Julia was in no hurry to get off the train, so she waited until everyone else had gone. She had a good view of the girls as they walked along the platform. They were such a picture of vitality, all of them, hair shining, skin glowing, long-legged and confident. In their way, moving as a group, they were overpowering, almost intimidating. They made her shrink back in her seat feeling withered and tired. She frowned as she began to leave the train, trying to remember if she had ever been like those young women. Had she had her day, in that respect, and not known it? But she had never been part of that kind of group. She’d had friends, but she’d never functioned as part of a little gang. It had been one of the things Andrew had liked about her, that she wasn’t a girly ‘girl’.
She thought of her own wedding, as the young women disappeared from view, carrying hat boxes, as well as trundling cases behind them. Julia hadn’t seen a hat box since she’d left Manchester all those years ago. Aunt Maureen and Iris both had several, containing magnificent confections of silk and tulle. By not inviting them to her wedding she’d denied them the chance once more to travel with a hat box, but then her wedding had not, in the true sense of the word, been a wedding. She and Andrew married in a registry office with two friends as witnesses and then they all went to a restaurant in Charlotte Street for a meal. She hadn’t even told Aunt Maureen and the Annovazzis that she was getting married, though afterwards she sent them a card. When they wrote back to her, in astonished and aggrieved tones, the worst of the hurts she seemed to have inflicted was that of denying Elsa and Fran the opportunity to be bridesmaids. Carlo also added a note, saying he would have been happy to give Julia away, if he’d been asked, and to provide the wedding breakfast.
Why on earth he bothered to write this Julia couldn’t imagine. She deduced it was a kind of showing off, Carlo being proud of bearing her no resentment.
Julia, in her last month with the Annovazzis, became expert at writing anonymous letters. She bought several pens, each with a different type of nib, and collected various pads of writing paper, stealing them from W.H. Smith. She’d discovered she could shoplift almost anything, finding it so easy she wondered why anyone ever actually paid for goods. Everything she stole was cheap, and from chain stores, only a fool risked stealing from small shops.
She studied the handwriting of teachers at school, the comments written on her own exercise books when the work in them was marked, surprised to find so much variation. Hardly any of them had good, clear, plain handwriting, even though they were teachers. It was initially hard to copy any of the writing but with lots of practice she perfected two or three samples. Her own handwriting was neat and small, and upright, so she concentrated on sloping writing, as different from her own as possible. She used tracing paper at first, to get the individual letters absolutely accurate, and then she launched into a bold, free hand. It gave her more than satisfaction to be able to execute what amounted to a forgery.
The first letter she dared to send to Carlo was just a trial, a piece of fun. She chose a lilac paper, slightly scented, very feminine, and wrote with a broad-nib pen, using dark blue Quink ink. ‘Darling,’ she wrote, ‘I can’t meet you as arranged. Something has come up. Will meet you tomorrow, same time, same place. If you are not there, I’ll understand, and wait to hear from you – but do not phone. Leave a message in the usual box. All my love, R.’ Julia hesitated over whether to put two or three kisses, but didn’t. She posted this letter from Piccadilly on a Friday afternoon, using the post office near to Carlo’s latest addition to his chain of coffee shops. He had six by then, and was proudest of this central one.
The letter arrived on Saturday morning, as she knew it would. She’d deliberately posted it on Friday so that it would arrive on a morning when they were all at home. Elsa picked the letters up and brought them into the kitchen, where everyone was at different stages of eating breakfast. ‘One for you, Dad,’ Elsa said, and handed over the pale lilac-coloured envelope. Carlo frowned, and took it, then tore it open carelessly. Julia carefully turned her back on the table where he and the girls were eating toast, but she was watching him through the mirror which hung over the sink where she was slowly rinsing her own cup and plate. She thought maybe he would laugh, and read the note aloud, and wonder how this mistake could have happened, but he didn’t. Instead, he tore it up, got to his feet, and put the pieces of paper in the bin, already almost full of rubbish. ‘I’ll take this out now, on my way out,’ he said, tying the bag up and lifting it out of the bin. No one asked who the torn-up letter had been from. Iris, who had been scrambling eggs for herself and the girls, hadn’t even registered that Carlo had received a mysterious letter.
Julia found herself smiling at her own reflection. ‘You look happy,’ Iris said, smiling herself.
Julia did not exactly run away. There was no running. Her departure from the Annovazzi household was sedate. No drama, no farewell speeches, no accusations. She began to plan it carefully, starting the day after she walked out on John Messenger. Carlo was in the car, waiting. When she appeared, he thought Messenger had finished with her. ‘That was quick,’ he said. All she had to do was nod. It wasn’t until they got home (in silence) that Iris said there had been a phone call, that Mr Messenger had rung to say Julia had walked out and was she with them.
Carlo was furious. Such trouble had been gone to, he ranted, to get Julia that appointment with the child psychologist – on and on he went, calling her ungrateful and selfish and rude. He didn’t know what they were going to do with her, he shuddered to think what might happen next. Julia could have told him, but she didn’t. What was going to happen next was that she was going to leave. Nothing childish, no dashing out of the house in a storm of tears and then obliged to crawl back because she had no money and nowhere to go and no plan. That would not do. She needed time to work out how to get hold of some money and how to find somewhere to live where she would be safe and could still carry on at school till she’d done her exams. Oh, there was nothing impetuous or short-sighted about Julia.
Hardest of all was finding out the legal position. She didn’t know what legally Iris and Carlo could do if she left their home. Could they force her to return? She went to the library, but though there were plenty of law books she didn’t know where to start. Then she remembered that when her mother died Aunt Maureen told her that she and Uncle Tom had been made her guardians in her mother’s will but that they thought it better she should live with the Annovazzis. So, Julia deduced, Iris and Carlo had no legal authority over her. Only Aunt Maureen, now that Uncle Tom was dead, had that.
But she knew she couldn’t go and live with Aunt Maureen. Any appeal to her would be wasted. She’d say she was too old to have a teenager in her house, she couldn’t be doing with it. No good promising to be very quiet and helpful. It wouldn’t work. Where could she go, then? Briefly, she thought of asking Caroline’s mother if she could live with their family but then thought better of it. That wouldn’t work either. Then she wondered if she could go into a hostel, but how would she find a hostel, and who would pay for it? It did cross her mind to allege that she was being ill-treated, maybe confiding in a teacher, which might get her taken into care, but she dismissed that idea fairly quickly. There would be an investigation and any fool would be able to see Iris and Carlo were nothing but kind and generous.
But living with them became more and more unbearable even though she didn’t know exactly why she felt so stifled in that house, or why she was now so constantly rebellious, unable to fit into the Annovazzi family at all. She hardly spoke to any of them, not even Fran, who minded her silence the most. ‘Talk to me, Julia,’ Fran would plead, ‘don’t ’nore me, Julia, please.’ ‘Nothing to say,’ she would mutter, feeling mean, and when Fran tried to get her to respond to her chatter she moved away. Elsa reacted differently. If Julia was not going to have a normal conversation with her, then Elsa would give her the same treatment. It made the atmosphere in the house tense and awkward, all this lack of communication.
/>
Caroline thought she was only harming herself with her behaviour (relayed to her with some relish by Julia). ‘What is the point?’ she asked, exasperated. ‘What have they done to you to make you so horrible to them?’
Julia shrugged. ‘I’m supposed to be grateful,’ she said, ‘and I’m tired of being grateful.’
‘That’s sick,’ Caroline said.
Julia shrugged again. She knew she hadn’t explained herself well. If she couldn’t explain how she felt, to her best friend, then she couldn’t explain to anyone else. It hurt her that Caroline was lacking in sympathy and, as Julia saw it, took Carlo and Iris’s side.
‘Sometimes,’ Caroline said, ‘I don’t know how they put up with you. You’re poisoning their life, you’re like a cuckoo in their nest.’
‘Well,’ Julia said, not at all displeased with this analogy, ‘cuckoos migrate eventually, and I will. Soon.’
‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ Caroline said.
‘Oh, not you too,’ said Julia.
From then on, she never confided in Caroline again.
Jasmine came with her foster-mother, a neat-looking middle-aged woman who kept her coat on, buttoned up at the neck, even though it was hot in Julia’s room and she had been invited to take it off. ‘They haven’t adjusted the heating yet,’ Julia apologised. ‘We’ve just moved in here and the council are still seeing to it.’ But Mrs McClusky said she liked it warm, she was quite comfortable, thank you. Jasmine took her jacket off, though. It was a thick-looking red fleece, zipped up to the neck. She unzipped it in one swift movement which somehow sounded dramatic. Mrs McClusky frowned, as though the noise pained her, but said nothing. Underneath the fleece Jasmine was wearing a white T-shirt with ‘New York’ written in red across it.
Julia smiled at her. Jasmine didn’t smile back. She just looked a little to the left of Julia, though not so far left that it would appear she was trying to avoid her gaze. Her expression was not sullen. It was bored, world-weary. Julia recognised how tedious the girl was finding this, how she resented having to come here with Mrs McClusky, and decided to be brisk. No point in asking Jasmine why she was truanting so regularly. Better to talk to Mrs McClusky, who would be bound to irritate Jasmine with whatever she said, however she said it, and out of the irritation might come some small enlightenment. It was interesting that when Jasmine slipped out of school, usually at the morning break, she went back to Mrs McClusky’s. Most truants wandered the streets or shopping centres till it was normal going-home time, but Jasmine didn’t. She had a key, and let herself in (Mrs McClusky had a cleaning job three weekdays) and watched television. When Mrs McClusky came home, with another younger foster-child she’d picked up from school, there Jasmine would be, sitting perfectly still in front of the television.
‘It’s weird,’ said Mrs McClusky, ‘she don’t say nothing, not a hello or anything. I didn’t even know she weren’t at school till the teacher rang. I never know whether she’s been at school or not. That’s the truth.’
‘Mrs McClusky,’ Julia began, ‘does Jasmine help around the house?’
Mrs McClusky looked faintly alarmed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘she has her jobs like I give them all, soon as they’re able.’ Then a thought seemed to occur to her that made her pause and look surprised. ‘She cleans the bathroom regular,’ she said. ‘Very nice job she makes of it, the bath, the shower, the taps.’
Julia smiled at Jasmine, without saying anything, and the girl frowned and blushed slightly. But Mrs McClusky was now busy enumerating other housewifely virtues of Jasmine’s, ending by saying that from ‘that point of view’ she had no complaints. It was just the truanting, and coming home, and just sitting there.
‘It’s a compliment, Mrs McClusky,’ Julia said, ‘see it as a compliment. Jasmine likes your house. She likes coming back to it. It’s quiet during the day, and it pleases her when she’s helped to make everything neat and tidy. It gives her the kind of satisfaction school can’t give. She needs it.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said Mrs McClusky, ‘but she has to go to school and stay there, it’s the law, and I’m the one gets rung up. She don’t care.’
All this time, Jasmine hadn’t said a word. Julia hadn’t asked her anything and she hadn’t volunteered any comment, but now Julia said, ‘I think you do care, Jasmine. I think you want to stay with Mrs McClusky. You like her house, and how she keeps it. But if you keep walking out of school the authorities will have to do something about it and you might end up being moved on. You can see that, can’t you?’
Julia thought the girl was going to continue not to say a word, but after a long stare, and an even deeper frown, she said, ‘I hate school. I don’t see why I have to put up with it. I can read and write, and all that. There’s no point to it. I can learn what I want from the telly.’
‘The fact remains,’ Julia said gently, ‘it is the law that all children must be educated from the age of five to sixteen and you are only thirteen. You’ve three years to get through, so we have to think of some way of making them bearable. So, is it all schools you hate, or this particular school?’
‘All schools.’
‘Mind you,’ Mrs McClusky suddenly said, ‘it’s a rough place her school.’
‘Well,’ said Julia, ‘let’s see if we can find you a school you’ll be able to tolerate better, OK, Jasmine?’
Jasmine looked doubtful, but nodded.
When they’d gone Julia looked at all the schools within reach of Mrs McClusky’s house. There were a surprising number, though she knew catchment areas varied from year to year and you had to live very near the good ones to have a chance of getting in. But Jasmine was ‘special needs’ category, not through any disability but because of her history. Social workers had a file a foot thick on the girl’s experiences from the age of two, when she had been found in a shed on an allotment locked in and so distressed she’d badly hurt herself throwing herself at the door in an attempt to escape. It was astounding that she had survived not just this abandonment but, afterwards, a whole series of accidents. Julia told herself she ought to be used to reading these sorts of histories but she wasn’t. Most of the children who were referred to the centre had problems which, in comparison to what Jasmine had endured, were not hard to do something about. Her one bit of good luck was to be now with Mrs McClusky who gave her the sort of stability she’d never had. School, on the other hand, destabilised her all over again.
Julia wondered if home schooling might be a possibility, a tutor coming to Mrs McClusky’s. Madness. Of course it wasn’t even a remote possibility in the current climate. A school had to be found, and Jasmine persuaded that it was worth attending it to avoid getting her foster-mother into trouble and herself moved on.
Before she wrote the second letter, Julia visited each of Carlo’s shops in turn. She chose times when she knew he would not be there, and was careful not to attract attention to herself in any way. All she did was buy a cup of coffee, just so that she could observe who was working there. They were all young women, two behind the counter selling the beans and ground coffee, two serving cups of coffee at the bar running round the room. They wore uniforms Carlo had designed himself, bright red waistcoats worn over black polo-necked sweaters and short black skirts, showing plenty of leg. You had to have good legs to work in Carlo’s shops. Each assistant had a name tag worn on her waistcoat, so Julia didn’t need to find out their names. It was a problem to decide who to choose. Not, she thought, the most obviously attractive or the youngest. Finally, she settled on Ramola. She’d signed the first letter with an R, after all.
She wanted Iris to be aware of this letter, which again would be timed to arrive on a Saturday morning. This meant Julia herself would have to collect any post and bring it into the kitchen and hand it to Iris first. If Elsa picked it up, she’d hand the important letter to her father, and Carlo could once more rip it up before Iris registered its significance. It gave Julia a headache, trying to work out how she could contrive to
be the one who was nearest the mat upon which letters would land that Saturday morning, but finally she resorted to sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, apparently absorbed in threading new laces into her trainers.
This time, she’d chosen ordinary white paper and a white envelope. Anything lilac would immediately alert Carlo, whereas most of the bills, etc., he received arrived in innocuous white or buff-coloured envelopes. His reaction to the first letter had, Julia reckoned, shown him to be guilty of something, only she didn’t know what. He might be having a fling with someone who had nothing to do with his shops, or he might not be having a fling at all but merely be on the brink of having one. The clever bit was that the chances of him ever having seen the handwriting of anyone who worked for him were slim. He couldn’t be sure that a letter was not from Ramola. The test would be to see what he would do about it. Confront her? Tell Iris? Or act on it?
Julia wrote a dozen versions before she felt she’d got the tone of the letter right. Keep it simple, keep it short, she told herself. In the end, all she wrote was one sentence: ‘I love you too, and will be there, Ramola.’ It was silly, but might, she hoped, have a devastating effect, though if it did, she might never know about it.
The Unknown Bridesmaid Page 20