The Unknown Bridesmaid

by Margaret Forster

  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.

  The anaesthetic took effect very quickly. She was on her back, staring into a harsh light which hurt her eyes. ‘Sorry about the light,’ the woman said, ‘but we can’t give you protective glasses or a shade because they’d cast a shadow on your cheek.’ Julia felt small tugs on her face. ‘OK?’ the woman said. She nodded. The man was watching the woman closely. It occurred to Julia that she had never done this operation before. He was instructing her, telling her to do this, to do that. The woman’s face was above her, a little flushed, and she was frowning. It was all over in ten minutes or so, just as they’d promised. ‘Well done,’ the man said, but he said it to the woman, not to Julia. ‘Neat stitches,’ he said, ‘very nice. You’ve followed the line running down her nose at the side. Good work. There won’t be any scar.’ Then he left the room, and the woman smiled and patted Julia’s hand and said the nurse would put a dressing on, then she could go. She only needed to keep this dressing on for the rest of the day and then she could remove it and let the air get at it.

  When she got home, Julia removed the dressing and looked in the mirror. She didn’t know how many stitches had been put in but the red line was livid. If this was good work she didn’t want to see what bad work looked like. Her cheek would scare the children, but if she covered the stitches the plaster would have to be so large and prominent that would scare them too. She would have to spend precious time explaining, and going into details about basal cell carcinomas would not be a good idea. All she could say was that a bad bit had been cut out, like a bad bit from an apple, and that it hadn’t hurt and in a few days her cheek would mend and look the same as it always had. But she decided to take some time off, two or three days. She would write up reports which she could do perfectly well at home. There were no referrals which would have to be cancelled. Her next appointment was on Tuesday, plenty of time for the stitches to stop looking so raw, and she might get away with a neat little plaster by then. Any questions could be dealt with in a matter-of-fact way, but few children did ask those sorts of questions, fascinated though they might be at the sight of any kind of sore or wound. Once, Julia had broken her arm and had to have it in a sling for weeks, but not one child had asked her what she had done to her arm.

  She was the one who had always, as a child, wanted to ask questions but had been trained not to. She liked being asked them, too, or thought she did until the questions became tricky and she began to worry about what her answers were revealing, to herself as much as to the questioner.

  All Julia was told was that a lady would ask her some questions. Nobody told her who this lady was, but she wasn’t in uniform so Julia thought she couldn’t be a policewoman. She thought what a funny job it must be, just asking questions, but one she might like herself.

  The lady was gentle and kind. She smiled at Julia, and told her not to worry, she just wanted to go over exactly what had happened the day before the poor baby fell asleep. Julia wondered why she didn’t say ‘died’. She decided she would say it herself. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘the day before little Reggie died?’ The lady looked a little shocked, but nodded. Julia nodded back, and waited.

  ‘Now,’ the lady said, ‘you and your mother were here that day, is that right, Julia?’

  Julia knew that she knew it was right. It was such a wasted question.

  ‘So,’ the lady went on, ‘tell me about that day, from when you arrived at the house. Tell me every little thing you can remember.’

  Julia told her. She rather enjoyed giving every little detail, right down to what kind of bread Maureen provided with the salad, stressing that it was granary, not straight brown, and not sliced, and the slices cut were thick and the butter spread thickly too and . . . The lady stopped her. She explained that by ‘every little thing’ she meant actions, what was done, that sort of thing. Julia said that before this lunch when they arrived at her aunt’s house she had gone with Iris to watch little Reggie be bathed. Iris thought he seemed hot, and a bath would cool him down.

  The lady sat up very straight and looked expectant, her mouth opening slightly in encouragement. ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘You watched the baby being bathed?’ Julia agreed that was what she had done. ‘Tell me about how baby seemed,’ said the lady. ‘Did he like his bath? Did he cry?’ Julia said yes, he’d liked it and he hadn’t cried at all. Iris had lowered him very carefully into the water and splashed him a little bit and he’d kicked his legs, and then Iris had wrapped him in a white towel and cuddled him . . . This time, the lady didn’t stop her.

  It took a long time for Julia to get to later in the afternoon of that day. When she reached that point in her narrative, a strange feeling began to come over her. It was a feeling of dread, though dread of what she couldn’t have articulated. ‘They said to go in the garden and look at little Reggie in his pram and so I did.’ Then she stopped.

  The lady, whose attention throughout was unmistakably close, said, ‘Go on, Julia. Little Reggie, in his pram? Did you look at him, in his pram?’ Julia nodded. ‘Was he asleep?’ She nodded again. ‘Did you touch him, Julia?’ She shook her head. ‘Did you touch the pram?’

  Julia hesitated – she knew the lady saw her hesitate – and said, ‘I touched the handle, the way Iris showed me. Just a little. Just once.’

  There was a silence, and the lady stared at her. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘what did you do?’

  ‘I walked round and round the garden,’ said Julia, ‘and then I went back inside.’

  She had lied. The moment she had missed out the next bit, about taking little Reggie for a walk, she started to feel sick. Lies led to more lies, her mother always said, and ended up making a terrible mess. Lies, her mother taught her, always got found out in the end. This lie could easily be found out if someone in the road had after all seen her without her realising. Then what would she do? Julia started to tremble, and then to cry. The lady comforted her. She said yes, it was very upsetting, the baby dying, and that she, Julia, had been brave, not crying up to now. Julia cried harder, and the lady went to get Julia’s mother who, when she came into the room, said quite sharply, ‘Really, Julia,’ but then she did put her arms round Julia, briefly, and said, ‘It’s enough to make anyone cry, all this.’ Julia was taken into the kitchen and given a glass of water, and soon after that she and her mother at last went home.

  The next day, she started her new school, after her mother had rung the headmistress and explained why Julia had missed the first two days.

  The stitches came out of Julia’s face, and all that was left was a thin red line which hardly stood out. It could have been nothing more than a scratch. She was glad not to attract attention when she returned to work, though really there had been few questions about the plaster and what it was covering. People probably thought, she reckoned, that it would be a trifle indelicate to ask a middle-aged woman what was wrong with her face.

  But she saw that Eva was scrutinising her face and wondering about the scar. Eva had a scar of sorts herself, a birthma
rk in the centre of her left cheek. Because she was fair-skinned, the red blotch, which was quite large, stood out more than it would have otherwise done. Presumably, Julia thought, nothing could be done about it. When Eva was older, she could cover it with make-up, if it bothered her. She was a pretty girl, in spite of the birthmark, with thick, auburn hair, a mass of curls, framing her face. Julia noticed in particular the child’s mouth. Her lips were full, the upper lip a perfect bow, and when she smiled a dimple appeared in her right cheek. She was, Julia estimated, aware of her own good looks, sitting with an air of absolute confidence on her chair. She was used, no doubt, to being looked at and admired, the birthmark notwithstanding.

  The mother was a single parent. Julia thought at first she was a divorcee, but she had been misinformed. Eva was the result of a sperm donor insemination. She knew, the mother told Julia, all about her origins and always had done. That was not a problem. The mother said this emphatically and Julia didn’t contest the assertion, though she was tempted to say that remained to be seen. The problem was alleged to be disorder, extreme disorder of every sort. Eva trashed things. She deliberately tore her clothes, deliberately knocked things over, deliberately created mess wherever she went. Her own room was, said her mother, like a tip, heap upon heap of rubbish, most of it taken from skips in the street. It was shocking, the mother said, that such a young child should collect such disgusting junk. There must be something wrong with her, and she wanted it put right before Eva became a teenager and got totally out of control. Julia prayed silently for patience, and asked the mother to wait outside. There was such antagonism between mother and daughter that it would be hopeless trying to talk to Eva while her mother was present.

  Studying Eva, once she had her on her own, Julia was struck by her neat appearance. No sign of disorder there. The mother, of course, would have made sure Eva was tidily dressed, but there were plenty of ways the girl could have sabotaged her efforts if she had wanted to. Buttons could have been buttoned in the wrong order, socks shoved down, sleeves shoved up – there were all kinds of small rebellions possible if Eva wanted to be disorderly. But she had made none of them. Julia thought about commenting on this, but didn’t.

  ‘Tell me about your room, Eva,’ Julia said.

  ‘What?’ Eva said.

  ‘Your room at home – describe it to me,’ Julia said.

  Eva thought for a minute. The hesitation seemed prolonged. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Eva said, and then, ‘It’s not a very big room. It has my bed, and a chest thing, with drawers, you know the sort.’ Julia nodded. ‘The carpet is blue. The curtains are blue. That’s all.’

  ‘It sounds quite empty?’ Julia said.

  Eva shook her head vigorously. ‘It isn’t empty.’

  ‘What do you have in it, then?’

  Eva began to itemise everything that she’d filled her room with, from things she’d found in the park, just left lying abandoned on benches or dropped on paths, to items she’d picked up from outside people’s doors. ‘They just leave stuff there,’ she told Julia, ‘anyone can take it.’ She’d found a little cabinet with six drawers, only one of them broken, and a lamp which didn’t work but had a pretty frilly pink shade, and an umbrella which was like one she’d seen in a picture, a white-and-black umbrella, intact except for two bent spokes. It looked lovely opened out on the floor of her room, Eva said, but her mother said it got in the way and was always closing it up. Her mother didn’t like clutter. Her mother liked everything neat and tidy. ‘Like the Mr Men books,’ Eva said helpfully, ‘Miss Neat & Tidy.’

  ‘And who are you?’ Julia asked. ‘Miss Messy?’

  Eva smiled then seemed to change her mind. ‘I’m not messy,’ she said, ‘I’m just not like my mother.’

  How true. How common, how familiar the situation, about which there was very little Julia could do. She talked a little more to Eva, discovering that the child was well on the way to being a real collector. She collected buttons, she said, but only green ones, and purses, she loved purses, especially very small ones that hardly held more than a few pence. Her enthusiasm grew, as she told Julia about the stones she had, picked up every year from any beach she was taken to, and Julia began to think this was an extraordinary girl who might one day become an expert on something unusual. There was nothing at all wrong with her. The mother was simply being unreasonable, dictating standards of tidiness way beyond the norm. Julia didn’t believe anything remotely approaching ‘trashing’ was being done.

  Eva didn’t like her mother. Her mother didn’t like Eva. She’d wanted a clone and instead got a rebel. It had been so difficult for her to have a child at all and now, ten years later, she was realising nothing about Eva was how she had thought it would be. None of this could be spelled out. All Julia could do was try to affect a compromise, persuade Eva to be neat and tidy everywhere at home except in her own room, and her mother to let her have that room as she wished to have it. Julia told Eva’s mother that she had a very special daughter, and that she shouldn’t worry about her resistance to tidiness. Eva was going to try hard to meet her mother’s standards.

  Difficult, of course, but both Eva and her mother left without the hostility between them bristling so fiercely.

  IV

  JULIA WAS ALMOST daunted when the application form arrived, both by its length (eight pages) and by the detailed nature of the many questions. For a week, she didn’t touch it. Every day, coming in from work, she’d see it lying on the kitchen table and think no, I’m too tired, it was a mistake to think I could be a magistrate. She had got carried away, reading about a certain case in the newspapers where it seemed to her the magistrates (according to the report) were completely out of touch with the lives young people led. She was not, she was sure she was not. And so she sent off for the application form in a fit of what she now saw was self-importance.

  But when finally, on Sunday afternoon, she picked up the form, she was struck by how suitable she seemed for the post. ‘Do you have the ability to sit and concentrate for long periods of time?’ – Well, of course she did, she was expert at concentration. Only one question made her hesitate: ‘Is there anything in your private or your working life, or in your past, or, to your knowledge, in that of your family or close friends which, if it became generally known, might bring you or the magistracy into disrepute, or call into question your integrity, authority or standing as a magistrate?’ What a complicated question. How could anyone be certain that they were answering it truthfully? Leaving aside her own qualms about some of her behaviour when she was young, how could she be sure that her family was blameless? She didn’t know enough about all of them. None had been murderers but what about all the lesser crimes and misdemeanours that existed and were frowned upon by the law? She knew nothing at all for example, about her dead father.

  She was taking the question too literally, as she tended to take so many questions. ‘Not so far as I know,’ she wrote. Would that do? She filled in the remaining questions, returned the form to its envelope and went out to post it before she changed her mind. The three people she had given as referees would, she knew, give her a glowing report. She’d already discussed her application with them and they were all standing by. ‘You are good, Julia,’ her boss had said. There was an edge, she was sure, of sarcasm there but she ignored it.

  Julia thought how her mother would have said that Janice, the girl now in front of her, had a shifty look. Her eyes darted constantly about, from door to window, restlessly checking her surroundings. When Julia spoke to her, she momentarily made eye contact, then looked over her left shoulder, as though someone there might require her attention. She sat with her knees tightly together, one hand gripping each of them. Her voice was light, and a little breathy. Julia, studying her while asking some routine questions, wondered if Janice’s mother had combed her hair for her. It was so very neatly parted in the centre and pulled into two bunches, each secured with a thick elastic band.

  The alleged problem with Janice,
who was aged ten, was that it seemed she would take no part in any communal activities. Her mother was worried because she had no real friends, and she wouldn’t join any group. She was, the mother said, a real Billy-no-mates. Her mother thought this was going to be a dreadful handicap in life, and wondered aloud if possibly Janice might be autistic. Patiently, Julia defined what autistic meant then reassured the mother that Janice didn’t come into this category. This seemed to disappoint her. Something must nevertheless be wrong, she persisted, with a girl who chose to have no friends. Julia said this was not necessarily so – unusual, yes, but ‘wrong’, no. If Janice liked being on her own it was her nature. She would make friends eventually, slowly, if she came to want them. The mother was not convinced. Janice, she feared, was becoming what she called ‘a serious loner’, and everyone apparently knew where this might lead.

  So here Janice was, answering questions politely, controlling her nervousness well.

  ‘Do you play games, Janice?’ Julia asked her. She said she didn’t like games. ‘Do your classmates play games together?’ Janice nodded. ‘Doesn’t this make you feel left out?’ Janice shook her head. ‘What do other girls say to you when you won’t join in?’

  Janice smiled slightly. ‘They think I’m weird,’ she said, ‘or a snob.’

  ‘Do you care about this?’ Julia asked.

  Janice said no, she supposed she was a bit weird, preferring to be on her own. She didn’t know why her mother fussed about this, there was nothing wrong with it.