The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell

gaily than anyone he had ever known. He could understand she might not want to be too closely associated with the Collier family, a jolly beefy-faced crowd of sport-mad men and bingo-addicted women. “My mother was an Icelandic woman,” she said. “My father was in the navy, you see, and he met her when they put in at Reykjavik.”
    “What do you mean ‘was,’ Senta? Your mother’s still alive, isn’t she?” She had told him her parents were separated, each now living with a new partner. “You said your mother had a boy friend you don’t much like.”
    “My mother died when I was born.”
    He stared at her, it seemed so strange. He had never heard of anyone dying in childbirth except in old books.
    “It was in Reykjavik, I was born there. My father was away at sea.” Her expression had grown suspicious, slightly displeased. “Why do you look like that? What are you thinking? They were married, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    “Senta, I didn’t mean—”
    “He brought me back here and soon after that he married Rita—she’s the woman I call my mother. My real mother’s name was Reidun, Reidun Knudsdatter. It means Canute’s daughter. Don’t you think that’s amazing? Not ‘son’ but ‘daughter.’ It’s an ancient matrilinear system.”
    That evening too she told him how she had won a scholarship to drama school and come out top student of her year. During the holidays, in her second year, she had gone to Morocco and taken a room for two months in the Medina of Marrakesh. Because it was difficult to be a western woman alone there, she had worn Moslem women’s dress, the veil which allowed only her eyes and forehead to show, and a floor-length black dress. Another time she had gone with friends to Mexico City and been there during the earthquake. She had been to India. Philip felt he had little to tell her about himself in return for these accounts of remarkable or exotic experiences. The death of a father, responsibility for a mother, worries over Cheryl, were a poor exchange.
    But once back in the basement room, sharing a bottle of wine he had bought, he did tell her about Christine and Gerard Arnham and Flora. He gave her a detailed account of what had happened after he saw the marble girl from Mrs. Ripple’s bedroom window. She laughed when he described how he had stolen the statue and been seen by one of Arnham’s neighbours, and she even ask exactly where this was, what was the name of the street and so on; but still he had a feeling she hadn’t listened as closely to his narrations as he had to hers. Reclining on the big bed, she seemed preoccupied with her own image in the mirror. This relic of some vanished once-elegant drawing room, its gilded cherubs missing a leg or arm, its swags of flowers denuded of their leaves, reflected her mistily, as if she were suspended in cloudy greenish water, her marble white body spotted by the flaws in the glass.
    If she hadn’t concentrated on what he said, he soon thought, this was due only to her desire for him, which seemed as great as his for her. He wasn’t used to this with girls, who, in the past, when his need was insistent, were tired or “not feeling like it” or having periods or peeved by something he had said. Senta’s sexual impulses were as urgent as his. And—blessed relief from those girls of the past—she was as quickly and easily satisfied as he. Uniquely, no long-drawn-out patient attention to a partner’s needs were here required. His needs were hers, and hers his.
    On the last night of their second week, the night before Fee and Darren were due home from their honeymoon, he began to get to know her. It was a break-through, that evening, and he was glad of it.
    They had made love and rolled apart from each other on the bed. He lay spent and happy, the only alloy to his contentment being the niggling concern which now wormed back into his mind: How could he broach the subject of getting her to change the sheets? How