The Unknown Bridesmaid (18 page)

As a child, after little Reggie died, she didn’t have nightmares. She slept soundlessly, dreamlessly. It was during the day, while she was wide awake and moving through her life, that she had what seemed like waking dreams. She’d be sitting in class, doing something as practical as long-division sums, when there would rise before her a vision of the Silver Cross pram, tilted on its hood, and she’d hear the thump it made on the kerbstone.
But it was the next bit that confused her. She would hear voices in her head, as she sat, petrified, pencil clutched in her hand. One of them, she was sure, was her own, pleading, crying, saying over and over that she was sorry, sorry.

Gradually, these episodes faded and she began to forget they had ever occurred. But then, when her mother died, she had the nightmares she had never had before. In them, her mother was dragging her along the pavement where she had wheeled the pram but it was no longer a solid pavement. Instead, it had become a river of blood and the level rose and rose until it engulfed her, and her mother, and filled the pram, and the baby floated out of it, and she woke up sweating and terrified. But she was certain the baby was alive.

Naturally, she told no one about these nightmares and, in time, they, too, became infrequent and finally ceased. But she felt there had been some message there, if only she could interpret it. Whether it was about the baby, or her mother, or merely her own hidden guilt, she could never work out.

The letter finally arrived: she was appointed a magistrate. The first training session was on a Monday morning. The district judge was dealing with people charged over the weekend, and all Julia and the others had to do was observe. She observed intensely, noting the judge’s decisiveness, which impressed her, but also his politeness towards those charged. There was no harshness in his manner, and she saw how kind he was to anyone obviously terrified that they would immediately be sent to prison. She observed, too, the widely varying demeanours of those accused. Not all of them were nervous. One young woman, accused of stealing a pair of shoes from a chain store, objected violently when the shoes were described as leather, claiming only the uppers were leather and the shoes ‘rubbish’ on examination. She thought she saw the merest suggestion of a suppressed smile on the judge’s face as he gave her a conditional discharge for six months. The woman shrugged when
she heard this, as though she didn’t care either way, and Julia felt surprised, expecting her to realise how lucky she’d been.

Some people did. There was another woman, middle-aged, very soberly and neatly dressed in a grey suit, charged with a driving offence. Her car had neither insurance nor an MOT certificate, and she had been driving it after drinking enough to be just over the limit. She hung her head in what looked like genuine shame, and appeared grateful for the fine she received, obviously having expected worse. Julia was not at all sure that a fine was enough, thinking maybe the woman should automatically be disqualified from driving, but there were apparently extenuating circumstances disclosed to the judge but which they did not hear.

But the case that worried her most was concerning bailiffs. If the bailiffs managed to gain entry into a household where debts had not been paid they could cart off belongings in payment, though only non-essential goods. The case that morning involved a distress warrant applied for by a managing director of a firm of bailiffs. He wanted permission to seize the belongings of a man who had a wife and four young children and who had defaulted on many and various debts, for the 32-inch plasma TV, a three-piece suite, a stair carpet and a kitchen table among other things. All non-essential items, but Julia immediately visualised the denuded home and the effect on the wife and children. The warrant was granted, and rightly so, but she found herself heartily disliking the bailiff who looked extremely pleased and smug.

She warned herself sternly against this kind of reaction. It was her job to be impersonal, dispassionate. The law insisted upon it.

Julia lived with Iris and Carlo and their girls for only three years, but they were years which when they came to an end
seemed to have gone on much longer. Those three years seemed, later on, to have almost obscured the years that had gone before. It used to make Julia panic when she found that she could not successfully reconstruct the earlier years. She could not place herself in the house she and her mother had lived in, could not
be
in it though she could answer any questions about it. When the memory of her mother also began to be less sharp, as painfully sharp as it had once been, she was filled with despair, and also a kind of shame. How could her mother, whose opinions and habits and rules of conduct had filled every moment of her life, how could she fade, becoming instead a vague picture in her head, fuzzy at the edges and entirely silent?

Yet she was judged to be happy during those years. She heard Aunt Maureen and Iris tell other people how quickly she had ‘settled’, as though she were a bird who had found a nest, and how easily she had fitted into the Annovazzi family, adored by Elsa and Francesca. This, of all the false assumptions made, was, to Julia, the most absurd. There had been no ‘fitting in’. She resented from the very first day being cast in the role of elder sister to her two cousins (she was described to outsiders as the girls’ cousin, though they were her first cousins once removed, a pedantic fact which mattered to her). Once she might have wanted a sister, indeed she could recall clearly wanting one, but now that she had, in effect, two sisters she longed to be an only child again. There was never any privacy, never any real stretch of time to herself. She had her own room, at least, and was grateful for it, but it was either regularly invaded by Elsa in particular, or else she was called out of it to do something for Iris. The Annovazzis in general liked togetherness. They were all highly social animals for whom silence and being on one’s own were afflictions. ‘Are you sulking, Julia?’ Carlo would ask her when she said she was going to her room. ‘What’s the matter, what have we done?’ Told that she was not sulking and that nobody
had done anything, that she just wanted to go to her room for a bit and read, Carlo would say ‘Funny girl’, and shake his head. Neither he nor Iris ever stopped Elsa and Fran from following her to her room. Instead, they encouraged them. Julia heard Carlo urging his daughters to ‘Go and cheer Julia up’, a suggestion they followed at once, running up the stairs and pounding their little fists on her door. She always had to open it. If she didn’t, Carlo or Iris would come up and make anxious enquiries about what was wrong with her.

Homework was the only thing that did give her the right to be shut in her room for an hour or two. Neither Carlo nor Iris knew much about examinations but they were prepared to take them seriously, aware that Julia was clever and might do well. Hard work Carlo certainly understood, and agreed with, whatever kind of hard work was involved. ‘I have a lot of homework tonight’ became the magic password to being allowed seclusion in her room. Julia did the homework, but did it far quicker than Carlo and Iris could possibly have guessed since both of them had laboured over their own homework at school and shuddered at the memory of it. Julia’s bag, bursting with books and files, filled them almost with awe – ‘The weight!’ Iris would exclaim. But most of the stuff crammed into Julia’s bag was not needed for her homework. She kept half of the books there all the time, for the look of the thing. In the hour after she had done her homework, she would often just lie on her bed, thinking, daydreaming, not daring to play music or make any noise in case she gave the game away.

Her room, which overlooked the garden, was small, but then all the rooms Julia had ever had as her bedroom had been small. She would have liked space, though she was used to her quarters being cramped. There was no room for a bookshelf, but Carlo had put up three planks across an alcove and these were crammed with her books. In front of each line of books she had propped up photographs, some
in frames, some not. They were mostly of herself, though the most prominent was of her mother and father, taken on their wedding day. Her mother had always had it on their mantelpiece. It had been dusted daily, and the silver frame polished once a month. But commanding attention though it did, with its posh frame and its size, compared to the other photographs, Julia rarely concentrated her attention on it. It was photographs of her younger self that fascinated, and even troubled, her.

She would have liked to ask someone about these photographs, someone who had been there when they were taken and had watched her smiling, or trying to smile, for the camera. She wanted reassurance that she really had looked sweet (at three years old), happy (at five), mischievous (at seven) and so on. Most of all, she wanted to ask someone about the photograph of herself at Iris’s wedding, as a bridesmaid – the first wedding. There was a photograph of her on her own, holding the posy of flowers in front of her in an attitude that looked defensive. Julia couldn’t believe that the girl there was herself. She didn’t recognise it at all, though of course she could remember the dress and flowers. What she wanted was to be that girl again, and for everything that had happened since the photograph was taken to happen differently. She didn’t want to have lost that girl.

Once, she had tried to talk to Iris about that photograph and how she felt. Iris was always kind and friendly, but there was rarely any chance to talk to her on her own. Elsa and Fran were always there when Julia got home from school, and when they had been put to bed, Carlo was there, and often other members of his gregarious family. Time alone with Iris was incredibly rare and only happened when Julia was ill with flu or something similar. Then, Iris would make time to bring her hot drinks and literally soothe her forehead with a cold flannel. Iris was always bright and cheerful, assuring Julia that she would be better soon, and asking her if there
was anything she wanted, an approach to illness which Julia could distinctly remember had not been her mother’s.

‘Iris,’ she murmured, on one such occasion keeping her eyes shut, ‘do you remember that photo of me being taken?’

‘Which one, pet?’

‘The one of me as a bridesmaid, there,’ and Julia opened her eyes and pointed.

Iris looked at it for a moment, and then went over to the shelf and picked it up. ‘Yes, of course I do,’ she said, her voice soft, ‘my dad took it,’ and she put it back.

‘It doesn’t look like me,’ Julia said, ‘I can’t believe it was me.’

‘Well,’ said Iris, ‘we all change, we all grow up.’

She looked so sad suddenly that Julia felt guilty. She’d reminded Iris of Reginald, that was it, Reginald who had given her the secret present, Reginald whose baby son had died – all those things, things Iris, so far as Julia knew, never talked about. Julia’s mother had approved of how Iris had dealt with two tragedies. She had admired Iris for not allowing them to ‘get her down’, except, naturally, at first, and most of all she had admired how Iris never, ever referred to either Reginald or little Reggie once she had met and was happy with Carlo. ‘An example to us all,’ Julia’s mother had said, and when Julia had asked, ‘An example of what?’ had replied, ‘What do you think, Julia?’ and that had been that.

But Julia wondered if how Iris reacted was a good example or not, even though she followed it for years.

The girl was described in the referral notes as possibly seriously depressed. This comment had a red asterisk next to it, which irritated Julia – as if she would have missed the significance of this! Depression in any teenager was taken very seriously but these days she felt the term was used to cover many lesser states of mind, all of them perfectly normal. To
be fed up, miserable, lethargic was not necessarily to be depressed. But schools panicked, and so did parents. They were afraid that ‘something’ might happen.

However, there did seem grounds for Sarah Baxter, aged fourteen, to be a cause of genuine concern. She had begun refusing to get up in the morning. She lay in a darkened room unless her mother hauled her out of it and forced her to go to school. Once there, she would not speak. This had been going on for some time. Julia could see this Sarah Baxter already in her mind’s eye, right down to the sullen expression and aggressive frown. The session she would have with her was likely to be very wearing.

When Julia returned to school after her mother’s death, Caroline was at her side instantly, shielding her from the curiosity of other girls, and from the pity she dreaded.

Caroline had never met Julia’s mother. She’d never been to Julia’s home. But she knew about death, sudden death. She had had a brother who was an epileptic and had died, aged sixteen, when Caroline was twelve. She had never told Julia this, though they had got to the stage of telling each other about their families, and she didn’t make the mistake of saying to Julia that she knew how she felt. Mature for her age, Caroline found other, subtle, ways of expressing concern and showing sympathy, and Julia recognised what she was doing and appreciated it. From that point on, they were truly friends, soon thought of by the teachers as inseparable. Everyone was pleased that these two clever girls, excellent students both, had become so devoted.

It took even longer, though, for them to see each other out of school hours. Julia didn’t want to invite Caroline to the Annovazzi household, where Elsa and Fran would run riot and give her and Caroline no peace or privacy, and Iris would
be far too interested, plaguing Caroline with questions. And Julia knew, too, that Iris wouldn’t think much of Caroline, though she would say nothing. Caroline would not be deemed a fun person, with her rather solemn habitual expression, and the frown she had when anything puzzled her could make her look cross. The Annovazzis liked pretty girls and were wary of plain girls who might turn out to be clever. They knew Julia was clever, and forgave her for it, since she was family, but they didn’t want her friend to be of the same mould. They wanted a friend who would lighten her up and they would know, Iris and Carlo, at first glance, that Caroline was never going to do that.