The Bridesmaid Read Online Free PDF Page A

over the front entrance. He shook his head, said something about an exorbitant rent.
    She held on to his arm. “Is it because of Rebecca Neave?”
    He looked at her in astonishment. A month and more had passed since the girl’s disappearance. Theories, whole articles of speculation, appeared from time to time in newspapers, outlining their authors’ ideas of what had become of her. There was no real news, there had been no leads that could be called firm. She had vanished as surely as if she had been made invisible and spirited away. The name for a second meant nothing to Philip, so securely had he banished it from his mind, hating to dwell on these things. The identity of its possessor came back to him uneasily.
    “Rebecca Neave?”
    “She lived there, didn’t she?” Jenny said.
    “I had no idea.”
    He must have spoken very coldly, for he could sense her looking at him as if she thought he was pretending to something he didn’t truly feel. But this phobia of his was real enough, and sometimes it extended to the human beings who allowed violence to occupy their minds. He didn’t want to seem smug or prudish. Because she expected him to do so, he looked up at the building, bathed in the orangeade sticky light of stilt-borne street lamps. Not a window was open on the facade. The front doors swung apart and a woman came out briskly and got into a car. Jenny was unable to say exactly which flat had been Rebecca’s, but she guessed its windows were the two in the very top right-hand corner.
    “I thought that was why you didn’t fancy it.”
    “I don’t fancy living all the way up here.” North of the North Circular Road, he meant. He thought of the surprise it would be telling her of his acquisition of a house rent-free, but something stayed him, some inner prudence held him back. It might be only a matter of weeks before he knew—until then he could refrain. “Anyway, I ought to wait till I’ve got a proper job,” he said.
    The last time he knew Arnham had phoned Christine was at the end of November. He heard her speaking to someone quite late at night and call him Gerry. Soon after that he expected Arnham home—or Fee did. Fee watched their mother as once a mother might have watched her daughter, looking for an air of excitement, for changes in her appearance. They wouldn’t ask. Christine never questioned them about their private affairs. Fee said she seemed depressed, but Philip couldn’t see it. Christine was just the same as far as he knew.
    Christmas passed and his training course came to an end. He was on the Roseberry Lawn staff now, a very junior surveyor-planner, on a salary of which he was obliged to part out with a third to Christine. When Fee went, it would be more than a third, and he must learn not to mind that, either. Christine, quite quietly and not making any fuss about it, began earning a little by doing the neighbours’ hair at home. If his father had been alive, Philip thought, he would have stopped Cheryl working at Tesco on the checkout. Not that this endured for long. She only lasted there three weeks, and afterwards, instead of trying to get another job, she went on the dole with indifferent acceptance.
    In the living room in Glenallan Close, a room which had once been two—very tiny, poky rooms they must have been, for combined they measured not much more than six metres—the postcard with the White House on it remained on the mantelpiece. All the Christmas cards had been taken down but Arnham’s card remained. Philip would have liked to take it down and throw it away, but he had an uneasy feeling Christine treasured it. Once, looking at it sideways in sunlight, he saw that its glossy surface was covered with her fingermarks.
    “Perhaps he just hasn’t come back yet,” Fee said.
    “He wouldn’t be away on a business trip for four months.”
    Cheryl said unexpectedly, “She’s tried to phone him herself but the number’s unobtainable. She told me so, she said his phone