The Bridesmaid (8 page)

She pulled it off impatiently. “I look awful, don’t I?”

“You look fine.”

“If it doesn’t work out, we can get divorced. Most people do.”

I wouldn’t get married if I thought like that. He didn’t say it aloud. It seemed to him that he had begun keeping everything from her, his views, opinions, feelings. She knew neither that Flora was upstairs in his wardrobe nor that he had seen Cheryl come weeping out of a shop in the Edgware Road. Soon she would have someone else to confide in, tell her innermost thoughts to, but who would he have?

She stepped back from the glass and turned to pick up her sheaf of arums from the table. But instead of doing this, she stopped in mid-act, as it were, and threw herself upon him and into his arms. Tense currents seemed to vibrate through her body. It was as if she were full of wires that thrilled with electricity.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on. Calm down.” He held her in a hug that wasn’t tight enough to crush the icy satin. “You’ve known him for years, he’s the one for you.” What else could he say? “The original childhood sweethearts.”

He heard the car coming, the brakes, a door close slickly, then footsteps on the front path.

“D’you know what I keep thinking?” she said, disengaging herself, drawing herself up, smoothing her waistline, “I keep thinking if only that bloody Arnham had done right by Mum, we could have been having a double wedding.”

He had made his speech, conscious while he brought out the stiff phrases of praise for Fee and Darren, of Senta Pelham’s eyes resting on him. They seemed to rest there in a cold and speculative manner. Every time he looked in her direction, which was often, he found she was looking at him. He asked himself why this should be. Did he truly, as he feared, look ridiculous or unsightly in the grey morning coat, white shirt, and silvery tie? It seemed to him, for all his fears, that the coat in fact fitted rather well. He knew—he couldn’t help knowing—that he was good-looking and attractive to girls. Luckily, wherever that gene of shortness and dumpiness came from in his family, it had passed him and Cheryl by. He looked rather the way Paul McCartney had done when young. An old record sleeve of one of the Beatles albums showed him his own face smiling.

The party would break up soon. They had St. Mary’s church hall, an ancient hut smelling of stewed tea and hymn books, only until six. The guests—uncles and aunts and cousins and school friends and workmates past and present—would leave as soon as Fee and Darren had gone. Christine was talking to a rather good-looking middle-aged man, another of Darren’s innumerable relatives. Giggling, behaving naturally for once, Cheryl stood eating wedding cake with two boys whose shoulder-length hair looked odd with their formal clothes. He accepted a piece of cake handed him by Stephanie and, raising his eyes, met those of Senta, of Flora’s double.

They seemed to have darkened, the green staining that drifted thorough their watery depths having curiously intensified. Somewhere during the course of the afternoon she had shed the wreath of flowers which had encircled her head, and her hair, unconfined, hung in two gleaming curtains between which the soft, seductive features were enclosed. Her eyes widened as they held his, and still gazing at him, she parted her lips and ran her tongue slowly and deliberately over the upper lip and then the lower. The lovely mouth was the pale pink of fruit blossom but her tongue was red. He turned sharply away, convinced she was mocking him.

Fee and Darren came back dressed as no one had ever seen them dressed before, each in a suit, his dark grey, hers white. It would be impossible for anyone they encountered on their journey tonight to a hotel, tomorrow to Guernsey, to mistake them for other than a honeymoon couple. This had been the first wedding Philip had been to since he was a child, and he was unprepared for the feeling of anticlimax he experienced as he got into the car. Once the bride and groom were gone—their trim suits smothered in confetti, their car decorated with slogans and with a tin can tied on behind—there came an immediate sense of letdown. Everyone was going. The evening yawned emptily ahead. Christine would be spending it with one of her sisters. It was left to Philip to drive the bridesmaids back to Glenallan Close, where their everyday clothes were.

All but Senta, who, standing by the bar in conversation with a man Philip didn’t know, sent him a peremptory message by Janice that she would find her own way back to the house, she would get a lift. She would need to, Philip thought aggrievedly, for after the bright start to the day and sunny afternoon, a heavy rain had begun to fall. It made returning home and entering the empty house an even more gloomy business. The three girls went up to the room that Cheryl and Fee had shared and now was Cheryl’s alone, while Philip let Hardy out of the kitchen. He changed into jeans and a sweater and, as the rain seemed briefly to have lessened, took the little dog round the block, passing the departing Stephanie and Janice on his way back.

Now was his chance to try and talk to Cheryl. She must still be upstairs. Halfway up, he heard music coming from behind her closed door, and he went into his own room. He would give her ten minutes or so. Philip’s room was very small, too small to hold more than a single bed, a clothes cupboard, desk, and narrow upright chair. And although he worked for a firm which specialised among other things in making the most of tiny, boxy rooms like this one with space-saving fitments and built-in furniture, he had never felt inspired to do something of that kind here. This was partly because he didn’t want Glenallan Close improved. Make it more attractive and Christine—and therefore himself—might be tempted to remain there for ever. On the other hand, it would have been a different story if Christine was Mrs. Arnham, living in Chigwell, and this house had been made over to him. He would have smartened it up then, all right.

He opened the clothes cupboard and lifted Flora out. She was still wrapped in the blue plastic bag with the split in it for her face to show through. Philip untied the knot in the bag and pulled it off over her head. He stood her in the corner by the window. It was interesting that just having her there immediately improved the look of the room. Her white marble skin seemed to gleam in the grey, rain-filtered light. He wondered if it would be possible to remove the green stain that mantled her neck and breast. Her eyes looked beyond him and her face seemed alight with pagan wisdom.

Arnham and his wife would have missed her as soon as they looked out into their garden. Probably the neighbour would have told them as soon as they returned about the thief he had seen carrying a log-shaped bundle, and they would have put two and two together. But Philip didn’t think they would connect the removal of Flora with him. If Arnham remembered him at all, it would be as he then was, a recent student, a newly recruited Roseberry Lawn trainee, who had presented a very different appearance from the man the neighbour would have described as short-haired and wearing a suit. Arnham might even be relieved at the loss of Flora, while perhaps superstitiously unwilling to get rid of her himself. He was wondering whether to try working on that stain with paint-stripping fluid or to talk to Cheryl first, when she spoke to him from outside on the landing. They never knocked at each other’s doors, but they didn’t walk into rooms uninvited, either.

“Phil? Are you in there?”

He hung his Moss Brothers clothes over the chair and pushed it in front of Flora to hide her. Opening the door, he found no one there, and then Cheryl came out of her room, dressed to go out in her usual uniform, the cowgirl hat in her hand. Her hair, done that morning in soft loose curls falling from a centre parting—bridesmaid’s coiffure—looked incongruous with the heavy black eye makeup and the green star she had drawn on one cheekbone.

“Will you do me a favour?” she said.

The inevitable reply to that one: “Depends what it is.”

“Would you lend me five pounds?”

“Cheryl,” he said, “I have to tell you I saw you in the Edgware Road on Wednesday. It was around six or six-thirty. You were crying and you were sort of staggering around.”

She stared at him, her underlip protruding.

“I couldn’t stop, I was stuck in the traffic. You looked like you were drunk. I’ve been thinking lately you might be on drugs, but you looked more as if you were drunk.”

“I don’t drink,” she said. “Don’t you notice anything about people? Couldn’t you see I didn’t even drink that fizzy stuff at the wedding? A glass of wine is enough to knock me sideways.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Will you lend me five pounds? I’ll give it back to you tomorrow.”

“It’s not the money,” he said, though of course up to a point it was. He had very little spare cash. “It’s not the money that’s the trouble. But what do you mean, I can have it back tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Sunday. How are you going to get money on a Sunday?” She was gazing at him, her eyes glaring with a kind of desperate intensity. “Cheryl, how
do
you get money? Where does it come from?”

“You sound like a policeman,” she said. “Just like a policeman would question a person.”

He said unhappily, “I think I’ve got a sort of right to ask you.”

“I don’t. I’m over eighteen. I’m as much an adult as you are. I can vote.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Please,” she said,
“please
just lend me five pounds. You’ll get it back tomorrow.”

“When you get your dole on Wednesday will do.” He went back into his room and took from his wallet, in the pocket of the Moss Brothers trousers, the last five-pound note he had. That left him with three pound coins and some odd pence.

She snatched it from him. Once she held it crushed in her hand up against the lapels of the leather jacket, she managed a smile, she managed a “Thanks very much, Phil.”

He could find nothing to say to her. He went back into his room and sat down on the bed. Her feet went fast down the stairs and he waited for the front door to slam. Instead, he heard her speaking to someone, a brief exchange of indecipherable words. Their mother perhaps had come back for something she had forgotten. Forgetting things—money, keys, a coat, suitable shoes—was a commonplace with Christine.

The door slammed rather less violently than usual. The house didn’t shake from foundations to roof. He took the hired clothes off the chair, emptied the pockets, placed the clothes on hangers, and hung them inside the cupboard. The rain had begun again, buffeted against the glass by the rising wind. Someone knocked at the bedroom door.

But no one in this household ever did. He thought, suppose it is the police, sent after me for taking Flora, just suppose it is. A cold thrill went down his spine. But he didn’t cover her up or put her away. He opened the door.

It was Senta Pelham.

He had forgotten she was coming back.

She was still in her bridesmaid’s dress and she was very wet. Her hair was wet, water dripping from it, and the spotted net, intended to be puffed and stiff, drooped like the petals of a rain-soaked flower. The coral satin clung to her thin, fragile-looking ribcage and to the large round breasts, incongruously big for so slight a girl. Her nipples stuck out erect at the touch of the cold wet stuff.

“Is there a towel somewhere?”

“In the bathroom,” he said. Didn’t she know that? Hadn’t she got herself up in that absurd garment in this house?

“I couldn’t get a lift after all,” she said, and he noticed she was out of breath. “I had to walk,” though it was more as if she had been running.

“Dressed like that?”

She laughed in a throaty, gasping way. She seemed tremendously nervous. She went into the bathroom and came out, rubbing her hair dry with one bath towel and with another slung over her shoulder. Philip expected her to go into Cheryl’s room, but instead she came into his and shut the door behind her.

“There’s a hair dryer somewhere.”

She shook her head—took off the towel and really shook it. The gleaming hair flew out and she ran her fingers through it. He had hardly realised what she was doing, he had hardly taken in that she was kicking off shoes, stripping off pale, wet, mud-splashed stockings, before she stood up and peeled the dress over her head. She stood there looking at him, her arms hanging by her sides.

The room was too small for two people ever to be separated by more than a few feet. As it was, he found himself at no more than arm’s length from this naked girl—her strange, thin, big-breasted body marble-white, and at the base of her flat belly, a triangle, not of silver or blond, but of flame red. Philip was in no doubt—whatever he may have felt thirty seconds before—of what was going on and what she intended. She was eyeing him with that intense yet mysterious gaze with which she had so frequently favoured him at the wedding. He took a step towards her, put out his arms, and held her shoulders with his hands. The coldness of marble was what he had strangely expected, but she was warm, hot even, her skin silky and dry.

Philip folded her slowly in his arms, savouring the slippery soft full and slender nakedness against his own body. As she moved her head to bring her mouth against his, the long wet hair slapped at his hands, making him shiver. She whispered to him between flicks of her tongue, her hands unbuttoning his shirt: “Into bed. I’m cold, I’m cold.” But she felt as hot as a body on a tropical beach, the heat shimmered from her.

It warmed the cold sheets. Philip pulled the duvet over them, and they lay pressed into each other’s body in the narrow little bed. The rain began crashing against the window. Suddenly she started to make love to him with a greedy passion. Her fingers dug into his neck, his shoulders, she moved down his body, kissing his flesh, licking him with a curious gasping savour. Bowed over him, arching up the quilt, she swept him with her curtain of hair, teased him with her tongue. Her lips felt tender and rapturous and gentle.

He gasped, “No!” and then, “No!” because it was too much, it stretched him to explosion point. Behind his head and inside his eyes was a red rolling light. Groaning, he pulled her onto him and entered her—her white body, now streaming with sweat, sinking onto his with a strange quivering rhythm. She held him in a total clutch, holding her breath, then relaxing as she expelled it, drawing breath again, gripping him, releasing herself and him with a final expulsion and a little thin scream.