The Bridesmaid (6 page)

At the end of the road, at a T-junction, he turned round and drove back. Opposite the house he parked the car by the kerb and switched off the engine. The front garden was small, with a rosebed in which the roses were not yet out. Three steps led up to one of those Georgian front doors with a sunburst fanlight. A feature of the house—Philip was sure it would be called a feature—was a small circular stained-glass window a little way above the front door.

Through one of the panes of clear glass in that window, a lozenge shape in the pretentious coat of arms which formed the design, a woman’s face could be seen, looking out. She wasn’t looking at Philip, who in any case was invisible inside his car. She moved away, and he was about to start the engine when her face reappeared, along with the upper part of her body, at a casement of leaded lights, which she opened.

She wasn’t all that young by his standards, but still he could see she was young. The afternoon sun shone full on her face, which was handsome in a bold, aggressive sort of way, the mass of dark frizzy hair springing back from a broad white brow. She was a good distance from him, but he saw the sun catch and flash fire from a diamond on her left hand, and that told him she was Gerard Arnham’s wife. Arnham had married and this was whom he had married. Anger bubbled up in Philip the way blood bubbles up through a sharp cut in skin. Like that blood flow, he couldn’t immediately control it—there was no cold tap to hold his rage under—and he cursed silently in the closed car.

Philip’s anger made his hands tremble on the wheel. He wished he hadn’t come, he wished he had driven back from Mrs. Ripple’s the way he had come, through Hainault and Barking-side. If things had gone differently, his mother might have been living there, surveying the street from that stained-glass shield, opening that casement to feel the sun.

He couldn’t meet Christine’s eyes. He was uneasy when he was alone with her. Sometimes he could hardly frame the words of some simple routine sentence, something about the dog or had she paid this or that bill. This was the first time he had experienced a mental preoccupation that had become obsessive. In the past there had been his grief at his father’s death. He had worried a bit about exams, then been in suspense while waiting to hear if he was to be offered a place in the Roseberry Lawn training scheme. Another cause for anxiety had been his doubt that permanent employment would follow when his training was complete. But none of those invasions of his equilibrium had overwhelmed his waking thoughts as this knowledge did. It frightened him too because he couldn’t understand what was happening to him.

Why did he care so much that his mother had slept with a man? He knew she had slept with his father. He knew that if she had married Arnham, they would have slept together. Why did he have to think about it so much, torment himself with pictures of the two of them together, repeat in his mind over and over Fee’s words, Fee’s awful revelations? The postcard was still on the living room mantelpiece; he had never carried out his threat of throwing it away, and it was always the first thing he saw when he went into the room. It was as if, instead of a small piece of card with a commonplace photograph on it, it had become a huge picture in violent oils depicting some scene of sadism and sexual depravity, the kind of thing you don’t want to look at but which compels your eyes and stretches them from their sockets.

Somehow their roles had been reversed. He had become her father and she his child. He was the father who wants revenge on his daughter’s seducer or for her seducer to marry her. Pity for her wrenched at him when he looked at her sitting there quietly, stitching away at Cheryl’s bridesmaid’s dress. If she had gone alone to Arnham’s house that day they took Flora, would she be Mrs. Arnham now? Philip couldn’t help thinking that the arrival of all of them on that autumn evening instead of Christine on her own had been a decisive factor in Arnham’s marriage plans. The other woman, the one with the dark hair and the diamond ring, might also have been a candidate at that time, and he had chosen her because she wasn’t accompanied by a bevy of children and a marble statue.

She asked him if he minded her putting the television on. She always asked. He tried to remember if she had done that while his father was alive, and he didn’t think she had. One of the items on the nine o’clock news was a sighting of Rebecca Neave by someone in Spain. it was nearly eight months since her disappearance but reminders of her came into the papers and on television from time to time. A man who sounded responsible and honest claimed to have seen her in her green velvet tracksuit in a resort on the Costa del Sol. It was a place where, according to her parents, Rebecca had twice spent holidays. The man had probably imagined it, Philip thought, or was one of those who will say and do anything to get publicity.

He hadn’t meant to return to Mrs. Ripple’s house, had felt strongly that Chigwell was a corner of the outskirts of London he would be happy never to see again. But in the middle of the week before Fee’s wedding, Roy, who was designing the new bathroom, came up with a problem about the tiling. He needed Mrs. Ripple’s consent to certain changes he proposed in the design, as well as further wall measurements, notably distances between window frames and door architraves and the ends of walls. Philip found himself saying that he could make a very good guess at those measurements and the householder’s consent could be obtained by phone.

“That’s the sort of reply I expect of certain other newly graduated trainees,” said Roy, “but not of you.” His hard dark eyes swam behind the thick glasses he wore. When he wasn’t making cynical, unfunny jokes, Roy talked like a brochure. “It’s thoroughness and attention to the smallest detail which has established Roseberry Lawn’s distinguished reputation.”

Philip realised there was no escape from going to Chigwell, but he told himself that he need not drive along the street where Arnham lived or even, come to that, take a second look at Flora through the binoculars in Mrs. Ripple’s back bedroom. When he left home, Christine’s first client of the day had already arrived, a woman who was having copper-coloured low lights put into her hair. For once Philip was glad his mother wouldn’t be carrying out this project in the bathroom. As it was, he would come home to find the kitchen floor covered with orange splash marks.

“I want to make enough money to pay for Fee’s flowers myself,” Christine whispered as she saw him off at the front door. She pulled on the rubber gloves that were to keep her hands stain-free for Saturday and stuck her thumbnail through the left-hand one.

Customers of Roseberry Lawn often behaved as if visits from employees of the company they had engaged to renovate their homes were a gross intrusion of privacy. Philip had been told of one householder who had taped up the doors on the kitchen he was having converted and obliged the fitters to climb in and out through the window. It was commonplace to be refused the use of lavatory or phone.

Mrs. Ripple, alerted to his coming, though not by him, opened her front door with alacrity. It was as if she had been waiting just inside it. He had scarcely set foot inside the hall when she said to him in a savage tone, “What right do you think you had to use my husband’s field glasses?”

Philip was briefly dumbstruck. Had she tested them for fingerprints? Had some neighbour reported seeing them in his hands?

“Caught you there, haven’t I?” she said. “You thought you’d got away with that one.”

Philip said he was sorry. What else could he say?

“I expect you’re wondering how I found you out.”

This was uttered the reverse of roguishly, Mrs. Ripple’s thick brown eyebrows drawing together like a pair of furry caterpillars meeting, but Philip nevertheless hazarded a smile.

“I place them on that windowsill just so,” she said, “in the corner and with the long side precisely parallel to the wall.” The caterpillars leapt apart and sprang towards her hairline. “I’ve my own reasons for doing that which I shan’t go into. But that’s how I knew. They had been replaced out of alignment.”

“I won’t touch them,” Philip said, making for the stairs.

“You won’t get the chance.”

She had removed the binoculars. Philip felt quite shaken by this encounter. Like most people, he was frightened by madness even when manifested in its milder forms. Did she perhaps suspect her husband of using the glasses to watch women undressing or something like that? And if so, what good did having her suspicions repeatedly proved sound do her? At least temptation had been removed from him. He wouldn’t be able to take a close look at Flora without them.

The guesses he had made at the measurements were so nearly accurate as to confirm his opinion that he was wasting his time coming here. But denied the use of the binoculars, he perversely found himself longing to look at Flora again. He opened the window and leaned out. The may tree had bloomed and shed most of its blossoms. The grass and paving stones were pink with fallen petals, the purple rock garden sprinkled with pink as if covered by a rosy veil. Petals lay on Flora’s shoulders and on her outstretched arm, and the flowers she carried were no longer stone but a bouquet of may.

But she seemed very far away from him. The distance rendered her features and the details of sculpture invisible. He retreated, closing the window, wondering as he did so if Mrs. Ripple had placed a hair across the catch. Perhaps she would come up after he had gone and sprinkle the window frame with fingerprint powder. Then, woe betide him when he came to inspect the work in progress, as he might easily have to do.

She was waiting for him at the foot of the stairs. She said nothing, and her silence and long, cold, basilisk stare had the effect of making him speak in a nervous, hearty way.

“Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Ripple, that’s done. You’ll be hearing from us in due course. We’ll keep you up to date with progress.”

He passed her, left her behind his line of vision, felt her eyes following him. Halfway down the path he saw Arnham’s car go by. Not the Jaguar but a second car; he
would
have a second car. The Jaguar probably belonged to his company the way the Kadett belonged to Roseberry Lawn. The woman in the passenger seat, the side which was nearest to him, was the woman he had seen at the window. It was a warm day and the car window was open on her side. Her arm rested along the rim of the glass panel. On the hand was the diamond ring and on the wrist a diamond watch. Arnham he could see only as a dark heavy silhouette.

The direction they were going in was away from their house. It was this which made up Philip’s mind for him—if his mind could be said to be made up, if his mind entered into it. The Kadett even seemed to drive itself. Caution and reason returned sufficiently to make him park it a little way down the road.

There was no one about. There never was, in suburbs in the afternoons. Philip could remember his father telling him of the time when he was a child and there had been people about in streets like this one, quite a lot of them, people on foot because cars were few. These houses might have been uninhabited, their garages closed, their front gardens empty. All down the road, the green of foliage and grass, the whiteness of buildings, were patched with laburnums in full bloom, a pure glistening yellow. The sun shone onto stillness and silence.

Philip went into Arnham’s garden by the gates to the garage drive and made his way to the wooden door that evidently led to a passageway between garage and house. If it was locked, that would be the end of the enterprise, but it wasn’t locked. Once inside, in a narrow defile with brick walls on either side, he realised he had brought neither container nor covering with him. And he knew that if he went back to the car to find something suitable, he would never return, he would give up and drive away.

At the end of the passage was a yard or terrace of concrete slabs. A very commonplace coal bunker on one side, a pair of dustbins on the other. Arnham had changed the Buckhurst Hill house for something distinctly inferior. Of course, he had had to divide the sale price with his former wife. Protruding over the rim of one of the dustbins was a blue plastic bag, provided no doubt by the local authority’s refuse collection service. Philip helped himself to that bag.

He crossed the lawn to where she was. Close to, the fallen may blossoms on her shoulders and the crown of her head gave her a neglected look. He brushed them off, lightly blew away a petal from her ear, the same ear that once, long ago, he had chipped with a stone from his catapult. Squatting down close in front of her, he observed, as he had never quite done before, the remoteness of her gaze, the way her eyes seem to stare past those who looked at her, to fix themselves on some distant and perhaps glorious horizon. Of course she was a goddess; she was above earthly things and human needs.

His thoughts surprised him. They were as fanciful as if he were dreaming or in a fever. This was the way he had thought and imagined things while in the throes of that bad bout of flu he had had in the winter. But why on earth had Arnham told Christine that Flora looked like her? Or had that perhaps been wishful thinking on her part? She looked like no real woman Philip had ever seen, though he thought quite suddenly—and rather madly—that if he ever saw a real woman with that face, he would at once fall in love with her.

He reached for Flora and lifted her up. Some of the pink petals fell off the bunch of marble flowers. She seemed even heavier than when he had carried her up the hill from Buckhurst Hill station. He drew the blue plastic bag over her head, laid her on the grass and tied a knot in the top of the bag. Carrying the bundle in his arms, he might have been holding a length of piping or some garden tool.

It was when he was halfway across the grass towards the passageway and the wooden door that he saw he was watched. A man in a window next door was watching him. Philip told himself he was doing nothing wrong. Flora didn’t belong to Gerard Arnham. Or rather, he thought somewhat obscurely, she might have if Arnham had done the right thing by Christine, loved her and married her; but in the present circumstances, Flora certainly didn’t belong to him. Arnham, by his behaviour, had forfeited the right to own her. Philip had read somewhere that if you borrow an object and hold on to it, the only person who has a right to take it from you is the true owner. That was the law. Well, he was the true owner. Flora had been lent to Arnham. She was his conditionally only on his marrying Christine—that surely was an understood thing. Nevertheless, he quickened his pace. In spite of the weight of her, he ran down the path to the garage gates.