The Unknown Bridesmaid

by Margaret Forster

  ‘When do you think we will be summoned again?’ She kept her voice low and light so as not to enrage her mother more than was necessary.

  But her mother was instantly provoked to attack. ‘Why are you suddenly so keen on that lot? What’s that family to you? What do you think you are to them? Iris might have asked you to be her bridesmaid, but has she ever shown any real interest in you? Even after your father was killed? Has she ever sent you anything for your birthday or a little something for your Christmas stocking? No, she has not. I’d be ashamed if I were them, ashamed.’

  There was a long silence. Julia didn’t dare to point out to her mother that this tirade was not a reply to her question. The best thing to do was keep quiet and hope that eventually her mother would realise she hadn’t answered and would go into another reply which might be more informative.

  ‘Summoned?’ she queried after a good few minutes. ‘Summoned, did you say?’

  ‘You said it,’ Julia said, her tone cautious, the accusation of being cheeky hovering in the air. ‘You said we only see Iris when Aunt Maureen summons us.’

  Julia’s mother nodded, inexplicably pleased with this explanation. ‘Well then, there you are. We’ll get summoned if there’s another wedding or a funeral.’

  Julia sat thinking about this. How could there be another wedding when Iris was an only child, just as she was, and she was already now married? And who would a funeral be for? Who was likely to die? But then her own father hadn’t been likely to die. He’d had an accident involving a chainsaw which had slipped (Julia had been spared the details). She’d heard him described by people as having been the strongest, most fit man they’d ever known. So maybe Aunt Maureen or Uncle Tom would have an accident of some sort and there would be a funeral and she and her mother would be summoned and she would see Iris again and give her Reginald’s present.

  Julia agonised over what to do for another three days, then decided she would have to tell her mother. It was silly to wait for a funeral and a summons that might not come for years. Reginald would have found out by now that Iris had not been given the secret present and he would want to know what Julia had done with it. Over breakfast Julia tried to catch her mother’s attention.

  ‘Mum,’ she said, and at that moment the telephone rang.

  ‘Get that, Julia,’ her mother said, ‘though I don’t know who can be ringing at this time of the morning.’

  Julia obediently answered the phone. It was her Uncle Tom, his voice hoarse, as though he had a terrible cold. He told her he needed to speak to her mother. Julia relayed this message, and saw a peculiar expression cross her mother’s face as she dried her hands and turned from the sink to go over to the alcove where the phone rested. Julia had never seen this look on her mother’s face before and couldn’t quite interpret it. Excitement was there, and eagerness, but also something else. Dread? Julia didn’t know.

  After that, things happened quickly. Julia was told to pack her nightdress and a change of underclothes in a bag, and then put her coat on and stand at the window watching for the taxi.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘Manchester, to your aunt and uncle’s, now hurry up.’

  Julia fairly skipped up the stairs, delighted to be returning to Manchester. All the problems about Reginald’s present would be solved. She put the present in her bag and resolved to slip it into Iris’s room as soon as she got to her aunt’s house. She’d remembered her aunt say that Iris would be returning, after the brief honeymoon, before going to live in the married quarters of Reginald’s regiment. She had a lot of stuff to sort out and take, and Uncle Tom was going to drive her there. Julia was smiling and humming with relief as she put her coat on and took up her position at the window.

  ‘Take that silly grin off your face,’ her mother snapped, ‘we’re going to a house of mourning.’

  Julia put off writing her report on Honor Brooks for as long as possible. There seemed so much doubt about so many aspects of the case and she hadn’t been able to resolve them to her own satisfaction never mind to other people’s. Honor was an enigma. Her mother, on the other hand, was not. There was no need to wonder what part she had played in all this, or what she thought about Honor. She was absolutely sure that her daughter was guilty and had fully intended to do what she had done. She wanted Honor ‘dealt with’, as she put it. ‘There must be places where they treat girls like Honor,’ she said, and added, ‘she isn’t safe, mixing with normal children, I mean the other children aren’t safe, not after what she’s done.’

  But that was the point: what had Honor done? The baby was dead. That was indisputable. Honor had been the last person known to have touched her. That was admitted by her. She went into the baby’s room because she heard her crying and she picked her up, trying to comfort her, and she cuddled her. Cuddled? The word and its meaning had been gone over and over. How hard had the three-week-old baby been cuddled? How had Honor held her? Over her shoulder? Tight to her chest? And for how long? Till she stopped crying, at any rate. Then Honor put the baby back in the cradle and went downstairs where her mother and her friend, the baby’s mother, were talking. ‘Is the baby asleep now?’ the friend, the mother, had asked, and Honor had not replied. She walked straight out into the garden and kicked a tennis ball lying on the grass. This was made much of by Mrs Brooks. The ignoring of the enquiry about whether the baby was asleep and then the kicking of the ball were in her opinion proof of guilt.

  In all Julia’s experience, she had never come across any mother who did not attempt at least some sort of defence of her child. Most mothers were aggressively defensive, no matter how damning the evidence. It troubled Julia a great deal that Mrs Brooks was so antagonistic towards her own daughter. Why? Where were the seeds of this buried?

  She resolved to have one final interview with Honor.

  Today, Honor was wearing a strange assortment of garments whereas previously she had been in her school uniform. Julia studied them. Nothing remarkable about the jeans, except that they seemed too big for the child, but the frilly apricot-coloured dress worn over a long-sleeved red T-shirt was startling. The colours clashed. The scarlet fighting with the almost-orange, and the material of the dress, gauze-like, looked odd stretched over the cotton T-shirt. Maybe, Julia thought, I am out of touch with what eight-year-old girls choose to wear. It crossed her mind that her mother must have allowed Honor to do just that, ‘choose’ her own clothes. Surely she herself would never have selected this outfit?

  To mention the clothes or not . . . Julia hesitated. Best not to make too much of them, probably. She invited Honor to sit on the large beanbag, telling her how comfortable it was to settle into. Other children enjoyed hurling themselves onto the bright blue canvas, but Honor treated it as though it were a straight-backed wooden chair, lowering herself carefully onto it, refusing to surrender her body to it. Her arms were braced either side, her hands clutching the canvas. She looked awkward, ill at ease, so much so that Julia felt she had to ask her if she would prefer to sit on an ordinary chair. Honor said she was OK. There was a defiance in her expression which Julia read as a refusal to give in to the idea of moving. She was going to sit where she’d been told to sit however uncomfortable she was. It meant some kind of victory, though over what Julia wasn’t sure.

  It was half-term, hence no school uniform. Even though Honor had not been at school since the baby died, she had always been wearing this uniform until now. Her mother said it made the home schooling seem more school-like if Honor wore her uniform, and Julia agreed she could see that this might be true. But this week was the official half-term, and so Honor’s tutor had been told not to come though she had been willing to.

  Julia wondered, aloud, what Honor had been doing this week.

  Honor shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  Julia said that must be very boring for her.

  Honor shrugged again, and said, ‘Don’t mind.’

  ‘You don’t mind being bored?’ Julia asked,
keeping disbelief out of her tone. ‘That’s interesting. When I’m bored, I mind it. I want something to do, or something to happen.’

  Honor neither shrugged nor spoke. She just stared at Julia, and waited.

  The day the baby died was a Saturday. Leila Brooks and Honor had arrived at around two in the afternoon. Leila’s friend, the mother of the baby, had made coffee for Leila and given Honor some apple juice. She’d also provided cupcakes, apologising for not having baked them herself. They were iced, a selection of pink, yellow and chocolate. Leila declined a cupcake but Honor had two and would have accepted a third if her mother had not admonished her for greed. All this detail – the time of arrival at the friend’s house, the cupcakes, etc. – had been gone over many times. None of it was important except that attention to detail helped to recreate the atmosphere of the afternoon and through doing that there was the hope that the truth of exactly what had happened might emerge. But it had not emerged. There was no clear medical evidence that the baby had been in any provable way harmed by Honor. She had been the last person to touch the baby, a fact freely admitted, so there had not been any real need for forensic tests to confirm this, though they had been carried out anyway. It was the baby’s mother who was convinced that Honor had harmed the baby. Mrs Brooks had come to believe this too. They thought Honor had smothered the baby, pressed her so tightly to her chest or shoulder that she had been asphyxiated. But there was no evidence of this. It was a cot death.

  Julia had a hospital appointment. She resolved to spend the time sitting in the clinic profitably. She would sit with her eyes closed, thinking about Honor Brooks and what she should write in her report. Forcing herself to concentrate hard would make the waiting more tolerable.

  Right, she told herself, once she was seated in the corridor between a large man who had a plaster covering his left cheek, which he kept touching, and a pregnant young woman who was turning the pages of a magazine, turning them noisily and quickly, appearing to pay no attention to the contents – right, concentrate.

  II

  CLAIRE SMILED, ALL the time. Julia found herself smiling back, as one does. The child had the sort of face which was made for smiling, her cheeks plump, the face itself broad, her complexion pink-and-white. A pleasant, amiable face, a pleasure to look at. But the expression upon it, in spite of the smile, was bland. There was no sincere happiness there, though the smile tried to give the impression that there was. The eyes, perhaps? Did they give away what the smile tried to cover up? Julia wondered about this. The eyes were slightly hooded, odd in such a young girl. Julia wasn’t sure whether this was because Claire was tired, or it was just that the upper lids of her eyes were formed that way.

  She sat comfortably on the beanbag, hands clasped in front of her, on her lap. She’d arranged her skirt carefully. Julia had seen her do it. She’d smoothed the material so that it covered her knees, and patted down the folds either side. She looked, Julia thought, like one of the original illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Her dress had a sash, and she wore a velvet headband on her long, fair hair. Old-fashioned. Her socks, knee-high socks, were white, and her shoes, Mary-Jane style, were black patent leather. Julia wondered what other children thought of Claire’s attire. Looking at the notes, she thought it unlikely that the girl moved in circles where these clothes were normal.

  ‘So, Claire,’ Julia said, ‘how old are you?’ She knew precisely how old Claire was, but this harmless question was as good an opening as any. Claire replied that she was eight and a half. Her smile grew even broader, and she started to fiddle with her hair, taking hold of one piece and twirling it round her finger. It looked a winsome gesture, but Julia wasn’t sure if this was intentional. Was the girl, after all, nervous? It would be understandable if she was. A lot had happened in her young life recently. Probably it had not been fully explained to her why she was here. Some children challenged Julia straight away, asking quite truculently who she was and why she was questioning them. Julia rather liked that kind of spirited approach. It meant things moved on quickly. But Claire was not one of those children. She was not going to challenge Julia in any way. This was going to be a slow business.

  Claire was good at smiling but not at talking, and not at revealing her true feelings.

  This time, they were met at Manchester station. Uncle Tom, dressed in a black suit and wearing a black tie, was waiting on the platform. ‘Tom,’ Julia’s mother said, and put her hand on his shoulder. Tom didn’t speak. He shook his head and sighed and picked up their bags. Slowly, the three of them walked through the thundering noise of the station, none of them speaking, but then, Julia thought, they wouldn’t have been able to hear each other anyway.

  In the car, it could have been different, but no one spoke there either. Uncle Tom drove carefully through the rain-lashed streets, the noise of his squeaky windscreen wipers the only sound. It was a long drive. Outside the garage of his house, he stopped the car, just short of its doors, and said Julia and her mother had best get out here because space was tight in the garage. ‘Don’t ring the bell,’ he said, ‘she’ll have been watching for you coming.’ He was right. The front door was open, and Aunt Maureen was standing there. Julia didn’t know what she had expected but it was not what she saw. Aunt Maureen’s face had changed almost beyond recognition. Her eyes were slits set in ugly red circles, and her mouth looked strange, its lips clenched together. She ushered them out of the rain and into the house, and then stood with her back against the front door, as though bracing herself. ‘Tea, Maureen,’ Julia’s mother said firmly. ‘It would be nice to have some proper tea after that train muck.’ Julia felt faintly ashamed. Shouldn’t her mother have said something different?

  It was ages until they saw Iris. Tea was brewed and drunk and Aunt Maureen talked, though saying repeatedly that she couldn’t talk. Julia kept her head down and listened. She didn’t make the mistake of asking any questions though there were lots of things she didn’t understand. Her mother didn’t ask any either. By the time Aunt Maureen had made a second pot of tea, though the first pot was not yet emptied and neither Julia’s mother nor Uncle Tom had finished what was in their cups, Julia had picked up that Reginald had been shot by a sniper while he was on patrol. There was mention of three letters, ‘I’ and ‘R’ and ‘A’, which Julia realised were significant but she didn’t know what they stood for. Her mother seemed to, though, and Uncle Tom certainly did. The three letters IRA were, he said ‘murdering bastards’. Nobody objected to this description. Julia said the two words to herself over and over, excited by them. ‘I don’t know why,’ her mother said, ‘we don’t just leave Ireland to the Irish and get out of there, let them fight it out among themselves.’

  Eventually, Aunt Maureen led the way upstairs to Iris’s room. They went up in single file, Julia the last. She fingered the secret present in her pocket, determined that whatever happened she would leave it in Iris’s room even if she couldn’t manage to give it to Iris herself. It made her agitated, thinking of Reginald dead and his present ungiven. Had he asked Iris about it while they were on their all-too-short honeymoon? Had he died reproaching Julia? She felt she might be sick, just imagining this, imagining his face as he told Iris he had given the youngest bridesmaid a present for her, and where was it?

  Iris was in bed. The curtains were pulled tight shut but the material was not thick and there was some dim daylight in the room. The bedcovers were right up to Iris’s chin. For a moment, Julia thought Iris, too, might now be dead. Her heart began to thud and she tightened her grip on the little package in her pocket. Her mother went up to the bed and looked down at Iris. ‘Come on now, Iris,’ she said, ‘this is no good. You have to eat, you have to get up, or you’ll make yourself ill, and what good would that do?’ Iris didn’t reply. Aunt Maureen opened the curtains a bit, so that Julia saw Iris’s face properly. She hadn’t been crying. That surprised Julia. Iris was very pale but there were no traces of tears on her cheeks and her eyes were not tear-filled.
She was staring at the ceiling, seeming mesmerised by the dangling lampshade. ‘Julia,’ her mother said, her voice sounding indecently loud, ‘sit with Iris while Aunt Maureen and I make Iris a nice snack. We’ll bring it up on a tray.’ Julia was horrified. She dreaded being left alone with this frightening new Iris, so still and silent, but her mother left the room quickly, pulling her sister with her.

  The time to give Iris Reginald’s present had come. Clearing her throat, Julia went up to the bed, on her tiptoes, and whispered, ‘Iris, this is something Reginald gave me for you.’ She held out the present, but Iris didn’t take it. She just went on staring at the ceiling. Julia wondered if grief, or shock, had perhaps made her cousin deaf. She went even nearer, and repeated what she had just said, adding that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to deliver the present earlier. Iris took not the slightest notice of her. Cautiously, Julia put the present on the pillow, beside Iris’s head. Iris ignored it. Julia wondered if she should offer to unwrap it, but decided not to. She went on standing nervously by the bed, acutely aware of the rain splattering against the window, and of the sound of a kettle boiling hysterically in the kitchen below, a shriek that seemed to go on forever before it stopped abruptly.

  There was something she should say to Iris, something she had the uneasy feeling her mother should have said. Sorry? No, that wasn’t right. Sorry wouldn’t do. Nothing would do, which was perhaps why her mother hadn’t attempted any words of comfort. All the feeling in Julia rose up in her throat, an awful disturbance coming from her stomach and threatening to make her vomit. The pressure of wanting to say something and not knowing what to say, or how to say it, made her whimper with panic. It was lucky that her mother returned then, carrying a tray upon which rested a cup of tea, gently steaming, and a slice of toast, cut into triangles. ‘Come on, Iris,’ her mother said. ‘Put a pillow behind her head, another pillow to prop her up,’ her mother instructed her sister. ‘Just do it.’ Aunt Maureen obeyed, struggling to do what she had been ordered to do, and the present rolled off the first pillow and onto the floor. It made no noise. The floor was carpeted and the present was light. Nobody except Julia saw it happen. She drew no attention to it. She let it lie there, almost under the bed. Iris, when eventually she got out of bed, which Julia reasoned she was bound to do, would find it. If she didn’t, Aunt Maureen would, when she next hoovered the carpet.