The Unknown Bridesmaid

by Margaret Forster

  At last, Julia unfolded the page from the magazine enclosed in Sandra’s letter. It seemed to have been taken from a feature about wedding-dress styles over the last fifty years. There were three photographs on this page. The bottom one was of Iris’s first wedding. There she was, in 1973, Reginald at her side, in his uniform. Iris, Reginald and bridesmaids Sylvie and Pat all had their names listed underneath. Then Julia realised that though Sandra was correct, she was in this photograph, her name was not in the caption, which simply said ‘unknown bridesmaid’. Unknown? She felt strangely shocked seeing that word: Unknown? What would it signify to people? Who had sent this photograph to the magazine? Who had not known her?

  But then, still staring at the photograph, Julia thought that she did not know that child either. The description was correct. She was unknown to herself. It was a stage she was beginning to suspect, that all adults reached. She knew that she had been that child but nevertheless the child was a stranger to her and it was distressing.

  She would not reply to Sandra.

  One day, when she was fifteen, Julia came home from school to find the house, as she thought, empty. She banged the door shut as she entered, and waited for her mother to shout ‘Don’t bang the door’, part of the ritual of coming home, but no shout came. Assuming her mother was out, Julia went into the kitchen to look for something to eat, and only after she’d cut herself a piece of cake did she notice there was a pan on the cooker, its contents bubbling away. So her mother wasn’t out. She trailed into the living room and put the television on and half watched Blue Peter. There was homework to do, but she hadn’t the energy yet. When Blue Peter finished, she went back into the kitchen to make some tea and saw that the pan was still bubbling but now there was a slight smell of burning. She lifted the lid and peered in. There was a chicken carcass inside, with only a tiny bit of water at the bottom of the pan. Stock. Her mother had left the chicken bones simmering to make stock, and she’d forgotten it and gone out.

  But her mother never forgot such a thing. She was incapable of leaving the house while a pan was bubbling away. Julia went to the bottom of the stairs and called out, ‘Mum? You’ve left the stock pan on and it’s nearly boiled dry.’ She realised she sounded scornful, and added, ‘I’ve turned it off.’ Then she waited. Even before she mounted the stairs she knew something was wrong. Outside her mother’s bedroom, she hesitated. The door was half open, but she didn’t go in straight away. Maybe her mother was having a nap. But Julia knew this was another impossibility. Her mother had nothing but contempt for those feeble enough (like Aunt Maureen) to need naps in the afternoon. So Julia pushed the door further open and went in. At first, she was relieved to see that her mother did indeed appear to be having a nap. She was lying on her back, her eyes closed, her arms by her side, neatly arranged, slightly tucked into the folds of her skirt. But Julia knew.

  She behaved in an exemplary fashion. Calmly, though she did not feel calm, she went towards the bed and touched her mother’s shoulder, shaking it slightly. No response. ‘Mum!’ she said loudly. There wasn’t a flicker. Julia went back downstairs and rang Aunt Maureen. She got Uncle Tom. He seemed a little irritated by Julia’s call, asking twice if she was sure her mother wasn’t just having a well-earned rest. Julia said she was sure. He came round ten minutes later, in his car, looking grumpy (he’d been watching the cricket), but then when he’d gone upstairs, he changed his attitude.

  If Julia’s mother had suffered from headaches or blurred vision, she hadn’t mentioned them to anyone. No doctors had been consulted. The aneurysm, when it happened, must, everyone said, have taken her by surprise. Much was made of this to Julia. ‘Painless’ was a word used frequently. ‘There would have been no time,’ Aunt Maureen assured her, ‘to worry about you.’ Julia resented this, but said nothing. She said nothing for days. There was plenty of talking around her, but she didn’t take part in it. Everyone was kind, but she hated them all. She longed for them all to go away, but that was the one thing they would not do. She must, they said to each other, never be left alone. There was no doubt about it: she needed her family and must be looked after by them. So she was taken to Aunt Maureen and Uncle Tom’s.

  Nobody consulted her about her future. She was told, gently enough, that though Aunt Maureen and Uncle Tom were her legally appointed guardians she would be going to live with Iris and Carlo and their girls. ‘You’ll be happier there,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘part of a young family instead of stuck with middle-aged folk like your Uncle Tom and me.’ Aunt Maureen seemed to want Julia to be pleased, or so Julia thought, but she was not pleased. She couldn’t take anything in, or find words to express the strangeness she felt. Her mother had ruled her life. Everything she did, or did not do, in some way referred back to her mother. Recently, she had begun to rebel against her mother’s absolute authority but she needed her mother to be there to be rebelled against. Without her presence, there was only a void, and that was frightening.

  For weeks afterwards, going home from school to the Annovazzi house, Julia would find her footsteps coming to a halt at the point where the road to her old home and the road to theirs met at a corner. Sometimes, she took the old route, not because she’d forgotten where she now lived but deliberately, to see how it would feel. How it felt was good. She had no wish to be back in that house. She didn’t feel distressed looking at it. It didn’t make her yearn for her mother (though she did want her to be alive again). She stood on the pavement outside the garden of her old home and looked at it not with longing but something near to contempt. What a miserable house, what a miserable place this was. She had never liked it, she had never liked Manchester. Home, in her head, was in Cumbria, where she was sure she and her mother had been happy. Why her mother chose to come here had never been explained to her, and she wanted to know the reasons now more than ever.

  When she began being able to talk properly once more, Julia asked her Aunt Maureen why her mother had moved to Manchester.

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to fret about that,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’

  ‘But I want to know,’ Julia insisted, ‘it’s important.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘important? It’s all water under the bridge. What’s important about it?’

  Julia just managed to stop short of saying it was important because from that move onwards everything in her life had gone wrong so she needed to know why her mother had chosen to come to this place she hated. There had to be a reason, and perhaps if she knew the reason she might not feel so angry and resentful. But she didn’t say any of this. Confessing a hatred of Manchester might be taken as also hating her aunt and cousin, and she was smart enough to realise this would do her no good. Instead, she said stubbornly, ‘I just want to know, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one day,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘not that there’s much to tell.’ And that was that.

  Julia believed in the theory that dreams were a sort of dustbin for the mind and had no significance. But when she had a particularly clear, vivid dream, in which the sense of reality was so strong that, on waking, she was still within it, she had difficulty accepting that there was no hidden meaning there.

  As a child, after little Reggie died, she didn’t have nightmares. She slept soundlessly, dreamlessly. It was during the day, while she was wide awake and moving through her life, that she had what seemed like waking dreams. She’d be sitting in class, doing something as practical as long-division sums, when there would rise before her a vision of the Silver Cross pram, tilted on its hood, and she’d hear the thump it made on the kerbstone. But it was the next bit that confused her. She would hear voices in her head, as she sat, petrified, pencil clutched in her hand. One of them, she was sure, was her own, pleading, crying, saying over and over that she was sorry, sorry.

  Gradually, these episodes faded and she began to forget they had ever occurred. But then, when her mother died, she had the nightmares she had never had before
. In them, her mother was dragging her along the pavement where she had wheeled the pram but it was no longer a solid pavement. Instead, it had become a river of blood and the level rose and rose until it engulfed her, and her mother, and filled the pram, and the baby floated out of it, and she woke up sweating and terrified. But she was certain the baby was alive.

  Naturally, she told no one about these nightmares and, in time, they, too, became infrequent and finally ceased. But she felt there had been some message there, if only she could interpret it. Whether it was about the baby, or her mother, or merely her own hidden guilt, she could never work out.

  The letter finally arrived: she was appointed a magistrate. The first training session was on a Monday morning. The district judge was dealing with people charged over the weekend, and all Julia and the others had to do was observe. She observed intensely, noting the judge’s decisiveness, which impressed her, but also his politeness towards those charged. There was no harshness in his manner, and she saw how kind he was to anyone obviously terrified that they would immediately be sent to prison. She observed, too, the widely varying demeanours of those accused. Not all of them were nervous. One young woman, accused of stealing a pair of shoes from a chain store, objected violently when the shoes were described as leather, claiming only the uppers were leather and the shoes ‘rubbish’ on examination. She thought she saw the merest suggestion of a suppressed smile on the judge’s face as he gave her a conditional discharge for six months. The woman shrugged when she heard this, as though she didn’t care either way, and Julia felt surprised, expecting her to realise how lucky she’d been.

  Some people did. There was another woman, middle-aged, very soberly and neatly dressed in a grey suit, charged with a driving offence. Her car had neither insurance nor an MOT certificate, and she had been driving it after drinking enough to be just over the limit. She hung her head in what looked like genuine shame, and appeared grateful for the fine she received, obviously having expected worse. Julia was not at all sure that a fine was enough, thinking maybe the woman should automatically be disqualified from driving, but there were apparently extenuating circumstances disclosed to the judge but which they did not hear.

  But the case that worried her most was concerning bailiffs. If the bailiffs managed to gain entry into a household where debts had not been paid they could cart off belongings in payment, though only non-essential goods. The case that morning involved a distress warrant applied for by a managing director of a firm of bailiffs. He wanted permission to seize the belongings of a man who had a wife and four young children and who had defaulted on many and various debts, for the 32-inch plasma TV, a three-piece suite, a stair carpet and a kitchen table among other things. All non-essential items, but Julia immediately visualised the denuded home and the effect on the wife and children. The warrant was granted, and rightly so, but she found herself heartily disliking the bailiff who looked extremely pleased and smug.

  She warned herself sternly against this kind of reaction. It was her job to be impersonal, dispassionate. The law insisted upon it.

  Julia lived with Iris and Carlo and their girls for only three years, but they were years which when they came to an end seemed to have gone on much longer. Those three years seemed, later on, to have almost obscured the years that had gone before. It used to make Julia panic when she found that she could not successfully reconstruct the earlier years. She could not place herself in the house she and her mother had lived in, could not be in it though she could answer any questions about it. When the memory of her mother also began to be less sharp, as painfully sharp as it had once been, she was filled with despair, and also a kind of shame. How could her mother, whose opinions and habits and rules of conduct had filled every moment of her life, how could she fade, becoming instead a vague picture in her head, fuzzy at the edges and entirely silent?

  Yet she was judged to be happy during those years. She heard Aunt Maureen and Iris tell other people how quickly she had ‘settled’, as though she were a bird who had found a nest, and how easily she had fitted into the Annovazzi family, adored by Elsa and Francesca. This, of all the false assumptions made, was, to Julia, the most absurd. There had been no ‘fitting in’. She resented from the very first day being cast in the role of elder sister to her two cousins (she was described to outsiders as the girls’ cousin, though they were her first cousins once removed, a pedantic fact which mattered to her). Once she might have wanted a sister, indeed she could recall clearly wanting one, but now that she had, in effect, two sisters she longed to be an only child again. There was never any privacy, never any real stretch of time to herself. She had her own room, at least, and was grateful for it, but it was either regularly invaded by Elsa in particular, or else she was called out of it to do something for Iris. The Annovazzis in general liked togetherness. They were all highly social animals for whom silence and being on one’s own were afflictions. ‘Are you sulking, Julia?’ Carlo would ask her when she said she was going to her room. ‘What’s the matter, what have we done?’ Told that she was not sulking and that nobody had done anything, that she just wanted to go to her room for a bit and read, Carlo would say ‘Funny girl’, and shake his head. Neither he nor Iris ever stopped Elsa and Fran from following her to her room. Instead, they encouraged them. Julia heard Carlo urging his daughters to ‘Go and cheer Julia up’, a suggestion they followed at once, running up the stairs and pounding their little fists on her door. She always had to open it. If she didn’t, Carlo or Iris would come up and make anxious enquiries about what was wrong with her.

  Homework was the only thing that did give her the right to be shut in her room for an hour or two. Neither Carlo nor Iris knew much about examinations but they were prepared to take them seriously, aware that Julia was clever and might do well. Hard work Carlo certainly understood, and agreed with, whatever kind of hard work was involved. ‘I have a lot of homework tonight’ became the magic password to being allowed seclusion in her room. Julia did the homework, but did it far quicker than Carlo and Iris could possibly have guessed since both of them had laboured over their own homework at school and shuddered at the memory of it. Julia’s bag, bursting with books and files, filled them almost with awe – ‘The weight!’ Iris would exclaim. But most of the stuff crammed into Julia’s bag was not needed for her homework. She kept half of the books there all the time, for the look of the thing. In the hour after she had done her homework, she would often just lie on her bed, thinking, daydreaming, not daring to play music or make any noise in case she gave the game away.

  Her room, which overlooked the garden, was small, but then all the rooms Julia had ever had as her bedroom had been small. She would have liked space, though she was used to her quarters being cramped. There was no room for a bookshelf, but Carlo had put up three planks across an alcove and these were crammed with her books. In front of each line of books she had propped up photographs, some in frames, some not. They were mostly of herself, though the most prominent was of her mother and father, taken on their wedding day. Her mother had always had it on their mantelpiece. It had been dusted daily, and the silver frame polished once a month. But commanding attention though it did, with its posh frame and its size, compared to the other photographs, Julia rarely concentrated her attention on it. It was photographs of her younger self that fascinated, and even troubled, her.

  She would have liked to ask someone about these photographs, someone who had been there when they were taken and had watched her smiling, or trying to smile, for the camera. She wanted reassurance that she really had looked sweet (at three years old), happy (at five), mischievous (at seven) and so on. Most of all, she wanted to ask someone about the photograph of herself at Iris’s wedding, as a bridesmaid – the first wedding. There was a photograph of her on her own, holding the posy of flowers in front of her in an attitude that looked defensive. Julia couldn’t believe that the girl there was herself. She didn’t recognise it at all, though of course she could remember the dress and fl
owers. What she wanted was to be that girl again, and for everything that had happened since the photograph was taken to happen differently. She didn’t want to have lost that girl.

  Once, she had tried to talk to Iris about that photograph and how she felt. Iris was always kind and friendly, but there was rarely any chance to talk to her on her own. Elsa and Fran were always there when Julia got home from school, and when they had been put to bed, Carlo was there, and often other members of his gregarious family. Time alone with Iris was incredibly rare and only happened when Julia was ill with flu or something similar. Then, Iris would make time to bring her hot drinks and literally soothe her forehead with a cold flannel. Iris was always bright and cheerful, assuring Julia that she would be better soon, and asking her if there was anything she wanted, an approach to illness which Julia could distinctly remember had not been her mother’s.

  ‘Iris,’ she murmured, on one such occasion keeping her eyes shut, ‘do you remember that photo of me being taken?’

  ‘Which one, pet?’

  ‘The one of me as a bridesmaid, there,’ and Julia opened her eyes and pointed.

  Iris looked at it for a moment, and then went over to the shelf and picked it up. ‘Yes, of course I do,’ she said, her voice soft, ‘my dad took it,’ and she put it back.

  ‘It doesn’t look like me,’ Julia said, ‘I can’t believe it was me.’

  ‘Well,’ said Iris, ‘we all change, we all grow up.’

  She looked so sad suddenly that Julia felt guilty. She’d reminded Iris of Reginald, that was it, Reginald who had given her the secret present, Reginald whose baby son had died – all those things, things Iris, so far as Julia knew, never talked about. Julia’s mother had approved of how Iris had dealt with two tragedies. She had admired Iris for not allowing them to ‘get her down’, except, naturally, at first, and most of all she had admired how Iris never, ever referred to either Reginald or little Reggie once she had met and was happy with Carlo. ‘An example to us all,’ Julia’s mother had said, and when Julia had asked, ‘An example of what?’ had replied, ‘What do you think, Julia?’ and that had been that.