The Unknown Bridesmaid (9 page)

She watched from the window as Camilla and her parents walked to their car. Her mother was holding her hand. Her father patted her back tentatively. It was a reassuring scene. The parents were clearly sorry.

‘Don’t say anything,’ Julia’s mother told her as they hurried to Aunt Maureen’s. ‘Don’t ask any of your questions, whatever you do.’ Julia, half asleep, absorbed these instructions. They were familiar, after all. Her mother was always forbidding her to ask questions, even obvious, simple ones. She was expected to be able to understand what was going on through some process of osmosis, and often she did.

It was only a ten-minute walk, but Julia’s mother was almost running, dragging Julia with her. She gave a gasp as they turned the corner into Maureen’s road, a sort of long drawn-out ‘Oh!’ Julia saw the ambulance standing at her aunt’s front door, its doors open. ‘My God,’ Julia’s mother
said, but quietly, whispering the words. The front door was open too. As she and her mother walked past the ambulance, almost tiptoeing their way across the gravel, they both looked in. It was empty. The house seemed at first to be empty too. Julia’s mother didn’t call out. She took Julia’s hand, and together they walked into the sitting room. It was full of people. Julia took in the man and woman in uniform first. One of them, the woman, was holding Aunt Maureen’s hand and saying something to her. Uncle Tom was standing looking out of the French windows into the garden where a cat was slowly picking its way across the lawn. The woman stopped saying whatever she was saying to Maureen and in the silence that followed Julia heard a strange sound. It wasn’t exactly the sound of crying, more a howl which rose and fell quite rhythmically. ‘Stay here,’ Julia’s mother said to her, and left the room. Nobody stopped her. Julia heard her mother go up the stairs, heard a door being knocked on, and then Iris’s name being spoken. The weird noise intensified for a moment, and then a door closed and there was silence.

A long time seemed to pass. There was some sort of discussion between the ambulance people and then the man went outside the room and Julia heard the crackle of what she supposed was a walkie-talkie thing. She couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but he soon came back and spoke to his colleague, and they both shook hands first with Maureen and then with Tom. Then they left, and Julia heard the ambulance driving off. This puzzled her. Why was the ambulance going off empty? What did it mean? But mindful of her mother’s warning, she didn’t ask. Another vehicle had just pulled up outside the still open front door. Julia waited. This time it was another policewoman, and a man with her who was not in any uniform. Tom turned away from watching the cat, and the policewoman went up to him and said something. ‘Is that necessary?’ she heard her uncle say, and the policewoman said, ‘I’m afraid so, sir.’

Nobody said anything to Julia. Nobody seemed to notice her. She wondered if it would be wrong to say she was hungry, and thought that so long as she didn’t
ask
for something to eat it would be all right. But when she tried to say the three words, she got no further than ‘I’m . . .’ which came out as more like a throat clearing than a word. It called attention to her presence.

‘Julia!’ her aunt said, as though amazed to see her, and then, to her husband, ‘Where’s Lydia?’

‘With Iris,’ Tom said.

‘She let her in?’ Maureen asked.

Tom nodded.

‘Well,’ Maureen said, ‘I’d better give Julia some breakfast. We have to eat. What time is it?’

Tom said it was seven o’clock, about.

‘What do you mean “about”?’ Maureen said. ‘You’ve got a watch, we’ve got clocks, what time is it?’

Tom said it was 6.54 a.m.

Maureen boiled an egg for Julia, talking rapidly all the time about eggs. She said she would have fried some bacon, but the smell might upset Iris. Smells, she told Julia, drifted upwards even if the extractor fan was put on, and it didn’t work very well. Julia ate the egg and two slices of toast. She ate them so enthusiastically that Maureen offered her another slice and she accepted. ‘You’ve a good appetite,’ Maureen said, and then her face crumpled and she started to weep. Julia was embarrassed. She had no idea what to do, beyond daintily nibble at the remaining morsel of toast. Her uncle had left the room and there was only herself and her aunt there, facing each other across the table. The weeping didn’t show any sign of stopping, so Julia got up, scraping her chair on the floor, and tore off a piece of kitchen paper. It was quite rough paper, but she couldn’t see a box of tissues anywhere. She offered the paper to her aunt who balled it up and dabbed at her streaming eyes, to little effect. At that moment, Julia’s
mother was heard coming down the stairs. Relieved, Julia turned towards her as she came into the kitchen.

‘Stop this, Maureen,’ Julia’s mother said, ‘there’s things will need to be done, and Iris is in no fit state.’ She put the kettle on, and banged about quite noisily, selecting a tea bag from a canister and a mug from a hook and a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer. There was more noise as the fridge was opened and the milk taken out and the fridge shut again. Julia, watching her mother, knew all this noise, such as it was, was deliberate. Normally, her mother did everything quietly, and objected if Julia so much as dropped a teaspoon on the draining board. Maureen took the tea offered and Julia’s mother sat down with her.

‘Julia,’ she said, ‘go and play in the garden a minute.’

Julia stared at her. ‘Play?’ she echoed.

‘You heard. Just go in the garden, pick some flowers or something, some roses.’

‘For Iris?’ Julia asked. ‘Is she ill?’

She’d broken the order not to ask questions, but, surprisingly, her mother didn’t seem annoyed. She said that yes, Iris was feeling ill but wasn’t actually ill. It was the baby. It was little Reggie, who had been taken from her and it was very sad. Julia immediately began to want to ask dozens of questions but her mother said, quite sharply, ‘Go in the garden, I’ll call you in a minute.’

Feeling excited, Julia went into the garden and wandered aimlessly around, trying to work out who could have stolen little Reggie. Had he been kidnapped? Would there be a ransom note? And how had it been done? She looked up at Iris’s bedroom window. There was a drainpipe to the right of it. Had the kidnapper climbed up the pipe and got in through the window? But how could he have climbed down holding the baby? Wouldn’t little Reggie have cried? Wouldn’t Iris have heard him?

She seemed to be in the garden much longer than the minute
her mother promised. She did no playing and picked no flowers. Instead she lurked beside the kitchen window, which was open a little bit, enough for her to hear some of the talking going on inside. She stood to the left of the window, her back flat against the brick wall, and she strained to make sense of what she could hear. This consisted of words broken up as her mother moved between sink and table, doing whatever she was doing. Sometimes a tap would run and Julia could hear nothing, then there would be a minute of clarity and she’d hear a whole sentence. She couldn’t hear her aunt at all, only the burr of her voice in the background.

It took a long time for Julia to come to the conclusion from which she finally could not escape. Little Reggie was dead. Her mouth went dry when this realisation came to her and her knees began to tremble. She clutched the drainpipe next to the window frame to steady herself. No one had told her little Reggie was dead. Maybe she had pieced together wrongly the fragments she’d heard. But then her mother called her name, sharply, and as she stepped forward and walked towards the kitchen door where her mother stood, Julia remembered the phrase ‘taken from her’ and knew she was right.

‘Mum,’ she said, ‘is little Reggie—’ But she got no further.

‘Shh,’ her mother said, ‘come back inside, sit quietly; find a book or something. I’ll tell you later.’

‘Later’ turned out to be much later. They stayed all that day and the night at Aunt Maureen’s. There was a constant procession of people coming and going, all of whom ignored Julia. She sat in an armchair in a corner of the sitting room with one of Uncle Tom’s books about birds open on her lap. She turned a page occasionally, to look like an authentic reader, though nobody was watching her. She watched them instead. She had a good view of the hall and the first flight of stairs and saw how solemn everyone looked as they arrived. They spoke in hushed voices and if they were
wearing a hat they took it off and clutched it awkwardly. Julia heard odd words which she didn’t understand. One was something ‘mortem’. They’d done a poem during her last term at her old school about King Arthur and his knights and the title was
Morte d’Arthur
which the teacher explained meant the death of Arthur.
Morte
meant death.
Mortem
must mean something to do with death.

At lunchtime, Julia was called into the kitchen and given a sandwich. Maureen said she couldn’t eat, she’d be sick, the mere thought of eating made her feel sick. Julia’s mother told her that not eating wouldn’t help anyone and that Maureen needed to be strong and to be strong she needed to eat. Maureen said she was going up to see Iris. Julia’s mother said that if she was going to do that she should be sure not to start crying again because Iris had had quite enough of crying already. She’d wept buckets herself and now she was exhausted and silent and needed comforting. One day, she could have another baby, Julia’s mother said. She was young and healthy and little Reggie passing away was nothing to do with her, it was just one of those things. ‘They don’t know that yet, Lydia,’ Maureen suddenly said in a surprisingly firm tone, ‘they have to wait for the result of the post-mortem.’ Julia’s mother was scandalised. She said that whatever a post-mortem showed it still wouldn’t have anything to do with Iris. ‘It might,’ Maureen said. Julia’s mother said it was beyond her comprehension how her sister could say such a thing about her own daughter.

The argument carried on, becoming more and more confusing to Julia. She could tell this
was
an argument but what she couldn’t understand was what lay underneath her aunt’s words. What did it mean, that something to do with little Reggie being dead might be Iris’s fault? Or had she picked that up wrongly? Her mother was angry with her aunt, and it was that sort of dangerous anger Julia recognised and feared, not the run-of-the-mill crossness. But this troubling discord between the sisters stopped when the doorbell rang and Uncle Tom
answered and then came into the kitchen and said, ‘They’ve come for . . .’ and didn’t finish his sentence. Its meaning seemed to be understood, though. Julia’s mother said, ‘Stay here, Maureen, stay here, Julia. I’ll see to it,’ and she left the kitchen, closing the door firmly behind her. Uncle Tom sighed, and sat down. ‘This is . . .’ he said, and again didn’t finish his sentence. Julia couldn’t guess how it might have gone on.

At six o’clock, Iris came downstairs. The curtains were drawn in the sitting room, where they were all sitting, their tea just finished. It hadn’t been a proper tea, to Julia’s disappointment. Nothing freshly baked; just some shortbread and the tea itself. Nobody was expecting Iris to come down, so when they heard her door upstairs opening and then the sound of her slowly descending, they all seemed to freeze, even Julia’s mother. Julia was watching her closely, and saw how alarmed she looked, a frown creasing her forehead. But she didn’t get up, and neither did anyone else. The door opened, creaking a bit, and Iris stood there, staring at them. ‘Oh, Julia,’ she said, ‘you’re here!’ Julia got up, blushing. Iris sounded so surprised, as though Julia should have been somewhere else. In her head, Julia was instructing herself to say something, say something, but nothing came. She felt strangled with embarrassment.

It was a feeling that didn’t lift. Julia soon sensed that neither her aunt nor her uncle, nor inexplicably, her mother, knew what to say to Iris. It was much worse than when Reginald was killed. Then, people spoke freely, even if they all said the same things, or so it seemed to Julia. But now there wasn’t even a ‘I’m sorry, so sorry’. There were no hugs either, and the tears were all dried up. Uncle Tom said he would have to go out. He didn’t say why or where he was going but nobody questioned him. Once he’d gone, there was a slight easing of the tension. Julia’s mother and her aunt began talking, in a stilted fashion, but still, it was talk. Iris didn’t join in, but she picked up the newspaper her father had left there and turned its pages.

Julia thought that day would never end. For once, she was longing to be sent to bed but it was nine o’clock before her mother told her to brush her teeth and go to bed in the little box room. Julia said she hadn’t got a toothbrush or her pyjamas. ‘For heaven’s sake, Julia,’ her mother said, ‘have some sense.’ Julia couldn’t imagine what sense had to do with pointing out that she had no pyjamas and no toothbrush, but she said sorry and left the room and went upstairs to the bedroom. On the bed lay a toothbrush and her pyjamas. Her mother must have packed them, in her bag before they left the house that morning. ‘Sense’ meant that Julia should have known that her efficient mother would do so, whatever the emergency. It was oddly comforting, seeing her own pyjamas and toothbrush, and Julia, after brushing her teeth extra vigorously, went to bed more content and settled than she had been all day. But when she closed her eyes, she saw little Reggie, and quickly opened them again. It suddenly occurred to her that the dead baby might be in the next room, Iris’s room, and after that she couldn’t get to sleep. What did a dead baby look like?

It wasn’t until the following day that the questioning began.

‘It’s a simple procedure,’ the nurse said, ‘only takes ten minutes.’ Julia asked what exactly was going to be done. ‘We cut it out,’ the nurse said, ‘and then put a few stitches in. You only need a local anaesthetic.’ She seemed dismissive, bored with Julia’s anxiety. ‘Ready?’ she asked. ‘Then sign here.’ Julia signed. Two other people appeared. A young woman and an older man, both wearing blue tops and with their hair covered. Julia didn’t watch medical soaps but she’d caught the end of enough of them, turning the television on for other programmes, to recognise that their clothes identified them as doctors. They barely greeted her before the man indicated to the woman the black spot on her cheek. ‘It’s a
BCC,’ he said, ‘you need to cut right round.’ He said something else Julia couldn’t quite catch. She felt stupid, as though she had no will or power, and cleared her throat to show she was there, a real person. Images of revenge rose up in her mind and she suppressed them hastily.