The Unknown Bridesmaid (8 page)

They hadn’t been angry but they were bewildered. On one occasion, the parents thought Camilla safely at school, to which they’d delivered her themselves. She had slipped out
at break time without anyone spotting her, though quite how she’d managed to do this when the playground gate was locked from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. nobody had established satisfactorily. The teachers didn’t yet know Camilla and none of them appeared to have noticed her disappearance until at least an hour later when for some reason there had been a name- or head-check, and one girl was missing.

Julia had listened patiently while all this was described by the parents, who blamed the teachers for being ‘slack’. They ought, in the father’s opinion, to have been keeping a watch on a new pupil. He didn’t know how this school had been rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, if a nine-year-old girl could just leave it without anyone noticing for more than an hour.

‘And the second time Camilla wandered off?’ Julia asked, knowing this time the school could not be blamed. Camilla had been at home. It was an hour before her parents realised she was not watching the DVD they’d left her (they thought) engrossed in.

‘We were decorating,’ the mother said, ‘we were painting the bedroom.’

Julia nodded. She looked at Camilla, who returned her gaze with a slight smile.

‘Why does she do this?’ her father asked. ‘Why doesn’t she tell us why she does it? I mean, think what could have happened? It’s dangerous, we’ve told her that, we’ve tried to tell her without, you know, scaring her. We can’t trust her any more, she won’t promise never to go off again just when she feels like it.’

There was a lot more in this vein. Julia listened, and watched Camilla, who appeared entirely unworried.

Visits to see little Reggie became regular. Julia and her mother now lived only ten minutes’ walk away from where Iris still
lived with her parents. Often, Julia and her mother babysat while Maureen and Iris went out. It was, Julia discovered, a deeply boring pastime. Hours, she seemed to spend, standing dutifully in the garden watching over a sleeping little Reggie. There was a canopy over his Silver Cross pram but this might not protect him from the attentions of stray cats even if it guarded him adequately from the sun. It was Julia’s job to chase away any interested cats, and look out for wasps and bees. A bee sting, she was told, could be ‘fatal’ for such a young baby. If a bee started to hover round the pram, she was to move its position at once. It occurred to Julia that, since bees flew, they could fly after the pram and it would be no good moving it, but she didn’t mention this obvious fact. To do so would have meant being called ‘argumentative’ by her mother.

Little Reggie was still very little. Julia listened to the conversations about his weight. They were interminable. Iris fretted about her baby’s lack of substantial weight gain whereas Maureen saw nothing worrying about little Reggie only having put on a couple of ounces since regaining his birth weight. Julia’s mother, however, supported Iris. Little Reggie was taken weekly to the baby clinic where all three women watched the scales intently while he was weighed. The nurse who did the weighing was reassuring, saying little Reggie was perfectly healthy, but Iris was sometimes tearful on the way home. Maureen and Julia’s mother nudged each other when this happened, and cleared their throats, and began talking over-brightly to each other, until Iris recovered.

It was the last week of the school holidays. The weather went on being hot and sunny, but Julia didn’t enjoy it much. She wished she could be at the seaside, any seaside, or at least near a lake or river. Their new home had a small garden but this consisted merely of a parched plot of grass and a ragged border full of weeds and not much else. Julia’s mother clicked her tongue at the sight of these weeds but said she had no time to do anything about them and certainly couldn’t afford
a gardener. Julia wished they had a garden like Maureen’s but as they didn’t she stayed mostly inside, out of the sun. Go out and play, her mother urged, but there was no one to play with and outside it was too hot. Go and explore, her mother suggested, get to know the way to your new school. But Julia knew the way. There was no need to explore. The use of that word irritated her. ‘Explore’ sounded exciting, and walking the roads round where they now lived was not in the least exciting. She would have liked to explore the canal at the back of the houses, but the gate onto the towpath was locked.

She was worried about starting her new school. On the one hand, she wanted the holidays to be over because she was so bored, but on the other she was nervous because she would know no one. She would be the new girl, and she had seen what it could be like to be a new girl. She’d be an object of great curiosity at first and then this interest would fade away and she’d be left struggling to break into groups and partnerships formed by the others long ago. She was resolved not to care about this isolation, but she was not looking forward to experiencing it. She didn’t bother voicing her anxieties to her mother, knowing she would only get a bracing lecture on facing up to things. What her mother didn’t appreciate was that in her imagination Julia had done just that and hadn’t liked it. She had envisaged the faces peering at her, seen the crowd surrounding her in the playground on her first day, and her heart had started to beat loudly. She felt taut with apprehension. She could feel herself inside the heads of the other girls. Knew what they would be thinking about her and what they would say. She practised over and over again how to react.

The day before term started Julia and her mother spent the afternoon at Maureen’s. They had lunch there after Julia had watched Iris bathe little Reggie. Iris was very tired because little Reggie had woken up every hour all night. He seemed to be hungry but had only half emptied the bottle he was given. Theories as to the cause of the baby’s reluctance to
accept all the milk were debated by Iris, Maureen and Julia’s mother. Julia’s mind wandered. She heard the voices of the three talkers but she didn’t take in the words. Asking if she could be excused (her mother had brought her up always to ask if she could be excused from the table), she stood up and took her empty plate to the sink and rinsed it clean, and then she wandered into the garden, kicking the gravel on the path, but carefully, quietly, so that nobody would hear her.

Little Reggie was in his pram, finally asleep. Iris had said he would probably sleep for hours now, and his regular feeding pattern would be disrupted, but she didn’t care, she wasn’t going to waken him, he needed the rest and so did she. Julia peered into the pram, which as usual during this hot weather was under the pear tree, nicely shaded. She could only see the baby’s head, a still bald head, unless the new darker fuzz on it was counted as hair. He was lying on his back, his eyes, of course, shut but his eyelids occasionally seeming to flicker. Julia thought he must be dreaming, and wondered what a baby would dream about. She thought she’d gently rock the pram, as she had been taught, though there was no need to because little Reggie was asleep and perfectly quiet. The pram wouldn’t rock with the brake on so she released the brake. It now rocked satisfactorily. Julia looked back at the house. Her mother and aunt and cousin weren’t in the dining room any longer. They had either all gone to wash up or they’d retreated to the cooler sitting room at the back of the house. They weren’t watching Julia or the pram anyway.

Slowly, experimentally, Julia began to push the pram towards the gate. It was a broad wooden gate, painted green. When she reached it, she put the brake back on while she opened the gate. She would take little Reggie for a short walk, just up the road and back. It would only take ten minutes. She liked the idea of being in charge of the pram, of being capable enough to manage to push it without her mother’s supervision. She could be back in the garden before
her mother or aunt or cousin came to check on the baby. Walking very erect, head held high, she negotiated the way through the open gateway skilfully, turning the pram neatly to face down the road. She didn’t close the gate. No need to, when she was going to be back in a few minutes.

She was at the end of the first stretch of the road in what seemed like seconds. Once there, she hesitated. There was a kerb, and then another kerb, with a minor road leading to the canal joining the main road. Could she safely manage the kerbs? Yes, of course she could, and she did. On she went until she came to the very end of the road, where she was resolved to turn and go back. Faint pricklings of guilt and anxiety were beginning to trouble her. Any moment she expected to hear her mother or aunt or cousin, or all three of them, shouting down the road at her, wanting to know what on earth she thought she was doing, pushing the big pram on her own, yelling at her to come back at once. But there was no shouting. The road, at two in the afternoon, was eerily silent. Most houses had blinds or curtains drawn against the fierce sun. Nobody was in the gardens, nobody mowing the lawn or clipping a hedge. It was much too hot. Julia turned the pram round, again taking great care. Then she set off back to the house, the sun now in her eyes.

Quite what happened she wouldn’t have been able to say. It was something to do with going down the first kerb. She’d already gone over two kerbs, one upwards, one downwards, each time gently tipping the pram at the right angle. But now something happened. She turned the pram round, with no difficulty, and then, pleased that this manoeuvre was so easy, she put her hands under instead of on top of the handle, and pushed, so that the big front wheels would slide over the kerb. Immediately, much too quickly for her to correct the angle, the whole pram seemed to stand on end, the hood hitting the ground, the handle in the air, her hands trying to clutch it. She could see that little Reggie had slid down into the interior of
the hood, his head separated from the tarmac road only by the fabric of this hood. But he was still asleep there wasn’t a sound from him. Julia raised herself on tiptoes and pushed down on the handle with all her might. Thankfully, the pram righted itself and she pushed it across the short width of the side road and got it up the other kerb without mishap.

‘Phew!’ she said out loud, just as her mother was in the habit of doing when a minor catastrophe was averted, and again, ‘phew.’ She put the brake on the pram and peered at little Reggie. He had come free of the white cotton cover (a lacy affair, very lightweight because of the heat) so she put it over him again, very neatly, and then carried on pushing the pram back to the garden. She went at a quicker pace than before, anxious now to get the pram back in the position it had been in when she had decided to go for a walk. Nobody was about. She looked to right and left and all was still in the afternoon heat. Turning into the gate, she stopped as soon as she was through and closed it and placed the pram under the pear tree, just as it had been. But then she realised there were wheel marks slightly to the left of where she’d parked the pram. They were only visible here because the grass was a little longer than on the rest of the lawn which had become parched in the weeks of sun. It took some struggling to get the wheels exactly set in the existing tracks but finally she succeeded. She scuffed the grass with her feet all around, went into the house and straight into the kitchen where she ran the cold tap and filled a glass with water. She looked at the kitchen clock but couldn’t work out how long she had been. Not long, she decided.

When Julia and her mother left to go home, little Reggie was still asleep. ‘The lamb!’ Iris said. ‘He’s making up for last night.’ There was a bit of discussion about whether the pram should now be moved inside, and Iris decided perhaps it should be because the sun was moving around and there wasn’t as much shade under the tree as there had been. She was pushing it inside the front door as Julia and her
mother waved goodbye. They dawdled along the road. It was much too hot even for Julia’s mother to rush. ‘What did you do with yourself in the garden?’ she asked Julia. Julia could tell her mother wasn’t asking this because she really wanted to know. It was what her mother once described to her as ‘a pleasantry’, a polite bit of chat, just another way of saying hello or how are you? ‘Nothing’ would be a perfectly satisfactory answer, so Julia gave it. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

Next day was meant to be Julia’s first day at her new school, but she didn’t go to school. The phone rang during the night. Julia didn’t hear it, but her mother did, and answered it. She shook Julia awake at dawn, a startlingly lurid red dawn. ‘Get up, Julia,’ she said, ‘get dressed. We’re going to Maureen’s house. I’m needed there, and you’ll have to come with me.’ Still half asleep, Julia said, ‘But what about school?’ Her mother said, ‘School can wait.’

‘Were you lost, Camilla, when you left your new school?’ Julia asked. Camilla said a little bit, but not much. ‘What did you find, when you were exploring?’ Camilla described the running track she’d found and the shops she’d passed, and the railway bridge she’d stood on watching the overground train go by. ‘Were you going to go back to the school? Did you intend to?’ No, Camilla had intended to find her way home when she got tired. She said she knew the right bus to get. ‘And when you went exploring from home, what were you planning to do then?’

‘Don’t know,’ Camilla said, ‘just wanted to be out. I like being out.’

‘But it worries your parents,’ Julia pointed out. ‘Think of being them, how would you feel if your daughter just disappeared? Wouldn’t you worry?’ Camilla nodded, but smiled at the same time.

The parents had made a mistake, moving Camilla from one school to another, which they believed to be a much better school and when she only had a year and a bit to go before changing to secondary school anyway. Julia thought they realised that, but wouldn’t reverse the process. Camilla was quite likely to continue her ‘exploring’ if she could, but probably she wouldn’t be able to. She would be watched. Seizing an opportunity would be hard. She had no idea of how vulnerable she was, wandering the streets and parks.

‘Well, Camilla,’ Julia said, ‘I think you’re going to have to accept the new school and try to make the best of it. But you could still go exploring if you called your parents on your mobile. You can’t leave school to do it, but you could do it from home sometimes. Could you give that a try? Otherwise nobody will let you out of their sight and you wouldn’t like that, would you?’