The Unknown Bridesmaid (12 page)

Her mother was at the gate, looking up and down the road distractedly. The moment she saw Julia, who was still a long way off, she began shouting her name, and then she hurtled down the road calling, ‘Wherever have you been?’ When she caught up with Julia, she seized her by the shoulders and
looked at her and said, ‘What’s wrong? What is the matter with you? You’ve been running, haven’t you?’ and she shook her slightly. All Julia could think of to say was that she felt sick. In reply, her mother said she wasn’t surprised at all this ridiculous behaviour, but the explanation, though it made no sense, seemed to satisfy her. She stopped talking and marched Julia back home. She said they must go to Aunt Maureen’s at once. Julia tried to say that she wanted to wash and to change her clothes but her mother said there was no time for that, they were late already. She would just have to suffer the consequences of all that silly running.

Aunt Maureen’s sitting room was again full of people. To Julia’s relief none of them, so far as she could tell, appeared to be police. There were two women and one man, and they all looked serious, but smiled when Aunt Maureen said this was Julia, her niece.

‘Hello, Julia,’ one of the women said. ‘I’m Linda, and this is Mary, and this is Mr Robertson. We just want to go over again what happened that sad day when baby Reggie fell asleep.’

Julia once more registered ‘fell asleep’, and for a moment wondered if Linda knew that baby Reggie hadn’t just fallen asleep but that he’d died, really died. But at the mention of little Reggie’s name, Aunt Maureen began quietly weeping, and Linda, who was sitting next to her, patted her hand, so Julia knew there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the baby was dead.

Then Linda said, ‘Maureen, why don’t you go and make that tea you offered?’

Maureen got up, looking quite grateful to be given something to do, and left the room.

‘Would you like to help your sister?’ Linda said, looking at Julia’s mother, but Julia’s mother said Maureen was perfectly capable of making a pot of tea by herself and she would stay with her daughter if, as she’d gathered from Maureen’s call earlier, there was to be any more questioning.

Hearing her mother’s tone of voice, strong and faintly challenging, Julia felt comforted, and found herself slipping her hand into her mother’s hand. Her mother squeezed it.

They sat down, facing Linda and Mary, and with Mr Robertson on a chair to their right. He took a pen out, and sat with it poised over a pad of paper, the sort, Julia noticed, with a spiral top. Linda started asking her questions, and Julia’s mother began answering them, only to be stopped. ‘I’d like Julia to tell us about that day, in her own words, if you don’t mind. Julia? Do you remember coming to this house on the day of 4th September?’ Julia nodded. ‘Could you actually say “yes” or “no”?’ Linda urged. Julia said yes. The man, Mr Robertson, was writing something down. Julia thought it looked as if he was writing down more than her ‘yes’, and she wondered what it might be. But Linda was pressing her to continue. ‘So you arrived at this house,’ Linda said, ‘and what did you do?’ Julia told her yet again. She described the lunch they had had, in minute detail. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Mr Robertson, far from writing down her every word, had stopped writing anything at all. ‘And after lunch?’ Linda repeated.

‘I went into the garden.’

‘Did you look at the baby in his pram?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was he asleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you touch the pram?’

‘Yes, I shuggled the handle a bit.’

‘Shuggled?’

‘I just moved it a bit. That’s what Iris said to do, to keep little Reggie asleep.’

‘Did he wake up when you stopped?’

‘No.’

‘So what did you do then?’

Julia took a deep breath, and frowned. They were all
waiting, including her mother. This was the hard bit, this was where the lying had to begin again if she were going to carry on lying. But she had already lied, by omission. She knew that. She’d pointed that out to herself already. Don’t be stupid, Julia, she’d said to herself, you didn’t tell anyone about tipping up the pram. She could tell them now. This was her second chance. She could burst into tears and tell them and say she was sorry. Tipping the pram up, and little Reggie’s head getting knocked (but not much, there was no blood or cut) might have nothing to do with anything. They would tell her that. They would say they were glad she had told them the truth at last and that she was not to worry about it. Julia opened her mouth to tell them about her walk with the pram, but instead of telling the truth she said, ‘I pushed the pram round the garden a bit, then I put it back where it had been, in the shade.’ She was astonished at her own words. Where had they come from? Why had she said that?

But Linda seemed satisfied. Mr Robertson wrote some more, and then looked at Linda, and nodded. Mary, who hadn’t said anything, just smiled and watched Julia, then got up. ‘I think that will be all for now,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Julia, you’ve been very helpful.’ That was when Julia started to cry. Everyone fussed over her, providing handkerchiefs to mop
her eyes and wipe her nose, and a glass of water appeared, sent for by Linda. Maureen arrived with the tea at the same time as Mary came with the water, and there was a lot of bustle as the tea things were set down: proper cups and saucers, and a sugar bowl (lump sugar) and tongs, and a small milk jug, and the pot itself. Julia recognised it. It was Aunt Maureen’s best teapot, a flowery thing, not the plain brown one. Everyone took tea. There was no talking, except remarks about how delicious, and welcome, the tea was.

After Linda, Mary and Mr Robertson had left, Aunt Maureen didn’t immediately clear the tea things away, as she usually did. Instead, she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes and said, ‘I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep, not a wink.’ Julia’s mother said it wasn’t surprising, and that she’d hardly slept herself. Julia’s head whirled with questions but she asked none of them, much too alarmed at what the answers might be. She wished she had someone to talk to, someone she could tell everything to. Her mother? No.

‘Sometimes,’ Janice admitted, ‘it would be good to be with someone, just for a bit, but I don’t care, really, it doesn’t matter.’

Julia asked on what sort of occasions Janice might like to have a companion. She said, walking in a crocodile to the swimming baths she always got stuck with girls she didn’t like, who nobody liked, or wanted to walk with, but the class had to walk in twos. If that day there was an uneven number, she had to walk with the games teacher and she hated that. It would be good to have a walking partner, that was all.

‘To talk to?’ Julia asked, knowing perfectly well that would not be the reason.

Janice shook her head vigorously. ‘I wouldn’t talk,’ she said, ‘I’d just have someone regular to walk with.’

‘Who would you prefer, of all the girls in your class?’ Julia asked.

Janice shrugged. She waited. Janice then began a list of elimination. She named eight girls very rapidly and then, more hesitantly, another six. ‘Does that leave ten, or twelve, who wouldn’t be so bad to walk with once a week?’ ‘Ten,’ Janice said.

‘And who, of the ten, would be the most bearable?’

Long pause. A lot of looking at the ceiling, and then, ‘I know what you’re trying to get me to say,’ Janice said.

‘Do you?’ Julia said. ‘You tell me what you think I’m trying to get you to say and I’ll tell you if you’re right.’

She told her.

‘Very good,’ Julia said, ‘spot on. And now you’ve said it, how reasonable does my theory sound? Do you think I’m right, and in fact there
are
at least two girls you would quite like to get to know and walk with and maybe become friends with?’

‘Possibly,’ Janice said, ‘but I don’t care, I won’t try to get them to walk with me anyway, I wouldn’t ever ask them.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Julia said, ‘you wouldn’t
ask
, that would be against your own rules. It’s called pride, Janice. You’re too proud to show you would quite like occasional companionship.’

‘No,’ Janice said, ‘I’m not too proud.’

‘So,’ Julia said, ‘if one of those girls actually asked you to walk with her to swimming, what would you say?’

‘Nobody would ask,’ Janice said, ‘nobody does any asking, it just happens.’

‘Well then,’ Julia persisted, ‘suppose it just happened, suppose one of these girls gravitated towards you and assumed you’d be happy to walk with her, what then, what would you do?’

‘Walk with her, of course,’ Janice said.

Julia had no worries at all about this child. She wasn’t as peculiar as her mother suspected, just content with her own company. She might never develop any liking for being in any kind of social group but in time she would make one or two friends of like mind, people who shared her outlook on life and were as discerning as herself. Her mother was fretting about nothing.

But Julia was doubtful if she could convince Janice’s mother of this.

There was a call from the police station that afternoon. An appropriate adult was needed to attend with a young girl who had thrown a bottle of Coca-Cola at an elderly woman and was going to be charged with assault. It was not Julia’s job to be an appropriate adult but her name had been
suggested by the social worker who knew Julia had worked with this girl before. The social worker couldn’t be there herself, and there was no parent available – the girl was in a home after her foster-mother refused to keep her following a fight – so the need was urgent. All Julia was required to do was be present at the questioning. It wouldn’t take long. A car would collect her and take her back.

Julia remembered the girl. She’d been about nine at the time, so must be around fifteen by now. Julia couldn’t remember exactly why this girl had come to her but it had been for some kind of unexceptionable bad behaviour, stealing of some sort, nothing too unusual. Walking into the police station, something she hated doing and hadn’t found got any easier, she wondered if she would recognise the girl, who was surely bound to have changed dramatically in the intervening years. But she did recognise her, from the hair alone, black and unruly, dropping heavily all round her face, quite distinctive hair. The girl, Gill, didn’t recognise Julia, though, or if she did she was determined not to admit it.

‘Who’s this?’ she said to the policewoman sitting with her.

The policewoman told her who Julia was and why she was there.

‘I don’t care,’ the girl said, ‘doesn’t matter to me.’

‘Shall we get started, then?’ the policewoman said.

Julia settled in at the new school quite quickly, to her mother’s relief. She even made a friend, Caroline, in the third week. There were no more ‘funny’ episodes. But at home, she was ‘not right’, as her mother described it to Maureen. But then nobody in the family was quite right. Iris barely stirred from her bed. Her mind, Julia heard her whisper, was full of images in which her baby was being cut to pieces, hacked at with saws and knives. Julia immediately had these same images herself.
When the autopsy was over, and Iris was taken to see little Reggie, Julia scandalised her mother by asking if she could go too. But whatever the dead baby had looked like, Iris came back calmer. ‘He looked perfect,’ she told Julia, which disappointed Julia. There was a lot of talk that day about the cause of little Reggie’s death but Julia understood hardly any of it. She caught odd words, but not clearly enough to retain them in her mind so that she could look them up afterwards.

Eventually, there was a funeral. Julia, to her fury, was not allowed to go to it. Her mother said she had been through enough and it would do her no good to see the tiny coffin and Iris in a state of collapse. So Julia stayed at home, sulking, in the company of a cousin of her mother and Aunt Maureen, who had turned up at the house saying she couldn’t after all face the funeral but she wanted to pay her respects. She was an odd woman. Julia was embarrassed to be left with her and tried to retreat to her room to read. The cousin wouldn’t allow this. ‘You need company,’ she told Julia, ‘it isn’t good to be alone on a day like this. Come on now, we’ll bake a cake.’ Julia said she didn’t want to bake a cake. There was plenty of mother’s gingerbread in the cake tin already, thank you. The cousin said in that case they could play I spy – that was harmless enough. I’ll start, she said, something beginning with F. Julia wanted to say ‘fool’ and ‘it’s you’ but instead went into the kitchen and banged about, running the tap and boiling the kettle, pointlessly, just as her mother did when she was cross.

The hour the funeral took passed so slowly Julia began to think the clock had stopped. It sat on the mantelpiece, fair and square in the middle, a toby jug to the right, a toby jug to the left, both exactly the same distance from the clock. Julia hated the clock and hated the jugs. She wanted to be at the funeral, she wanted to see the little white coffin. Then, it would be real. Real, and over. Nothing could be done, once she’d seen the coffin buried. She didn’t know what might have happened if she’d been allowed to go to the funeral.
She would have cried, of course, but she might not just have cried. She might, at last, have said something, and then what would have happened? Julia looked away from the clock, and stared at the cousin: small, stupid, horrible skirt, horrible jacket, ugly shoes. She thought about shocking her. She thought about telling this cousin, whose name she hadn’t even listened to, that she, Julia, might have killed little Reggie. She thought about describing the walk she’d taken with the Silver Cross pram, and what had happened on the way back. She opened her mouth to begin talking just as the cousin said, ‘My baby died, Julia, same thing, six weeks old, no reason.’ There were tears running down the cousin’s powder-encrusted cheeks. ‘Well,’ the cousin said, ‘it was a long time ago. I never have got over it, though.’

So Julia said nothing. She couldn’t do the shocking she’d thought about. Instead, she made the cousin a cup of tea, and was thanked for it. The remaining time was spent listening to the cousin reminisce about when she and Aunt Maureen had been children. Julia noticed that her mother wasn’t mentioned in any of these rambling anecdotes, just Aunt Maureen. She vaguely wondered why. Then her mother came home. ‘Thank you, Doris,’ she said, ‘you’ll be wanting to get to the tea. Tom’s waiting to take you. I hope Julia has been no trouble.’ There was no pausing for the answer. ‘Julia, get Doris’s coat. Have you got your bag there, Doris? Good. And thank you again.’ Cousin Doris was out of the door before she had time to say a word.