The Unknown Bridesmaid (17 page)

She only walked a couple of yards. She never had any intention of abandoning Elsa, of course she didn’t. But in that short fragment of time she felt an intense excitement which immediately made her feel shaky and sick. Quickly, she turned back, and shouted to Elsa to stop it, stop it, and then she lay down full-length on the bank and told Elsa to stretch her arms as high as she could and slowly, slowly, she was able to haul the child up, but only just. If Elsa had not been so light, she would not have been able to do it. ‘There,’ Julia said, panting, ‘now stop crying, there’s nothing wrong with you.’ But clearly there was. Elsa did stop crying, but she went on trembling. Julia held her tight and soothed her and told her what a brave girl she’d been and what a great adventure they had had. ‘Don’t tell anyone about it, though,’ she added, ‘it’s our secret, OK?’ Elsa didn’t nod in agreement. She was silent all the way back to the gate, though Julia chatted away to her and sang her favourite songs. When they were safely in the garden, Elsa broke away from Julia and ran into the house. Following her, Julia found her mother looking astonished and Elsa with her arms wrapped round her mother’s legs.

‘Good heavens,’ her mother said, ‘what’s brought this on? What’s the matter with Elsa?’

‘Oh, she’s tired,’ Julia said carelessly. ‘I walked her too far.’ Her heart beat rather hard as she said this, but Elsa, for the moment, stayed silent. That night she stayed in her camp bed. Julia was excessively kind to her, but it made no difference, she wouldn’t be coaxed into Julia’s bed. Next day was the last day, then she went home.

Julia’s mother had a phone call from Iris. Iris thanked her for having Elsa, said she was so grateful, and grateful to Julia
too. Elsa, it seemed, had had such an exciting time with Julia that she’d been having nightmares. Iris said this quite nicely, Julia’s mother reported, but there had been ‘an edge’ to it. The nightmares were about boats and chocolate cake. ‘What on earth could have caused that?’ Julia’s mother asked her, watching her closely. ‘You didn’t take her onto a boat, did you?’ Julia said of course not, but they’d seen a boat and seen a cake through one of the windows. She excused herself the lie because strictly speaking she hadn’t ‘taken’ Elsa onto the boat. Elsa had jumped.

After that, Elsa was not so keen on Julia. ‘It’s to be expected,’ Julia’s mother said, ‘she’s growing up.’

Afterwards, Julia regretted telling her friend Caroline about the boat thing. She couldn’t remember why she’d broken her own rules by confiding in Caroline. Needing to confide anything to anyone was a weakness. But she had done it, while walking to school the next morning. Caroline was odd. It was this oddness that had drawn them together, though they were each thought odd in a different way, Julia because of how she kept herself to herself, and Caroline because of her accent and her appearance. She was from Motherwell, near Glasgow, and had a strong Scottish accent, and she had a brutal haircut, clipped round her ears and in at the neck, which looked strange when her figure was so full-breasted and womanly. Girls were not comfortable with Caroline but Julia was interested in her because she was different and clever.

They were both clever, particularly at maths and science. Julia’s cleverness was of the quiet, unobtrusive variety. She didn’t speak much in class and it was not until marks were given out that her ability was revealed. But Caroline was a show-off. She had her hand almost permanently raised aloft in lessons, answers to everything at the ready and always correct. Neither girl made any approach to the other, but they
had been put together to work by their chemistry teacher. Outside the laboratory they went their separate ways but then they began meeting each other accidentally on the way to school and soon this developed into a habit and from this they discovered they shared a liking for a sharp comment about a whole list of things. Neither of them yet knew much about the other, so the name Elsa meant nothing to Caroline when Julia suddenly began this tale, told in a laconic tone, of dumping her cousin on a boat and almost leaving her. Caroline said nothing at first. She realised that Julia was pitching for some reaction but she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be shocked or amused, or something else. It seemed to her that Julia was trying to tell her something, that this story about the cousin indicated some undercurrent worrying her. So Caroline said nothing, except that maybe Julia should keep away from this Elsa.

‘Why?’ asked Julia.

‘Well,’ said Caroline ‘you seem to like hurting the kid, no?’

‘No!’ said Julia. ‘Of course I don’t, that’s stupid.’

She didn’t speak to Caroline for the rest of the day.

When Julia got home and saw a letter lying on the mat behind her front door, she thought it might be to say she’d been appointed as a magistrate, but one glance, as she picked it up, showed her it could not be. It was a personal letter, the address written in a round, almost childish hand. Julia held it, playing her mother’s annoying game of spending ages wondering who this unexpected letter could be from when all she had to do to find out was open it. But she rather liked the suspense. A letter was, after all, now a rare event. Who wrote to her? Caroline, occasionally, very occasionally, and Iris, on her birthday and at Christmas, but everyone else emailed or phoned.

The letter was from Sandra who Julia had neither seen nor heard from for something like forty years, ever since she and her mother had left Cumbria. It was written on two small sheets of blue paper with another thicker page folded up and stuck between these two sheets. Julia read the letter first, without unfolding the other sheet. It reminisced about their primary schooldays together, with Sandra apparently having crystal-clear memories of incidents Julia could not recollect at all, and then moved on to (as Sandra put it) bringing Julia ‘up to speed’ on how her own life had developed. She was married and had two children, both boys, of twenty and nineteen, who still lived at home. Sandra was a full-time wife and mother, which she didn’t regret at all (the ‘at all’ underlined) but nevertheless she was full of admiration for what she’d heard from others about Julia’s career, and often thought about her, and how well she’d done.

By the time Julia was onto the second sheet of paper, she was wondering what the point of this letter was going to turn out to be. Could it really just be a ‘for old times’ sake’ letter? Or was Sandra writing with a purpose and if so what would it be? She noticed that right at the beginning Sandra had revealed how she had got Julia’s address, a complicated sequence of encounters with someone who knew someone who knew someone else who knew Julia’s cousin, Iris, who had provided the address. Once she had it, Sandra had felt she really must write, especially as – and here the point of the letter began to emerge – she had recently seen, in the extract from the magazine she enclosed, a photograph she was sure was of Julia.

At last, Julia unfolded the page from the magazine enclosed in Sandra’s letter. It seemed to have been taken from a feature about wedding-dress styles over the last fifty years. There were three photographs on this page. The bottom one was of Iris’s first wedding. There she was, in 1973, Reginald at her side, in his uniform. Iris, Reginald and bridesmaids Sylvie
and Pat all had their names listed underneath. Then Julia realised that though Sandra was correct, she was in this photograph, her name was not in the caption, which simply said ‘unknown bridesmaid’. Unknown? She felt strangely shocked seeing that word: Unknown? What would it signify to people? Who had sent this photograph to the magazine? Who had not known her?

But then, still staring at the photograph, Julia thought that
she
did not know that child either. The description was correct. She was unknown to herself. It was a stage she was beginning to suspect, that all adults reached. She knew that she had been that child but nevertheless the child was a stranger to her and it was distressing.

She would not reply to Sandra.

One day, when she was fifteen, Julia came home from school to find the house, as she thought, empty. She banged the door shut as she entered, and waited for her mother to shout ‘Don’t bang the door’, part of the ritual of coming home, but no shout came. Assuming her mother was out, Julia went into the kitchen to look for something to eat, and only after she’d cut herself a piece of cake did she notice there was a pan on the cooker, its contents bubbling away. So her mother wasn’t out. She trailed into the living room and put the television on and half watched
Blue Peter
. There was homework to do, but she hadn’t the energy yet. When
Blue Peter
finished, she went back into the kitchen to make some tea and saw that the pan was still bubbling but now there was a slight smell of burning. She lifted the lid and peered in. There was a chicken carcass inside, with only a tiny bit of water at the bottom of the pan. Stock. Her mother had left the chicken bones simmering to make stock, and she’d forgotten it and gone out.

But her mother never forgot such a thing. She was incapable of leaving the house while a pan was bubbling away. Julia went to the bottom of the stairs and called out, ‘Mum? You’ve left the stock pan on and it’s nearly boiled dry.’ She realised she sounded scornful, and added, ‘I’ve turned it off.’ Then she waited. Even before she mounted the stairs she knew something was wrong. Outside her mother’s bedroom, she hesitated. The door was half open, but she didn’t go in straight away. Maybe her mother was having a nap. But Julia knew this was another impossibility. Her mother had nothing but contempt for those feeble enough (like Aunt Maureen) to need naps in the afternoon. So Julia pushed the door further open and went in. At first, she was relieved to see that her mother did indeed appear to be having a nap. She was lying on her back, her eyes closed, her arms by her side, neatly arranged, slightly tucked into the folds of her skirt. But Julia knew.

She behaved in an exemplary fashion. Calmly, though she did not feel calm, she went towards the bed and touched her mother’s shoulder, shaking it slightly. No response. ‘Mum!’ she said loudly. There wasn’t a flicker. Julia went back downstairs and rang Aunt Maureen. She got Uncle Tom. He seemed a little irritated by Julia’s call, asking twice if she was sure her mother wasn’t just having a well-earned rest. Julia said she was sure. He came round ten minutes later, in his car, looking grumpy (he’d been watching the cricket), but then when he’d gone upstairs, he changed his attitude.

If Julia’s mother had suffered from headaches or blurred vision, she hadn’t mentioned them to anyone. No doctors had been consulted. The aneurysm, when it happened, must, everyone said, have taken her by surprise. Much was made of this to Julia. ‘Painless’ was a word used frequently. ‘There would have been no time,’ Aunt Maureen assured her, ‘to worry about you.’ Julia resented this, but said nothing. She said nothing for days. There was plenty of talking around her, but she didn’t take part in it. Everyone was kind, but
she hated them all. She longed for them all to go away, but that was the one thing they would not do. She must, they said to each other, never be left alone. There was no doubt about it: she needed her family and must be looked after by them. So she was taken to Aunt Maureen and Uncle Tom’s.

Nobody consulted her about her future. She was told, gently enough, that though Aunt Maureen and Uncle Tom were her legally appointed guardians she would be going to live with Iris and Carlo and their girls. ‘You’ll be happier there,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘part of a young family instead of stuck with middle-aged folk like your Uncle Tom and me.’ Aunt Maureen seemed to want Julia to be pleased, or so Julia thought, but she was not pleased. She couldn’t take anything in, or find words to express the strangeness she felt. Her mother had ruled her life. Everything she did, or did not do, in some way referred back to her mother. Recently, she had begun to rebel against her mother’s absolute authority but she needed her mother to be there to be rebelled against. Without her presence, there was only a void, and that was frightening.

For weeks afterwards, going home from school to the Annovazzi house, Julia would find her footsteps coming to a halt at the point where the road to her old home and the road to theirs met at a corner. Sometimes, she took the old route, not because she’d forgotten where she now lived but deliberately, to see how it would feel. How it felt was good. She had no wish to be back in that house. She didn’t feel distressed looking at it. It didn’t make her yearn for her mother (though she did want her to be alive again). She stood on the pavement outside the garden of her old home and looked at it not with longing but something near to contempt. What a miserable house, what a miserable place this was. She had never liked it, she had never liked Manchester. Home, in her head, was in Cumbria, where she was sure she and her mother had been happy. Why her mother chose to come here had never been explained to her, and she wanted to know the reasons now more than ever.

When she began being able to talk properly once more, Julia asked her Aunt Maureen why her mother had moved to Manchester.

‘Oh, you don’t want to fret about that,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’

‘But I want to know,’ Julia insisted, ‘it’s important.’

‘Good heavens,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘important? It’s all water under the bridge. What’s important about it?’

Julia just managed to stop short of saying it was important because from that move onwards everything in her life had gone wrong so she needed to know why her mother had chosen to come to this place she hated. There had to be a reason, and perhaps if she knew the reason she might not feel so angry and resentful. But she didn’t say any of this. Confessing a hatred of Manchester might be taken as also hating her aunt and cousin, and she was smart enough to realise this would do her no good. Instead, she said stubbornly, ‘I just want to know, that’s all.’

‘I’ll tell you one day,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘not that there’s much to tell.’ And that was that.

Julia believed in the theory that dreams were a sort of dustbin for the mind and had no significance. But when she had a particularly clear, vivid dream, in which the sense of reality was so strong that, on waking, she was still within it, she had difficulty accepting that there was no hidden meaning there.