The penalties were severe. Grounded for a month, and never allowed to have Iris’s car on her own again. But the excitement, the thrill, stayed with Julia, compensating for the aftermath. Whenever she recalled the speed on the motorway, her heart raced, and she had to shut her eyes to relive the experience all over again. Even the car window exploding, and the sight in her mirror of Elsa shielding her head from the glass shards flying in her direction, excited at the same time as frightened her. It was Elsa who had nightmares, not Julia.
Caroline, to Julia’s irritation, was still reminiscing. ‘What about their parents, how are they? They were such nice people. And the grandmother, how about her? I forget her name. She was quite a presence, wasn’t she?’ Julia said yes, Aunt Maureen had been a presence.
The last time Julia had visited her, Aunt Maureen was thought by Iris to be losing her memory. But Maureen told Julia that if she had Alzheimer’s (which she said she did not) nothing really could be done about it. ‘Look at your grandfather,’ she said to Julia, ‘now he had Alzheimer’s, though it wasn’t called that then. Remember him?’
Julia said how could she remember him when he had died before she was born. Both her grandfathers had, and one of her grandmothers. The only grandparent she had a vague recollection of was her father’s mother. She lived in a farmhouse near Alston, in the Pennines, and she had hens, which Julia remembered more clearly than her grandmother.
‘Tell me about him,’ she said to Maureen, a request which led to the pulling out of photograph albums and a happy hour (from Aunt Maureen’s point of view) of looking at people now dead and giving summaries of their faults.
‘The male line in my family has died out,’ Aunt Maureen declared, as she neared the end of the last volume. ‘I had a daughter and your mother had a daughter, and that’s it.’
‘But,’ said Julia, ‘even if Iris and I had brothers the male line wouldn’t have carried on. It was your father, the grandfather with Alzheimer’s, who ended the male line by not having sons.’
‘Oh, it’s the same thing,’ Aunt Maureen said crossly.
One of the photographs of her mother, unusually smart and dressed up, reminded Julia, that day, of her mother’s visit to the solicitor all those years ago. It wasn’t that Julia had forgotten about it but that anything to do with her mother, any memory, was hard for her to deal with. She had trained herself for a very long time not to conjure up images of her mother. They only distressed her. More than that, they frightened her because instead of seeming comfortably solid and reassuring, proof that her mother had existed and loved her, they were insubstantial, lacking all authenticity. And the memory of the day her mother dressed up to go and see a solicitor was particularly troubling. Julia could see her, as she could so often ‘see’ some episode in her past, but she couldn’t put herself in the frame even though she knew she had been in it. She remembered, though, her mother being unlike herself, being nervous and agitated and Aunt Maureen attempting to give her confidence, an unusual state of affairs. When her mother returned, she was abstracted. She couldn’t, Julia suddenly recalled, eat the cakes.
She said this out loud. ‘Mum couldn’t eat the cakes,’ she said. The final album was still open at a photograph of her mother taken at Iris’s wedding to Reginald.
‘What are you talking about?’ Aunt Maureen asked. ‘Cakes? What cakes?’
‘The ones you and I made that day, the day Mum had to go and see a solicitor.’
‘This is a photograph of your mum at Iris’s wedding – there’s no cake in it.’
‘I know that,’ Julia said, ‘I’m not talking about the photograph itself. It’s just that I suddenly remembered about the promise you made, ages ago, to tell me about the visit to the lawyer, when Mum was all dressed up like she was in this photo.’
‘It was a wedding,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘of course she was dressed up.’
Julia knew what she was going to say next, and she did.
‘I can’t remember anything anyway,’ Aunt Maureen said, giving a melodramatic sigh, and passing a hand over her eyes, ‘my memory has gone entirely, so it’s no use bothering me.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Julia said, ‘I’ll have to find out some other way.’
‘Find out what?’ Aunt Maureen said. ‘There’s nothing to find out. You’re always suspecting things, Julia.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Julia said, ‘and I’m usually right. Mum went to see a solicitor that time because something was wrong. It was to do with money, and another woman, wasn’t it?’ She’d made the last bit up, a wild guess which, if it were wrong, would be laughed at by Aunt Maureen.
‘Who told you?’ Aunt Maureen said, suddenly no longer concentrating on being vague.
‘I can’t remember,’ Julia said, playing her aunt’s own game.
‘You can’t trust anyone any more,’ Aunt Maureen said, ‘dragging things up, years later, smearing the dead. Your mother was innocent as a lamb.’
This made Julia smile it was such an unlikely analogy. There’d been nothing lamb-like about her mother. But her smile annoyed Aunt Maureen, and annoyance made her talk. It was a simple enough tale, one Julia had come across often enough in her work. Her father had committed bigamy when he married her mother, nothing more heinous than that. He’d secretly married a girl Aunt Maureen quaintly described as ‘a buxom wench’ when he was eighteen, and then he’d left her and moved away to Manchester where he met Julia’s mother and ‘married’ her. Only after his death did Julia’s mother find out about his first marriage.
There had been a report in the newspapers about the accident that killed Julia’s father, with a photograph of him taken with his wife and child. The first wife, the real wife, saw it, and was shocked. As far as she was concerned, her husband had simply vanished years ago. She didn’t know what had happened to him, and thought he might be dead. But she rang up the newspaper, who sent a reporter to see her, and she told this man her story, producing her marriage certificate. It was, said Aunt Maureen, shown to Julia’s mother, who was incredulous, but obliged to believe the evidence before her. There was then a battle over the insurance money. The first wife claimed it, and started legal proceedings to get it. She claimed the house Julia and her mother were living in, too. The whole business dragged on and on for years, and the day Julia remembered was the day her mother went to hear the final outcome from the solicitor.
There was another embrace from Caroline before they parted. This time Julia felt more comfortable about it. She thought she might even go to her old friend’s wedding, though weddings in her life had never been entirely happy experiences. Standing, waiting for the number 4 bus, she looked up at St Paul’s and tried to remember the churches where she had attended weddings. Not many. But she could recall the church where Iris had married Reginald. She could see that church clearly in her mind’s eye, as she could see everything about that day. When she got on the bus, her head was full of it.
Elsa suddenly shot up in height when she was nearly nine, a growth spurt viewed with alarm by her father. ‘She’s going to be a giantess,’ he exclaimed, and made poor jokes about limiting her food so that she wouldn’t grow any taller. Her hair changed too. She could no longer be described as his golden girl because the gold had dulled to a light, undistinguished brown. The final disaster was that Elsa needed spectacles. Carlo didn’t care for girls in glasses.
Julia observed all these changes in Elsa, and how they affected Carlo, but felt no sympathy for the girl who had to cope with them. Instead, she felt smug. She herself was not tall, and her hair was a rich dark brown, and she didn’t need specs. She was aware that she now compared favourably with Elsa, though she realised that the age gap between them made any comparison false. All the same, she, in that last year she lived with the Annovazzis, constantly drew attention to what were regarded as Elsa’s new defects, addressing her as beanpole, and wondering aloud if she needed a white stick. This sniping was cruel, and she knew it was cruel, but she couldn’t restrain herself. There ha
d always been in her this meanness which every now and again got out of control.
She did nothing about the silver bracelet she’d stolen from Iris’s drawer. She’d thought of planting it somehow on Elsa, but realised this would never work. Elsa, discovering it, would simply be puzzled, and take it to her mother saying, look what I found in my sock drawer, where did it come from? Iris would know she was innocent of having taken it. It was no good either waiting for Iris to miss Reginald’s present and start searching for it because she hadn’t realised it had gone, and might never do so. Stealing it had been stupid, but Julia didn’t replace it, hoping she would suddenly see a way of putting it to use.
It was easier and more effective to sabotage anything Elsa did. She did this very, very carefully, never going too far. She removed things from Elsa’s school bag, things Elsa had packed neatly the night before, and put them in the living room under a cushion or beneath the television, in the shelf that held the video. Elsa would come home from school upset because she’d got a detention after failing to hand in the homework due. She was absolutely certain she’d put the exercise book in her bag, but it hadn’t been there. Carlo would say she was getting careless, the book must be somewhere, and they would all start looking for it, and when it was found Elsa would be left without any defence. No one believed she had ever placed the book in her bag.
This kind of thing was trivial but, to Julia, immensely satisfying. It was wrong, and she knew it was wrong, but nobody was really harmed, not even Elsa. There were other petty pieces of mischief she carried out, damaging to Elsa, but it was not until she started lying to Carlo that she began to step over a line she had always assured herself was there.
Julia went to Aunt Maureen’s funeral, a small affair, only Iris and her family, some elderly cousins, some neighbours, no more than twenty-odd people in the church. Aunt Maureen, Julia reflected, counting the heads, would have been offended by such a turnout. They were mostly dressed in black, though, which would’ve mollified her. And the older women wore hats, as Julia herself did. It was her magistrate’s hat, never worn. She’d bought it recently, when first appointed to the bench, under the misapprehension that women JPs had to wear a hat. She had suffered such embarrassment discovering no hat was required and she was thought odd to be wearing one, as though a parody of a female magistrate.
There was quite a lot to clear out of Aunt Maureen’s house, where she’d lived for almost fifty years, managing to avoid being moved into a home, though it had been a close-run thing the last eighteen months. Julia stayed to help. ‘Some of all this stuff might be your mother’s,’ Iris said. ‘Mum took a lot of things to keep for you, remember?’ Julia didn’t remember. The time of her mother’s death had become swallowed in a fog that had never really lifted, and she’d come to believe she never wanted it to. But she said she’d help, she’d share the job of clearing out her aunt’s house. She stayed with Iris for three days after the funeral, going over each day to her aunt’s old house. The furniture went first, collected by a charity Iris had contacted, and then the clothes and shoes and bags, all bundled into bin liners and taken to an Oxfam shop. Iris didn’t want any of them, not even the excellent quality, fairly recently purchased cashmere cardigans. ‘It was ridiculous,’ Iris said, half laughing, ‘Mum going on buying these things when she hardly went out and had plenty anyway, but she loved shopping.’ As you do, Julia thought, but did not say. She’d never worked out what the relationship between Iris and her mother had been. Yes, they were ‘close’ but was it a stifling closeness, or an easy, relaxed one, and had it changed during Aunt Maureen’s last years? Iris didn’t seem too upset by her mother’s death. There were no tears, no betrayal of any emotion as she dealt with her mother’s belongings.
The drawers were the problem. Not the drawers with clothes or linen in them, but the ones in the bureau in the sitting room, and in the dressing table in the bedroom. They were both crammed with papers of various sorts and each item would have to be looked at in case they included unpaid bills or bank details or investments. Julia settled down to the dressing-table drawers, three of them (but two full of jewellery). It was raining, and the wind was bashing the rain against the windows, just like it had done on the morning of Iris’s first wedding. The memory depressed her. She wondered if Iris was remembering it. The house felt cold, though it was June, so she put down her shivers to the chilly atmosphere, but knew that had nothing to do with them. She didn’t like this house, she never had done. Pressing in upon her was a threat. She was threatening herself. I dare you, confess, she said in her head. Go on, do it, now. This is your chance. How many years is it? So many. Get rid of it, don’t let it linger there forever, niggling away every time the behaviour of some child touches it. But then she shook her head. There was nothing to confess. No, that was not it. There was something she ought to tell Iris but telling it would do no good. It would do harm. The only good it would do would be to herself. She might, through confessing, rid herself of this worry which had embedded itself all these years in her mind. When it surfaced, it was like a discordant note being struck. It made her wince, and then it was gone.
‘Julia,’ Iris called up the stairs, ‘come and look at this.’
VIII
PHOTOGRAPHS. JUST TWO, both black and white, one of them torn across the top right-hand corner. They seemed, at first glance, to be the same, except for the tear in one of them. ‘That,’ said Iris, ‘is your father. But the woman he’s got his arm round is not your mother. It must be “her”.’ There was no mistaking how Iris said ‘her’. Julia made no comment. She held the snapshots up to the light and scrutinised them, as though the very action of doing this might reveal something. She wasn’t sure if she recognised the young man in the picture as her father. Could be, but she couldn’t say for certain, though Iris seemed able to. The woman she definitely had never seen. The phrase ‘buxom wench’ sprang ludicrously into her mind. Her father (allegedly) with his arm round Aunt Maureen’s ‘buxom wench’.
She hadn’t known that Iris knew about the buxom wench, but she realised she should have guessed. Aunt Maureen wouldn’t have been able to keep the information to herself forever, and who better to astound than her own daughter. ‘It was a long time ago,’ Iris said, in her most sympathetic tone. Julia thought this must mean that she was looking shocked at being presented with these photographs, so she smiled at Iris and said it was indeed a long time ago and not really all that exciting. But Iris was looking at her, still, with concern.
‘I’m sure he loved your mum, Julia,’ she said. ‘I mean, he was only a teenager when he . . . when . . . I mean, that’s what used to happen.’
‘I know,’ Julia said, ‘it doesn’t bother me.’ She tried to be brisk. ‘What bothers me,’ she said, ‘is how did your mother come to have these snaps?’
‘I expect they were among your mum’s things,’ Iris said.
Julia raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘I don’t think my mum would’ve kept a picture of my father with his buxom wench. She’d have destroyed it, hated it.’
‘Well,’ Iris said, ‘I don’t know how it came into my mother’s possession, unless someone sent it to her, because she was your mum’s sister.’
‘What would’ve been the point?’ Julia said. ‘How would anyone have known her address? And why didn’t she either give it to my mum, or tear it up herself?’
There were no answers. They spent the rest of that day finishing off the paper stuff, the letters and bills (all ticked, with ‘paid’ scribbled across them) and statements and policies. It had looked overwhelming and untidy, but in fact there was some sort of order. There were no more discoveries to intrigue. Julia took the two little photographs, slipping them into her bag. ‘Might as well keep them,’ she said to Iris, ‘they’ve lasted this long.’ Iris nodded, pretended to be uninterested, but Julia saw in her expression the same sort of ‘you-don’t-fool-me’ look that Aunt Maureen’s face used to show in direct contradiction to something she
was appearing to agree with. But Iris was not her mother. She was kinder, she would say no more, Julia knew.
It occurred to Julia, when she lay awake in her old room in the Annovazzis’ house, that she might have a half-sibling somewhere. What she couldn’t decide was whether she would like to find out and, if it were true, meet this half-sibling. And that’s when the thought of her mother’s pain became distressing, as such thoughts always did. Stupid, self-indulgent distress she had tried so hard, and for so long, to eradicate from her mind. Her mother had suffered the humiliation. She had borne it, and now she was dead, and this pain was long since over. To imagine it, to empathise to such a degree that it was being suffered all over again was not just stupid but masochistic. It had to be controlled, dealt with, this obsession with a tiny fragment of the past.
But Julia thought she would keep the photographs.
The word ‘blackmail’ was not used, but it was clear it was implied. A ten-year-old girl had been found to be consistently exerting pressure on other children to give her money. She used threats and carried them out. Those who did not pay had books stolen, paint poured over clothes, shoes filled with mud. All relatively minor acts, but hurtful to the children involved. It was felt by the girls’ teachers that any minute worse could happen, that some assault would take place, and so the school was not ignoring these signs of real trouble brewing. The mother had been contacted and said she didn’t care what the school did with Olivia, it was up to them.
The Unknown Bridesmaid Page 17