The bridesmaid, p.21
The Bridesmaid, page 21
The yellow light from street lamps was shed in windowpane shapes across the brown bedcover. Above his head he could hear the Skaters’ Waltz and the dancing feet of Rita and Jacopo circling the floor. He thought he must be neurotic, dwelling like this on the foolish past. Hadn’t he seen Arnham and spoken to him? Didn’t he know beyond a doubt the man was alive and well?
Up on the Heath, though he had felt her happiness and known she was glad to be there with him, he had sensed too her unease in the outdoors, the spacious night. How could he seriously have considered it possible for someone like her to perform a violent act while out in the open? The outdoors was her dangerous place.
Senta’s silver head lay on the pillow beside him. She was deeply asleep. The music and the dancing never disturbed her, safe down here under the ground. Philip heard the feet approach the window and as the waltz ended a thin little shriek of laughter as if Jacopo had taken Rita in his arms and whirled her round and round.
15
HE BROUGHT SENTA home to see Christine. She held out her left hand almost timidly, like a little dog lifting its paw, to display her engagement ring, a Victorian antique of silver with two moonstones. He had given it to her the day before when the announcement of their engagement appeared. In company Senta was very quiet, answering in monosyllables or sitting in a silence she broke only to say please and thank you. He tried to remember back to Fee’s wedding, the only time he had seen her in a group of others. She had been talkative then, a different girl, going up to people and introducing herself. He could recall, just before he left to go home, how she had been talking and laughing with two or three men, all friends of Darren’s. But he didn’t mind this silent manner of hers, knowing as he did that her talk and her sweetness and all her animation were reserved for him when they got back to her room.
They stayed in Glenallan Close for about an hour. It was Sunday and Cheryl was also at home. Philip had glanced at the newspaper’s colour supplement and seen an article in it on Murano glass daggers. There was a huge photograph of a dagger very like the ones he had seen in the shop and another picture of people at the Venice Carnival in the snow. He closed the magazine as quickly as he might have done if it was hard pornography which was displayed and which the women might have seen. Christine kissed Senta when they left. Philip hardly knew why it was that he was afraid Senta would draw back. She didn’t. She pleased him tremendously by presenting her cheek to Christine, her head tilted a little to one side, a small sweet smile on her lips.
His suggestion that they should visit her father met with a stubborn refusal. She took the line that Tom Pelham was lucky to get his name in the paper in a respectable way without having to pay a penny for it. Rita had brought her up, not he. Often she hadn’t seen him for months on end. It was Rita who gave her a home rent-free. Not that she wanted to impart the news to her stepmother either. Let her find out for herself. Rita had changed since she took up with Jacopo.
At the first wine shop which was open that they came to Senta wanted to get out of the car and go in and buy supplies. She had had enough of being out, she said. Philip had wanted to take her for a meal and then to meet Geoff and his girl friend in Jack Straw’s Castle. He had it all planned, a further protracted celebration of their engagement with a meal in Hampstead, then the pub where he thought it likely some old college friends of his would be on a Sunday night.
‘You’re trying to cure me of my phobia by overexposure,’ she said to him, smiling. ‘Haven’t I been good? Haven’t I really tried for you?’
He had to give in, only stipulating that they got hold of some proper food to take back with them. It worried him sometimes, the way she seemed to live on air and wine with the occasional chocolate. She waited in silence, standing with clasped hands, while he foraged in a Finchley Road supermarket, buying biscuits and bread and cheese and fruit. He had noticed how, out in the open, she mostly looked down at the ground or kept a kind of discreet custody of the eyes.
They approached Tarsus Street from the Kilburn end. There were rather a lot of people about, sitting on walls, lounging, standing, gossiping, leaning out of windows to talk to people leaning on windowsills, as there are on fine summer evenings in London streets such as this one. A strong odour of diesel, melted tar and cooking spices filled the air. Philip looked for Joley the way he always did and for a brief moment thought he had spotted him on the corner where the street met Caesarea Grove. But it was a different man, younger, thinner, who wandered aimlessly along the pavement with his possessions contained in carpet bags.
She asked him as they got out of the car with their load of food and heavier load of wine bottles, who he was looking for.
‘Joley,’ he said. ‘The old man with the barrow. The tramp, I suppose you’d call him.’
She gave him a strange sidelong glance. Her eyelashes were very long and thick and they seemed to sweep the fine white skin under her eyes. The hand with the moonstone ring was lifted to hold back a long lock of silver hair which had fallen to cover her cheek.
‘You can’t mean the old man who used to sit on our steps? The one who was sometimes in the churchyard round the corner?’
‘Why can’t I? That’s the one I do mean.’
They were in the house now, going down the basement stairs. She unlocked the door. That room only had to be shut up for a few hours for it to become intolerably close and stuffy. Senta took one of the bottles of wine out of the bag he had put down on the bed and reached for the corkscrew.
‘But that was John Crucifer,’ she said.
For a moment the name meant nothing to him. ‘Who?’
She laughed. It was a light, rather musical laugh. ‘You ought to know, Philip. You killed him.’
The room seemed to shift a little. The floor rose up the way it does when you feel faint. Philip put two fingers, which were surprisingly cold, up to touch his forehead. He sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘Do you mean that the old man who said he was called Joley and used to have his beat down here was really the man who was murdered in Kensal Green?’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I thought you knew.’ She poured a large measure of wine into a glass which hadn’t been washed since the last Riesling had been drunk from it. ‘You must have known it was Crucifer.’
‘The man who was murdered . . .’ He was speaking slowly, abstractedly, ‘. . . his name was John.’
She was impatient in a smiling way. ‘John, Johnny, Joley – so what? It was a sort of nickname.’ A bead of wine trembled on her lower lip like a diamond drop. ‘I mean, didn’t you pick on him because it was Crucifer?’
His own voice sounded feeble to him, as if he had suddenly become ill. ‘Why would I?’
‘Have some wine.’ She passed him the bottle and another dirty glass. He took it mechanically and sat there holding glass in one hand and bottle in the other, staring at her. ‘I thought you picked him because he was my enemy.’
A terrible thing happened. Her face was the same, white and soft, the pale lips slightly parted, but he saw madness staring out of her eyes. He couldn’t have said how he knew, for he had never seen or known a person even slightly mentally disturbed, but this was madness, stark and real and awful. It was as if a demon sat inside there and looked out of her eyes. And at the same time it was Flora’s look he saw, remote, pre-dating civilisation, heedless of morality.
He had to exercise all the control he could muster. He had to be calm, even maintain a light touch. ‘What do you mean, Senta, your enemy?’
‘He asked for money. I hadn’t any money to give him. He started shouting out after me, making remarks about my clothes and my – my hair. I don’t want to say what they were, but they were very insulting.’
‘Why did you think I knew?’
She said softly, moving nearer to him, ‘Because you know my thoughts, Philip, because we are so close now we can read each other’s minds, can’t we?’
He looked away, turned his eyes back reluctantly to look at her. The madness was gone. He had imagined it. That was what it must have been, his imagination. He refilled her glass and filled his own. She started telling him about some audition she was going to in the coming week for a part in a television serial. More fantasy, but of a harmless kind, if any of it was harmless, if it could be. They sat side by side on the bed in the airless room that was full of dusty orange sunlight. For once, he didn’t feel like opening the window. A superstitious fear had come to him that not a single word they spoke must be overheard.
‘Senta, listen to me. We mustn’t ever talk about killing again, not even as a joke or a fantasy. I mean killing isn’t a joke, it never can be.’
‘I didn’t say it was a joke. I never said that.’
‘No, but you made up stories about it and pretended about it. I’m just as bad. I did it too. You pretended to have killed someone and I pretended to have killed someone and it doesn’t matter now because we didn’t really do it or even believe the other one had. But it’s bad for us to keep on talking about it as if it was real. Can’t you see that? It’s sort of bad for our characters.’
Just for an instant he saw the demon in there behind her eyes. The demon came and chuckled and vanished. She was silent. He prepared himself for an enraged onslaught such as had been made on him last time he questioned her word. But she was still and silent. She threw back her head and drank the wine down in one swallow, then held out the empty glass to him.
‘I’ll never mention it again,’ she said slowly, and, ‘I understand how it is with you, Philip. You’re very conventional still. You were glad when you found out it was my mother I lived here with, weren’t you? It made things seem respectable. You were pleased when I got a real job that paid. How could you be otherwise with that family? You were brought up to be very straight and rigid and you aren’t going to change in a couple of months. But listen to me now. What we had to do for each other to prove our love was a terrible thing, I realise that, I realise it was terrible, and I do understand it makes it easier for you if we just bury it in the past. As long as you also know we can’t change the past. We just don’t have to talk about it.’
He said almost roughly, ‘If you’re going to drink so much wine we ought to eat something. Come on, let’s eat.’
‘Are you telling me I drink too much, Philip?’
The early warning signs were becoming familiar to him. He was beginning to know them and how to handle them. ‘No, of course I’m not. But I think you don’t eat enough. I’m trying to look after you, Senta.’
‘Yes, look after me, Philip, take care of me.’ She turned and clutched at him, holding on to his shouders, her eyes suddenly wild and frightened. ‘We don’t want to eat yet. Please don’t let’s. I want you to love me.’
‘I do love you,’ he said, and he put his glass down and took the glass out of her hand and pulled her down with him in his arms on to the brown quilt.
It was another small hours return home for him that night. He had meant to discuss their future with her. Were they going to live together in the upstairs flat? Had she thought about that as she had promised? Were they going to set a wedding date for sometime next year? Could she come up with any ideas as to how the problem of Christine and, come to that Cheryl, could be dealt with? They had scarcely talked at all but made love all the evening. At one point he had got up and eaten something and washed himself under the tap.
Coming back to open the window and let some fresh air into the dusty staleness, he had found her sitting up starting on the second bottle of wine, and she had welcomed him back into bed with outstretched yearning arms.
He slept soundly. He slept like the dead, exhausted and at peace. His future with Senta looked glorious to him, a series of days of dreaming of her and of nights of love. Their love-making got even better as time went on and she loved it as much as he did. It was hard to imagine that it could get better than it was now but that was something he had said three weeks ago and it had got better. When the alarm went off and he woke up he reached for her, but he was in his own bed and she wasn’t there and he felt bereft.
On the way to work, a reluctant visit to Olivia Brett, Philip castigated himself for imagining he had seen signs of some kind of neurosis in Senta. It was the shock of course. It was caused by the shock of finding out that John Crucifer was Joley. Poor Senta had told him a simple fact which he might have gathered for himself by this time and he had been so upset by it that he had off-loaded his hysterical feelings on to her. Didn’t the psychologists call that projection?
It was hardly surprising anyway that she believed he had killed Joley. After all, he had told her he had. He had actually told her, fantastic and unreal though this now seemed, that he had killed the old man. Of course she believed him. For a while, remember, he told himself, he had believed her story of killing Arnham. Well, off and on he had believed it. And all this really illustrated what he had said to her about this kind of talk harming them, damaging their characters. It was certainly damaging his character if it made him believe his Senta wasn’t quite sane.
But Joley . . . Philip found he hated to think that it was Joley who had been murdered in Kensal Green, and hated it the more because he had told Senta he was responsible for that death. Now he found it hard to understand why he had ever done that. If she really loved him, and there was no doubt she did, she would have come to realise there was no need for fantasies about proofs of love. It would only have been a matter of sticking it out till she came round, maybe bearing the brunt of a few temper tantrums. Philip had a fleeting qualm at even using the expression in connection with Senta, having a very good idea of how she would react, but how else would you describe it?
In saying he had murdered Joley he had somehow involved himself in that death. Worse than that, he had in part made himself responsible for it, becoming a kind of accessory after the fact. He had aligned himself with Joley’s killer, put himself into the same category. With these ideas unpleasantly occupying his mind, Philip went up the steps of Olivia Brett’s house and was admitted by the actress herself. He couldn’t help remembering the complimentary things she was supposed to have said about him and he felt awkward in her company.
Stories proliferated in his kind of job about women alone at home who were simply waiting to come across for men like himself, women who invited the surveyor or site manager or fitter into their bedrooms or suddenly appeared in front of them with no clothes on. Nothing like that had ever happened to him but it was early days yet. Olivia Brett wore a dressing gown which was white with a lot of frills on it but not see-through. She smelt like a bowl of tropical fruit that has been left out in the sun.
She insisted on walking upstairs behind Philip. He wondered what he would do if he felt her hand caress his neck or a fingertip run down his spine. But she didn’t touch him. He didn’t want to think about her at all, he wanted her to be an answering machine only or to make her requests in a neutral practical tone. She showed him into the recently gutted bathroom and stood behind him now while he made a draft chart of how he thought the electric wiring should be planned.
‘Oh, darling,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if they told you I changed my mind and I’m going to have one of those showers that squirt water out of the walls at you.’
‘Yes, I’ve got a note of it.’
‘I showed my friend the picture in your book and do you know what he said? He said it was a jacuzzi standing up to pee.’
Philip was a bit shocked. Not by what she said but because she had said it and to him. He didn’t say anything, though he knew he ought to have laughed appreciatively. He got out his tape measure and pretended to measure something in the far corner. When he turned round he could see she was looking at him with calculation and he couldn’t help contrasting her with Senta, her lined pinched greasy face with Senta’s pure velvety skin and the mottled cleavage between the broderie anglaise lapels with Senta’s white breasts. It made him smile quite pleasantly at her as he said, ‘That seems to be that then. I shan’t be troubling you again until the electrician has done his stuff.’
‘Have you got a girl friend?’ she said.
He was astonished. Her tone was harsh and direct. He felt a hot blush redden his face. She took a step nearer.
‘What are you afraid of?’
It was a stroke of genius. For all the times Philip had thought of things he ought to have said, perfect rejoinders, when it was ten minutes too late to say them, this paid. He didn’t know how he thought of it. It came to him on wings of serene appropriateness.
‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I got engaged to be married last week.’
With that he passed her, smiling politely, and descended the stairs, not hurrying. She came out on to the landing behind him. He had a momentary qualm. But prostituting oneself for Roseberry Lawn was surely way beyond the call of loyalty.
‘Goodbye for now,’ he called. ‘I’ll let myself out, shall I?’
The interlude made him feel rather jaunty. He had acquitted himself well. It had also served to distract him from the business of John Crucifer alias Joley. The real world, or at least a different one, had intruded. Philip could now see that Joley’s death had absolutely nothing to do with him. In fact, his gifts to Joley had probably made the old man’s last days brighter.
He put the car in the car park when he reached head office. It was ten past one. Just the sort of time when, if he went to find somewhere for lunch, he might bump into Arnham again. Philip told himself that was why he avoided the passage which led into the street of Georgian houses but he knew it wasn’t really. The true reason was that he wanted to avoid passing the Venetian glass shop where he might see in the window the dagger of Murano glass.
