The Unknown Bridesmaid (28 page)

Then, four years later, by which time Julia was no longer teaching, Iris wrote asking if Elsa could come and stay for one night the following week. She could sleep on a sofa, or
even on the floor, and would be no trouble. She was coming for an interview at Goldsmiths Training College, though Iris would much prefer her to have applied to a college in Manchester and didn’t know why it had to be London. Julia wrote back swiftly saying she was very sorry but she wouldn’t be at home that day and neither would her flatmates, so it wouldn’t be possible to have Elsa to stay. She wished her good luck with the interview. There was, to her relief, no response, though she was pretty sure Iris, and certainly Elsa, would have seen through her excuse.

But Elsa turned up, not on the night her mother had asked if she could stay but the night before. Julia didn’t recognise her, which was hardly surprising given the fact that Elsa had been only ten when she last saw her and was now seventeen. The spectacles had gone, and so had the gawkiness. Her height was now in proportion, and she was trendily dressed. Completely self-assured, she said, ‘Hi, Julia,’ and when Julia didn’t react, ‘I’m Elsa.’ She stepped inside, taking off her rucksack and putting it on the ground. ‘Nice to see you too,’ she said, smiling, perfectly at ease, as Julia still just stood there. ‘Took ages to find this street,’ Elsa said. ‘I got lost twice, there are so many Victoria Streets.’

No one else was home that night, so there were plenty of beds. Julia found clean sheets and made a business of putting them on, and then she offered Elsa some bread and cheese, which was all she had. Elsa sprawled on the sofa and munched away and Julia felt more and more that she was the interloper. ‘Mum misses you,’ Elsa said, ‘she’s always going on about you.’ Then, with a pause, ‘Drives us all mad. She’s never taken the hint, has she?’ Julia didn’t ask what hint. She was concentrating on being civil but distinctly frosty. If there were any hints to be taken Elsa was staring them in the face. Elsa, she reasoned, must have come with a purpose, even if it were one as obvious as merely to annoy her and catch her out, force her into giving the hospitality she’d been
determined not to offer. ‘Mum’s quite hurt that you don’t come to see us or keep in touch. Dad tells her not to be so touchy. He says they did their best for you and it’s not their fault if you reject them.’

When Julia didn’t respond to this either, Elsa put her head on one side and studied Julia. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘I don’t really remember your mum, but somehow I think you look like her now. Do you? Do you think you look like her?’

‘Why have you come here, Elsa?’ Julia said. ‘Not just to wonder if I look like my mother, I’m sure.’

‘No,’ Elsa said, ‘that’s true. I needed a bed for the night, but I could have afforded a hotel, couldn’t I? Instead of trailing all this way here. So why did I bother eh? Well, curiosity, of course. To see what you looked like now. I haven’t got very good memories of you when you lived with us, but then I don’t suppose you’ve got good memories of me.’

‘No,’ said Julia, ‘I haven’t.’

‘But you’ll have them of my mum, I’m sure? She was always kind, wasn’t she?’

Julia nodded.

‘And my dad? Wasn’t he kind too?’

Again, Julia nodded. She was about to say something, about to ask Elsa to stop fooling about, and to say whatever she was bursting to say, but Elsa carried on.

‘You caused my dad a lot of trouble,’ she said, ‘I wonder if you remember that? I’ve always wondered why you were so horrible to him. It didn’t seem to make sense. Was it because you were jealous of me? Jealous, because you didn’t have a father? Was that it?’

‘I think we should both go to bed,’ Julia said, and got up and left the room. It was the point at which she wilfully rejected the opportunity she’d been given, and it never came again. In the morning, when she came down, Elsa had gone, leaving her worried and uneasy.

THERE WAS A
funeral, of course, but Julia didn’t go to this one. She didn’t send a wreath, or flowers, either. But a week later she wrote to Iris, a careful letter, saying that she had been sorry to hear about Carlo’s death but that she had thought she would not be welcome at the funeral. She was grateful, she wrote, for everything Iris and Carlo had done for her, and she was sorry if she had not always been as appreciative as she should have been. She made no reference to having been asked to apologise to Carlo for something Elsa had apparently accused her of. A generalised apology was, she reckoned, enough.

She didn’t expect to hear from Iris ever again.

The feeling of guilt was stronger than it had ever been. She was never going to see Iris again, but Julia thought about her cousin constantly, going over and over their history, starting with being her bridesmaid and ending with the scene in her house the night Carlo died. She’d carried this guilt, for all the wrong things she’d done, for years but it had never been so intense, never eaten away at her as it was doing now. Again and again she told herself that nothing could be done about it that had not already been done. Guilt had to be admitted and accepted and then absorbed. Who, after all, was not guilty of something less than admirable in their life?

But in her own case, the list was long. Guilt had shaped her life. It had made her, she was sure, a closed-up creature, always wary, suspicious that she might be found out long after there was anything to find out. She had never allowed anyone to get too close in case she let slip any of her grubby little secrets. She’d been a child when she failed to confess that she’d tipped the baby’s pram, and her silence could be explained by fear of the consequences, if she told the truth, not only for herself but for her mother. But later? What was the excuse then? She told herself, comfortingly, that she couldn’t really remember exactly what had happened. Maybe the baby’s head hadn’t been knocked at all. Maybe she hadn’t really stolen money, nor done any of the other things she was ashamed of. Who could be sure of anything in their childhood?

On many different occasions, she’d thought of walking into a police station and saying that when she was eight she might have caused the death of a baby. What would the police do? Pull out a file on the case? But it would have in it, if it existed at all, the coroner’s verdict which (though she didn’t know exactly what this was) absolved anyone from blame. She would be an embarrassment, and, as ever, the refrain ‘what good would it do?’ ran in her head. It would only distress Iris, and it was Julia’s conviction that Iris’s life had not been blighted irrevocably by her son’s death. She never mentioned it, and when her mother had sometimes done so Iris had said firmly that it was in the past and she didn’t want it mentioned. Once, when Elsa had seen a photograph of her mother with a baby, at her grandmother’s house, she had asked Iris if it was herself. ‘No,’ Iris had said, in Julia’s hearing, ‘it was another baby, before you were born.’ She had shown no emotion, was brisk and matter-of-fact (it was nine years afterwards) though Julia, listening, had felt afraid.

Guilt, she’d discovered as she grew up, could be lived with. She even, at one stage, convinced herself that she’d been brave, bearing the guilt, keeping it to herself, though
she’d disabused herself of this notion later. The guilt about the other lesser acts of dishonesty was easier to deal with. They were familiar in her work where she repeatedly saw the lying and cheating and general nastiness exhibited by some children. Her own behaviour in the past fitted a pattern. Where she was lucky was in not having her various deceits exposed. She’d been given the chance to leave them behind, label them to herself as a phase in her development, whereas other children were not so fortunate. And she, unlike so many of them, had been treated kindly. The guilt about how she’d reacted to this kindness was the hardest and most complicated guilt to absorb.

Everything, in every person’s life, led back to childhood, a truism which she’d found could not be stressed enough. Childhoods did not explain or justify all subsequent behaviour, of course not, but they were the obvious starting point for any understanding. She’d thought long and hard about her own childhood experiences, searching for key moments and influences, and discovered how difficult it was to be sure of them. Again and again she came back to the secrecy surrounding her father, how she’d known so little, and how her mother had been determined that she should know nothing. The lesson she reckoned she’d picked up was that hiding information was not just permissible but
a good thing
. It had to be done.
Not
concealing things was weak, if the revelation might damage you. There was, in fact, no need to call the habit one of concealment. It could be called a policy of self-protection.

It was a filthy, wet morning, the sky a sullen grey, the pavements dark with rain. Getting up had been hard, the house so cold that Julia shivered making herself coffee. The central heating system had failed the day before and there’d been no chance to call someone to come and put it right.

The bus that took her to the magistrates’ court was packed
to more than capacity but the driver had let extra passengers on, out of pity for their drowned state, at the last bus stop. A double buggy jammed the exit doors, the young woman holding the handle looked defiantly at a man sighing pointedly as he tried to make a space for himself to the right of it. Another buggy blocked the aisle, the area allowed for buggies already full. Julia closed her eyes. She thought of all the bus rides to school in Manchester on mornings like this, and how she’d endured them by fantasising about her life after school, a life which would be full of sun and warmth and light and fun. Once she’d wished that there existed a means of looking into the future, so that she could see herself in that happy place, but now she was grateful it did not exist. She wouldn’t have wanted to see herself on this bus, clad in a black raincoat not dissimilar to her old school raincoat, and black boots, on her way to a magistrates’ court, there to be depressed even more by what would pass before her.

She arrived late. This was good. It cut out the biscuits and chat. The other two magistrates were waiting for her in the corridor, relieved that the session didn’t have to be cancelled because she hadn’t turned up. She had time only to hang up her dripping wet coat and then they were straight into court and onto the first case. In contrast to herself, Julia felt the woman glowed with energy and optimism. She was dressed in an alarming collection of colourful garments, a dizzying array from her hat down to her socks and multicoloured shoes. It hurt the eyes to look at her. At first, it all looked a mess, a jumble, some sort of sartorial disaster, but gradually Julia realised there was a degree of coordination. The colours were in the same spectrum, violent pink deepening to dark purple, a magenta merging into lilac. It must have taken hours to put together. The charge was a serious one. This flamboyantly but well-dressed woman, aged forty, hitherto a respectable shop assistant in a department store, had stolen a baby. She had taken the fifteen-month-old girl, asleep in her
buggy, and wheeled her out of the supermarket while the mother was struggling to control her other child, a three-year-old boy, who was pulling boxes of cereal from the shelves. The buggy had been at the end of the aisle, the brake on, a wire basket, half full, laid down beside it, while the mother ran down to stop the boy and followed him when he raced round the corner to the next aisle. It had taken perhaps three minutes for the boy to be hauled back to where the buggy and the mother’s wire basket had been parked, but in that time the accused was out of the car park and halfway down the street outside and lost in a crowd.

The shop had been crowded. No one had seen the accused take the baby out, though plenty had seen the mother battling with the destructive three-year-old. CCTV cameras showed the accused walking at a leisurely pace out of the shop and across the car park into the street beyond. After that, there was no trace of her, but the last image showed her about to turn left. Left led to the high street. It took five minutes for the alarm to be raised in the supermarket and another five for the supermarket to be thoroughly searched. The police were then called, and they arrived eight minutes later. Descriptions of the child were taken from the mother, who was incoherent with distress. First she said the little girl had been wearing a blue jacket and then that the jacket was red. She couldn’t remember what make the buggy was, but thought it was a Maclaren or maybe a Mothercare. The only distinguishing feature she came up with was that the child was wearing a white hat with ear flaps, bought the day before, brand new, made of faux fur.

A police car toured the high street looking for the child but, though there were plenty of children in buggies being trundled about by mothers, and several were stopped, none contained the missing child. An appeal went out on local radio, emphasis laid on the white hat, and it was this which brought the response leading to the discovery of the child in
the accused woman’s flat. The accused, known to have no children, had been noticed wheeling a buggy into the lift of her block. The police had retrieved the child and arrested the accused. Only two hours ten minutes had passed. The child was still asleep and oblivious to what had happened.

There were medical reports to consider. The accused had a history of miscarriages and of one cot death the year before. This had led to separation from her partner and a three-month period of sick leave. There were no previous charges against the accused, who professed herself deeply sorry and claimed not to know what had come over her. She couldn’t remember taking the child. She couldn’t remember being in the supermarket. All she could remember was finding herself at home, and the buggy with the sleeping child in it, parked in her living room. She claimed that she had been about to ring the police when they arrived.

The chairman was gentle with her, as Julia had known he would be. She’d sat on the bench with him several times and admired his handling of some tricky cases. In a case like this, what was at issue was whether the accused had, or had not, known what she was doing. Had she experienced a mental blackout, explained by the extreme recent stress she’d been under? Or was this merely a pretence and in reality she deliberately stole the child? Looking at the accused, Julia could not make her own mind up, and listened intently both to the chairman’s questions and the accused’s replies. The woman seemed so extremely calm and collected. Her manner was polite, her answers short, clear, direct. There was no sign of any trauma, but then of course the incident was over days ago. But there was something about her apology for what she had done that struck Julia as false. She did not seem truly contrite, prefacing her ‘very sorry’ with ‘of course’, in a matter-of-fact way, almost briskly.