The Unknown Bridesmaid Read online

  The point was the present had finally been given to Iris even if she had no interest in it. The responsibility was no longer Julia’s.

  ‘What did you do then, Claire?’ asked Julia. Claire widened her eyes, intensified her smile, and said she couldn’t remember exactly. ‘Try,’ Julia urged. ‘You got off the train with your mother, and you were carrying a bag. Is that correct?’ Claire nodded. ‘Was it heavy?’ Claire shook her head. ‘What was in it?’ Claire said she didn’t know, she hadn’t looked inside the bag, she’d just been handed it by her mother who had told her to carry it because she herself had too much to carry. Julia (who knew the answers of course) asked Claire if the bag was a plastic carrier bag, or made of material of some sort – canvas? leather? – and whether it was zipped closed, if it was that sort of bag, or remained open. Claire said it was not a plastic bag, she was sure of that, and it did have a zip, which was pulled tight across the top. She added that the bag had long handles and that it had touched the ground sometimes and she had had to lift it higher.

  The bag had been stolen. It didn’t belong to Claire’s mother at all. The mother claimed to have picked up this bag in mistake for her own, which was of a similar size and design. She had so much luggage and got muddled and was worried that she and Claire wouldn’t get off the train in time, hence the confusion. It was all feasible. The bag was an expensive one, but lots of imitations of it existed and could be bought cheaply. But no cheap versions had subsequently been found on that train. Someone could have found it, and taken it home and kept it, but the woman from whom the expensive bag had been stolen said there was no other bag like it when she had put it on the luggage rack.

  None of this was of concern to Julia. Her job was to ascertain how much responsibility Claire had for the theft of this bag. Nobody seemed sure. The child was only eight. Her mother had handed her a bag and told her to carry it. She had obeyed. But why had she not said ‘This is not your bag, Mum’? Was she unobservant? Did she truly not notice? And she had said the bag was not heavy but it must have been, considering what it contained. Most children would have felt the weight and complained about it, surely. Claire had carried it all the way through the station, keeping pace with her hurrying mother without difficulty in spite of the weight of the bag. And then they were stopped, Claire and her mother. The real owner of the bag had run through the crowds searching for her bag being carried by someone else, and she had caught Claire by the arm and shouted, ‘You’ve got my bag!’ Claire had smiled, looked at her mother, and dropped the bag.

  ‘Do you and your mum travel much?’ Julia asked Claire. Claire hesitated, but only for a second, then nodded. ‘Do you always have a lot of luggage?’ More nods. ‘And where do you go, Claire, with all this luggage?’

  Claire shrugged, the smile never shifting. ‘Places,’ she said.

  ‘To visit relatives?’

  Nod.

  ‘Your grandparents?’

  Claire said, ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Aunts? Cousins? Friends?’ Julia prompted.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Julia asked if Claire enjoyed this travelling, knowing Claire would probably stick to ‘sometimes’, as she did.

  ‘Your mum is very lucky to have a strong girl like you to help carry her bags,’ Julia said, and then, gently, ‘Don’t you get tired of carrying heavy bags?’

  ‘They aren’t always heavy,’ Claire said, and then her smile faltered for the first time. ‘I mean,’ she corrected, ‘that bag wasn’t heavy.’

  Julia looked at her, and remained silent for a moment or two. The owner of the bag had made a scene, clinging onto Claire and shouting for the police. Claire’s arm still bore faint marks from how firmly she had been gripped. ‘Does your arm hurt?’ Julia asked. ‘Does it still hurt, where the woman got hold of you?’ Claire said no, it didn’t. ‘Did it hurt at the time?’ Claire said no, it didn’t, not really. ‘But you must have got a shock,’ Julia suggested, ‘you must have been a little frightened?’ Claire, her smile wavering only slightly, said no, she hadn’t been shocked. ‘Has this happened before?’ Julia asked. Claire hesitated. She looked at Julia searchingly, and Julia knew the girl was trying to work out how much Julia knew. She didn’t want to be caught out if Julia had the evidence that this picking up of the ‘wrong’ bag, and what happened subsequently, was familiar, that there was a pattern of similar incidents. So Claire did the wisest thing. She kept quiet.

  There was no need for Julia to see Claire’s mother, but she would like to have done. The woman had two convictions for shoplifting, but Claire had not been involved in either episode. She’d been with her mother, though, in a buggy, and the buggy was where her mother had hidden the goods. At a year and eighteen months old respectively, Claire could not have been party to either theft. She wouldn’t even have been aware of the sweater tucked underneath the removable pad on the seat of the buggy, or of the necklace and earrings nestling in the closed-up hood. Claire, then, had no responsibility whatsoever for her mother’s shoplifting. But since then? Almost certainly, the girl had aided and abetted, under instructions from her mother. There were many ways in which the shoplifting and the bag-snatching could have been represented to her. Julia thought about them all.

  ‘It was a good bag, Claire, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘It costs a lot of money, that sort of bag, doesn’t it?’ Claire was back to shrugging. ‘Do you like shopping?’ Julia asked. Surprisingly, Claire said, not really.

  ‘Why not?’ Julia pressed.

  ‘No money to buy anything,’ Claire said, ‘so it’s boring.’

  ‘But you had money to spend last week, didn’t you? Did you enjoy shopping then? Did you enjoy spending it?’

  Claire nodded, but her smile faded. Julia was not going to ask where the money had come from. Claire, she knew, was expecting her to ask this, but she had no need to ask it.

  ‘Do you ever do any baking, Claire?’ she suddenly asked instead. ‘Do you make cakes, or buns, that kind of thing?’ Claire said, sometimes. ‘Who taught you how to do it?’ Claire said, her grandma. ‘Not your mother?’ No, her mother hadn’t time. ‘What has your mother taught you?’ Julia asked. Claire, for the first time, frowned, then said, lots of things. Julia asked for an example, and one was given: how to pack. Julia could hardly suppress a laugh.

  ‘Well, Claire,’ she said, ‘I think you and I understand each other very well. Nothing was your fault but if it happens again it will be, won’t it? So you’ll have to be very careful. It will be hard, but you have to take responsibility for yourself from now on. Your mother knows that too. You say you didn’t get a shock, but she did. You weren’t to blame, whatever you thought you were doing.’ Julia smiled at Claire encouragingly, but now Claire was not smiling at all. Her face was contorted with resentment.

  ‘Can I go now?’ she asked.

  Julia nodded. Claire stood up, smoothed her dress down, and walked out of the room without looking at Julia again and without saying goodbye. She banged the door behind her.

  Julia felt slightly shaken. Claire was a tough character, by no means defenceless against her mother’s will and power. She was only eight, but seemed more like eighteen in her understanding.

  Aunt Maureen taught Julia how to make scones. Julia had watched her own mother make scones many times, but had not been allowed to try to make them herself. ‘When you’re older, I’ll teach you,’ her mother said. But Maureen thought Julia was more than old enough. ‘Eight,’ she exclaimed, ‘eight, and you’ve never done any baking!’ She said this in the hearing of Julia’s mother who, because of the circumstances, because of Maureen being in such a state about Iris, did not react as she would normally have done. She just smiled, which was retaliation enough, and graciously left the kitchen saying she would leave Maureen and Julia to it while she went upstairs to try to ‘liven Iris up’.

  Livening Iris up was a much harder task than making scones. Julia herself had been sent, regularly, to try to get her cousin to respond to something, anything. ‘A yo
ung face will cheer her up,’ her mother told her. It did not. Iris stared at the ceiling, same as ever, and didn’t reply to anything Julia asked. The question she repeatedly asked was: what was in the little package Reginald had left. ‘Have you opened the present yet, Iris?’ she asked timidly, careful to say ‘the’ present and not ‘Reginald’s’, because she’d been told not to mention his name. If anyone did, Iris started weeping again, and she’d only just stopped doing this all the time. But when asked, Iris shook her head. ‘Where is it?’ Julia dared to enquire. Iris nodded towards the cabinet beside her bed. It had a cupboard in it, and a drawer, and there was a lamp on top. Julia eyed the drawer and thought about asking if she could open it and take the present out and unwrap it, but she was afraid of distressing Iris. The risk was too great. So she sighed and yawned and wished she was back at school and not staying at Aunt Maureen’s all this time and enduring the boredom of sitting in this bedroom trying to liven up her once extra-lively cousin.

  Then, one day, Iris was sick. The next morning, she was sick again. The doctor was sent for, and came, and suddenly Aunt Maureen and Uncle Tom and even Julia’s mother were all excited at the ‘good news’. What this news was, Julia didn’t know. ‘You’ll know soon enough,’ her mother said, ‘it’s too early for you to know.’ Julia was so used to her mother making these kinds of enigmatic statements that she simply accepted them. The good news which she did understand was that they were going home. ‘Pack your bag, Julia,’ her mother said, ‘we’re leaving tomorrow. Iris will be fine now she’s got something to live for.’ And it was true, Iris was smiling and talking again, and though very pale she looked better. Her eyes lost the glazed look they’d had for the last four weeks, and though her hair was bedraggled and greasy she had pulled a brush across it and tied it back and was going to wash it in the afternoon.

  Home they went. Julia had never imagined she would be so glad to get home. On Monday, she returned to school where her more enlightened friend Sandra immediately divined why Aunt Maureen and Uncle Tom and Julia’s mother and Iris herself had all been made happy. ‘Sick every morning,’ Sandra queried, ‘and you don’t know what that means, Julia? Honestly, you’re hopeless.’ Apparently it meant a baby. Iris was going to have a baby. ‘But Reginald is dead,’ Julia whispered. Sandra said that didn’t matter so long as he and Iris had ‘done it’ at least once. Julia went home that day feeling strange. She wanted to discuss what Sandra had suggested with her mother, who would know if Sandra was right, but she couldn’t bring herself to broach the subject. She would just have to wait for her mother to tell her about the baby.

  This took a long time. It was only when her mother began knitting, and Julia saw the cover of the pattern she was following, that she felt able to ask what her mother was knitting. ‘What does it look like?’ her mother said. Julia said it looked like a baby’s jumper. ‘A matinee jacket,’ her mother corrected, ‘for Iris’s baby. Maureen can’t knit. If I don’t knit a few things for the poor child, nobody will.’ Julia asked when the baby would be born. Her mother made a strange noise, half a snort of what sounded like disapproval (a sound Julia was well acquainted with) and half a laugh of disbelief. ‘Who knows?’ her mother finally said. ‘Maybe sooner than it should be.’

  Julia didn’t forget about Iris’s baby. The little white garments produced by her mother’s rapidly clacking needles were a constant reminder. But, all the same, she was taken by surprise when she came home from school one day, a long time after they’d visited Manchester, and her mother told her Iris had given birth to a boy. Julia was immediately disappointed. She’d wanted Iris to have a girl. Unwisely, she said this to her mother who told her how silly she was to have wished Iris had a daughter ‘in the circumstances’. Julia hadn’t the faintest idea what these circumstances might be, but was given a clue after she asked what the baby would be called. ‘Reginald, of course,’ her mother said. Again, Julia was disappointed. Reginald seemed to her an embarrassing name to have. Nobody was called Reginald any more. Didn’t Iris know that? When Julia told Sandra about the baby’s name, Sandra laughed.

  They went to pay tribute to little Reggie (as he was always referred to, right from birth) when he was a week old. Julia carried the small case containing all the baby clothes her mother had knitted, each item separately wrapped in tissue paper. ‘On no account,’ her mother said, ‘put that case down, not for an instant. Sit with it on your knee in the taxi and on the train and if you need to go to the toilet give it to me. There’s hours and hours of work in there.’ Julia, as ever, followed instructions. When they arrived at Aunt Maureen’s, she still held on to the case. Maureen looked entirely different from the distraught creature she had been all those months ago.

  She beamed at Julia and kissed her and said, ‘You’ve got a lovely little new cousin.’

  ‘First cousin once removed,’ Julia’s mother said sternly, but Maureen ignored her.

  They were led up the stairs because Iris was still in bed. Julia heard Maureen say Iris had had a bad time and was still weak because she’d lost a lot of blood and forceps had been used and stitching required. The word ‘stitching’ lodged itself in Julia’s mind. She wished Sandra was on hand to explain ‘stitching’, to tell her what had been stitched and what kind of needle and thread was used. It made her nervous about going into the bedroom and seeing Iris. If she’d had a bad time and lost a lot of blood and something or other had been stitched she must look awful. Julia steeled herself.

  Iris looked radiant. It was Julia’s mother who used this word and Julia took to it at once. It was a beautiful word, making her think of rays of sunshine and warmth, and sparkle. She was pleased with her mother. Iris was sitting up in bed wearing a pretty pink lacy jacket over a white nightdress which had pearl buttons all the way down the front. Her hair was back to its glossy best, and her skin really did look peach-like. She never stopped smiling, though she did once wince as she moved position in the bed, but said it was just a twinge. The baby was asleep in his cradle beside her. They all stood there, round the bed, admiring Iris, admiring the baby. Julia had never seen her mother so soft-faced and gentle-looking. The baby let out a little cry, and Iris leaned over and plucked him from his cradle. He’d looked all right in the cradle, but now that Julia saw him awake she was dismayed. Little Reggie didn’t look at all how a baby should look. His eyes were not large and blue like babies’ eyes were in picture books. They were just like two little raisins, set above red, wrinkled cheeks. And he had no hair, just a sort of blond down covering his head. The head itself looked to Julia as though it had been squashed. It bulged in certain places and there was a bit that looked bloody and sore.

  But her mother and Aunt Maureen cooed over little Reggie, saying what a handsome fellow he was, and that he had his grandfather’s nose. Julia stared at the baby’s nose, and thought about Uncle Tom’s nose, and could see no connection. Iris, to Julia’s relief, said it was nonsense. Little Reggie didn’t have his grandfather’s nose. He was the image of his father – nose, chin, everything about him was like his own father. Aunt Maureen and Julia’s mother said nothing, but they looked at each other meaningfully. Julia saw the look and interpreted it as the sisters for once agreeing to disagree with Iris but also agreeing to say nothing. Julia was asked if she’d like to hold the baby. She didn’t really want to but recognised that she was being honoured and that she should accept, so she did. She sat on the edge of the bed, as instructed, and little Reggie was placed in her arms. He immediately started to howl, his face contorted and his mouth wide open. ‘Cuddle him, cuddle him!’ everyone urged. Julia tried, but she felt awkward and didn’t feel she knew how to cuddle a baby. ‘Dear me,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘you’re not going to be a natural mother, Julia.’

  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 a
rea 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.