The Unknown Bridesmaid

by Margaret Forster

  She had been in and out of Iris’s bedroom quite a lot while little Reggie was alive. Iris was always sending her to get something to do with the care of the baby, so Julia had plenty of opportunity to have a quick look in Iris’s familiar drawers. Reginald’s secret after-the-wedding present was always there, never touched again after its one unwrapping, or so Julia reckoned, but kept tucked in the back left-hand corner of the small, shallow drawer, behind a packet of tissues (opened) and a pair of spectacles in a soft leather case. After little Reggie died, Julia was not as often in Iris’s bedroom because Iris herself practically lived there, with the curtains drawn, but as things improved, and Iris began getting up, she would send Julia up to her room to get some item she hadn’t the energy to go and get herself. Julia would go to collect the nail scissors, or whatever it was Iris wanted, and she sometimes allowed herself a quick peep in the drawer which held Reginald’s present, just to check it hadn’t been thrown out. She was always pleased to see it was there, and would touch it lightly with one finger, nothing more. She had no wish to ask Iris about this object. It appealed to her, in an odd way, to have it remain mysterious.

  Then one day, eight months after little Reggie died, Julia and her mother were summoned by Aunt Maureen who said she had some news. Julia heard her mother on the telephone saying, ‘News? What sort of news? Good, or bad?’ Whatever the answer, Julia’s mother responded by telling Julia to get her coat on, quickly. The news, which was described by Aunt Maureen as ‘a shock’, was that Iris had become engaged. No, not to Michael Osborne, which Aunt Maureen could have understood, and welcomed, but to a man who sold coffee, who was half Italian and had an unpronounceable surname. Julia smiled.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ her mother said.

  ‘He’s nice,’ Julia said, ‘he has curly black hair.’

  Aunt Maureen and Julia’s mother stared at her, their expressions similar, a mixture of barely suppressed curiosity, and distaste.

  ‘Curly black hair?’ Aunt Maureen queried, as though curls in themselves were deeply suspect in a man.

  Julia nodded. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘he ties it back in a ponytail.’

  Stunned silence.

  ‘Not with a ribbon,’ Julia added hastily, ‘just with an elastic band, I think. Iris likes it tied back.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Aunt Maureen asked, her tone incredulous.

  ‘I asked her,’ Julia said. ‘I asked her, “Do you like Carlo’s hair loose or tied back?” and she said—’

  ‘Carlo?’ her mother queried.

  Julia nodded. ‘Carlo Annovazzi,’ she said, lingering on the surname, breaking it up into three syllables and emphasising the ‘Anno’, making it long drawn-out, the way Carlo himself did.

  ‘What a name,’ Aunt Maureen said, and then, ‘Why she couldn’t fall for someone English I don’t know, someone like—’

  ‘Maureen!’ Julia’s mother said warningly.

  ‘Well,’ Maureen said, ‘someone like him, where’s the harm in saying that, what’s wrong in a mother wanting her daughter to get engaged to an Englishman and not a foreigner?’

  But Carlo Annovazzi was not really a foreigner. He’d been born in Manchester, of an Italian father and an English mother. His father was born in Naples but came to Manchester with his parents and two sisters when he was two. All that was foreign about Carlo was his name. Otherwise, he was Manchester born-and-bred. He talked like a Mancunian, and couldn’t speak more than a few phrases of Italian. All this emerged the very first time Iris brought him home, and helped a great deal to make Aunt Maureen reconciled. She didn’t like Carlo’s job though. Selling coffee, no matter how fashionable the place it was sold in, or how good the coffee, was not a profession. Carlo was a shopkeeper. A shopkeeper and a salesman and that was that. ‘Maureen,’ Julia’s mother told her, ‘you are a snob, you always have been.’ Maureen said she didn’t care. If wanting the best for your daughter meant you were a snob, then she was happy to be one.

  Gradually, though, Aunt Maureen came round to liking Carlo, who worked hard to charm her. He was naturally charming (Julia’s mother recognised this, and was consequently suspicious from the start) but he made extra efforts with his future mother-in-law, quickly realising no flattery was too excessive but that all the same she was not a fool. He was open about his business prospects, letting Iris’s parents know that he was the co-owner of the coffee shop and cafe, and his income considerable. Iris’s father liked him because he was a Manchester City, and not a United, fan and they could talk football. Carlo was sporty, playing both golf and tennis, which went some way to offsetting the long hair and ponytail.

  Iris wanted a quiet wedding. A registry office, not a church. ‘Not a church?’ her mother said. ‘But, Iris—’

  ‘Mum,’ Iris said, and gave her mother what Julia’s mother said was a significant look.

  ‘What was significant about it?’ Julia asked later, and was told ‘think’. Thinking in the end did for once explain what her mother meant: Iris didn’t want to marry in a church because she’d married Reginald in a church and the memories would be overwhelming. This led to more thinking: did it mean that Iris didn’t love Carlo as much as she’d loved Reginald? But she seemed happy with him. All the times Julia saw them together over the following months she noticed how light-hearted her cousin seemed, how much she laughed, how readily she showed her affection for Carlo, and he for her. She’d only seen Reginald once with Iris but it was enough to know there was a difference in how she regarded him. Julia couldn’t exactly remember what that difference had been but it had existed, she was sure.

  It set her doing yet more thinking: what about Reginald’s secret present? Would Iris now throw it away? It made Julia’s heart flutter to think that she might, and she could hardly wait for an opportunity to check Iris’s drawer. It was an opportunity that took a long time coming. Iris, when Julia was in Aunt Maureen’s house, no longer seemed to send Julia to get anything at all from her room. She was suddenly full of energy herself, running up and down the stairs, singing as she went. ‘Someone’s happy,’ Julia’s mother would comment, but in an ominous tone, followed by a further remark, ‘Let’s hope it lasts.’ Julia asked why it would not and her mother shook her head and said, ‘Julia, Julia.’

  Finally, Julia accepted that she was never going to be sent to fetch anything from Iris’s room, which left her with no option. She and her mother were at Aunt Maureen’s house for tea, as they often were these days, with so much about the approaching wedding to discuss, and Julia was left to amuse herself, which she usually did by reading in the sitting room, away from the kitchen where her mother and aunt were talking. She put her book down on the sofa, and said out loud, ‘I am just going to the bathroom.’ Indeed, she would go to the bathroom, she needed to. Up the stairs she went, making sure she could be heard if either her mother or her aunt cared to listen, plodding heavily on each stair, and when she got to the bathroom she opened, then closed, the door noisily. No reason why she shouldn’t be in there quite some time. Then she slipped into Iris’s bedroom, went straight to the bedside cabinet, and opened the drawer.

  Reginald’s secret gift was no longer there.

  The wedding was as quiet and simple as Iris had wanted it to be. Julia wore a blue-and-white flowery dress she already owned, but being a bridesmaid turned out this time to be meaningless. All she did was stand beside Iris for the photographs which, this time, were taken at home in the garden. There were only thirty guests for the lunch at an Italian restaurant, owned by Carlo’s uncle. No speeches. Carlo kissed Iris lovingly, and everyone cheered and clapped.

  Julia sulked throughout.

  The conference room was not even half full, which would upset the speakers, Julia thought, and most people were sitting well to the back, leaving the first four rows entirely empty. She sat in the fifth, an aisle seat, as she had intended, though it was obvious that it would be impossible to slip out undetected. She would have to last the course, however boring it turned
out to be.

  The first speaker, the man who had written the book on childhood trauma and its effect on later life, was clearly nervous, though it couldn’t have been the first time he’d spoken at such an event. He had not just notes for a talk but the entire talk itself written out. Never once did he lift his eyes from the paper in front of him on the lectern. His audience might as well not have been there. Julia felt that in the circumstances it was excusable to close her eyes, and once she had done, aided by the monotone he delivered his talk in, she began to drift. Only certain words the speaker was using penetrated the haze which descended on her – ‘retrograde’, ‘cognitive’, ‘simulation’ – all quite unconnected. There was no applause at the end, but the speaker didn’t seem to expect any, moving straight on from his last sentence to ask ‘Any questions?’ Julia would like to have asked why he had not troubled to explain his definition of ‘trauma’, which these days had become an overused word constantly applied to situations which no psychologist would describe as traumatic. But she kept silent, as did everyone else. She saw the speaker smile as he gathered up his sheets of paper. Clearly, he thought that no questions had been forthcoming because he had cleverly answered them all in advance.

  The next speaker was a woman whose name was unfamiliar to Julia. Glancing at the programme she saw that this was a clinical psychologist who had previously and most unusually been a police officer. The jump from one profession to another obviously couldn’t have been easy. It hadn’t been easy for Julia herself, switching from teaching, and having to take the accredited psychology conversion course, and what this woman had done had entailed far more studying, so Julia was instantly impressed. The woman was self-possessed rather than confident, rather stiff in manner but her expression was pleasant. She introduced herself with a smile, looking along the rows of people steadily as she spoke. She stood, not in front of the lectern, but to its left, resting her right hand upon it, where she had placed some notes. But these notes were not consulted. She had either memorised what she wanted to say, or else was speaking off the cuff. She told her audience, first of all, about her experience of being a police officer and how it had brought her into touch with the more violent crimes committed by children. It was always difficult, she said, for an adult to believe that a child could intend to kill somebody, ‘intend’ being the crucial word. She had, she went on, begun to think that she didn’t understand how a child’s mind worked, and this had led to her change of profession. She had wanted to know how a child thought, how this was different from how an adult thought, and what she wanted to talk about was her realisation that some children do not think in a childlike way. Some children, so far as cognitive development goes, are mature far beyond their years. They can think like an adult and they can carry those thoughts through to behaving like an adult. ‘And that,’ said the woman, ‘is both alarming and challenging.’ Exactly, thought Julia. She recalled the day she’d realised this herself, faced with a ten-year-old girl in a class she was teaching who had shown a cunning Julia had been astounded by. It had been the start of her own determination to try to understand how a child’s mind does work.

  ‘Could you kill someone?’ Julia once asked her friend Caroline. They were walking through a cemetery at the time, a short cut on their way home from school.

  ‘Kill someone?’ Caroline said, ‘I wouldn’t know how.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of the method,’ Julia said, ‘I was thinking of wanting to do it. Do you think you could hate someone enough to want to kill them and think of doing it?’

  ‘No,’ said Caroline.

  ‘I could,’ Julia said.

  ‘But you wouldn’t really,’ Caroline said, ‘not when it came to the bit.’

  ‘I might,’ Julia said, ‘I nearly killed a cat once – with a spade. It was attacking a little puppy in the garden next door. I saw it over the wall, a big, black tomcat with its claws digging into the puppy’s back, and I took a spade and jumped over the wall and bashed the cat. I could have killed it.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ said Caroline.

  ‘No. But only because the puppy’s owner heard the screeching and came out.’

  ‘Lucky, then,’ said Caroline.

  ‘Lucky, why?’

  ‘Well, killing anything is wrong, isn’t it?’ Caroline said.

  ‘Oh, Caroline, you’re such a goody-goody.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Caroline.

  They walked on through the cemetery in silence. When they were almost at the top of the main path, near the grave of a woman about whom it was said on the stone ‘She was ever quiet’ (which always amused them), Julia spoke again.

  ‘What I meant was could you hate someone enough to think about killing them?’

  ‘I’ve never hated anyone,’ Caroline said.

  ‘You haven’t?’ Julia was incredulous. ‘But if you did, if someone came into your life and made it a misery, and was cruel, wouldn’t you hate them then?’

  ‘Probably,’ Caroline said, ‘but hating them wouldn’t make me try to kill them.’

  ‘It would make me want to,’ said Julia.

  ‘Well, that’s where we differ,’ Caroline said, ‘and anyway, I don’t believe you would kill anyone. Don’t be silly.’

  Julia said nothing. Her mind, she knew, worked in a different way from Caroline’s. She was beginning to think it worked in a different way from everyone’s. She wished someone would explain how minds did work.

  Iris had another baby, nine months (‘to the day’ Aunt Maureen kept saying, with emphasis, which puzzled Julia) after she and Carlo married. It was a girl. ‘Just as well,’ Aunt Maureen said, and this time Julia understood. Julia and her mother saw the baby, named Elsa, often. Just as with little Reggie, they helped look after Elsa, taking her for walks in her pram. This was not a Silver Cross pram. It was another pram called a buggy, what Aunt Maureen said was ‘a new fangled sort’. The body could be lifted off the wheels and served as a carrycot, and the rest of the pram could be folded up and put in the boot of a car. It was dark green in colour and not at all impressive, in Julia’s opinion, but Iris and Carlo were pleased with it. By now, Julia was taller and, since the pram was smaller, she could push it easily. The days of having difficulty going up and down kerbs were over.

  Julia was entrusted, from almost the beginning, with taking Elsa for walks. Just up and down the road, not to the park. The first time she pushed the pram, her mother stood at the gate and watched her. Julia counted her steps to the first kerb. Sixty. When she reached it, her mother called out ‘Now turn, carefully!’ and she turned the pram with exaggerated care. Her mother made her walk up and down twice more, then said, ‘You’ve got the hang of it.’ After that, she was often ordered to take Elsa for a walk up and down the road. It was a very dull walk. At the time of these walks, nobody ever seemed to come out of the houses. The whole road appeared in a deep sleep. Julia looked at the gardens and, as ever, saw no activity, not even a lawn being mowed, even though all the lawns were trim and obviously must be regularly mowed. She was so bored.

  Julia, on these promenades, wished something would happen. Anything, it didn’t matter what. And yet, even though she was longing for some drama, there was often the old uncomfortable feeling in her stomach. It always began, this churned-up sensation, as she approached the first kerb and the moment to turn the pram. She knew she could do it without any trouble so it wasn’t nervousness that made her feel churned up. On the way back along the road, the feeling disappeared, but then it would return the next time she approached the same spot. Julia tried experimenting. She stopped a good couple of yards from the kerb and turned the pram early. This worked quite well; she still felt a bit funny towards the moment of turning but nothing like she had felt before.

  Iris had another baby, ten months after Elsa was born. ‘Far too soon,’ Aunt Maureen said, sounding quite cross. Julia asked why it was too soon, and was told that it was better for children to be spaced out. Her following ‘why’ was treated to an exasperated �
��because’. This too-soon baby was also a girl. This time Aunt Maureen didn’t say it was just as well. What she said was ‘a pity, but never mind’. Julia correctly supposed that this meant Aunt Maureen wanted the baby to be a boy. The new baby was named Francesca, after Carlo’s Italian grandmother, which Aunt Maureen thought ‘unnecessary’. Fran, as she quickly became known, had Carlo’s black curly hair whereas Elsa’s was fair, like Iris’s. ‘You wouldn’t know they were sisters,’ Aunt Maureen commented. Julia couldn’t interpret her tone. But Julia’s mother reprimanded Aunt Maureen, saying something Julia found interesting. ‘Really, Maureen,’ she said, ‘just because they have different hair. We have different hair. People never thought we were sisters.’

  Julia looked at her mother’s hair and at Aunt Maureen’s hair. She couldn’t see much difference. They both had brown hair. Aunt Maureen’s was maybe a little more stylish, but then she went to the hairdresser every month to have it cut whereas Julia’s mother only went about twice a year, and in the meantime trimmed it herself. Julia knew, though, that there was a deeper meaning to her mother’s comment. It often seemed to her that her mother and her aunt were engaged in some sort of complicated battle but what this battle was about baffled her. Sometimes she sensed that her aunt was winning, even though she didn’t know exactly what was being won, and sometimes it was her mother who gave off a victorious air. Once, Julia had asked her mother if she liked Aunt Maureen. ‘Like?’ her mother replied, and then again, with emphasis, ‘Like? We’re sisters, Julia.’ This was obviously supposed to satisfy Julia but it didn’t. She pondered the information deeply and came to the conclusion that if you had a sister there was no choice about liking her.