The Bridesmaid (36 page)

He had put the receiver down rather than answer any more of Detective Sergeant Morris’s questions. He had replaced the receiver and cut off the policeman’s voice. Morris would certainly have rung back immediately. When Lucy or Roy told him Philip had gone out, he would know the phone call hadn’t been accidentally cut off but deliberately terminated by Philip. He would know Philip was guilty or guilty by association or desperately anxious he shouldn’t find out the identity of his girl friend. And that would make him waste no time in finding it out—her identity and her address. It would be easy. He had only to ask Christine. He had only to ask Fee. In their innocence they would give it to him at once.

Philip parked the car outside the house as near to the steps as he could get it. The nearside wheels were in a lake of water on which the rain drummed. The rain was a great grey roaring lashing curtain between him and the house. He remembered the rain that first night they had made love, the evening of Fee’s wedding day, but it hadn’t been like this, it had been mild to this. This house was only half-visible, for the rain made an obscuring wall, foglike yet savage.

He threw open the car door, jumped out, and slammed it behind him. Those seconds on the pavement and the steps before he was in the shelter of the porch were enough to soak him. He shook himself and stripped off his jacket. As soon as he was inside the hall, he knew Rita and Jacopo were away. He could always tell, though he never really knew how. The house was rather dark. All houses would be dark due to the storm-induced twilight outside. He couldn’t have said why he didn’t switch the light on but he didn’t.

There was no smell of joss stick coming up the basement stairs. There was no smell except the ingrained one you got used to when you habitually came to this house. He had rushed to get here, but now that he was here, he hesitated outside her door. He had to brace himself for the sight of her. A long breath inhaled and expelled, his eyes squeezed closed and opened again, he let himself into the room. It was empty, she wasn’t there.

But she had been there very recently. A candle was burning in a saucer on the low table in front of the mirror. It was a new candle, its tapering top burnt down only a little way. The shutters were closed, the room dark as night. She couldn’t have gone out, not in this rain. He folded back the shutters. The rain streamed down the glass in a shaking, sobbing waterfall.

Her green dress, a dress that might have been made of rain, water transmuted into silk, hung over the wicker chair. The high-heeled silver shoes stood side by side underneath. There were some sheets of paper with typing on them, clipped together and lying on the bed, that he thought might be her television script. He left the room and went up the stairs and hesitated at the top. She often went upstairs. It was a sort of parental home to her. He went up the next flight, came to the rooms he had glanced at that day she had had the bath in Rita’s bathroom, the day on which she had come home in the morning and told him she had killed Arnham.

The rooms were just the same—the one that was full of bags of clothes and newspapers, the bedroom where Rita and Jacopo slept, with its window covered by a pinned-up bedspread and a foam underlay doing duty for a carpet on its floor. He opened the bathroom door. There was no one in there, but as he came back onto the landing, he heard a board creak above his head. He thought, this was the day we were to begin up there. She has started without me, she has decided to make a start before I came. All that happened between us since then, all I said, all my horror and hatred have gone for nothing. He understood quite suddenly that all this time, since he began his drive here, since he parked the car and entered the house, he had been afraid of what she might have done, that she might have killed herself and he might find her dead.

He went to the foot of the stairs, the last flight. There he gradually became aware of the smell. It was a very strong, appalling reek which leaked down those stairs. As he smelt it and felt it grow more powerful, as he was aware that it had been creeping down to him since first he set foot on this floor, he also knew that it was of something he had never smelt before. It was a new smell and one that, perhaps, few human beings were obliged to smell in the present day. The board above him creaked again. He went up the stairs, trying to breathe only through his mouth, shutting off his nose from sense.

The doors were all shut. He thought of nothing, he had ceased to think of how, once, they had planned to live up here. His movements were instinctive. He no longer heard the roar of the rain. He opened the door into the main room. The light was dim but it wasn’t dark, for there were neither curtains nor shutters at the two dormer windows. This was the back of the house and through the streaming glass could be seen above rooftops a sky as grey and rough as granite. There was nothing in the room but an old armchair and, on the floor between the half-open cupboard door and the left-hand window, something that looked like a stretcher or pallet but which was in fact a door with a grey blanket laid on it.

Senta was standing beside it. She was wearing the clothes she had worn for her visit to Chigwell, the red cotton top on which she said she had searched for bloodstains, the jeans, the running shoes. Her hair was tied up with a piece of red striped cloth. The smile she gave him transformed her. Her whole face became a smile, her whole body. She came to him with her arms out.

“I knew you’d come. I felt it. I thought, Philip will come to me, he didn’t mean what he said, he
couldn’t mean it
. Isn’t it funny? I wasn’t even afraid for more than a moment. I knew my love would be too strong for yours to stop.”

And it was, he thought, it was. It had returned in a cascade, like the rain. The pity and the tenderness burned him, affecting the inside of his body with a painful sensation. There were tears at the back of his eyes. He put his arms round her and held her, and she crushed herself against him as if she were trying to push her body inside his.

This time she was the first to move out of their embrace. She stepped back and looked at him very sweetly, her head a little on one side. He was aware, incongruously, that while holding her, while renewing his love for her, he had ceased to smell the smell. It returned now on a thick hot wave. The smell was one he associated with flies.

She put out her hand and took his and said, “Philip, my darling, you said you’d help me with something I have to do. Well,
we
have to do. It’s something that has to be done before we can contemplate living up here actually.” She smiled. It was as mad a smile as he could ever imagine seeing on a woman’s face, demonic and empty and split off from real things. “I would have done it before, I know I
ought
to have done it before, but I’m not really physically strong enough to do things like that on my own.”

He had no thoughts. He could only stare and feel pain and feel her hand, small and hot, in his. There were all sorts of things he had to say, terrible things to tell her. All he could do was begin stupidly, “You said Jacopo—”

“They’re away till tomorrow. Anyway, it wouldn’t do to let them know. We have to get this done before they come back, Philip.”

A butcher’s shop left open and unattended for several long hot days, he thought. A shop full of rotting meat after everyone had died of the bomb or radiation sickness. She opened the cupboard door. He saw a kind of face. Like Flora’s, gleaming without life in the recesses of his own cupboard, but not like that, not like that at all. Something that had once been a girl and young, propped against the bare wall and still clothed in green velvet.

He made a sound of horror. He put both hands over his mouth. It seemed as if the whole inside of him rose up into his mouth and swelled there. The floor moved. He wasn’t going to faint, but he wasn’t going to remain standing up, either. His hands out like someone seeking water to swim in, he lowered himself till he crouched on the grey blanket pallet.

She hadn’t noticed, it hadn’t touched her. She was looking into the cupboard now as if what it contained was no more than a cumbersome or awkwardly shaped piece of furniture that somehow must be moved and disposed of. Apart from sight perhaps, her senses were shut off. He saw her reach into the cupboard and pick up from the floor a kitchen knife, its blade and handle blackened with old blood. She lied only about the little things, the minor details….

“You’ve got your car, haven’t you, Philip? I thought we could carry it down on that thing you’re sitting on and put it in my room till it gets dark and then we could—”

He screamed at her, “Shut up, for Christ’s sake, stop!”

She turned slowly, she turned mad, pale, watery eyes on him. “What’s the matter?”

They were the biggest things he had ever done, getting up off the floor, standing up, kicking that cupboard door shut. He put his arms round Senta and manhandled her out of that room. This was the next door to be shut. His nostrils, the entire inside of his head it seemed, his brain, were painted with that smell. There weren’t enough doors in the world to shut it out. He dragged her to the top of the stairs, pulled her with him halfway down the stairs until they sprawled together on the treads. He held her shoulders, made a cage for her face with his hands. Her face was forced up against his, their mouths inches apart.

“Listen to me, Senta. I’ve given you away to the police. I didn’t mean to but I have. They’ll come here, they’ll be here soon.”

Her lips parted, her eyes opened very wide. He was prepared for her to attack him with fists and teeth, but she was still and limp, as if suspended from his hands.

“I’ll get you away,” he said. “I’ll try to.” He hadn’t meant to say this. “That’s what we’ll use the car for. I’ll get you away somewhere.”

“I don’t want to go away,” she said. “Where would I go? I don’t want to be anywhere without you.”

She got up and he got up and they went downstairs. There was a new smell here, the old smell of sourness and mould. He thought, it is hours and hours since I spoke to Morris. She pushed open the door to the basement room. The candle had burnt itself out in a pool of wax. He folded back the shutters and saw that the rain had stopped. Water was running down the area wall and splashing against the kerb as cars passed. He turned back to her. At once he could see that only one thing concerned her, one thing only was important to her.

“You do still love me, Philip?”

It might be a lie. He no longer knew. “Yes,” he said.

“You won’t leave me?”

“I won’t leave you, Senta.”

He crouched on the bed beside her and turned his face away from its reflection in the mirror, its crumpled, frightened, damaged image. She crept across the mattress to him and he took her in his arms. She nestled up close to him and put her lips against his skin, and he held her tight. He could hear cars going through the water up there, and he heard one stop outside. The things we think of, he thought, the things we remember at terrible times. When he stole the statue, he had thought, They wouldn’t send a police car out for something like that.

But they would for this. They would for this.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1989 by Ruth Rendell

cover design by Jaya Miceli

ISBN: 978-1-4532-1099-4

This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com