The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

the firm’s time, something he was still conscientious about.
    At the end of the road, at a T-junction, he turned round and drove back. Opposite the house he parked the car by the kerb and switched off the engine. The front garden was small, with a rosebed in which the roses were not yet out. Three steps led up to one of those Georgian front doors with a sunburst fanlight. A feature of the house—Philip was sure it would be called a feature—was a small circular stained-glass window a little way above the front door.
    Through one of the panes of clear glass in that window, a lozenge shape in the pretentious coat of arms which formed the design, a woman’s face could be seen, looking out. She wasn’t looking at Philip, who in any case was invisible inside his car. She moved away, and he was about to start the engine when her face reappeared, along with the upper part of her body, at a casement of leaded lights, which she opened.
    She wasn’t all that young by his standards, but still he could see she was young. The afternoon sun shone full on her face, which was handsome in a bold, aggressive sort of way, the mass of dark frizzy hair springing back from a broad white brow. She was a good distance from him, but he saw the sun catch and flash fire from a diamond on her left hand, and that told him she was Gerard Arnham’s wife. Arnham had married and this was whom he had married. Anger bubbled up in Philip the way blood bubbles up through a sharp cut in skin. Like that blood flow, he couldn’t immediately control it—there was no cold tap to hold his rage under—and he cursed silently in the closed car.
    Philip’s anger made his hands tremble on the wheel. He wished he hadn’t come, he wished he had driven back from Mrs. Ripple’s the way he had come, through Hainault and Barking-side. If things had gone differently, his mother might have been living there, surveying the street from that stained-glass shield, opening that casement to feel the sun.
    He couldn’t meet Christine’s eyes. He was uneasy when he was alone with her. Sometimes he could hardly frame the words of some simple routine sentence, something about the dog or had she paid this or that bill. This was the first time he had experienced a mental preoccupation that had become obsessive. In the past there had been his grief at his father’s death. He had worried a bit about exams, then been in suspense while waiting to hear if he was to be offered a place in the Roseberry Lawn training scheme. Another cause for anxiety had been his doubt that permanent employment would follow when his training was complete. But none of those invasions of his equilibrium had overwhelmed his waking thoughts as this knowledge did. It frightened him too because he couldn’t understand what was happening to him.
    Why did he care so much that his mother had slept with a man? He knew she had slept with his father. He knew that if she had married Arnham, they would have slept together. Why did he have to think about it so much, torment himself with pictures of the two of them together, repeat in his mind over and over Fee’s words, Fee’s awful revelations? The postcard was still on the living room mantelpiece; he had never carried out his threat of throwing it away, and it was always the first thing he saw when he went into the room. It was as if, instead of a small piece of card with a commonplace photograph on it, it had become a huge picture in violent oils depicting some scene of sadism and sexual depravity, the kind of thing you don’t want to look at but which compels your eyes and stretches them from their sockets.
    Somehow their roles had been reversed. He had become her father and she his child. He was the father who wants revenge on his daughter’s seducer or for her seducer to marry her. Pity for her wrenched at him when he looked at her sitting there quietly, stitching away at Cheryl’s bridesmaid’s dress. If she had gone alone to Arnham’s house that day