Free The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell Page A

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