The Bridesmaid (32 page)

It terrified him because he didn’t know the answer. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what he was more afraid of, the law and the power of it out there, or her. It was important to him, as a man, to be afraid of neither. He forced himself to put his arms round her and hold her.

“I was jealous,” she said, her voice muffled. “If you ever found another girl, I’d kill her, Philip. I wouldn’t harm you but I’d kill her.”

She had told him nothing but he lacked the heart to persist. He had held her in a mechanical way, his arm becoming a clamp strong enough to support another human being in its hinged angle. It was rather like the way in which he had carried Flora to Arnham’s house. She felt as heavy and lifeless as stone.

Later he went out and bought food. He had made coffee and got her to drink some. They heard footsteps upstairs and the front door slam, and when Philip looked out of the window, up at the pavement, he saw Rita and Jacopo going off towards the tube station with suitcases. In the afternoon Senta went upstairs and, when she came back, said she had taken two of Rita’s sleeping tablets. Philip made sure there wasn’t any wine in the room, and as soon as she was asleep, he left her. She would sleep for hours, and he would come back in the night.

Someone had scored a deep scratch along the nearside doors of the car. It looked as if done with the rusty nail which the perpetrator had left on the bonnet. Joley wasn’t outside nor in Caesarea Grove but bringing up the rear of the queue at the Mother Teresa food centre in Tyre Street. Philip nodded to him but didn’t smile or wave. He was finding that deep shock and preoccupation with some huge and terrible event paralyses movement, turns the body in on itself, awfully concentrating the mind. He doubted whether he ought to be driving. He was no more fit to drive than if he had been drinking.

The house in Glenallan Close was empty but for Hardy. The little dog made a great fuss of him, jumping up and licking his hands. Philip found sliced bread in the bread bin, cole slaw and ham sausage in the fridge, rejected all of it. Eating might be resumed one day when he no longer felt a blockage in his throat like a jammed trapdoor. He stood inside the living room window, watching the aftermath of sunset, seeing the serene, red-washed, pearly sky as unreal, the backdrop of a different world from that in which such things happened. A deep longing filled him that it might not be true, he might have imagined or dreamt it, he might wake up.

The car slid into his vision, stopped outside the house. He thought, absurdly: the police. It was Arnham’s Jaguar. Arnham and Christine got out of it, she with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a basket of what looked like raspberries in the other. Hardy heard Christine coming and ran out to the door.

She had caught the sun. There was a glow on her skin. “We’ve been for a picnic,” she said. “Gerard took the day off and we had this picnic in Epping Forest. It was ever so nice, like real country.”

A different world. He wondered if his face expressed the despair he felt. Arnham had a deep tan, which made him look even more Italian or Greek. The white shirt he wore was open nearly to the waist, like a young man’s, and he had jeans on.

“How are you, Philip? You’ve been in the wrong place today, I can tell you.”

From now on, he would always be in the wrong place. He said, not even trying to frame the words courteously, “Where do you live now?”

“Still in Buckhurst Hill, but on the other side of the High Road. I didn’t move far.”

Christine, who had fetched a vase full of water and was arranging her carnations in it, said in that innocent, charming, unthinking way of hers, “Yes, Philip, I wanted so much to see Gerard’s house. We were so near, really. I suppose I’m nosy but I do love to see a new home. Gerard wouldn’t take me there, he said it wasn’t fit for me to see. He’d have to give it a good clean before I’d be allowed to set foot inside.”

Philip hesitated, then said coldly, “I suppose the truth is you didn’t want her to see you’d got rid of Flora.”

There was silence. Arnham went very red. The shot had gone accurately home. Philip hadn’t actually believed this was the reason for Arnham’s unwillingness to take Christine to his house, but now he saw he had been right. Holding four or five of the carnations in one hand, holding them out very much in Flora’s own attitude, Christine turned to look wonderingly at Arnham.

“Did you, Gerard? You didn’t get rid of Flora really, did you?”

“I’m sorry,” Arnham said. “I’m desperately sorry. I didn’t want you to know. He’s right when he says that’s why I didn’t want to take you home. I’ve got a small garden and you’d have been bound to ask. I’m sorry.”

“If you didn’t like her, I wish you’d said.” Philip wouldn’t have imagined Christine could be so upset. “I’d much rather you’d said and we could have taken her back again.”

“Christine, believe me, I did want her, I did like her. Please don’t look like that.”

“Yes, I know I’m being very silly and very childish, but this has spoilt my day.”

“He sold her to some people in Chigwell.” Philip could never remember having been really vindictive before. It was a new, bitter flavour, sharp and satisfying in his mouth. “Ask him if he didn’t sell her to some people in Chigwell called Myerson.”

“I didn’t sell her!”

“Gave her, then.”

“It wasn’t like that. It was an accident. I went off to America, as you know, and I was there a month and they had the auction of the house and the contents while I was away. The statue shouldn’t have been included, I left instructions it shouldn’t be sold, but there was a mix-up and it was sold.” Arnham was looking angrily at Philip. “I was aghast when I found out. I did my best to get it back and I did trace it to the dealer who had bought it. Only, by that time he had sold it to a buyer who paid cash.

“As a matter of fact, that was why I didn’t get in touch with you, Christine. I may as well tell you the whole of it. I’d as soon your son wasn’t hearing all this, but since he’s here.…”

Once Philip would have left the room, but now he didn’t see why he should. He stood his ground.

“I wanted to see you,” Arnham said. “I wanted to see you very much but I couldn’t face telling you about Flora. I absolutely funked it. For a while I thought I’d be able to get her back, and when I couldn’t and I’d moved into my new house and months had gone by, I thought, I can’t phone her now, it’s too late, it’s ridiculous. Apart from the fact that I felt I still couldn’t explain about the statue. When I met your son in Baker Street that day, I realised how much I’d—I’d missed you.” A look of brooding resentment was levelled at Philip. Arnham’s heavy Latin face had taken on a purplish flush. “I wanted to see you,” he said to Christine, his tone becoming reproachful. “I wanted to get in touch and I did but I was worried all the time about the statue. I thought I’d have to tell you it had got broken or—or stolen.”

Philip gave a low, unamused laugh. His mother had got up, lifted the vase of carnations, and set it on the windowsill. She pulled at the flowers a bit, trying to make the arrangement symmetrical. She didn’t speak. Hardy jumped off the chair he had been sitting on and trotted over to Arnham, his kind cheerful muzzle uplifted and twitching and his tail beginning to wag. Philip noted, as one might observe some fact confirmed beyond a doubt, Arnham’s instinctive recoil. Then he put out a hand to touch Hardy’s head—a sop, no doubt, to Christine.

She turned to face Arnham. Philip expected her to begin uttering reproaches, though this would have been very unlike her. But she only smiled and said, “Well, that’s over. I hope you feel it’s cleared the air. Now I’ll make us all some tea.”

“You’re going to let me take you out to dinner, Christine?”

“I don’t think so. It’s rather late for that. I’m not used to eating so late and you’ve a long drive ahead of you. I’m afraid I didn’t realise until today,” she said in a bright conversational way, “what a very long drive it is.”

Philip left them and went upstairs. He had to return to Senta, yet there was nothing he wanted to do less. If anyone had told him two days before that there would come a time, and soon, when he wouldn’t want to see her, when he would recoil from seeing her, he would have dismissed this with derision. Now he felt as he once had, very long ago, when a little child and his cat had become ill. He had loved the cat, which the Wardmans had acquired as a mature animal, a stray, had named Smoky for its black and grey brindled coat, and had transformed with care and good food into a beautiful sleek creature.

Smoky had slept on Philip’s bed. He lay in Philip’s lap in the evening while Philip did his homework. He was very much Philip’s cat, petted and pampered and almost hourly caressed. Then, as he grew old, he became ill. Years and years had passed and Smoky was probably fourteen or fifteen. His teeth were bad and his breath smelt, his fur fell out and bald patches appeared on his coat, he stopped washing. And Philip lost his affection for him. He ceased to love him. He pretended to care still but it was a poor pretence. Awful though his guilt was, he came to avoid poor Smoky and his basket in the corner of the kitchen, and when his parents, fearful of telling him, at last made themselves suggest to him that Smoky should out of kindness be put to sleep, he was relieved, a load was lifted from him.

Had he then loved the cat only for his beauty? Had he loved Senta only for her beauty? And what he thought of as the beauty of her mind, her self—her soul, if you like? Now he knew that those areas of her being were not beautiful but ill, foul, sick, distorted. They were evil and they stank. Because of this, had he ceased to love her? It wasn’t as simple as that. It wasn’t simply that he flinched from her madness either, more that the person he had loved was imaginary, not the strange little wild animal with a twisted human brain that awaited him in Tarsus Street.

He opened his clothes cupboard and looked at Flora standing in the dimness within, her face framed between a pair of tweed trousers and the raincoat he had bought to replace the stolen one. The curious thing was that she no longer resembled Senta. Perhaps she never had and the likeness lay in his all too willing imagination. Her stone face looked blind and bland, the eyes empty of expression. She wasn’t even a she but an it, a thing made of marble, perhaps not even modelled from life, the work of an indifferent sculptor. He lifted her out, laid her on the bed. The idea came to him to replace her in the garden before he went out. There could be no reason not to do this, now that he knew Arnham had parted from her long ago, now that Christine knew it all, now that Myerson, who had owned her, was dead. He carried her downstairs.

Gerard Arnham was leaving. The front door was open and Christine was down at the gate watching as he got into the Jaguar. Philip took Flora into the back garden and set her up in her old position beside the birdbath. Had she always looked so tawdry, so scruffy? The green stain which disfigured her bosom and the folds of her robe, the chip out of her ear, and new hitherto unnoticed damage—a may flower missing from the bouquet—changed her into a fitting ornament for a ruin. He turned away and, looking back, saw that a sparrow had come to perch on her shoulder.

In the kitchen Christine was drinking a second cup of tea.

“I called out to see if you wanted some, dear, but you weren’t about. Poor Gerard was rather upset, wasn’t he?”

Philip said,
“You
were pretty upset when he didn’t come near you for months and months.”

“Was I?” She seemed puzzled, as if the effort of memory yielded nothing. “I don’t think he’ll be back and I can’t say I’m sorry. Audrey wouldn’t have liked it.”

At any rate Philip
thought
she said Audrey. He had always thought she said Audrey, only perhaps he had never listened very closely. “What has it got to do with her?”

“Not her, dear,
Aubrey.
My friend, Aubrey. You know who I mean, Tom’s brother, Tom Pelham.”

The world floated a little, the floor floated. “You mean, Senta’s father?”

“No, Philip. He’s Tom. This is his brother, Aubrey Pelham, he’s Darren’s mother’s brother and he’s never been married, I met him for the first time at Fee’s wedding. Philip dear, I’m sure I’ve never been secretive about this, I’ve never kept it dark, I always said I was going out with Aubrey, seeing a lot of Aubrey. You can’t deny it, now can you?”

He couldn’t deny it. He had been too occupied with his own affairs to pay it much attention. Audrey was the name he had heard, a woman’s name. But it hadn’t been for a woman that Christine had bought new clothes, bleached her hair, grown youthful.

“He wants to marry me, as a matter of fact. You—would you—would you mind if I married him?”

This was what he had wished for, longed for, a man into whose safe keeping he could entrust her. How could the world be so full of things that were of paramount importance one day and meant less than nothing the next?

“Me? No, of course I wouldn’t mind.”

“I just thought I’d ask. When your children are grown up, I think you ought to ask them if they mind you getting married, though you don’t expect them to ask you.”

“When is it going to be?”

“Oh, I don’t know that, dear. I haven’t told him yes yet. I thought it would be good for Cheryl if I married him.”

“Why good for Cheryl?”

“I told you, Philip, he’s a social worker, he works with teenagers with problems, like her.”

Philip thought, she’s got it all worked out, she has arranged her life without me. And I always thought she was helpless, I thought she would need to lean on me for life. Suddenly he saw something else: his mother was the kind of woman men would always want to marry, there would always be men anxious to marry her. Being married, that was what she was good at in her strange, loving, scatty way, and they could sense it.

It embarrassed him to do it, it wasn’t like him, but just the same he put his arm round her and gave her a kiss. She looked up into his face and smiled.

“I may not be back for a while,” he said. “I’m going to Senta’s.”

She said vaguely, “Have a good time, dear.” She was moving towards the phone in the hall, transparently waiting for him to leave so that, in private, she could transmit his permission and his reaction to Aubrey Pelham. He got into the car but didn’t immediately start the engine. The unwillingness to rejoin Senta which he had felt while in the house was growing stronger. He was beginning to understand that a violent antipathy could be the reverse, of which the obverse was passion. He saw her as evil; he saw her eyes looking at him, very green and glittering. The idea came to him of how it would be never to see her again—the relief, the peace. Somehow he knew that once he went back there, he would be lost, but to write—why shouldn’t he write and tell her it was all over, it had been a temporary insanity, bad for both of them?