Free The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell

writing her name down, “Senta Pelham.”
    “I’ve never met anyone called Senta before. It sounds foreign.”
    Her voice took on a cool edge. “Senta is the name of the girl in The Flying Dutchman.”
    Philip wasn’t sure what or who The Flying Dutchman was—something musical, an opera?—and he was glad of Christine’s voice urgently calling his name, “Philip, Philip, where are you?”
    “Excuse me.”
    She said nothing. He was unused to people who looked you straight in the eye without smiling. He closed the living room door behind him, found Christine in the kitchen, panicky, fraught with anxieties, but looking prettier than she had done for months. Her sudden resurgence of good looks embarrassed him, and he would have liked to close his eyes tightly. She was in blue, always her best colour, with a small round hat made of swathed silk in peacock’s feather turquoises and lavenders.
    “The car is here for me and your aunties and the one for the bridesmaids!”
    “That’s all right. Everyone’s ready.”
    She is nicer than Arnham’s wife, he thought, she is more of a woman, sweeter and gentler—and surprised himself by his thoughts. Her sisters came down the stairs, one mushroom hat, one parrot’s wing, stilt heels, twenty-denier nylons, every ring and bracelet and necklace to be found in their jewel boxes, accompanying clouds of Tweed and Fidji.
    “You won’t forget to shut Hardy up in the kitchen before you leave, will you?” Christine said to him. “Otherwise he’ll go and do a wee-wee on the white rug. You know how he always does that when he’s excited.”
    He was alone with Fee. If only she had looked romantic, beautiful! There was nothing in her appearance to inspire a brother’s emotion, to raise a lump in the throat, call forth memories of a shared childhood. Her face was creased up, petulant with a myriad small anxieties. She stood in front of a mirror, seeing, or imagining she saw, dots of mascara adhering to the skin under her left eye, and rubbing at them with a finger whose cuticle she had bitten in stressful moments before the photographer turned up.
    “Don’t forget to put your engagement ring on your other hand.”
    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,