The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell Page B

she said, “is for ever. Don’t you feel that? I saw you across the room and I knew you were the twin to my soul, the other half. That’s why the first thing I ever said to you, the first word I spoke, was your name.”
    Philip thought he remembered the first word she had spoken was to say Hardy was a peculiar dog, but he must be mistaken. What did it matter anyway? She was in his bed, had made love with him more gloriously than any girl ever before, and would do so, almost certainly, again.
    “For ever,” she whispered, a slow hieratic smile spreading across her face. He was glad of that smile, for he didn’t want her becoming too serious. “Philip, I don’t want you to say you love me. Not yet. I shan’t tell you I love you, though I do. Those words are so commonplace, everyone uses them, they’re not for us. What we have and are going to have is too deep for that, our feelings are too deep.” She turned her face into the hollow of his shoulder and ran her fingers lightly down the length of his body, quickly exciting him again. “Philip, shall I stay the night here with you?”
    He hated having to refuse that. Christine wouldn’t come into his room that night, but she would in the morning, she always did, bearing with her the cup of tea slopped into its saucer, the encrusted sugar bowl with the damp spoon stuck in it. She wouldn’t criticise him; she might even not mention she had found him with a girl in his bed; she might only look dismayed and terribly embarrassed, her eyes wide and her hand going up to her pursed lips—but he wouldn’t be able to bear it. It would be too much for him.
    “I’d love you to, more than anything, but I don’t really think it’s on.” Without yet knowing her very well, he anticipated an immediate scene, fury perhaps or tears.
    She surprised him by her radiant smile, the way she took his face in her hands and planted a tiny light kiss on his mouth. In a moment she was out of bed, shaking her hair, drawing her fingers through it. “It doesn’t matter. We can go to my place.”
    “You’ve a place of your own?”
    “Of course. It’s yours as well now, Philip. You understand that, don’t you? It’s yours as well.”
    In Cheryl’s room, absent for an instant, she changed into the clothes she must have arrived in that morning: a long, full black skirt, a long, loose sweater of silvery knitted stuff the colour of her hair. These garments hid the shape of her as nearly as the burka hides the contours of the Islamic woman. Her slender legs, tiny ankles, were in black tights, her feet in flat black pumps. She came back into his room and saw Flora in the corner for the first time.
    “She looks like me!”
    He remembered what he had thought in Arnham’s garden before he stole her: if he ever met a girl like her, he would fall at once in love. His eyes went from Senta to the statue and he saw the resemblance. So often when you thought someone looked like someone else or like a picture, say, the likeness disappeared when they were together. This didn’t happen. They were twins, in stone and flesh. It made him shiver a little as if something solemn had happened. “Yes, she looks like you.” He realised he had spoken quite gravely. “I’ll tell you about her sometime,” he said.
    “Yes, you must. I want to know all about you, Philip. I want to know everything. We must have no secrets from each other. Get dressed and come with me now. I’m scared of seeing other people— Oh, your mother, your sister, I don’t know. I just don’t want to meet anyone else. I think our first evening should be sacred somehow, don’t you?”
    The rain lifted for them just before they left, and when they came out into the streaming street, the setting sun showed. The sun made all the puddles and sheets of water shine like a paving of gold. She had hesitated a little before leaving the house, as if to go out was to take some kind of plunge. Perhaps it was, for the street was like a shallow