Read Online The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online Page A

knowing where the others were and what they were doing. Cheryl was dressed in her customary jeans and black leather and she had a cowgirl’s hat on, broad brimmed, steep crowned, with a fringed leather band.
    There was no reason why she shouldn’t be there. She was free, she wasn’t doing anything she shouldn’t be—or as far as he could see, she wasn’t. Philip had to drive on, he had to take his eyes from her, as the lights had gone to red and amber and a moment’s delay would set the drivers behind him all braying on their horns. There was nothing to trouble him in her presence here, but in her appearance and stance there was.
    She had moved out of that doorway like a girl drugged or drunk—or exhausted or driven out against her will. The cause of her exit might have been any of those. And she was crying, the tears were running down her face. He saw her bow her head and put her fists in her eyes, and then he had to turn his eyes back to the road and put the car into gear and move fast away from her.

C HAPTER F OUR
    The five girls took up their pose against the drawn curtains at Christine’s french windows. These curtains had come from her old home and were of rich, dark brown velvet, lined and interlined, light excluding. The May sunshine showed itself only as a single thin bright line on the right-hand edge of the window, and this vanished when the photographer fastened the curtain to the window frame with a piece of Scotch tape.
    Philip, a little uneasy in his Moss Brothers morning coat and striped trousers, first put his head round the door, then came in and stood at the opposite end of the room. The photographer’s lights made it very hot. The photographer was an oldish man, his clothes reeking of cigarette smoke. At first, the appearance of the girls dismayed Philip. He knew he had good taste, an eye for the stylish and elegant colour combinations. If he hadn’t, he probably wouldn’t have been in his present job or have wanted it. Who had so badly advised Fee that she had got herself up in white satin, a bluish, Arctic white, stiff and gleaming as a sheet of ice? But perhaps it was all her own choice. Couldn’t she see that this patrician dress with its high throat and lean arum lily sleeves, its narrow bell skirt, was designed for a tall thin woman with a flat chest?
    Her hat was the sort of thing lead actresses wore in period films of the forties. Philip had seen plenty of them on television. A kind of bowler sported by ladies sidesaddle on horseback, only this one was white with the wrong length of veil. And it was arum lilies she carried. Funeral flowers, he thought, remembering a wreath on his father’s coffin. As to the bridesmaids, being commanded to smile now, to look, not at the camera, but adoringly at Fee, he would have laughed at their costumes— what other word for them was there?—if he had seen them in a magazine.
    A kind of tunic, each in a different colour—rose, coral, lemon, apricot—great puffy sleeves of some net stuff with orange spots, and bursting from tunic hem at hip level, puffball skirts of the same spotty net. Pink and orange circlets of some unidentifiable flowers on their heads. They were grotesque. Well, he thought, surprising himself, they were all grotesque but one. Cheryl, Stephanie, and Fee’s old school friend Janice were absurd figures of fun, but the other one, she was different. She was—Words failed Philip as he stared at her.
    This must be Senta. She didn’t look as if connected with that family, she didn’t look as if related to anyone of their sort. She was extraordinary. This wasn’t in her height or something startling about the shape of her, for she was shorter than the other girls and very slender. Her skin was white but not what people mean when they talk about white skin—very fair or pale or creamy—but whiter than milk, white as the inner side of some deep sea shell. Her lips were scarcely less pale. He couldn’t tell the colour of her