slab up the staircase, very much aware of its weight, aware of it as a man three times his age might be. Inside the new bathroom he crossed to the window, now fussily cluttered with floral Austrian blinds, and gazed at the back of Arnham’s house. The may tree, which when he first saw it had been festooned with blossoms, now bore a harvest of berries changing from green to russet colour. Beneath stood the figure of Cupid with his bow and quiver which had replaced Flora. But he noticed something else about that garden which struck him hollowly. No one had tended it for weeks. No one had mown the lawn or pulled out a weed or trimmed off a dead head. Rank grass grew six inches high with yellow and white flowering weeds among it.

The little black dog came running into the garden from round the side of the house. It disappeared into the tall grass as a wild animal disappears into the bush. Ebony, he thought, Ebony. Philip turned away and came out on to the landing. Sick though he felt, panic-stricken in some fearful, unanalysable way, he had to know the truth. If necessary, he would have to ask. In his present state of near certainty, which was still uncertainty, it would be unthinkable to leave here and drive home, to carry with him a doubt that would gnaw like a rat. He could feel in anticipation (through experience) the pain of it.

He didn’t have to ask. He stood on the landing, holding on to the railing at the head of the stairs, listening to their voices. The door into the living room was open and he heard Mrs. Ripple say, “You know who that was?”

“Who what was?”

“The woman with the dog who came in to ask if I knew anyone who’d help her with her garden.”

“I didn’t catch the name.”

“Myerson’s her name. Myerson. Mark you, I don’t like dogs in the house, I wouldn’t have had it if it was anyone else, but I couldn’t very well say anything in the circumstances. I’m surprised the name didn’t ring a bell with you. It was her husband that was murdered—when would it have been? A month ago? Five weeks?”

“Murdered?” said Pearl. “What was the name again?”

“Harold. Harold Myerson.”

“You may have mentioned it in your letter. I never read those things in the paper, I avoid those things. I may be a coward but I can’t bear things like that.”

“He was murdered in Hainault Forest,” said Mrs. Ripple. “It was on a Sunday morning, a beautiful sunny morning. He was stabbed in the heart while he was out with that dog.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

She sat on the bed and he sat in the wicker chair. The window had been open but he had closed it out of fear. There was the room they were in and the looking-glass country of that room reflected in the tilted mirror—greenish, watery, clouded, a land of swamps.

“I told you I killed him, Philip,” she said. “I told you over and over I stabbed him with my glass dagger.”

He couldn’t speak. It had been as much as he could do to articulate the words that demanded the truth from her. She was calmer and more reasonable, even gently amused, than he had ever known her.

“I see now that I have killed the wrong man. But you did tell me over and over that Gerard Arnham lived there. You showed me the house. We drove past and you pointed to it and you said, ‘That’s where Gerard Arnham lives.’ I think you have to admit, Philip, that it was you who made the mistake, not me.”

She spoke as if his contention was only that she had picked the wrong victim. She might have been mildly reproving him for being late for an engagement. Philip had dropped his head into his hands. He sat there feeling the sweat form between his fingertips and the hot pulsing skin of his forehead. Her hand on his arm, the touch of her little child’s hand, made him jump and flinch. It was like a lighted match brought close against bare flesh.

“It doesn’t really matter, Philip,” he heard her say. He heard her voice soft and sweetly reasonable. “It doesn’t really matter who I killed. The point was to kill someone to prove my love for you. I mean—if you don’t mind my saying this—it wasn’t the old down-and-out what’s-he-called, Joley, that you killed, was it? You made a mistake there as well. But we did do it.” The sound she made was a soft, rueful giggle. “Next time,” she said, “I expect we’d be better at it, we’d be more careful.”

He had jumped up and was on her before he realised what was happening. Her shoulders were in his hands, grasped with the nails digging in, and he was crashing her body up and down on the bed, pounding the frailness of her into the mattress, the flimsy ribcage, the bird’s bones. She didn’t fight him. She yielded to his violence moaning a little. When he began to strike her, she covered her face with her hands.

The sight of the ring he had given her, the silver and the milky stone, stopped him. That and her face, so feebly protected, cowering from his flailing hands, seemed to paralyse him in mid-onslaught. He had been the man who hated violence, who couldn’t imagine himself performing any brutish act. Even talking about it had offended him. Even thinking of it had seemed a source of corruption.

Upstairs the “Great Waltz” from
Rosenkavalier
sent its sweet, painful strains down through the ceiling. Disgusted with himself, he fell across the bed. He lay in a state of shock, unable to think, wanting to die.

Presently he was aware she had sat up. She was wiping her eyes with her fingers. Somehow his blows had cut her face, there was a trace of blood on one cheekbone. It was while she had been protecting her face with her hands that the moonstone ring had been pressed into the skin. Blood got onto her fingertip and she flinched when she saw it. She crouched on all fours, looking into the mirror at the scratch on her face.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” he said. “I went mad.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. I shouldn’t have hit you.”

“You can hit me if you want. You can do what you like with me. I love you.”

He was stunned by her. His shock was so immense as to have bludgeoned him into a kind of unconsciousness. He could only look helplessly at her and hear those words, uttered in an impossible context. Her face was soft with love, as if the features had begun to melt. Then blood marred a silvery-white perfection, made her human. All too human.

“It was all true, then?” he managed to say.

She nodded. She seemed surprised, but in a simple chidllike way. “Oh, yes, it was all true. Of course it was.”

“The part about following him and going up to him and saying you had something in your eye—that was true?” He could hardly say the words but he said them: “And stabbing him—that was true?”

“I told you. Of course it was true. I didn’t know you doubted me Philip. I thought you trusted me.”

In a fever of fear and disbelief and panic, he had driven straight to her from Chigwell. He had neither returned to head office nor gone home, so it had been quite early when he arrived. And for once, for the first time perhaps, she had seen him arriving from the basement window. Her smile had died when she saw his face.

He had brought no wine, no food. It was the end of his world, or so he had felt when he pounded down the basement stairs. He would never eat or drink again. It was she who said—after she had answered all his questions and confirmed it all, when he had no more words—“Shall we have some wine? I should like to. Would you go out and get some, Philip?”

Out in the street he was a hunted person. It was a new feeling. On the way here he had been frightened, but afraid only of what she might tell him, of what her looks and her words would confirm. Now that he knew for sure, he felt pursued. Before the weekend he had reached a point at which he believed almost nothing she told him until it was confirmed by outside authority, he had nearly come to switch off belief when she began spinning a narrative. That authority had confirmed her part in the television serial, and he had been happy, had been relieved. It was strange that now, when she recounted the most incredible things she had ever told him, he believed her utterly. There was no doubting anymore.

He bought two bottles of cheap white wine. Even before he was back in her room, he knew he couldn’t face drinking any of it. He must keep his head clear. Oblivion was not for him, still less the sloppy euphoric fuzzy state they so often reached, when sex was slipped into like the dreams that come at dawn, as easily found and as dazedly yielded to. As he came back to the room, passing from the dusty heat of upstairs to the cool dimness below, the facts, the truth, slammed back at him once more, the reality that she had murdered in cold blood a defenceless stranger, and he whispered to himself in incredulity. “It can’t be, it can’t be. …”

She began drinking the wine greedily. He carried his glassful with him out to the tap, poured it away, refilled the glass with water.

In those smoky green glasses you couldn’t tell whether the contents were wine or water. She put out her hand to him. “Stay the night with me. Don’t go home tonight.”

He looked at her in despair. He spoke his thoughts aloud. “I don’t think I could go home. I feel as if I couldn’t leave this room, I couldn’t see other people. I can only be with you. You’ve made it impossible for me to associate with others.”

This seemed to please her. He even had the momentary feeling that this had been her whole purpose, to set the two of them apart, to make them unfit for other company. He saw the madness in her face again, in the unfocussed gaze, the sublime indifference to all that perplexes and horrifies humanity. It was Flora’s face. That look had been on the marble features when he had seen her a lifetime ago lying in the flower bed in Arnham’s garden. This time he didn’t try, as he had tried once before, to dispel from his own mind the notion of her madness. If she was mad, she couldn’t help herself. If she was mad, she was helplessly unable to control what she did.

He took her in his arms. It was horrible, there was no pleasure in holding her like this. It was like holding some decaying drowned thing or a sack of garbage. He almost retched. And then pity came, for her and for himself, and he began to cry, with his face on her shoulder and his lips pressed into her neck. She stroked his hair. She whispered to him, “Poor Philip, poor Philip, don’t be sad, you mustn’t be sad.…”

He was alone in the house. He sat in the window of the living room, watching the light fade in the street. Glenallan Close, in a sunset like this one, bathed in pale red light, windless and basking, was as beautiful as it could ever be.

It had been a night and a day of almost continuous unrelieved suffering, incredible to look back on, beyond belief that two people had been able to bear it. Of course, there had been no question of his going to work. After that sleepless night, those long crawling hours in which she had dozed and awakened by turns, had begged him to make love to her, once gone down on her knees to him with infinite pathos, and still he had failed—after all that, he had gone up to the phone in the hall at eight in the morning and phoned Roy at home. He had no need to simulate a hoarse voice, a dry throat, an almost communicable weariness. All that was there already, as the result of those dreadful hours.

And with the coming of the sun it had begun again. No doors or windows had been opened the night before and the heat grew like an oven warming. Senta, who had slept till he came back, awoke and began crying. He wanted to hit her again then, to stop that meaningless, pointless moaning. To keep himself from striking her, he clutched his hands together. Violence that had been alien to him he was learning. He was learning that we are all capable of almost anything.

“You must stop,” he said. “You must stop crying. We have to talk. We have to decide what to do.”

“What is there to do if you won’t love me?”

Her face was sodden with weeping as if the skin had blotted up the tears. Wet strands of hair stuck to her face.

“Senta, you must tell me.” A thought struck him. “Tell me the truth now. You have to tell me only the truth from now on.”

She nodded. He felt she was placating him, agreeing in order to avoid more trouble. Her eyes had become wary, greener and sharper, within their swollen lids.

“What did you mean when you said it wasn’t the first time? You told me when you were talking about the police that this wasn’t the first time. What did you mean?”

There was a pause while her eyes shifted, looked into the mirror, back at him. She spoke so innocently, in a way calculated to disarm.

“I mean I killed someone else once. I had this boy friend called Martin, Martin Hunt—I did tell you that. I did tell you there was someone before you. I thought he was the one. It was before I ever saw you. Long before we met. You don’t mind, do you, Philip? You don’t mind? If I’d known, I’d never have gone near him, I’d never have spoken to him if I’d known I was going to meet you.”

He shook his head. It was a feeble ineffectual protest at something he didn’t understand but which he knew was monstrous. “What about him?”

Instead of replying, she said, creeping close to him but receiving no welcome, no warmth, “You are going to protect me and save me and go on loving me, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”