The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell

me five pounds. You’ll get it back tomorrow.”
    “When you get your dole on Wednesday will do.” He went back into his room and took from his wallet, in the pocket of the Moss Brothers trousers, the last five-pound note he had. That left him with three pound coins and some odd pence.
    She snatched it from him. Once she held it crushed in her hand up against the lapels of the leather jacket, she managed a smile, she managed a “Thanks very much, Phil.”
    He could find nothing to say to her. He went back into his room and sat down on the bed. Her feet went fast down the stairs and he waited for the front door to slam. Instead, he heard her speaking to someone, a brief exchange of indecipherable words. Their mother perhaps had come back for something she had forgotten. Forgetting things—money, keys, a coat, suitable shoes—was a commonplace with Christine.
    The door slammed rather less violently than usual. The house didn’t shake from foundations to roof. He took the hired clothes off the chair, emptied the pockets, placed the clothes on hangers, and hung them inside the cupboard. The rain had begun again, buffeted against the glass by the rising wind. Someone knocked at the bedroom door.
    But no one in this household ever did. He thought, suppose it is the police, sent after me for taking Flora, just suppose it is. A cold thrill went down his spine. But he didn’t cover her up or put her away. He opened the door.
    It was Senta Pelham.
    He had forgotten she was coming back.
    She was still in her bridesmaid’s dress and she was very wet. Her hair was wet, water dripping from it, and the spotted net, intended to be puffed and stiff, drooped like the petals of a rain-soaked flower. The coral satin clung to her thin, fragile-looking ribcage and to the large round breasts, incongruously big for so slight a girl. Her nipples stuck out erect at the touch of the cold wet stuff.
    “Is there a towel somewhere?”
    “In the bathroom,” he said. Didn’t she know that? Hadn’t she got herself up in that absurd garment in this house?
    “I couldn’t get a lift after all,” she said, and he noticed she was out of breath. “I had to walk,” though it was more as if she had been running.
    “Dressed like that?”
    She laughed in a throaty, gasping way. She seemed tremendously nervous. She went into the bathroom and came out, rubbing her hair dry with one bath towel and with another slung over her shoulder. Philip expected her to go into Cheryl’s room, but instead she came into his and shut the door behind her.
    “There’s a hair dryer somewhere.”
    She shook her head—took off the towel and really shook it. The gleaming hair flew out and she ran her fingers through it. He had hardly realised what she was doing, he had hardly taken in that she was kicking off shoes, stripping off pale, wet, mud-splashed stockings, before she stood up and peeled the dress over her head. She stood there looking at him, her arms hanging by her sides.
    The room was too small for two people ever to be separated by more than a few feet. As it was, he found himself at no more than arm’s length from this naked girl—her strange, thin, big-breasted body marble-white, and at the base of her flat belly, a triangle, not of silver or blond, but of flame red. Philip was in no doubt—whatever he may have felt thirty seconds before—of what was going on and what she intended. She was eyeing him with that intense yet mysterious gaze with which she had so frequently favoured him at the wedding. He took a step towards her, put out his arms, and held her shoulders with his hands. The coldness of marble was what he had strangely expected, but she was warm, hot even, her skin silky and dry.
    Philip folded her slowly in his arms, savouring the slippery soft full and slender nakedness against his own body. As she moved her head to bring her mouth against his, the long wet hair slapped at his hands, making him shiver. She whispered to him between flicks