The Bridesmaid (5 page)

She came into the room with the plates of potatoes and beans. Water had slopped onto the tray from overfilled glasses. He quickly took it from her. His mother did her best. It was only—dreadful accusation!—that she did nothing well except emotional things. She was good at loving a man and good at making children feel safe and happy. Those functions came naturally to her. She couldn’t help being expensive to keep, a waste-maker, one of those people who cost more by earning than they would by doing nothing.

They watched television. This obviated for a while the need to talk. It was still only seven. He looked unseeing at the screen, where a dancer in lamé and feathers capered about. Christine, he noticed, her tray balanced on her lap, had surreptitiously opened her
Brides
magazine again and was looking longingly at ridiculous photographs of girls in white satin crinolines. Even Fee herself didn’t want that, was resigned to a homemade wedding dress and what the caterers called a “finger buffet.” They would all share the cost, but even so … And there was Christine still hankering after a thousand quid’s worth of bridal gown, a sit-down dinner, and a disco.

She was looking at him. It occurred to him that in the whole of his twenty-two years of life he had never known her to be angry. And when she anticipated anger from others, her face wore that particular expression it wore now, the eyes afraid, the lips parted in the beginnings of a hopeful, mollifying smile. He said to her, “Is there any point in leaving that card there any longer?” It was a roundabout way of asking what he didn’t want to ask and knew the answer to, anyway.

She turned pink, looked away. “You can take it down if you want to.”

Would she have given him that terrible yet naive reason for her continued hope if Fee hadn’t come in at that moment? But Fee did come in, sweeping in swiftly like a human breeze, the front door banging first, then the living room one behind her. She looked at their trays, turned up the television, then turned it off, dropped into an armchair, her arms hanging down over its sides.

“Have you had anything to eat, dear?” Christine said.

If Fee had said no and what was there, Christine would have been hard put to it to produce even a sandwich. But she routinely enquired and Fee almost always gave an impatient shake of the head.

“I can’t understand why people don’t do things. Why don’t they do what they say they’ll do? Can you believe it, Stephanie hasn’t even started on her dress yet and she’s supposed to be making Senta’s as well.”

“Why can’t Senta make her own?” Philip asked, though he wasn’t much interested in the activities of his sister’s bridesmaids.

“If you knew Senta, you wouldn’t have to ask that. It’s quite funny actually, the idea of her sewing anything.”

“Is that the one that’s Darren’s cousin?”

Fee nodded in the way she had that made you think your enquiry irritated her. And then she grinned, wrinkling up her nose, looking at him as if they were conspirators. He realised quite suddenly how much he dreaded her departure from this house. There were only three weeks to go to her wedding and then she would be gone, never to return. Cheryl was useless, Cheryl was never at home. He would be alone with the responsibility of Christine, and what guarantee had he now that this state of affairs would ever end, that he would ever be free? He kept seeing Arnham’s car, parked there at the foot of the windowless, ivy-clad wall. Perhaps, like Christine, he had believed, or half believed, that Arnham had never come back, that he was unaccountably still in America. Or ill. Ill in hospital somewhere for months and unable to get in touch. Or even that he had died. He jumped up and said he was going to take Hardy out, take him a bit further than the usual evening ambulation round the block. Would Fee come too? It was a fine mild evening, very warm for April.

They walked along the pavements between the grassy patches with budding trees and the boundary walls of little square gardens. The grid of streets extended half a mile this way and half a mile that and then merged into Victorian sprawl. At one of the crossroads, waiting while Hardy investigated with exploratory sniffs a pair of gateposts and ceremoniously lifted his leg against them, Philip began to talk about Arnham, about seeing his car that day and therefore knowing now that he had simply deserted Christine. He had become indifferent to her.

Unexpectedly, Fee said, “He really ought to give Flora back.”

“Flora?”

“Well, don’t you think he ought? Like giving back an engagement ring when you break things off, or returning letters.” Fee was an ardent reader of romantic fiction. She would need to be, marrying Darren, Philip sometimes thought. “She’s valuable, she’s not a plastic garden gnome. If he doesn’t want to face Mum, he ought to send her back.”

This seemed ridiculous to Philip. He wished Christine had been less impetuous in the first place and never decided to present Arnham with this unsuitable gift. They crossed the road, the dog obediently by their side until they reached the opposite pavement, where he began to run on ahead, but decorously, his tail maintaining a constant, cheerful wagging. Philip thought how strange it was, the different lights in which people saw things, even a brother and sister as close as he and Fee. He saw Arnham’s offence in his encouraging Christine to love him and his abandonment of her. Then Fee surprised him by showing how nearly they did see eye to eye. She also shocked him.

“She thought he’d marry her, she thought that for ages,” Fee said. “And do you know why? I don’t suppose you do, but you know Mum, how sort of strange she is, like a child sometimes. I may as well tell you. You could say she confided in me, but she didn’t say I wasn’t to tell you.

“Tell me what?”

“You won’t let on to her I told you, will you? I mean, I think she told me because of being her daughter. It’s sort of different, a son, isn’t it? She just came out with it, out of the blue. It’s why she was certain he’d marry her.” Fee’s eyes returned to his face. They were almost tragic. “I mean, any other woman wouldn’t feel that way or she’d think just the reverse, especially someone her age, but you know Mum.”

Philip really didn’t have to be told any more. He felt a flush spread up his neck across his face. His face was burning and he put his cold hand up to touch the skin. If Fee noticed, she gave no sign of it.

“That time he came here and she cooked a meal for them or got takeaway or something and we were all out somewhere, well, he—they— they had sex, made love, whatever you call it. In her bedroom. Suppose one of us had come in? It would have been very embarrassing.”

He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked, looking down. “I wish you hadn’t told me.” The turmoil inside him frightened him. It was as if he were jealous as well as angry. “Why did she tell you?”

Fee had put her arm through his. He gave her no answering pressure; he was suddenly upset by physical contact. The dog ran on ahead. It was the hour of dusk when, briefly, everything appears clear and defined but with an unearthly, very chilly pale light.

“I don’t know really. I reckon it was on account of Senta. Her mother’s ten years older than Mum but she’s always having affairs. She’s got this new lover, Darren was telling me, and he’s not thirty, and I told Mum, and that’s when she came out with it. ‘I had an affair with Gerard,’ she said. ‘Well, just the once.’ You know how she gets expressions just that little bit wrong. ‘We had an affair that evening he came round with the wine and said he liked Flora.’”

He said nothing. Fee lifted her shoulders. He felt the movement against his own, but he didn’t look at her. Without saying a word to each other, the idea came to them simultaneously to turn back. Fee called to Hardy and put him on the lead. After a little while she began talking about her wedding, the arrangements at the church, the times the various cars would come to the house. Philip felt confused and angry and inexplicably terribly upset. When they returned to the house, he knew he would be incapable of facing Christine again that night, and he went straight upstairs to his room.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

As a place to sleep in, it was rather small, but it would make a spacious bathroom. It wasn’t for him to ask why Mrs. Ripple should wish to sacrifice her third bedroom in order to have a second bathroom, though he tended to wonder about these things. In other people’s homes, as he so often was these days, Philip found himself speculating about all sorts of oddities and incongruities. Why, for instance, did she keep a pair of binoculars on the windowsill in here? To watch birds? To observe the behaviour of neighbours?

The dressing table was very low and there was no stool. If a woman wanted to do her hair or put makeup on in front of the mirror, she would have to sit on the floor. In the small bookcase were nothing but cookery books. Why didn’t she keep her cookery books in the kitchen? He took his tape measure from his pocket and began measuring the room. Four metres thirty by three metres fifteen, and the ceiling height two metres fifty-two. He wouldn’t be doing the design himself, he hadn’t progressed so far yet. In any case, there would be nothing inspired or ambitious about it. Champagne bath and basin, she had chosen, a vanity unit with black marble top, and milk-coloured tiles with a black and gold floral pattern.

The window was to be double glazed. He took his measurements with concentrated care. Roy would want to know widths and lengths to the nearest millimetre. The figures written down in his neat small hand in the Roseberry Lawn Interiors notebook, Philip leaned on the windowsill and looked outside.

A collage of gardens lay below him, all the same size, each one separated from its neighbours by fencing with trellis on it. It was the most beautiful time of the year, and the ornamental trees were in fresh new leaf, many of them in blossom, pink or white. Tulips were in bloom. These were one of the few flowers Philip knew by name. The velvety brown and gold things which filled the end of Mrs. Ripple’s garden he thought might be wallflowers. Beyond the gardens which backed on to those on this side was a row of houses, their rear aspects facing him. No doubt they had started off all the same but various additions, a loft made into a bedroom, a conservatory built on, an extra added garage, now differentiated them and made each an individual. Only one seemed still as the builder had built it, but it had the best garden, with a pink may tree halfway down, where the lawn was broken into by a rock garden. Over this spilled and sprawled a carpet of purple and yellow alpine plants.

Surveying this tumbled spread of flowers, sheltered to some extent by the branches of the pink tree with its rose-coloured blossoms, stood a small statue in marble. Philip couldn’t see it very clearly, it was too far away, but something in its attitude seemed familiar, the angle of its slightly upraised face, the outstretched right hand holding a bunch of flowers, the feet that, though planted firmly on the ground, yet seemed to be dancing.

He wished very much that he could get a closer look at it. Then he realised that he could. The binoculars were here on the windowsill. He took them out of their case and raised them to his eyes. A certain amount of adjustment was needed before he could see clearly—and then, suddenly, the vision they afforded him was amazing. They were excellent glasses. He could see the little statue as if it were no more than a metre away from him. He could see her eyes and her lovely mouth and the waves in her hair, the diagonal weave in the fillet which bound it, the almond curves of her fingernails, and the details of the flowers, their stamens and petals, in the sheaf she carried.

And he could see too the green stain that travelled from the side of her neck to where her robe covered her breasts, and the tiny chip out of her left earlobe. He had made that chip himself when he was ten and a stone fired from his catapult had clipped the side of her head. His father had taken away the catapult, and docked his pocket money for three weeks. It was Flora. Not a look-alike or a copy, but Flora herself. As Fee had pointed out, she wasn’t one of those mass-produced plaster ornaments to be seen in their dozens of every motorway junction garden centre. She was unique. He remembered, rather incongruously, what Cheryl had said of her while talking to Arnham about their father. She was the Farnese Flora, who was traditionally associated with may blossom.

Philip replaced the binoculars in their case, put away his measure and his notebook, and went downstairs. Some clients you had to search for, cough, knock on doors to summon them. Mrs. Ripple wasn’t of that sort but alert, spry, hawk-eyed. She was a middle-aged woman of great spirit and vigour, very sharp tongued and, he suspected, critical. She had a shiny, sore-looking face and a lot of dark hair with threads of grey in it like fuse wire.

“I’ll be in touch when the layout is completed,” he said to her, “and then you’ll see me again when work commences.”

It was the way they were taught to speak to customers at Roseberry Lawn. Philip had never actually heard a human being snort, but that was the kind of sound Mrs. Ripple made. “When’s that going to be?” she said. “Sometime next year?”

There had been a delay about sending her their brochures, Roy said, adding that he didn’t think she was likely to forget it. Philip assured her, with as radiant a smile as he could manage, that he hoped it would be no more than four weeks at the outside. She said nothing in reply, left him to open the front door and close it after him. Philip got into his car, a three-month-old blue Opel Kadett, thinking as he sometimes did that it was the only nice thing he possessed, though he didn’t really possess it—it belonged to Roseberry Lawn.

Instead of driving back the way he had come, he took the first left-hand turning and then turned left again. This brought him out into the street where the row of houses must be whose rears faced the back of Mrs. Ripple’s. They looked very different from this aspect. He hadn’t counted precisely where in the row the house with the statue in its garden came, but he knew it must be fourth or fifth from the block of flats with green pantiled roof. It was also the only one without additions. And here it was, this must be it, between the house with the window in its roof and the house with the two garages. Philip drove past slowly. It was gone five, his day was over, so he wasn’t wasting the firm’s time, something he was still conscientious about.