The Unknown Bridesmaid (21 page)

‘Sorry,’ Elsa whispered, but unfortunately, without realising she was doing it, she smiled.

‘You little bitch,’ Julia said.

‘Dad!’ Elsa shouted. ‘I said sorry to Julia and she called me a bitch.’

But her father didn’t storm up the stairs and make Julia apologise. He just called out to her that she should leave Julia alone and come downstairs, enough was enough.

Now that Julia wasn’t trusted to take Elsa to her swimming club any more she found herself alone in the house on Friday evenings. Iris took Elsa, with Fran in tow, and Carlo picked her up. It gave Julia the rare freedom of the house and she relished it, wandering in and out of the different rooms, thinking how she’d change them if they belonged to her. She stayed longest in Carlo and Iris’s bedroom, looking at the clutter on Iris’s dressing table and trying on some of her jewellery, most of it either gold or glittery and not to Julia’s taste at all. Looking at herself in the triple mirror, she saw how wrong the glitzy necklace looked. She didn’t have the right complexion or face. Her own silver chain suited her better. Silver, she decided, was nicer than gold.

She’d given up, a long time ago, searching for Reginald’s present, beginning to think that Iris had either lost it or discarded it. This didn’t seem very likely, but Julia had come to realise that Iris often banished troublesome things from
her life, if she could. Reginald’s present might have come under that heading, loaded with a pathos Iris could not tolerate. It depended, a little, on what this present had been, which was what Julia had most wanted to know.

When, one Friday evening, she discovered the small, wrapped box, the old excitement gripped her. It hadn’t been in the drawers of the dressing table at all. Julia found it only because she was poking about Iris’s wardrobe, an old-fashioned thing which had a series of shelves inside to the right of the rail from which the dresses hung. Julia had been fingering a clutch bag covered in sequins. When she opened it there was the tiny package, just as she remembered it. Her hands trembled as she undid the faded ribbon and unwrapped the flimsy paper.

Her disappointment was huge. She’d invested Reginald’s present with such significance, imagining it to be something glamorous, something unique, though she’d never been able to decide what that would be. And there it was, a silver bracelet, quite ordinary. It was hardly worth taking, but she took it, contemptuously. She didn’t care if Iris discovered it was missing. Back in her own room, she hid the bracelet in the toe of one of her winter boots. She’d think about what to do with it later. There was a half-formed plan in her mind, involving Elsa, but it needed thinking about carefully, to achieve maximum effect.

Julia walked with her friend over the Millennium Bridge towards St Paul’s, where she was going to catch a bus. By then, Julia had begun to feel less distanced from Caroline, with some of the old connection emerging after all. They walked slowly, pausing in the middle of the bridge to look down the river, ruffled today by a sharp wind from the east.

‘Do you see much of the Annovazzis?’ Caroline asked.
‘Elsa? Fran? You were so mean to Elsa, weren’t you? I could never understand it. She was such a pathetic girl, all eager to please you. Until the car accident, well, the
almost
accident. Do you remember?’

‘I don’t think I want to,’ Julia said.

She’d just passed her test, the day of her seventeenth birthday. Elsa was in the back of the car, Caroline in front, beside Julia. Caroline had passed her own test two months before, and was there to offer support, though Julia was not admitting to nerves. They’d driven sedately along the quiet road where the Annovazzis lived, and onto the busier main road.

‘Where shall we go?’ Julia asked. ‘Elsa? Where do you want to go?’

She hadn’t wanted Elsa to be in the car at all but it was a condition of being allowed to have Iris’s car, a treat for Elsa who had just recovered from flu.

‘The seaside!’ Elsa shouted. Any seaside was miles and miles away.

‘OK,’ Julia said.

Caroline laughed. ‘You must be joking,’ she said, but Julia turned onto the slip road for the motorway. ‘Steady on,’ Caroline said, ‘I don’t think you’re ready for the motorway yet.’

They were soon doing seventy miles an hour. Caroline pointed this out to Julia, urging her to slow down, but Elsa, wildly excited, yelled, ‘Faster, faster,’ laughing and bouncing up and down in her seat. ‘Seaside, here we come!’ Julia shouted. The accident, when it happened, wasn’t her fault. She had slowed down after they left the motorway and were on an A-road heading for Southport, and then she’d mistakenly taken a B-road and was lost, and regretting the whole trip. The accident was caused by a tractor driven by
a man who didn’t seem to have gauged the width of the equipment he was pulling behind the tractor. It had spokes sticking out of it, metal prongs, and as he passed Julia, who had sensibly pulled into the side, one of these prongs pierced the side-back window of the car and shattered the glass, showering Elsa with the fragments. Elsa wasn’t hurt, only shocked, but returning home with Elsa still whimpering and the window smashed was likely, Julia knew, to send Carlo mad with worry about what could have happened. It would be no good saying it hadn’t been her fault, and that the tractor driver had fully admitted it was his fault, and given her all his details for insurance purposes. Explanations, justifications, excuses – they’d all be no good. Elsa was bound to report that they’d been going really fast, even if they hadn’t been at the time of the accident, and of course she’d say they’d been on their way to the seaside, which would make Carlo erupt. Julia had been trusted with the precious car and the even more precious Elsa and had risked both with her dangerous and absurd attempted drive to the sea.

The penalties were severe. Grounded for a month, and never allowed to have Iris’s car on her own again. But the excitement, the thrill, stayed with Julia, compensating for the aftermath. Whenever she recalled the speed on the motorway, her heart raced, and she had to shut her eyes to relive the experience all over again. Even the car window exploding, and the sight in her mirror of Elsa shielding her head from the glass shards flying in her direction, excited at the same time as frightened her. It was Elsa who had nightmares, not Julia.

Caroline, to Julia’s irritation, was still reminiscing. ‘What about their parents, how are they? They were such nice people. And the grandmother, how about her? I forget her
name. She was quite a presence, wasn’t she?’ Julia said yes, Aunt Maureen had been a presence.

The last time Julia had visited her, Aunt Maureen was thought by Iris to be losing her memory. But Maureen told Julia that if she had Alzheimer’s (which she said she did not) nothing really could be done about it. ‘Look at your grandfather,’ she said to Julia, ‘now
he
had Alzheimer’s, though it wasn’t called that then. Remember him?’

Julia said how could she remember him when he had died before she was born. Both her grandfathers had, and one of her grandmothers. The only grandparent she had a vague recollection of was her father’s mother. She lived in a farmhouse near Alston, in the Pennines, and she had hens, which Julia remembered more clearly than her grandmother.

‘Tell me about him,’ she said to Maureen, a request which led to the pulling out of photograph albums and a happy hour (from Aunt Maureen’s point of view) of looking at people now dead and giving summaries of their faults.

‘The male line in my family has died out,’ Aunt Maureen declared, as she neared the end of the last volume. ‘I had a daughter and your mother had a daughter, and that’s it.’

‘But,’ said Julia, ‘even if Iris and I had brothers the male line wouldn’t have carried on. It was your father, the grandfather with Alzheimer’s, who ended the male line by not having sons.’

‘Oh, it’s the same thing,’ Aunt Maureen said crossly.

One of the photographs of her mother, unusually smart and dressed up, reminded Julia, that day, of her mother’s visit to the solicitor all those years ago. It wasn’t that Julia had forgotten about it but that anything to do with her mother, any memory, was hard for her to deal with. She had trained herself for a very long time not to conjure up images of her mother. They only distressed her. More than that, they frightened her because instead of seeming
comfortably solid and reassuring, proof that her mother had existed and loved her, they were insubstantial, lacking all authenticity. And the memory of the day her mother dressed up to go and see a solicitor was particularly troubling. Julia could
see
her, as she could so often ‘see’ some episode in her past, but she couldn’t put herself in the frame even though she knew she had been in it. She remembered, though, her mother being unlike herself, being nervous and agitated and Aunt Maureen attempting to give her confidence, an unusual state of affairs. When her mother returned, she was abstracted. She couldn’t, Julia suddenly recalled, eat the cakes.

She said this out loud. ‘Mum couldn’t eat the cakes,’ she said. The final album was still open at a photograph of her mother taken at Iris’s wedding to Reginald.

‘What are you talking about?’ Aunt Maureen asked. ‘Cakes? What cakes?’

‘The ones you and I made that day, the day Mum had to go and see a solicitor.’

‘This is a photograph of your mum at Iris’s wedding – there’s no cake in it.’

‘I know that,’ Julia said, ‘I’m not talking about the photograph itself. It’s just that I suddenly remembered about the promise you made, ages ago, to tell me about the visit to the lawyer, when Mum was all dressed up like she was in this photo.’

‘It was a wedding,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘of course she was dressed up.’

Julia knew what she was going to say next, and she did.

‘I can’t remember anything anyway,’ Aunt Maureen said, giving a melodramatic sigh, and passing a hand over her eyes, ‘my memory has gone entirely, so it’s no use bothering me.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Julia said, ‘I’ll have to find out some other way.’

‘Find out what?’ Aunt Maureen said. ‘There’s nothing to find out. You’re always suspecting things, Julia.’

‘Yes, I am,’ Julia said, ‘and I’m usually right. Mum went to see a solicitor that time because something was wrong. It was to do with money, and another woman, wasn’t it?’ She’d made the last bit up, a wild guess which, if it were wrong, would be laughed at by Aunt Maureen.

‘Who told you?’ Aunt Maureen said, suddenly no longer concentrating on being vague.

‘I can’t remember,’ Julia said, playing her aunt’s own game.

‘You can’t trust anyone any more,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘dragging things up, years later, smearing the dead. Your mother was innocent as a lamb.’

This made Julia smile it was such an unlikely analogy. There’d been nothing lamb-like about her mother. But her smile annoyed Aunt Maureen, and annoyance made her talk. It was a simple enough tale, one Julia had come across often enough in her work. Her father had committed bigamy when he married her mother, nothing more heinous than that. He’d secretly married a girl Aunt Maureen quaintly described as ‘a buxom wench’ when he was eighteen, and then he’d left her and moved away to Manchester where he met Julia’s mother and ‘married’ her. Only after his death did Julia’s mother find out about his first marriage.

There had been a report in the newspapers about the accident that killed Julia’s father, with a photograph of him taken with his wife and child. The first wife, the real wife, saw it, and was shocked. As far as she was concerned, her husband had simply vanished years ago. She didn’t know what had happened to him, and thought he might be dead. But she rang up the newspaper, who sent a reporter to see her, and she told this man her story, producing her marriage certificate. It was, said Aunt Maureen, shown to Julia’s mother, who was incredulous, but obliged to believe the evidence before her. There was then a battle over the insurance money. The
first wife claimed it, and started legal proceedings to get it. She claimed the house Julia and her mother were living in, too. The whole business dragged on and on for years, and the day Julia remembered was the day her mother went to hear the final outcome from the solicitor.

There was another embrace from Caroline before they parted. This time Julia felt more comfortable about it. She thought she might even go to her old friend’s wedding, though weddings in her life had never been entirely happy experiences. Standing, waiting for the number 4 bus, she looked up at St Paul’s and tried to remember the churches where she had attended weddings. Not many. But she could recall the church where Iris had married Reginald. She could see that church clearly in her mind’s eye, as she could see everything about that day. When she got on the bus, her head was full of it.

Elsa suddenly shot up in height when she was nearly nine, a growth spurt viewed with alarm by her father. ‘She’s going to be a giantess,’ he exclaimed, and made poor jokes about limiting her food so that she wouldn’t grow any taller. Her hair changed too. She could no longer be described as his golden girl because the gold had dulled to a light, undistinguished brown. The final disaster was that Elsa needed spectacles. Carlo didn’t care for girls in glasses.

Julia observed all these changes in Elsa, and how they affected Carlo, but felt no sympathy for the girl who had to cope with them. Instead, she felt smug. She herself was not tall, and her hair was a rich dark brown, and she didn’t need specs. She was aware that she now compared favourably with Elsa, though she realised that the age gap between them made any comparison false. All the same, she, in that
last year she lived with the Annovazzis, constantly drew attention to what were regarded as Elsa’s new defects, addressing her as beanpole, and wondering aloud if she needed a white stick. This sniping was cruel, and she knew it was cruel, but she couldn’t restrain herself. There had always been in her this meanness which every now and again got out of control.

She did nothing about the silver bracelet she’d stolen from Iris’s drawer. She’d thought of planting it somehow on Elsa, but realised this would never work. Elsa, discovering it, would simply be puzzled, and take it to her mother saying, look what I found in my sock drawer, where did it come from? Iris would know she was innocent of having taken it. It was no good either waiting for Iris to miss Reginald’s present and start searching for it because she hadn’t realised it had gone, and might never do so. Stealing it had been stupid, but Julia didn’t replace it, hoping she would suddenly see a way of putting it to use.