The Unknown Bridesmaid

by Margaret Forster

  Olivia fitted the role. Julia could see how the girl could intimidate merely by her physical presence. She was large, not in the sense of height alone but all over. Square-shouldered, she had heavy-looking arms and legs, and her torso was broad though there were no visible signs of early puberty. Probably, Julia thought, Olivia was overweight but this weight did not look like flab. It looked like muscle. There was the same indication of strength in the neck, quite unlike a ten-year-old child’s neck. Olivia jutted her chin out and her neck tensed. The face, though, was at odds with the body. It was surprisingly delicate, the features small, the complexion good. Pale, but with some healthy colour in the cheeks. It was as though the wrong head had been put on the body.

  Julia asked Olivia if she knew why she was here. Olivia said yes, she did, and it was unfair, she’d done nothing, they were all liars, they couldn’t prove anything . . . There was a lot more Olivia had to say, all of it with passion. She was going to stand up for herself, she said, and no one could stop her. Julia said no one wanted to stop her.

  ‘I want to hear your version of what’s been happening,’ she said. ‘Let’s start with pouring red paint over Emily Green’s exercise books. Why did you do that?’

  ‘She deserved it,’ Olivia said, ‘after what she did to me.’

  ‘And what did she do to you?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to. It’s got nothing to do with anything.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Olivia,’ Julia said, ‘it has everything to do with why you poured the paint. You didn’t just do it for fun, did you? Or did you?’ Olivia smiled, a strange smile, secretive, and said nothing.

  Emily Green was on record as claiming that Olivia threatened to ruin her exercise books, with all the work in them, if she did not give her one pound. Emily said she hadn’t got a pound. Olivia called her a liar. She said Emily had plenty of money, and she had a mobile phone too. A pound wasn’t much, she could spare it. It turned out Emily had already given Olivia a pound the week before, to prevent her cutting the sleeves of her jacket off. Olivia had been nice to her afterwards, but when Emily got home and had to explain the missing money she had cried and told her mother what had happened. Her mother wanted to go to the school and report Olivia’s behaviour but Emily begged her not to, but her mother wouldn’t agree.

  All for one pound, one coin. Julia wondered if this modest target meant Olivia was smart, and knew it was more likely to be reached, or the amount just popped into her head, not thought out at all. Almost for fun, to see the reaction. But either way, she had carried out her threat, and the other threats, to other girls. Emily, though, was the only one to have parted with the money. There had been nothing subtle about Olivia’s approach, no attempt at concealment. Three other girls saw her pick up the paint, in its plastic bottle, and deliberately squeeze it all over every page of Emily’s neat writing so that the work was beyond rescue.

  It seemed a small act of vandalism, but of course it was what might follow on from it that mattered. Paint poured onto a book was no great disaster. But then, later, Olivia older, what? Acid? Thrown into a face? Julia thought about this remote possibility and then put it out of her mind. A sense of proportion was needed.

  ‘Olivia,’ she said, ‘what did you want the money for?’

  ‘To spend,’ Olivia said.

  ‘Yes, obviously, but on what? What can a pound buy that you want?’

  ‘It’s money,’ Olivia said. ‘I want some money. I haven’t got any money and I just want some and Emily is spoiled, she always has new things. It isn’t fair.’

  ‘No,’ said Julia, ‘it isn’t, but how is it fair to pour paint over someone’s book, because they won’t give you money? That isn’t fair, is it?’

  She was only ten. What she’d done was so silly and clumsy it made Julia tired just to think about. Already, at her tender age, to feel such raw envy and sense of injustice, that she was a ‘have-not’ surrounded by ‘haves’. Julia hardly dared look at the notes again, didn’t want reminding of Olivia’s address, of her mother’s record, of the rapid succession of male partners in her household. None of the details provided any justification for Olivia’s pathetic attempt to extort money, but they did provide something that could be said to offer an explanation. It was not fair. Life was not fair, not in any way at all. This painful realisation had to be made by the child. Life is not fair. In any way.

  It was time to move again. Every five years, Julia moved house, each time getting a little nearer living where she wanted to live in the kind of house she wanted to own. It was always hard to move because she feared the inevitable sense of displacement which made her nervous and distracted and affected her work. Her colleagues never needed to be told she was in the process of moving house. All the signs were there, and they teased her about it. She was not an easy person to tease, but they persevered, and smirked when they got a result.

  This time, she actually was moving to a house, and not to another flat. The price she was paying scared her, but thanks to careful saving and modest living, plus getting more than she dared to hope from the sale of the previous flat (sold at the top of the market in 2007) she could manage it. Without the money she’d inherited, of course, she would never have been able to buy the tiny flat that started her off nearly thirty years ago. The insurance money. The money she had never known came from insurance. She was against inherited wealth but she had accepted what her mother left her, substantially increased by her uncle’s wise investment. It briefly crossed her mind to give it to Amnesty International, but only very briefly. She rationalised this decision by arguing with herself that though inherited wealth was unfair life had been unfair to herself. Taking the money balanced having first her father then her mother taken from her while she was so young. She, perhaps fortunately, was never called upon to voice all this to any other person.

  Not even Andrew. She already had her first flat when she met Andrew. He didn’t own any property, living as he did with two other final-year medical students. He was impressed when eventually Julia revealed she owned her one-bedroom flat in Queen’s Park, near the park itself. She had a mortgage, but a light one. Andrew was delighted because he had no chance himself of being able to buy, and so moving into Julia’s flat when they were married, as soon they would be, solved that problem. But it remained Julia’s flat. When Andrew started working, he expected to contribute to the mortgage, and have his name on it, but Julia said no. It was her flat. She would continue to pay the mortgage herself and Andrew could pay the bills, or most of them.

  It made the divorce, when it came (rather rapidly), simpler. Julia sold that flat immediately. She didn’t want to live where Andrew had lived. She couldn’t get out of the place quick enough, and in fact rented somewhere for six months so that she didn’t have to stay there while it was up for sale. The marriage was a mistake, her mistake rather than Andrew’s. He was a perfectly agreeable, good-looking, kind man, but what Julia had overlooked was his lack of interest in anyone except himself (and, of course, for a while, Julia). He became the sort of doctor who was interested in the various diseases his patients brought to his attention but not in the patients themselves. He lacked curiosity, whereas Julia seethed with it. Her own job made no sense to him. She couldn’t come home to tell him about the children she saw because he had no interest in them, and was astonished that she thought all the time about whoever she was currently assessing.

  Julia never shared her flat again, though she had affairs. Her flat was hers. She worried more about keeping it than about keeping lovers, which told her something. She knew this fierce protection of her property was odd, but put it down to feeling nothing belonged to her once her mother died. She was always just a lodger and hated being in that situation. It was clear to her that property represented stability. People couldn’t be depended upon but property could. Again, this skewed view of life was not one she shared with other people, so it was never challenged.
/>   This, she hoped, would be her final move, or as final as she realistically thought it would be. The house was not perfect, but perfection would always, she reckoned, be out of her reach because of the sheer cost. The house she now bought was in itself, if not the road in which it was situated, pretty well perfect: an end-of-terrace house, with good windows, so lots of light even on dark days, and a small garden facing south-west. The rooms were small but could easily be knocked through, leaving her with only two bedrooms and one living room/kitchen, which was fine. Even though it was a Georgian house, some clever previous owner had managed to get permission to install solar panels in the roof.

  The part of moving Julia hated most, unsurprisingly, was the packing up. She couldn’t bring herself to hire people to do it for her, not because of the cost but because she had a rule that every time she moved she must carefully sort through all her belongings and take the opportunity to discard things she no longer needed or wanted. It was a good rule. It meant she started off in the new place uncluttered, constantly streamlining her existence. But it was time-consuming, sitting herself down to go through every drawer and cupboard, though none of these were in the state Aunt Maureen’s had been.

  Every time, she always found the present she’d stolen from Iris. Every time, she’d feel the same quick-changing emotions: shame, guilt, embarrassment, and then irritation with herself for experiencing these feelings. It was not that she did not know why she kept the pathetic thing. She knew only too well. It had become a symbol of defiance, reminding her how near she had been to a very different sort of life. Always she thought about returning it to Iris. Easy enough to slip it into a drawer. But it wasn’t what she thought of doing. She thought about taking it to Iris and saying she was sorry she had stolen Reginald’s present, and that she was also sorry she had, at one time, stolen money, and had been cruel to Elsa, and most of all that she was sorry, all these years later, that she had tipped up baby Reggie’s pram and he’d bumped his head.

  She wouldn’t say any of that, of course. Such a confession would be an indulgence. But she did, each time she sorted out her possessions and packed them up, wonder how Iris would react if she did confess. Iris being Iris, what would she be likely to say? ‘Oh, don’t worry, it was a long time ago’? Quite possibly. Or, Iris being Iris, and rather slow on the uptake sometimes, might just smile vaguely and say nothing at all. But there was another scenario in Julia’s mind, lurking there: Iris might not react true to character. She might be appalled and furious, especially about the tipping of the pram. A new Iris might rise up, one who – but no. Julia couldn’t make this work. Iris was too old now to become angry and revengeful after a lifetime of being mild and endlessly forgiving.

  There was one remaining alternative response: Iris had always known. She’d known, and chosen not to know, in the sense of choosing not to acknowledge or voice her suspicions because – this would be very Iris – it would ‘do no good’. Iris had trained herself early in life not to live in the past. She deliberately shut it out, good or bad, people and events, concentrating always on the future. Once, as a teenager, Julia had come out with phrases her history teacher had used: we are our past, it is what made us who we are, we can’t know ourselves without knowing our past, etc. All of it banal, but deeply attractive to Julia then, feeling as she did that she was robbed of her own past. Iris had laughed. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘what a nonsense. The past is gone, Julia, that’s all that matters, pet.’

  Iris wouldn’t give the time of day (one of her favourite expressions) to confessions about the past. She believed each day was truly a clean sheet, an attitude to life which had stood her in good stead but which Julia was never able to adopt. For her, everything in her past was loaded with significance. She couldn’t rid herself of it. She couldn’t throw Reginald’s present away nor give it to Iris. So once more she packed it into a wooden jewellery box, with other bits of jewellery. Someone – Elsa? – would find it after she was dead and never for one moment appreciate its history. They – Elsa? Fran? – would be surprised, when they saw the silver bracelet. Not Cousin Julia’s thing, they would think. Never seen her wear it. It’s too girlish for her taste. She wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t have bought it herself, so who gave it to her?

  One of the girls might keep it, perhaps wear it, though they were a bit old for such a delicate ripple of silver. Their daughters, then, if either of them had daughters. Pointless to speculate which one might take it, but speculate she did.

  There were two moves: one personal, the move from flat to house; one for work, because the centre was being relocated (that was the term used in the official letter – ‘we are to be relocated’). Julia imagined a giant crane lifting up the whole building with everyone inside it, then swinging dangerously in the air until a site was decided upon. The spot chosen for this relocation seemed to her a bad one. Housed in its previous premises, the centre had looked modestly attractive, with a little bit of grass in front of it, and flower tubs lined up along the side wall, and a white-painted entrance hall. No child coming to it could possibly be frightened or intimidated. Great efforts were made to make the place welcoming and informal and not at all clinical, with lots of colourful posters on the walls and a cheerful brightly patterned rug on the floor of the waiting room, where there were two comfortable old sofas and a table with comics as well as magazines scattered over it.

  But these premises had never been owned. They were rented, and as the rent rose the council couldn’t afford them. There was space in a building it did own, and the decision was made to move the centre there. It was the work that went on inside it that mattered, the council said, not the rooms themselves. They didn’t matter. They could be freshly decorated – new paint was allowed – and would look the same as the old rooms. Wrong. Julia wasn’t quite sure from the actual address what the new workplace would be like, though she had her suspicions, but when she arrived there, together with her colleagues, the week before the relocation, she was quite shocked. The centre was now sandwiched between a bank, with flats above it, and a carpet warehouse, also with flats above. The centre itself was on the third floor of the block it was in, with a jobcentre beneath it. The stone steps from the street door up to the other floors were clean, the walls too, but there was very little light after the first turn of the stairs so that anyone approaching the third floor did so in an atmosphere of gloom. They were all appalled, but the best had to be made of it. Once inside, things improved slightly. The council had kept its word. Every room was newly painted, in the colours chosen, and the furniture from the old place had been brought over, with some new cushions added.

  The problem, though, was always going to be getting children through that doorway and up those stairs without depressing and worrying them from the start. They would come, with their parents or social worker, along the thundering high road, and stare up at the vast Edwardian buildings and feel at once overwhelmed. It could be argued that children don’t notice architecture, but they do notice size and draw conclusions from it. Imposing buildings, their exterior face none too clean, could strike some children dumb. And children were highly susceptible to atmosphere. Hearing their shoes ring out on the stone stairs would scare some of them. They would arrive tense and nervous even if they had been neither to begin with, and precious time would have to be spent making them relax. Then there was the additional problem of who else used the street door. The jobcentre was busy, with a constant stream, mainly of men, coming and going.

  They all, the people who were going to work here, knew this, so there was little discussion. It was suggested that maybe there could be some sort of partition put up in the entrance hall so that the entry to the centre was separate from the jobcentre’s, but even if that were agreed to by the council it still left the problem of the gloomy stairs, and little could be done about that. Julia went into the room allocated to her and closed the door.

  Carlo took her to the appointment, not Iris. He wore his best suit and a pristine white shirt with a
dark blue tie. Julia had been told to wear her school uniform, and to make sure her shoes were clean. Nobody told her who exactly this appointment was with, what sort of person he was, just that he was ‘a sort of doctor’. ‘I’m not ill,’ Julia said, ‘I don’t need to see a doctor,’ to which the reply was that this doctor was not that sort of doctor, not a medical doctor, just someone who would talk to her, and help her. ‘I don’t need help,’ Julia said, ‘and I’m not going.’

  She had burned holes in the wooden surround of the fireplace. There was a real fire in the fireplace, and she’d been sitting in front of it, staring at the flames, and poking the logs with a poker. Everyone was out, which ought to have made her happy but she was not happy. She should have been with Caroline, going to see a film, but Carlo had been so furious with her that he’d said she couldn’t go anywhere the whole weekend. He’d said she was getting out of control. ‘Out of control’ meant staying out later than ten o’clock, banging doors so hard he said she’d damaged the hinges, swearing, looking a mess, and terrorising Elsa. She’d laughed at that last feeble accusation – ‘terrorise’ indeed! It was ridiculous. All she’d done was send Elsa anonymous cards picturing evil-faced men with a balloon coming out of their mouths saying ‘Coming to get you’. Just an obvious joke.

  The poker was a long metal one, with a brass handle. Idly, Julia watched the tip of it turn red hot in the fire, and then she lifted it high, admiring the strong, fierce glow. Then, slowly, she swung the poker to the left and let it hover near the wood. She let it touch the wood. The sizzling was deeply satisfying, and so was the smoking black hole that emerged. She did another hole below, and then more, reheating the poker each time, and soon she had the letter E branded on the wood, scarring it irrevocably. Then she went to bed, half laughing, in a gasping sort of way at what she’d done, and half appalled. She’d been going to brand the whole of Elsa’s name there but it would have taken too long.