The Unknown Bridesmaid (6 page)

Julia held the baby out to Iris.

This time, waiting in the clinic, there was a young girl next to her, with a woman, who was probably her mother, beside her. The corridor was not so crowded today. There were four spare chairs, further along, and the main area of the waiting room, where patients checked in, was unusually quiet. The girl and the woman didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t have a book or a magazine to look at. It suddenly occurred to Julia that perhaps it was the woman who was here for treatment and not the girl, which she’d for some reason assumed was the case. If it had been the girl, Julia reasoned, surely the woman, the mother, would have been showing some sign of concern, however slight. Then she reprimanded herself. She was deducing things on no evidence whatsoever, in spite of her training. It was perfectly feasible that a girl and her mother would sit in silence, without distraction whoever was the patient.

But Julia did so want to know which one was.

Julia looked at the name: Hera. Names these days were not conventional, and by contemporary standards Hera was not remarkable. The surname was one of those complicated double-barrelled ones which usually turned out to be a clumsy amalgamation of the mother’s and the father’s
surnames. Hera Carpenter-Morrissey. Julia imagined being, say, five, and having to learn to write this as your name. Would the child do it every time, or drop the Carpenter bit sometimes and just write Hera C. Morrissey?

‘Hera!’ Julia said, pulling herself together. Hera, the Greek goddess of stately bearing and regal beauty, but this was not a beautiful child who bore herself regally. She could be an ugly duckling, of course, who would yet turn out to be a beauty, but Julia thought it unlikely. Hera’s features were all large and prominent – nose, ears, mouth, teeth. She was nine, but looked much older. Tall for her age, she seemed to try to hide her height by hunching her shoulders. It made Julia uncomfortable just to look at Hera whose proportions were all at odds with each other, fighting for prominence. She was wearing jeans which were too short and her knobbly ankles, sockless, stuck out, their flesh glaringly pale. She was such an unhealthy-looking girl, dull, without any vitality.

‘Hera,’ Julia repeated, clearing her throat, ‘I suppose everyone asks you about your name, how you came to be called Hera?’

‘Yes,’ said Hera, ‘they do.’

No explanation. If the child didn’t want to give one, Julia wasn’t going to press her.

‘You’ve got three brothers, Hera, is that correct?’

Hera nodded. Then she pointed at the file on Julia’s desk. ‘It will all be in there,’ she said. Her tone was not aggressive or rude, just weary.

‘Well,’ Julia said, ‘I like to check everything myself. Mistakes can happen, as you know.’

Hera frowned and said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ She imitated Julia’s stressing of ‘as you know’ at the end. ‘What am I supposed to know about mistakes?

Julia didn’t pause. ‘That you know what it’s like to make them,’ she said.

‘I didn’t make a mistake,’ Hera said, emphasising ‘mistake’. ‘
I meant it. I meant to do it. I’ve never pretended it was a mistake. It was my mother who said it was even though I told her it wasn’t. It’s stupid.’

‘What’s stupid?’ Julia asked quickly. ‘Your mother insisting that what you did was a mistake, or her failure to believe you meant it?’

‘Both,’ said Hera.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each studying the other. Hera didn’t blink. Julia did, several times, which Hera seemed to notice and be pleased by. It was lucky, Julia thought, that they were not engaged in an arm-locking exercise or at this point Hera would have won, my arm would be flat on the table, powerless.

‘You hurt your brother,’ Julia said, in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘quite considerably, as it turned out.’

Hera smiled.

‘You find that amusing?’ Julia asked, keeping any disapproval out of her voice, trying merely to state it as a fact.

‘No,’ Hera said.

‘Then why did you smile?’

‘At you,’ Hera said, ‘you think you’re so clever.’

Now there was a change in attitude. This was deliberate insolence, much easier to respond to.

‘You hurt your brother,’ Julia repeated, ‘you broke his wrist.’

‘He broke his own wrist,’ Hera said. ‘I pushed him to the ground, and he put his arm out and his wrist broke.’

Julia paused. ‘He didn’t choose to fall,’ she said, ‘you pushed him, so you caused the fall that broke his wrist.’

‘But all I did was push him,’ Hera said.

‘Hard,’ Julia said, ‘very hard, and you’re much bigger than him. You pushed with both hands. You pushed so hard he crashed into a chair.’

Hera nodded. ‘I did,’ she said, ‘and I meant it. But I didn’t break his wrist.’

Time for a pause. Julia got up and went to her desk and
made a business of consulting the file there, though she perfectly remembered its contents.

‘This is a waste of time,’ Hera said, and she too stood up. ‘Can I go? I mean, I’m going.’

‘Fine,’ Julia said, ‘so long as you realise the consequences.’

She was relieved to see that Hera suddenly looked uncertain.

‘What consequences?’ she asked. ‘Are you threatening me?’

Such apparent confidence in a young girl, a mere child, but Julia suspected it was not confidence.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not. Sit down again, Hera.’ And she sat down again herself. ‘Right,’ Julia said, ‘let’s be clear about a few things. This wasn’t a squabble between you and your brother. It was part of repeated acts of violence towards him and your other brothers, so something has to be done about your behaviour before you injure someone seriously. You can’t go around thumping other children the way you have been doing. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’ve been referred to me. Understand?’

This came out rather more sternly than Julia had intended, but it seemed to have some effect. Hera sat down and folded her arms in what Julia deduced was a defensive gesture. She couldn’t be certain, but she thought she also detected a faint watering of Hera’s prominent eyes. No tears came, but Hera held her head up and stared at the ceiling for a while before looking at Julia.

‘Your mother—’ Julia began, but Hera interrupted her.

‘My mum has nothing to do with it,’ she said.

‘I was going to say,’ Julia continued, ‘that your mother seems very troubled by what happened, very unhappy about it.’

‘I can’t help that,’ Hera said, ‘it’s how she is.’

‘What, troubled, unhappy?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No, but it’s what you meant, I think. Your mother cried
when she found your brother on the floor, screaming, and you standing over him. She says she cried when she took him to A & E and was told his wrist was broken and would need to be set in plaster. A lot of crying. Were you upset to see your mother crying?’

‘It was stupid,’ Hera said.

Hera’s mother had cried in front of Julia. Copiously. Hera, she said, was beyond control. Her rages were frightening and unpredictable. Everyone was frightened of her, even the brother who was a year older (but half a head smaller). Once, Hera had almost strangled this brother. She said she had only been experimenting, to see how easy it would be should she wish to strangle someone. The marks were on his neck for weeks. There was never an apology afterwards. Hera’s mother wept as she described her daughter’s callous behaviour, saying she had no idea what gave rise to it, why Hera was like this. They were a happy family; there had been no disasters to explain why Hera was as she was, no divorce or death, nothing. She repeated that they were a happy family. Except for Hera.

Julia and her mother stayed at Aunt Maureen’s for a week. They had never stayed so long before, except for when Reginald was killed, even though they had often been invited to, because the sisters invariably fell out within twenty-four hours and Julia’s mother would announce an abrupt departure back to Penrith. But not this time. Maureen was happy, Iris was happy, and Uncle Tom was happy (not that his happiness had ever had any bearing on anything). The baby was the centre of everyone’s attention, his every cry or whimper responded to. Julia’s mother was good with him. She walked about the house carrying him and crooning to him in a manner which puzzled Julia. She had never seen her mother so gentle
and loving, her usually cross expression quite gone, with only the hard mark between her eyes, the vertical slash on her forehead, to show how ferocious her frown had been for too many years. Julia couldn’t understand it.

She couldn’t understand the attraction of little Reggie either, and had become tired of pretending she was thrilled to be allowed, occasionally, to hold him. She preferred it when the baby was in his pram, which was an old-fashioned one, a Silver Cross pram with big wheels and a big hood and a rain cover which stretched tightly across it. The placing of the precious baby in this vehicle was a solemn ceremony involving a great deal of adjusting of the interior mattress and covers. Maureen put a pillow there, but Iris took it out, saying pillows were dangerous for small babies. Her mother and Julia’s mother raised their eyebrows at each other but neither dared to challenge Iris. On their last day, Julia and her mother were allowed to take little Reggie for a short walk while Iris had a dental appointment and Maureen was getting her hair done. It was clear to Julia that this was an honour, and that her mother appreciated that it was.

They set off slowly, Julia opening the gate so that the Silver Cross pram could glide through without marking its shiny navy-blue sides. The navy blue seemed a contradiction to Julia: if this was a
silver
cross pram, why was it navy blue? Where was the silver? She brought this up with Iris, and was laughed at and told she took things too literally. Once through the gate, her mother turned the pram round and they headed to the park, Julia also holding on to the handle. Two lots of hands gripping the thick handle. Her mother wouldn’t let Julia push it on her own until two kerbs had been negotiated and the park entered. Then, on the flat path leading to the duck pond, Julia was given permission to push the pram on her own. It was easy. It hardly took any strength to make the pram move. Julia pushed harder and for a second, only a second, took her hands off the handle to see if the pram would continue to
move on its own. Her mother was shocked, and immediately slapped her own hands back on the handle. ‘Never,’ she said, ‘
never
take your hands off the handle. Anything could happen. Really, Julia, you are the limit, the
idea
!’

Julia wasn’t given the chance again to push the pram on her own so she gave up and put her hands in her pockets instead. When they got to the duck pond, her mother put the brake on the pram wheels and she and Julia sat on a bench, with the pram’s hood up to shield the baby from the sun. They had no bread, so couldn’t feed the ducks, which might have relieved the boredom for Julia. Sitting on the bench, swinging her legs, Julia narrowed her eyes and looked at the pram and thought of releasing the brake and giving it a push to see how far it could travel by itself along the cement path. Quite a long way, she reckoned, because there was a slight slope downwards and the pram would gather speed.

The next time they went to see little Reggie he was eight weeks old. He could smile, what everyone said was a real smile and not just wind. Again, Julia was allowed to hold him, under heavy supervision, though she hadn’t asked to. She found his face ugly, but of course didn’t say so. The tiny bit of hair he’d had had gone and his baldness showed lumps, bulges, all over his head. His eyes hadn’t grown any bigger and were now almost lost in rolls of fat. Julia was glad to have him taken from her unwilling arms, and placed in the Silver Cross pram.

There was another outing, to the park, to the duck pond and back. This was as boring an outing as ever, but at least Julia was allowed, once she and her mother were in the park, to push the pram on her own. Her mother of course walked beside her, repeating ‘Slowly, slowly, Julia’, but only Julia’s hands were on the handle. It did make her feel quite important to be in charge of the Silver Cross pram and its precious cargo. Again, she had this urge to push the pram away from her to see how far it would go. It gave her an excited feeling
in her stomach which was not altogether pleasant. Any moment she felt she might give in to the urge, and she would do it so suddenly, and with such strength, that her mother wouldn’t be able to stop her.

‘You did that very nicely, Julia,’ her mother said, when the walk was over and they were turning into Maureen’s drive. It was so rarely that her mother praised her in any way, for anything at all, that Julia blushed with pleasure. Her mother told Maureen and Iris that Julia had pushed the pram
beautifully
in the park, though Maureen did slightly spoil the compliment by remarking that it was an easy pram to push, the Rolls-Royce of prams, not like modern-day prams with wheels so small they took a lot of turning. But still. As a reward, Julia was invited to help bathe little Reggie that evening. In the bathroom there was a stand with a plastic bath held within it. Iris ran the water until she announced it was at the correct temperature and then she used a jug to half fill the plastic baby bath. Julia sat with a white towel spread across her knees, as instructed, and watched Iris undress the baby. She was quite shocked at what she saw. Her eyes were riveted on little Reggie’s genitals as she tried to make sense of them. Never, in any book with pictures of babies in it, had she seen a naked baby, and never in real life had she seen a boy unclothed. Suddenly, little Reggie became a fascinating object and she watched with a new interest as he was carefully lowered into the bath, with Iris’s arm still round him. He yelped at first, but then as his adoring mother gently splashed the warm water over him he seemed to become calm and enjoy the sensation. When Iris had finished, she put the baby onto the waiting towel and Julia wrapped it round him and patted him dry, as directed by Iris. She didn’t pat his genitals, but concentrated on his feet. Then Iris took him and put a nappy on him and a vest, and a blue Babygro. All babies were dressed in Babygros now. Neither Iris’s mother nor Julia’s mother approved of them, partly
because each of them had made nightgowns for the baby, but Iris thought they were brilliant.