The Bridesmaid (34 page)

“I’ve got to go, Senta.”

She clung more closely. “I can’t take more time off,” he said. “I’ve got to go to work now.”

He didn’t tell her that first of all he was going to see Fee and Darren, to catch them before they left for work. He had to prise her off him, kissing her for comfort. The shawls spread over her, she curled foetuslike into the brown bedclothes. To exclude the harsh yellow light, he pulled the shutters nearly closed and left the room quickly without looking back at her.

His brother-in-law presented a different and more attractive image at breakfast time than in those afternoon and evening hours when he was to be found sprawled in front of the screen. Newly shaven, he was the handsome bridegroom once again, a frown of concentration aging him as he studied, of all unlikely newspapers, the
Financial Times
. And Fee who had been bright and brisk, a hair dryer in one hand and a plate of toast in the other, was astonished to see her brother, convinced he must have come because of some accident that had happened to their mother. Telling her everything was all right, Philip wondered at the use of this phrase which must always be meaningless.

He found himself postponing discussion of the true reason for his visit. Perhaps people often did that, he thought. Speak of the lesser anxiety first, the smaller care. Yet to place Cheryl in this category brought a rush of guilt. Fee was incredulous, then embarrassed. She lit a cigarette as if it was anything but addiction they were discussing.

“Fruit machines?” said Darren. “
Fruit machines?
I play fruit machines but no one calls me a junkie.”

“You’re not addicted to them. You can control your need to play them and you can make yourself stop. Cheryl can’t.”

Philip could tell that he was getting nowhere with these two, who would have perfectly understood the perils, for instance, of alcoholism. It showed him how far Fee had grown away from him and how much nearer to Darren. Perhaps it was necessary and inevitable for the endurance of the marriage. The time had come and could be put off no longer. Darren had already got up from the table and was hunting for his car keys. Philip said, “Who’s Martin Hunt?”

“What?”

“Martin Hunt, Fee. I’m sure it’s through you and Darren I’ve heard the name.”

She frowned, screwed up her nose at him in indignation or incredulity. “You know who it is, you must know. What’s wrong with your memory these days?”

“Is he—is he dead?”

“How should I know? I shouldn’t think so. He’s young. He’s only twenty-four or twenty-five. Why would he be dead?”

“Who is he, Fee?”

“I don’t know him,” she said. “It was Rebecca I knew. Rebecca Neave that I was at school with. He was her boy friend. That’s all I know, what I saw on telly and in the papers.”

It took him a little while to digest this, to understand the meaning of what she had said and to draw inferences. He wondered later if she had noticed how he had turned pale. He felt the blood drawn from his face and a goose-pimpling. It was something like faintness too. He held on to the back of one of Fee’s dining chairs. Darren came up to Fee and said he was off and kissed her.

Fee had gone into the kitchen. She came back drying her hands on a piece of paper towel. “Why did you want to know all that about Martin Hunt?”

He lied. Senta had taught him how and he could lie almost without a qualm. “Someone told me he’d been killed in a car crash.”

Fee wasn’t interested. “I don’t think so. We’d have heard.” She disappeared again, came back wearing a cotton jacket. “I’ve got to go to work, Phil. You coming? Oh, I nearly forgot. Mum phoned and told me Flora was back. I don’t really know what she meant. I mean she just said Flora had come back as if she’d walked in of her own accord or something.”

They went downstairs, out into the street and the white sunlight. Philip didn’t have to lie this time. “I happened to find her. I thought Mum would like her back so I—I got her back.”

“Why didn’t you say? Mum thinks it’s a miracle. She thinks Flora just walked in and set herself up on that bit of concrete.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t really,” Philip said abstractedly. “Anyway I’ll explain.”

Fee looked curiously at him as they parted. “Did you come all the way over here at this hour just to ask me about a fellow you didn’t even know you’d heard of?”

He was rehearsing some kind of explanation for Christine. It took his mind off more pressing concerns. It stopped him thinking about what he knew he must at some time confront. He would tell his mother that he had in fact known for a long time that Arnham no longer possessed Flora, that Flora was sold. He, Philip, had been advertising for her, had at last found her and bought her back as a surprise for Christine. The opportunity of giving a real performance of this farrago of inventions was denied him.

Cheryl had locked herself in her room. A white-faced Christine came up to Philip before he had even let himself into the house, before he had taken his key from the lock, came up to him and threw her arms round him.

He held her shoulders, tried to speak calmly, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Phil, the police have been here. They brought Cheryl back and they searched the house.”

“What do you mean?”

He got her to sit down. She was shaking and he held her hand tightly. She spoke in a breathless, gasping way. “She was caught shoplifting. Only a bottle of perfume but she had, she had”—Christine stopped, took a breath, began again—“she had—other things in her bag. They took her to the police station and charged her or whatever it is they do and then they brought her home. There was a woman detective sergeant and a young man who was the constable.” Hysteria took hold of her and she broke into sobbing laughter. “I thought it was so strange that way round, it seemed so funny in the midst of all that—that awfulness.”

He felt helpless. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“She has to come up in court tomorrow morning.” Christine said it calmly enough, coldly almost, until the sobs caught her again and she gave a cry of misery, clamping her hand over her mouth.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

She was in her room with the door locked. Philip knocked at the door and rattled the handle. She told him to go away.

“Cheryl, I only want to say Mum and I will come to court with you.”

There was silence. He repeated what he had said.

“If you do that, I won’t go. I’ll run away.”

“Aren’t you being a bit stupid?”

“It’s my business,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with you. I don’t want you there hearing what they say.”

As he went downstairs, he heard her unlock the bedroom door, but she didn’t come out. He wondered why the police had let her come home. Christine, seeming to read his thoughts, said, “She can lock herself in, Phil, but we can’t lock her in, can we?”

He shook his head. Christine had never told them what to do, constrained them, only left them to themselves and loved them. In Cheryl’s case at any rate, that apparently hadn’t been enough. He stood with Christine in the kitchen, drinking the tea she had made, and they heard Cheryl let herself out of the front door. For once she let herself out quietly. The door closed with a soft click. Christine made a whimpering sound. Philip knew that if he had said he was going to Senta as usual, that he would be out all the evening and half the night, she wouldn’t have protested. Now, letting Senta know he wasn’t coming, no longer seemed of importance. Instead, he felt how relieved he would be if this evening might be the start of a lifelong separation from her, if all that might become his past. But even as he caught at this hope, he recalled her love for him.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” Christine asked him.

For the moment he didn’t know who she meant. “Cheryl? I don’t know. I hope so.”

He was out in the garden when the phone rang. It was dusk and he had taken Hardy as far as Lochleven Gardens and back, coming in the back way. Light from the kitchen window fell on the figure of Flora, which cast a long black shadow on the grass. A stream of whitish grey bird excrement had dried on one of her arms. Christine opened the window and called to him that Senta was on the phone.

“Why haven’t you come?”

“I can’t come tonight, Senta.” He told her about Cheryl, adding that he couldn’t leave his mother. “It’s not possible to phone you, you know that,” he said as if he had tried.

“I love you. I don’t want to be here without you. Philip. You’re going to come and live here with me, aren’t you? When are you going to come?”

He could hear Rita and Jacopo’s music in the background. “I don’t know. We have to talk.”

There was terror in her voice. “Why do we have to talk? Talk about what?”

“Senta, I’ll come tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow.” I’ll tell you it’s over, he thought, I’m leaving you. I’ll never see you again after tomorrow.

When he had put the receiver back, he began thinking of those people, women mostly, who lived with or loved someone they suspected of being a murderer. He was a man and he knew the woman he loved had done murder, but it came to the same thing. It astonished him that such people could ever consider giving the suspected person up to the police, “shopping” them, but he was equally surprised that they could want to continue the association. Once, at a party, he had played a game where you had to say what a person would have to do to stop you loving or even liking them, wanting to know them. And he had said something silly, facetious, about being put off someone because they didn’t clean their teeth often enough. He knew better now. His love for Senta had melted away when he knew she was responsible for Myerson’s death.

Just before midnight Cheryl came back. Philip was sitting up waiting for her, hoping she would come. He had made Christine go to bed. He ran out into the hall when he heard her key in the lock and caught her crossing the hall.

“I only want to say I won’t try to come to court with you if that’s what you want.”

“The police are coming for me,” she said dully. “They’re coming in a car at nine-thirty.”

“You must tell them about the fruit machines.” As he spoke, he felt what a stupid term it was, a frivolity in tragedy. “You will tell them, won’t you? They’ll do something to help you.”

She didn’t answer him. With a strange gesture, she pulled out the pocket linings of her jeans to show they were empty. She threw out of her jacket pockets a half-used tube of peppermints, a ten-pence piece. “That’s all I’ve got in the world. That’s my lot. It’ll be best if I go to prison, won’t it?”

He didn’t see her in the morning but went off to work before she was up. In the afternoon he phoned Christine to be told Cheryl had received a suspended sentence. If she committed another offence, she would go to prison for six months. She was at home with Christine now, and Fee had taken the afternoon off and was with them. He began preparing himself for the ordeal before him. Tomorrow it would all be over, he would have done it, he would have broken with Senta and a new phase of life, empty and cold, would stretch before him.

Would he ever be able to forget what she had done and that he had loved her? It might grow faint and vague but it would always be there. A man had lost his life because of her. Before that, someone else had died because of her. She would kill others as time went on. She was made that way, she was mad. For all the rest of his life he would be marked by it, he thought. Even if he never spoke to her again, never saw her, it would scar him.

Seeing her was something he was fully resolved on. After all, he had prepared the way. He had told her they had to talk, and the fear in her voice showed him she went some way to guessing what he had to say. He would tell her all the truth, that he hated violence and violent death. Even talking or reading about these things was a horror to him. He would tell her how knowing what she had done had destroyed his love for her or, rather, that he now saw her as a different person—she wasn’t the girl he had loved, that girl was illusory.

But how was he to handle her love for him?

Joley was among the men and women in the queue at the Mother Teresa Centre. Philip superstitiously noted his presence there. He had been saying to himself, as he approached Tarsus Street, that if he saw Joley, he would go in and speak to Senta; if not, he would leave it and drive home. The old man with his barrow and his plastic carrier cushions constituted a sign, which Joley reinforced himself by waving to Philip as he passed.

Philip parked the car. He sat at the wheel for a long time, thinking about her, remembering how he had used to rush up the steps and into the house, as often as not in too much of a hurry to lock the car behind him. And there had been the time when she took his keys away and he had thought of breaking in, so great was his misery and his longing for her. Why was it impossible to put his mind and his feelings back into that time? She was still the same girl really, she looked and sounded the same. Surely he could go into the house and down the basement stairs and into that room and take her in his arms and forget?

He started the car and turned round and drove home. He didn’t know whether he was being weak or strong, purposeful or cowardly. Cheryl was out, Christine was out. He later came to know they were out together, had gone to Fee and Darren’s with Aubrey Pelham. The phone began ringing at eight and he let it ring. It rang nine times between eight and nine. At nine o’clock he put the little dog on the lead and walked him two or three miles about the streets. Of course he imagined the phone ringing while he was out and he imagined her in the dirty, sour-smelling hall at Tarsus Street, dialling, dialling. He thought of how it had been for him when she had expelled him from the house and he had tried to phone her.

The phone was ringing as he came in. He picked up the receiver. It was as if he suddenly understood he couldn’t avoid answering the phone for the rest of his life.

She was incoherent, sobbing into the phone, drawing breath to cry to him: “I saw you in the street. I saw the car. You turned away and left me.”

“I know. I couldn’t come in.”

“Why couldn’t you? Why?”