The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

me.” The turmoil inside him frightened him. It was as if he were jealous as well as angry. “Why did she tell you?”
    Fee had put her arm through his. He gave her no answering pressure; he was suddenly upset by physical contact. The dog ran on ahead. It was the hour of dusk when, briefly, everything appears clear and defined but with an unearthly, very chilly pale light.
    “I don’t know really. I reckon it was on account of Senta. Her mother’s ten years older than Mum but she’s always having affairs. She’s got this new lover, Darren was telling me, and he’s not thirty, and I told Mum, and that’s when she came out with it. ‘I had an affair with Gerard,’ she said. ‘Well, just the once.’ You know how she gets expressions just that little bit wrong. ‘We had an affair that evening he came round with the wine and said he liked Flora.’”
    He said nothing. Fee lifted her shoulders. He felt the movement against his own, but he didn’t look at her. Without saying a word to each other, the idea came to them simultaneously to turn back. Fee called to Hardy and put him on the lead. After a little while she began talking about her wedding, the arrangements at the church, the times the various cars would come to the house. Philip felt confused and angry and inexplicably terribly upset. When they returned to the house, he knew he would be incapable of facing Christine again that night, and he went straight upstairs to his room.

C HAPTER T HREE
    As a place to sleep in, it was rather small, but it would make a spacious bathroom. It wasn’t for him to ask why Mrs. Ripple should wish to sacrifice her third bedroom in order to have a second bathroom, though he tended to wonder about these things. In other people’s homes, as he so often was these days, Philip found himself speculating about all sorts of oddities and incongruities. Why, for instance, did she keep a pair of binoculars on the windowsill in here? To watch birds? To observe the behaviour of neighbours?
    The dressing table was very low and there was no stool. If a woman wanted to do her hair or put makeup on in front of the mirror, she would have to sit on the floor. In the small bookcase were nothing but cookery books. Why didn’t she keep her cookery books in the kitchen? He took his tape measure from his pocket and began measuring the room. Four metres thirty by three metres fifteen, and the ceiling height two metres fifty-two. He wouldn’t be doing the design himself, he hadn’t progressed so far yet. In any case, there would be nothing inspired or ambitious about it. Champagne bath and basin, she had chosen, a vanity unit with black marble top, and milk-coloured tiles with a black and gold floral pattern.
    The window was to be double glazed. He took his measurements with concentrated care. Roy would want to know widths and lengths to the nearest millimetre. The figures written down in his neat small hand in the Roseberry Lawn Interiors notebook, Philip leaned on the windowsill and looked outside.
    A collage of gardens lay below him, all the same size, each one separated from its neighbours by fencing with trellis on it. It was the most beautiful time of the year, and the ornamental trees were in fresh new leaf, many of them in blossom, pink or white. Tulips were in bloom. These were one of the few flowers Philip knew by name. The velvety brown and gold things which filled the end of Mrs. Ripple’s garden he thought might be wallflowers. Beyond the gardens which backed on to those on this side was a row of houses, their rear aspects facing him. No doubt they had started off all the same but various additions, a loft made into a bedroom, a conservatory built on, an extra added garage, now differentiated them and made each an individual. Only one seemed still as the builder had built it, but it had the best garden, with a pink may tree halfway down, where the lawn was broken into by a rock garden. Over this spilled and sprawled a carpet of purple