The Bridesmaid (9 page)

Her silver hair draped his shoulders, hanging like the rain he could see falling straight and glittering beyond the glass. He felt a deep, extraordinary, profound satisfaction, as if he had found something he had always been searching for and found it finer than he expected. There were things he thought he ought to say, but all that came to mind was “Thank you, thank you,” and he sensed that to utter this aloud would be wrong. Instead, he took her face in his hand and turned it to his and kissed her mouth long and very gently.

She hadn’t spoken a word since saying she was cold and they should go to bed. But now she raised her head and laid it on the arm which held her. She took his right hand in her left one, interlocking their fingers. In that high, pure tone of hers she said, “Philip …” She uttered his name reflectively and as if she were listening to the sound of it, as if she were putting it to the test to see if she liked it. “Philip.”

He smiled at her. Her eyes were close to his, her mouth as close to his face as it could be without their lips touching. He saw every detail of its soft and tender curves, the sweetly tucked-in corners of it.

“Say my name,” she said.

“Senta. It’s a beautiful name, Senta.”

“Listen to me, Philip. When I saw you here this morning, I knew at once that you were the one. I knew you were the only one.” Her tone was deeply solemn. She had raised herself on one elbow. She was looking deeply into his eyes. “I saw you across the room and I knew you were the one for me for always.”

He was astonished. This was not at all what he had expected from her.

“I’ve been looking for you for a long long time,” she said, “and now I’ve found you and it’s wonderful.”

Her intensity had begun, slightly, to embarrass him. He could only handle this awkwardness by speaking lightly, almost facetiously. “It can’t be all that long. How old are you, Senta? Not more than twenty, are you?”

“I’m twenty-four. You see? I’m going to tell you everything, I’ll keep nothing from you. You can ask me anything.” He didn’t particularly want to ask her things, just to hold her and feel her and have this glorious pleasure. “I’ve been looking for you since I was sixteen. You see, I’ve always known there was just one man in the world for me, and I knew that when I saw him, I’d know.”

Her lips brushed his shoulder. She turned her face and printed a kiss where the muscle swelled beyond the collar bone. “I believe that souls come in pairs, Philip, but when we’re born, they are split in two and we spend all our lives trying to find our other half. But sometimes people make a mistake and get the wrong one!”

“This isn’t a mistake. Is it? It wasn’t for me.”

“This,” she said, “is for ever. Don’t you feel that? I saw you across the room and I knew you were the twin to my soul, the other half. That’s why the first thing I ever said to you, the first word I spoke, was your name.”

Philip thought he remembered the first word she had spoken was to say Hardy was a peculiar dog, but he must be mistaken. What did it matter anyway? She was in his bed, had made love with him more gloriously than any girl ever before, and would do so, almost certainly, again.

“For ever,” she whispered, a slow hieratic smile spreading across her face. He was glad of that smile, for he didn’t want her becoming too serious. “Philip, I don’t want you to say you love me. Not yet. I shan’t tell you I love you, though I do. Those words are so commonplace, everyone uses them, they’re not for us. What we have and are going to have is too deep for that, our feelings are too deep.” She turned her face into the hollow of his shoulder and ran her fingers lightly down the length of his body, quickly exciting him again. “Philip, shall I stay the night here with you?”

He hated having to refuse that. Christine wouldn’t come into his room that night, but she would in the morning, she always did, bearing with her the cup of tea slopped into its saucer, the encrusted sugar bowl with the damp spoon stuck in it. She wouldn’t criticise him; she might even not mention she had found him with a girl in his bed; she might only look dismayed and terribly embarrassed, her eyes wide and her hand going up to her pursed lips—but he wouldn’t be able to bear it. It would be too much for him.

“I’d love you to, more than anything, but I don’t really think it’s on.” Without yet knowing her very well, he anticipated an immediate scene, fury perhaps or tears.

She surprised him by her radiant smile, the way she took his face in her hands and planted a tiny light kiss on his mouth. In a moment she was out of bed, shaking her hair, drawing her fingers through it. “It doesn’t matter. We can go to my place.”

“You’ve a place of your own?”

“Of course. It’s yours as well now, Philip. You understand that, don’t you? It’s yours as well.”

In Cheryl’s room, absent for an instant, she changed into the clothes she must have arrived in that morning: a long, full black skirt, a long, loose sweater of silvery knitted stuff the colour of her hair. These garments hid the shape of her as nearly as the burka hides the contours of the Islamic woman. Her slender legs, tiny ankles, were in black tights, her feet in flat black pumps. She came back into his room and saw Flora in the corner for the first time.

“She looks like me!”

He remembered what he had thought in Arnham’s garden before he stole her: if he ever met a girl like her, he would fall at once in love. His eyes went from Senta to the statue and he saw the resemblance. So often when you thought someone looked like someone else or like a picture, say, the likeness disappeared when they were together. This didn’t happen. They were twins, in stone and flesh. It made him shiver a little as if something solemn had happened. “Yes, she looks like you.” He realised he had spoken quite gravely. “I’ll tell you about her sometime,” he said.

“Yes, you must. I want to know all about you, Philip. I want to know everything. We must have no secrets from each other. Get dressed and come with me now. I’m scared of seeing other people— Oh, your mother, your sister, I don’t know. I just don’t want to meet anyone else. I think our first evening should be sacred somehow, don’t you?”

The rain lifted for them just before they left, and when they came out into the streaming street, the setting sun showed. The sun made all the puddles and sheets of water shine like a paving of gold. She had hesitated a little before leaving the house, as if to go out was to take some kind of plunge. Perhaps it was, for the street was like a shallow riverbed. Once inside the car, she drew in her breath and sighed as if with relief or perhaps just with happiness. He sat beside her and they kissed.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

This was a part of London he hardly knew, lying in westernmost West Kilburn and north of the Harrow Road. It was growing dark and after the rain the streets were empty of people. Opposite a huge sprawling school building, dating from the beginning of the century and surrounded by a high brick wall, was a food supply centre for down-and-outs, a soup kitchen. On its steps a queue of men waited, and one old woman with a basket on wheels in which a dog sat. Philip drove past a church set in a churchyard dark and dense as a wood and turned into Tarsus Street.

Only the plane trees, breaking into soon-to-be-abundant leaf, concealing and overshadowing fissures in the pavement and broken fences, saved it from being a slum. Their tender unfolding leaves were gilded in the light from street lamps and shed vine-like sharp-edged shadows. The house where Senta lived was in a terrace of plum-coloured brick. All the windows were flat and rectangular and recessed in the facade. A flight of ten steps led to the front door, a heavy, panelled wooden door. Once, many years past, it had been painted dark green, but now it was so pitted with chips and actual holes that it seemed as if someone had used it for target practice. From these steps it was possible to look over the plastered wall which served them as a balustrade and into the arena—clogged with rubbish, tin cans, paper, orange peel—that fronted the basement window. Senta unlocked the front door. The house was large, with three floors above the basement, but as soon as he was inside Philip sensed, without knowing how, that they were alone in it. This didn’t mean, of course, that Senta had sole possession of the house. The two bicycles leaning up against the wall, the pile of junk mail lying on a dilapidated mahogany table, made this improbable. All the doors were closed. She led him along the hall and down the basement stairs. The smell of the place was new to Philip. He couldn’t have defined it except to say it smelt very subtly of an accumulation of various kinds of ancient dirt—dirt that was never removed, never even shifted from one surface to another, one level to another—of food crumbs years old, fibres of unwashed clothes, dead insects, cobwebs, grains of mud and shreds of excrement, spilt liquids long dried, the hair of animals and their droppings, of dust and soot. It smelt of disintegration.

The basement had once been a self-contained flat. Or so it seemed. Its rooms, all but one, were used to store things, the objects that were perhaps partly responsible for the smell. Old furniture and crates of bottles and jars and heaps of old newspapers and piles of folded darkish woollen things that had once been blankets but which moths were reducing to a crumbling grey flocculent mass. An ancient lavatory with an overhead cistern which could be made private by drawing a sketchily rigged-up shower curtain. There was a claw-footed bath and a single cold tap of brass coated with a green crust and bandaged in rags.

Senta’s was the only inhabitable room. It was at the front of the house, the room whose window could be seen beyond the area. It contained primarily a large bed. This bed was six feet wide, with a sagging mattress, and made up with purple sheets and pillowcases that smelt as if they hadn’t been changed for rather a long time. There was also an enormous mirror, its frame adorned with plaster cherubs and fruit and flowers; much of the frame’s gilding as well as the occasional limb, twig, or petal had been chipped or had disappeared altogether.

On a low table stood a burnt-out candle in a saucer full of wax with an empty wine bottle beside it. There was a wicker chair draped with discarded clothes and a dying plant growing out of a brass pot full of dust. No curtains hung at the window but it could be covered by a pair of wooden shutters. A greyish watery light was shed into the room between these shutters, but it was insufficient to see by. Senta had lit the lamp, which had a bulb of low wattage under a parchment shade. That first evening, having looked wonderingly at the room, shocked by it and therefore feeling unsure of himself, he had asked her what she did.

“I’m an actor.”

“You mean an actress.”

“No, I don’t, Philip. You wouldn’t talk about a doctoress or a lawyeress, would your”

He conceded that. “Have you been on television?” he asked. “Would I have seen you in anything?”

She laughed but in a kindly way, an indulgent way. “I was at RADA. Now I’m waiting for the kind of part someone of my sort needs to make the best beginning. It would be letting myself down to take just anything, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“But you will. You’ll learn from me. I want you to have opinions about me, Philip, that’s going to be the most important thing in my world, our world, what we think about each other. A spiritual interchange is going to be the essence of our life together.”

But there had been nothing very spiritual that evening. Soon after that, they had got into her bed. When you were lying in her bed, you could see the legs of people walking along the pavement outside the window. That meant that if they bent down, they could see you. She laughed at him when he got up to close the shutters, but he closed them just the same. The lamp with its fringed shade gave a brownish dim light that laid a mysterious glaze on their lovemaking, a coat of gold to their moving limbs. She seemed to have an inexhaustible ardour, an inventiveness she pursued with a frown of concentration until she broke into high breathless laughter. She laughed a lot, he already loved her laughter. He already loved her extraordinary voice, high without shrillness, smooth and pure and cool.

He had meant to get up and go home at midnight—but used and repeatedly ridden by her, devoured and chewed and grasped and drawn in, expelled only with desperate reluctance, excavated with a child’s little strong fingers and excoriated with a tongue as coarse as a cat’s, he had whimpered and sighed and slept. The last thing he remembered hearing her say before that deep deathlike sleep came was, “I don’t just want to have you, Philip, I want to
be
you.”

Next morning, Sunday, he had walked in at ten—he hadn’t awakened till past nine—to find Christine and Cheryl on the point of calling the police. “I thought,” his mother said, “how awful it was going to be if I’d lost a son as well as a daughter.” She didn’t ask him where he had been, and that wasn’t tactfulness or discretion. Now she had him back, she simply didn’t think of where he might have been or what he was doing.

He walked into the living room and the postcard was gone. Because he had spoken about it to her or Fee had? On the rug in front of the fireplace lay a tiny, bruised pink rosebud. It must have come from one of the bridesmaids’ wreaths or bouquets, perhaps from Senta’s. It was a funny thing, though, that you couldn’t think of Senta in that sort of way, a sentimental or romantic way. You wouldn’t think of needing a flower that had been hers to remember her by. He picked it up and smelt it and it said nothing to him. But why should it? He had Senta and would have her again tonight; he had the real woman herself with her tarnished silver hair.

Cheryl came into the room and handed him a five-pound note. He felt differently from yesterday, fourteen or fifteen hours ago only, an entirely different person, and Cheryl’s troubles, if such existed, were remote from him, not his business.

“Thanks,” he said, and in such a preoccupied way as to make her stare at him. He would have liked best to tell her about Senta. Well, he would have liked best of all to tell Fee, if Fee hadn’t been on her way to St. Peter Port. Senta, in any case, had said no.