The Bridesmaid (10 page)

“I don’t want anyone knowing about us yet, Philip. Not yet. For a little while it must be our sacred secret.”

That had been two weeks ago. And since then he had seen her every day. By the first Tuesday he was telling Christine he would be staying away for the night, at least for tonight and maybe the next one, because Roseberry Lawn were involving him in a project of theirs at Winchester and were putting him up in a hotel. Now, for the first time, he understood the value of having a mother like Christine. That vagueness and unworldliness which had formerly irritated him—and worse, troubled him as to what this would mean for her future welfare—that apparent lack of knowledge of any sort of conventional response now appeared a godsend.

Senta had no phone. There was a phone half-hidden among the litter of junk mail on that table in the hall, but seldom anyone at home to answer it. Other people must live in the house, but Philip had never seen them, though one night, awakened by the phone, he had heard dance music above his head and the sound of waltzing feet.

Most nights, he went home to eat the meal Christine had prepared for him, took Hardy for a walk round the block, then drove to Kilburn. It was a relief one morning when Christine said she thought of spending the evening with her friend but she would leave him a meal and would that be all right? The friend was someone she had met at Fee’s wedding. What a lot of significant things had happened at Fee’s wedding!

Philip told her not to bother with a meal, he would eat out. He went to Senta’s straight from work, and for the first time they ate out together. It was a change; it was more like reality. Up till then he had been parking the car in the street at eight-thirty or nine, worrying a bit about it because this was a rough area. He would run down the basement stairs, his heartbeat racing. The smell was strongest here, in the well of the staircase. But inside Senta’s door it faded. There the damp sour smell of decay was overcome by the perfume of incense sticks, one of which was usually smoking in her room. She would be waiting for him, sitting in the window or cross-legged on the floor. Once she was reclining naked on the bed, reminding him of a picture someone had once sent Fee on a postcard, the Olympia of Manet.

To go out with her to a restaurant was a new experience. He discovered her to be not merely a vegetarian but a vegan. It was fortunate he had chosen to eat at an Indian place.

She wore a strange old dress that might have belonged to her grandmother, grey with silver threads woven into it, the belt missing, though you could see there should have been a belt, and a crumpled rose of grey silk on the bosom. Her silver hair hung like a veil bought to match it. She had painted her eyes green and her mouth dark purple. He didn’t know whether he liked this kind of dressing, but it disturbed him—it excited him—to look at her thus caparisoned. In the cheap Indian restaurant, where a tape played sitar music and the walls were papered with a design of elephants and turbanned men, where the lights were dim, she looked like a goddess of mystery and the arcane. Her mouth, though—he hated to see it concealed under that layer of greasy purple. Tentatively he had asked her to wipe it off, her mouth was so beautiful. Why had he expected defiance? She wiped her lips clean with a piece of tissue, then said to him in a humble tone, “I’ll do whatever you want. Whatever you like is right.”

“Tell me about yourself,” he said. “I don’t know anything about you, Senta, except that you’re an actress—sorry, actor—and you’re Darren’s cousin. Though I find that hard to believe.”

She smiled a little, then began laughing. She could be intensely serious, in a way he would have found embarrassing if he had tried to copy it, and she could laugh more freely and gaily than anyone he had ever known. He could understand she might not want to be too closely associated with the Collier family, a jolly beefy-faced crowd of sport-mad men and bingo-addicted women. “My mother was an Icelandic woman,” she said. “My father was in the navy, you see, and he met her when they put in at Reykjavik.”

“What do you mean ‘was,’ Senta? Your mother’s still alive, isn’t she?” She had told him her parents were separated, each now living with a new partner. “You said your mother had a boy friend you don’t much like.”

“My mother died when I was born.”

He stared at her, it seemed so strange. He had never heard of anyone dying in childbirth except in old books.

“It was in Reykjavik, I was born there. My father was away at sea.” Her expression had grown suspicious, slightly displeased. “Why do you look like that? What are you thinking? They were married, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Senta, I didn’t mean—”

“He brought me back here and soon after that he married Rita—she’s the woman I call my mother. My real mother’s name was Reidun, Reidun Knudsdatter. It means Canute’s daughter. Don’t you think that’s amazing? Not ‘son’ but ‘daughter.’ It’s an ancient matrilinear system.”

That evening too she told him how she had won a scholarship to drama school and come out top student of her year. During the holidays, in her second year, she had gone to Morocco and taken a room for two months in the Medina of Marrakesh. Because it was difficult to be a western woman alone there, she had worn Moslem women’s dress, the veil which allowed only her eyes and forehead to show, and a floor-length black dress. Another time she had gone with friends to Mexico City and been there during the earthquake. She had been to India. Philip felt he had little to tell her about himself in return for these accounts of remarkable or exotic experiences. The death of a father, responsibility for a mother, worries over Cheryl, were a poor exchange.

But once back in the basement room, sharing a bottle of wine he had bought, he did tell her about Christine and Gerard Arnham and Flora. He gave her a detailed account of what had happened after he saw the marble girl from Mrs. Ripple’s bedroom window. She laughed when he described how he had stolen the statue and been seen by one of Arnham’s neighbours, and she even ask exactly where this was, what was the name of the street and so on; but still he had a feeling she hadn’t listened as closely to his narrations as he had to hers. Reclining on the big bed, she seemed preoccupied with her own image in the mirror. This relic of some vanished once-elegant drawing room, its gilded cherubs missing a leg or arm, its swags of flowers denuded of their leaves, reflected her mistily, as if she were suspended in cloudy greenish water, her marble white body spotted by the flaws in the glass.

If she hadn’t concentrated on what he said, he soon thought, this was due only to her desire for him, which seemed as great as his for her. He wasn’t used to this with girls, who, in the past, when his need was insistent, were tired or “not feeling like it” or having periods or peeved by something he had said. Senta’s sexual impulses were as urgent as his. And—blessed relief from those girls of the past—she was as quickly and easily satisfied as he. Uniquely, no long-drawn-out patient attention to a partner’s needs were here required. His needs were hers, and hers his.

On the last night of their second week, the night before Fee and Darren were due home from their honeymoon, he began to get to know her. It was a break-through, that evening, and he was glad of it.

They had made love and rolled apart from each other on the bed. He lay spent and happy, the only alloy to his contentment being the niggling concern which now wormed back into his mind: How could he broach the subject of getting her to change the sheets? How could he do this without offence or seeming to criticise? It was such a silly small thing, yet the smell of the sheets upset him.

Her silver hair covered the pillow. Tresses of it here and there she had made into little plaits. She lay on her back. The hair in her crotch was a bright fiery unnatural colour, and he could see that vivid red patch twice, both on her white body and reflected in the mirror, which hung at a wide angle, its top jutting at least a foot from the wall.

Almost without thinking, on an impulse, taking her hand in his and laying it on the bright fuzzy triangle, he said with laughter in his voice, idly, “Why do you dye your pubic hair?”

She sprang up. She flung his hand from her, and because that hand had been relaxed and her movement utterly unexpected, it struck his chest a blow. Her face was contorted with rage. She trembled with anger, her fists clenched as she knelt up over him. “What do you mean, dye it? Fuck you, Philip Wardman! You’ve got a fucking nerve talking to me like that!”

For a second or two he could scarcely believe what he was hearing, those words uttered in that pure musical voice. He sat up, tried to catch her hands in his, but had to duck to avoid the blow she aimed at him.

“Senta, Senta, what’s the matter with you?”

“You, you’re the matter. How dare you say that to me about dyeing my pubic hair?”

He was nearly a foot taller than she and twice as powerful. This time he did get hold of her arms, did subdue her. She breathed in gasps, wriggling in his hold. Her face was twisted with the effort to escape. He laughed at her.

“Well, don’t you? You’re a blonde, you can’t be that colour down there.”

She spat the words at him. “I dye the hair of my head, you fool!”

Laughter made him relax his hold on her. As he did so, he expected an onslaught, put his hands to cover his face, simultaneously thinking, How awful, we’re quarrelling, what now, what now? She took his hands away gently, held his face, brought soft warm lips on to his, kissing him more sweetly and lengthily than she ever had, stroking his face, his chest. Then his hand—the one she had let fall to slap him with its knuckle bones—she took in her own and laid it delicately on the region of her body that had caused their strife, on the red hair and the thin white silky skin of her inner thighs.

Half an hour later she got up, said, “These sheets do nif a bit. Go and sit in the chair for a minute and I’ll change them.”

And she had, purple to emerald green, the soiled ones stuffed into her carpet bag for carrying to the launderette. He thought to himself, we are getting close, she read my mind, I like that, I love her, temperamental little spitfire that she is. But some time after midnight, leaving her asleep and covered by the quilt in its clean green cotton cover, climbing the dark smelly stairs, it came to him that he hadn’t believed what she said about dyeing the hair of her head. She must be making that up. Of course she bleached it and put something on it to make it silvery, you could see that, but no one with red hair would dye it a metal colour. Why would they?

He experienced a pang of something he quickly recognised as fear. It frightened him that she might tell him lies. But it was after all a very small lie, a matter of no importance, the sort of thing all girls perhaps failed to tell the strict truth about, and he remembered Jenny saying her tan was natural when in fact she had been having daily sessions on a sunbed.

Jenny—it was a long time since he had given her much thought. He hadn’t seen her or heard her voice since they had quarrelled back in January. She had wanted them to be engaged, had started on about it while they were away on holiday in Majorca together the previous October.

“If we were engaged,” she had said, “I’d feel I meant something to you, I’d feel we were together, a couple.”

“I can’t get married,” he had said to her, “I can’t think about getting married for years. Where would we live? Here with my mother?”

And then of course it had come out, the true reason behind it: “I don’t think I should sleep with you if it’s just casual. I don’t think it’s right if we aren’t going steady.”

She nagged him to make her a promise he couldn’t, then wouldn’t, make. Parting from her had been a far greater wrench than he expected, but now it seemed the wisest thing he could have done. Strange to compare, or rather contrast, her with Senta. Driving home, he found himself laughing aloud at the thought of Senta asking to go steady, to get engaged. Her idea of permanency was something Jenny in her mousey little suburban way had never dreamed of: total commitment, utter exclusivity, the perfect unparalleled union of two human beings embarking on life’s adventure.

The return of Fee and her husband served to show Philip something amazing: he had known Senta only a fortnight. Fee and Darren had been absent for two weeks, and when they were last here, Senta was virtually a stranger to him, a girl in an absurd orange-spotted dress who looked at him across a crowded room in certain mysterious ways that he, fool that he was, had been unable to interpret.

Her daily society since then had made him believe, all experience to the contrary, that Darren, being her cousin, must be a far more interesting and clever person than he remembered. He must have been wrong about Darren. Perhaps it was natural to feel no man was really good enough for one’s sister. But now that he was in the company of his new brother-in-law, he realised he hadn’t been mistaken. Thickset and with a fat belly already developing at twenty-four, Darren sat guffawing at some television serial which it seemed imperative for him to see, never to miss, even though he might be in someone else’s house. He had insisted on watching it the two Sundays they were away, Fee said in the proud tone of a mother talking of her baby’s feeding requirements.

Returned home the day before, they had come to tea, though tea as such wasn’t a meal ever eaten in the Glenallan Close household. Christine had supplied one of her culinary masterpieces in the shape of sliced ham sausage and canned spaghetti rings. Afterwards she was going to do Fee’s hair, was childishly delighted because Fee, for once, was permitting this. Philip thought Christine was looking rather nice. There was no doubt she had looked better—younger and somehow happier—since the wedding. It couldn’t be relief at getting the wedding over and Fee married, for she had once or twice suggested—she never did more than suggest—that Fee, at her age, could easily afford to wait a couple of years before settling down. It must be the new friend, having the companionship of someone her own age. She had pink lipstick on, rather well applied and not muzzy at the edges, and had given her hair one of those golden rinses that had hitherto been reserved for clients.