The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell Page A

could he do this without offence or seeming to criticise? It was such a silly small thing, yet the smell of the sheets upset him.
    Her silver hair covered the pillow. Tresses of it here and there she had made into little plaits. She lay on her back. The hair in her crotch was a bright fiery unnatural colour, and he could see that vivid red patch twice, both on her white body and reflected in the mirror, which hung at a wide angle, its top jutting at least a foot from the wall.
    Almost without thinking, on an impulse, taking her hand in his and laying it on the bright fuzzy triangle, he said with laughter in his voice, idly, “Why do you dye your pubic hair?”
    She sprang up. She flung his hand from her, and because that hand had been relaxed and her movement utterly unexpected, it struck his chest a blow. Her face was contorted with rage. She trembled with anger, her fists clenched as she knelt up over him. “What do you mean, dye it? Fuck you, Philip Wardman! You’ve got a fucking nerve talking to me like that!”
    For a second or two he could scarcely believe what he was hearing, those words uttered in that pure musical voice. He sat up, tried to catch her hands in his, but had to duck to avoid the blow she aimed at him.
    “Senta, Senta, what’s the matter with you?”
    “You, you’re the matter. How dare you say that to me about dyeing my pubic hair?”
    He was nearly a foot taller than she and twice as powerful. This time he did get hold of her arms, did subdue her. She breathed in gasps, wriggling in his hold. Her face was twisted with the effort to escape. He laughed at her.
    “Well, don’t you? You’re a blonde, you can’t be that colour down there.”
    She spat the words at him. “I dye the hair of my head, you fool!”
    Laughter made him relax his hold on her. As he did so, he expected an onslaught, put his hands to cover his face, simultaneously thinking, How awful, we’re quarrelling, what now, what now? She took his hands away gently, held his face, brought soft warm lips on to his, kissing him more sweetly and lengthily than she ever had, stroking his face, his chest. Then his hand—the one she had let fall to slap him with its knuckle bones—she took in her own and laid it delicately on the region of her body that had caused their strife, on the red hair and the thin white silky skin of her inner thighs.
    Half an hour later she got up, said, “These sheets do nif a bit. Go and sit in the chair for a minute and I’ll change them.”
    And she had, purple to emerald green, the soiled ones stuffed into her carpet bag for carrying to the launderette. He thought to himself, we are getting close, she read my mind, I like that, I love her, temperamental little spitfire that she is. But some time after midnight, leaving her asleep and covered by the quilt in its clean green cotton cover, climbing the dark smelly stairs, it came to him that he hadn’t believed what she said about dyeing the hair of her head. She must be making that up. Of course she bleached it and put something on it to make it silvery, you could see that, but no one with red hair would dye it a metal colour. Why would they?
    He experienced a pang of something he quickly recognised as fear. It frightened him that she might tell him lies. But it was after all a very small lie, a matter of no importance, the sort of thing all girls perhaps failed to tell the strict truth about, and he remembered Jenny saying her tan was natural when in fact she had been having daily sessions on a sunbed.
    Jenny—it was a long time since he had given her much thought. He hadn’t seen her or heard her voice since they had quarrelled back in January. She had wanted them to be engaged, had started on about it while they were away on holiday in Majorca together the previous October.
    “If we were engaged,” she had said, “I’d feel I meant something to you, I’d feel we were together, a couple.”
    “I can’t get married,” he had said to her, “I