The Unknown Bridesmaid

by Margaret Forster

  The shop had been crowded. No one had seen the accused take the baby out, though plenty had seen the mother battling with the destructive three-year-old. CCTV cameras showed the accused walking at a leisurely pace out of the shop and across the car park into the street beyond. After that, there was no trace of her, but the last image showed her about to turn left. Left led to the high street. It took five minutes for the alarm to be raised in the supermarket and another five for the supermarket to be thoroughly searched. The police were then called, and they arrived eight minutes later. Descriptions of the child were taken from the mother, who was incoherent with distress. First she said the little girl had been wearing a blue jacket and then that the jacket was red. She couldn’t remember what make the buggy was, but thought it was a Maclaren or maybe a Mothercare. The only distinguishing feature she came up with was that the child was wearing a white hat with ear flaps, bought the day before, brand new, made of faux fur.

  A police car toured the high street looking for the child but, though there were plenty of children in buggies being trundled about by mothers, and several were stopped, none contained the missing child. An appeal went out on local radio, emphasis laid on the white hat, and it was this which brought the response leading to the discovery of the child in the accused woman’s flat. The accused, known to have no children, had been noticed wheeling a buggy into the lift of her block. The police had retrieved the child and arrested the accused. Only two hours ten minutes had passed. The child was still asleep and oblivious to what had happened.

  There were medical reports to consider. The accused had a history of miscarriages and of one cot death the year before. This had led to separation from her partner and a three-month period of sick leave. There were no previous charges against the accused, who professed herself deeply sorry and claimed not to know what had come over her. She couldn’t remember taking the child. She couldn’t remember being in the supermarket. All she could remember was finding herself at home, and the buggy with the sleeping child in it, parked in her living room. She claimed that she had been about to ring the police when they arrived.

  The chairman was gentle with her, as Julia had known he would be. She’d sat on the bench with him several times and admired his handling of some tricky cases. In a case like this, what was at issue was whether the accused had, or had not, known what she was doing. Had she experienced a mental blackout, explained by the extreme recent stress she’d been under? Or was this merely a pretence and in reality she deliberately stole the child? Looking at the accused, Julia could not make her own mind up, and listened intently both to the chairman’s questions and the accused’s replies. The woman seemed so extremely calm and collected. Her manner was polite, her answers short, clear, direct. There was no sign of any trauma, but then of course the incident was over days ago. But there was something about her apology for what she had done that struck Julia as false. She did not seem truly contrite, prefacing her ‘very sorry’ with ‘of course’, in a matter-of-fact way, almost briskly.

  They withdrew to confer. No harm had been done, but nevertheless a serious crime had been committed and the case must be referred to the Crown Court, so their discussion was short, merely going over the obvious points. When they went back into the court, and before the chairman could speak, the accused’s solicitor said there was something his client would like to say to the bench before hearing what was to happen to her. The chairman agreed to hear her, and she was once more brought in. She had changed. Gone was the composed demeanour, the confident manner. She seemed to wilt in the box when previously she had stood there straight-backed, head held high. Her voice had altered too. It was suddenly a barely audible whisper which was a strain to catch. ‘I have something to confess,’ she began, and then stopped. The chairman waited a minute or two, and when she failed to continue asked if what she felt the need to confess had any relevance to the taking of the child, because unless she was sure that it had, there was no need, or reason, to make a confession. The woman replied, in a slightly stronger voice: ‘It has, it has, it was the start.’

  They waited.

  Julia didn’t go on to work. She called in, saying she felt ill and was going home to bed, which she did. Once home, she lay down on her bed for a while, without undressing or getting under the duvet, looking out at the branches of the gigantic plane tree, now bare of leaves and its stark black limbs revealing a crow’s nest in the highest fork. The sky behind, showing through the branches, was almost white, any colour bleached out by the cold, or so she fancied. Soothed, she got up and went to her desk and took out a pen, a proper fountain pen she had had since she was a schoolgirl, and now rarely used. She would have to write. She was not up to telephoning. The conversation would be too difficult. Her voice would fail her. And a visit was impossible, the thought of a confrontation unbearable.

  The letter took her most of the rest of the day. She told Iris everything, every little detail, trying to explain, without attempting to justify, her behaviour as a child. She badly wanted to tell her about the woman who had made her bizarre confession in court that day, and the effect it had on her, but she held back. To do so, to tell Iris how this confession acted as a catalyst, would only complicate matters, and she wanted to be direct and simple. The hardest part of the letter was the last bit, where she felt Iris had to be made to believe how she had suffered, that she had not got off scot-free. But saying that, however she said it, however she tried to phrase the truth of what she was saying made her sound self-pitying: poor me, I did wrong but oh how I have been punished by my conscience. She would be burdening Iris, as she had always vowed she would not. To stoop to such a thing was to be despicable.

  She copied out her final version, feeling that once posted she might so wish to blot out what she had written that she would forget it, and she did not want to do so. This was her ‘clean breast’ and she needed evidence that it had been made. Unlike the woman in court that morning, one wrong-doing had not ultimately led to crime. She had been lucky she had managed to turn herself away from lying, stealing, forging and all the other misdemeanours in her young life. For years now she had never even been tempted. She was a good person, law-abiding and dutiful. But the letter to Iris reminded her of what she could have become. She could have been any one of a number of women who had appeared before the bench she sat upon. She felt she had redeemed herself but this redemption was not complete until she unburdened herself to Iris and, at last, accepted the consequences, something she had struggled successfully for so long to persuade herself was not necessary.

  What these consequences would be she could not imagine. It was too frightening.

  Elsa turned up at seven one morning, unannounced, a week after Julia sent her letter to Iris. When Julia opened the door, still in her dressing gown, Elsa said: ‘I thought I’d catch you at this time,’ as though she had just popped in from a few doors down the street, maybe to borrow something. ‘What time do you leave for work?’ she asked as she stepped inside and took off her heavy black coat, hanging it in a familiar way on the hook behind the door.

  ‘About nine,’ Julia said.

  ‘Very civilised,’ Elsa said, and then, ‘Plenty of time for a chat, then. Coffee?’

  Julia felt as though Elsa was offering coffee, not requesting it, but she nodded and said she would just pull on some clothes first. There was something formidable about Elsa now, something threatening that hadn’t been there before. She’d nothing of her mother about her but plenty of her father’s confidence without his charm. Julia tried to remember what she did, what her job was, whether she was married and had children, all of which information Iris would definitely have told her in the letters she’d gone on writing even though they were never answered. A manager, that was it, a manager of a firm that made kitchenware of some sort. And she didn’t have children, nor was she married, but she had a partner who Carlo hadn’t liked.

  She dressed distractedly, barely noticing what she was choosing to put on, and then went straight
to the kitchen and made coffee. Elsa was in the living room, examining the bookshelves.

  ‘Heavy stuff,’ she said, ‘not much light reading, is there?’

  Julia didn’t reply. She set the coffee down, and gestured that Elsa should help herself to milk or sugar.

  ‘Good coffee,’ Elsa said, after the first sip. ‘Dad would approve. Do you remember how—’

  But Julia stopped her. ‘Elsa,’ she said, ‘you haven’t come here to discuss coffee. You’ve come about the letter I wrote to your mother, haven’t you? So shall we get straight to the point, whatever it is? Then you can go home and I can go to work.’

  Elsa drank some more coffee, then replaced her cup on the table in front of her. ‘The point,’ she said. ‘That’s very you, Julia. Not “How are you, Elsa?” but wanting to go straight to the point. Wanting there to be something as simple as a point.’ Then she reached into the bag she had with her and drew out a letter. Julia could see her own handwriting on the envelope. Elsa put the letter beside the coffee cup.

  There was an absolute silence between them. Julia’s face felt hot, her hands, holding her own cup of coffee, sweaty. This was a game Elsa was enjoying, but the nature of the game was mysterious. Julia realised she was meant to feel uncomfortable. Well, she did. But why should she feel this, merely confronted with her own letter? She cleared her throat, and then said, ‘I see that’s the letter I wrote to Iris. Presumably she gave it to you to read.’

  ‘No,’ Elsa said, ‘she didn’t. She’s never seen it, never read it.’

  ‘So you open your mother’s letters?’ Julia said.

  ‘At her request,’ Elsa said. ‘She has cataracts in both eyes and can’t make out any print. She’s due to have them done next week. Privately. Expensively. But she’s nervous, and wanted the best person. You’ll remember how timid she can be.’

  It was hopeless. Julia felt suddenly faint, baffled by Elsa’s attitude, weakened by her obvious strength. Elsa was waiting for a reaction now, but she couldn’t summon one up. She felt humiliated, embarrassed. Then she tried to shake off these feelings, to become more herself, assertive and calm.

  ‘Elsa,’ she said, pleased that her voice had regained its normal level, ‘obviously, you’ve read the letter and, obviously, you’ve come here to say something about it, so can you just say it, and then go? The letter wasn’t intended for anyone except Iris, and I’m sorry you had to read it.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be sorry,’ Elsa said, ‘I’m glad I’ve read it. It explains a lot. I always knew you were a nasty bit of work and now I have the proof.’

  Julia stood up. ‘You’ve said your bit,’ she said to Elsa, ‘so well done, that’s enough.’

  ‘It isn’t enough,’ Elsa snapped, ‘so you just sit down again. My mother, when she can read again, is never going to be shown your disgusting letter, the letter you’re so proud of, full of your own virtue. It would cause her the most awful distress, not that you’d care about that.’

  ‘Of course I’d care,’ Julia interrupted, ‘I do care, how can you think I don’t? That was what the letter was about, how much I—’

  ‘What your letter was about,’ said Elsa, ‘was you. That’s all. How you’d suffered, how you’d had to endure all this guilt, how unlucky, unfortunate, all the rest, you’d been, and how brilliantly you’d risen above all this “suffering”, how well you’d done to come through it and make something of your life when you could so easily have slipped into a life of crime. That’s what your letter is about. You never once, in it, try to put yourself in my mum’s place. Do you think she ever wanted to take you into her family? Do you? Can’t you see how my grandmother bullied her? How she couldn’t face it, knowing what you were like, so she forced my mum and dad to have you? Your mother was nothing but trouble and you were the same, so don’t give me all this how you suffered.’

  Elsa was quite breathless with fury. Julia kept silent, waited again. It was no good attempting to defend herself, or to pick on the outrageous accusation that her own mother had been ‘nothing but trouble’. Her professional self took over, and she waited, doing nothing to provoke Elsa further. At some stage, Elsa would have to go. It was just a question of how long this would take, and of whether Elsa had more to say. Was venting her rage enough? Or did she want something? Julia couldn’t decide. She told herself she didn’t have to. All the cards were in Elsa’s hands, and held very close still to her chest.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ Elsa suddenly said, ‘I may not be as clever as you think you are, but I’m not stupid. I know there’s nothing I can do about what’s in this letter, all the admissions in it. Is admissions the right word? Probably not. But you know what I mean, I’m sure. There were suspicions, at the time, about you, did you know that? No, you didn’t. Mum never told me, or Fran, about her baby boy dying, but Grandma did. You were the last person to touch the baby, everyone knew that. You’d said yourself that you tucked him in when he was asleep. No one knew you’d taken him for the walk you describe in your letter, but they knew you’d touched the pram. Grandma went over and over it, how she wouldn’t have put anything past you. But there was no proof. There still isn’t. It’s all maybe a possibility on that score. Mum doesn’t need to know about that walk and you tipping the pram, but you haven’t the wit to see it, what it would do, for all your training. Just keep your mouth shut. That’s the least you can do.’ Then Elsa leaned forward and tore the letter into tiny pieces. ‘That’s what I think of your wretched letter,’ she said, and stood up. ‘Feel guilty some more,’ she said. ‘Feel guilty till the day you die. You deserve to. It isn’t so easy to offload, it sticks, it will go on sticking.’

  Elsa stood up and went in search of her coat. Julia felt obliged to follow her, feeling as she did so like a little whipped dog. She watched Elsa put her coat on and button it up, and then she was out of the front door without any goodbye, slamming it behind her.

  Weeks it took, to recover from Elsa’s dramatic visit. Again and again, Julia shifted her opinion of what had been said, first seeing it was a mindless rant and then realising it had been no such thing and that there were elements within it she would be unwise to ignore. She wished, of course, that she had never written to Iris. It was a stupid thing to have done, as she had always known it would be if she gave in to the temptation to do it. Exactly why she had succumbed to the need to write such a letter she couldn’t understand, except that it had had a lot to do with the confession made by the woman in the dock that morning. Julia had watched her closely as she listed a whole string of familiar minor crimes in astonishing detail. Going back over two decades, she had itemised every article she had successfully stolen, able to name the shops, the prices, and the dates the thefts took place. She had smuggled drugs into the country several times (small amounts) without being detected and sold them afterwards. The admissions went on and on, though both her own horrified solicitor and the chairman tried to call a halt. Finally silenced, in the middle of recalling ludicrously trivial motoring offences, the woman had smiled, and sighed, and looked hugely relieved.

  Julia, leaving the courtroom later that morning, carried in her mind a picture of this woman’s excitement during her confession. She was, if not mentally unbalanced, certainly not in possession of all her faculties. But, as the chairman pointed out afterwards, there was an element of conscious boasting in what she’d insisted on telling them. She wanted people to know how clever she’d been, how easy she’d proved it was to steal and cheat. This boasting, though, was also masochistic. She craved punishment, the chairman thought. This last suggestion stuck with Julia. She wondered if she herself perhaps had always craved punishment. Had she? No, that was absurd. Forgiveness, then? Possibly. Nothing she’d done to Iris was so very terrible. Iris would tell her this. For heaven’s sake, Julia pet, she would surely say, how can you be dragging all this stuff up, as if it matters now?

  So she’d given in to the impulse she’d suppressed for so long, never imagining Elsa would be the reader of her letter and not I
ris. But then she ought to have foreseen that Iris might very well anyway have shown the letter to her daughters, to share its contents with them and consult them over what to say in reply. It would have been natural. I was a coward, Julia thought, and cowards get their comeuppance. Elsa had been right in what she’d come to say, and now the situation was worse than it had ever been, nothing gained, everything lost, peace of mind unobtainable, unless she did what she should have done in the first place, if she was going to do anything at all.

  ‘Julia!’ Iris said. ‘Well, this is a surprise, goodness it is, I can’t believe it.’ She stood at the open door staring at Julia, checking her out, her eyes going from head to feet and back again, while Julia stayed still, not daring to venture inside without an invitation. I must look, she thought, like the penitent I am.

  Iris had aged, or perhaps it was the recent cataract operations that made her seem much frailer, her walk a little unsteady. She led the way straight into her kitchen, saying she must have a cup of tea immediately to get over the shock. Once the tea was made, and the two of them were seated at the familiar table, she seemed more like her old self. Her expression, though, was not the kindly one that Julia remembered. Instead, it was searching, the eyes quite sharp and she was not smiling.

  ‘Been a long time, Julia,’ she said, ‘a very long time.’

  ‘I know,’ Julia said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You didn’t come to the funeral,’ Iris said, ‘you didn’t pay your respects.’

  ‘No,’ said Julia. ‘I should have done, I know.’

  ‘Why not?’ Iris said. ‘Why cut us off like that? Not a word from you all this time. What did we do wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Julia said. ‘I am the one who’s done wrong, and I’m ashamed.’

  ‘Well then,’ Iris said, ‘we’ll forget it, and start again, shall we?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Julia said. ‘I wrote you a letter. Elsa read it when you couldn’t read, but she didn’t tell you. It was about the past, all the mean things I did, and—’