The Unknown Bridesmaid

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The Unknown Bridesmaid Page 21

by Margaret Forster


  Elsa rang. Elsa hardly ever rang. Elsa hardly ever contacted Julia these days, and when she did it was always for some specific reason, as it was this time.

  ‘It’s Dad,’ Elsa said straight away, no preliminaries, no pleasantries first. ‘He’s in hospital, he’s had a stroke. Mum thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Oh,’ Julia said, ‘I’m sorry, how worrying.’

  Elsa said nothing. She seemed to be expecting Julia to say something else. Finally, the pause having gone on an uncomfortably long time, Julia said, ‘How bad is this stroke?’

  ‘He can’t speak,’ Elsa said, ‘and he can’t move his left arm or leg, and they say the next forty-eight hours will be crucial.’

  Another pause.

  ‘How awful,’ Julia said, all the time thinking why did Iris want her to know that Carlo had had a stroke.

  Immediately, she was ashamed. Of course Iris would want her to know. What she also wanted, naturally, was some show of support, some evidence of concern. But did Iris, did Elsa, imagine she was going to leap on a train to Manchester and rush to Iris’s side in the hospital? She hoped not.

  Carefully, she asked Elsa a few obvious questions about Carlo’s condition, and then a couple about how Iris was coping, and whether Elsa and Fran were with her, and then she said, ‘Well, Elsa, thank you for letting me know. You will keep me in touch with how things develop, won’t you? And I’ll ring Iris, I’ll try to catch her at home.’

  There were a few seconds of silence, then Elsa burst out, ‘Is that all? After everything they did for you? That’s disgusting.’ Then the phone was hung up.

  Julia got the last train to Manchester that day, and took a taxi to Iris’s house, perfectly prepared to find nobody in. She made the taxi wait, just in case, but she could see from the lights that someone was probably in. Standing on the doorstep ringing the bell she felt as she had always felt when about to enter this house: uncertain of her welcome, reluctant to go inside, stifled already by the overwhelming feeling of obligation. The life, her life, inside this house was what she had cast off at the age of eighteen. But at least Carlo would not answer the door. Iris opened it, after a long interval during which Julia could hear an internal door opening and shutting, and another light appeared in the hall.

  ‘Julia,’ Iris said, seeming unsurprised, but neither pleased nor displeased. ‘Come in, I’m just back from the hospital.’

  They went into the sitting room, where Iris sat in the middle of the sofa and Julia faced her, perched on an armchair.

  The room was lit only by one small lamp, though in the kitchen, which they’d gone past, all the lights blazed, as they did in the bedrooms above. There were no curtains closed anywhere, which was a break with Iris’s usual habits. Curtains had always been closed in the Annovazzis’ household at dusk, long before real darkness began, and even in summer all of them would be closed at nine o’clock, however light it was on a June or July evening. Julia had hated this. She never wanted the outside shut out. She’d sworn to herself that when she had her own house there would be no curtains. If people wanted to look in, they could look in. She would have nothing to hide. But then, when she was young, she was afraid of nothing.

  Iris waited. She was listless, but composed, showing no signs of the grief Julia had expected.

  ‘How is he?’ Julia asked.

  ‘The same,’ Iris said.

  She offered nothing more, which again was not what Julia had expected. She’d braced herself, in the taxi, for a torrent of detail about how Carlo’s stroke had come about, a minute by minute account which she would have been relieved to listen to patiently. When none of this came, and Iris went on sitting there silently, staring not quite at Julia but in her general direction – it was hard to tell exactly what she was looking at because the lighting was so dim – Julia said: ‘And how are you, Iris?’ It was an obvious but a silly question. If she had replied, ‘How do you think I am?’ Julia felt Iris would have been within her rights. But Iris said, ‘Fine. I’m fine. I think he’s going to die. I think that’s what they seem to be thinking will happen.’

  Julia wondered if she should move to the sofa and sit beside Iris, and perhaps take her hand, or put an arm round her shoulder, but something about Iris’s extreme stillness made her decide such a gesture would not be welcome, so she stayed where she was and said, ‘Can I make you something to eat or drink, Iris? Have you eaten?’

  ‘Yes,’ Iris said, ‘Elsa made me something earlier. An omelette, I think, with salad. I don’t think I ate the salad.’

  ‘Well,’ Julia said lamely, ‘eggs are full of protein.’ She felt her face grow hot, and struggled to rescue herself from such a banal comment.

  Just as she was about to make another attempt to show concern, Iris said, ‘I wanted you to come. Do you know why I wanted you to come?’

  Julia shook her head, then said, ‘I thought . . . I thought probably it was because you needed . . .’ and then her voice trailed off.

  ‘Needed?’ prompted Iris.

  ‘. . . family around you.’

  ‘Family,’ Iris repeated thoughtfully. ‘I suppose that would make sense. You are family. Not like Elsa and Fran, of course, but still. Family.’

  They sat there for what seemed, to Julia, an eternity, but out of the corner of her eye she could see the clock on the mantelpiece and its hands barely moved. The air in the room felt dangerous, as though it might ignite with a word. She suddenly realised that Iris was not motionless because she was relaxed or because exhaustion had made her so, but because she was deliberately holding herself in this posture. There was a tension in the tight-together knees and the shoulders pushed back against the sofa cushions which Julia had not seen at first. Her heart began to pound. She must do something, get away from Iris before a disaster she could not imagine, but could sense, overwhelmed them both. She stood up.

  ‘Iris,’ she said, ‘it’s late. You’re tired, I’m tired. I think we should both go to bed, don’t you? Get some rest?’

  ‘No,’ Iris said, ‘I don’t think we should. Not yet. I haven’t told you why I wanted you to come.’

  There was nothing to do but sit down again and wait. Waiting, in these circumstances, in this atmosphere, was agony, but there was no alternative. If Iris chose to sit there all night, then that was how it must be.

  ‘I wanted you to come before Carlo dies,’ Iris at last began, ‘so that you can say sorry to him. Tomorrow. They say tomorrow might be the last day, so far as they can tell. Of course, if he dies in the night, it will be too late, I’ll have brought you here for nothing, but I hope not.’

  Julia’s throat was dry, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She tried to moisten her lips but could not get her tongue to respond.

  ‘Iris,’ she managed at last to croak, and then she couldn’t go on, she couldn’t manage to say what she wanted to say, which was that she didn’t know what she had to say sorry to Carlo for, something apparently so important and perhaps terrible that a dying man had to hear it. There was some mistake being made, she was being suspected of some crime she had not committed, or if not a crime then some offence so serious Iris was prepared to drag an apology from her at her dying husband’s bedside.

  ‘Iris,’ she said again, ‘you’ll have to explain. I’m sorry, but I think . . . I mean, truly, I don’t . . .’ and she couldn’t get any more words out of her dry mouth.

  ‘Elsa told me,’ Iris said, ‘years ago. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe you would do that. So I said nothing. What’s the point? I said to myself. She’s leaving soon, she’ll be out of our lives. I never said anything to Carlo, not ever. Things went on as usual. I knew you were a liar, a cheat, a thief, but I told myself you were a disturbed child. Isn’t that what they call them, children like you, disturbed? I thought being disturbed excused everything. I thought being part of our loving family would settle you. But it didn’t, did it? And before you left, you did that to Carlo. He’d done nothing but treat you as his own, with true
kindness, never hesitated a moment about taking you in, and you did that to him. So I want you to say sorry.’

  The post didn’t arrive that Saturday morning. Some sort of strike involving the sorting office, it seemed. Julia sat for a long time on the bottom of the stairs, long enough to fit laces into fifty pairs of shoes. She didn’t want to leave the house until the post arrived, but by ten o’clock Carlo had gone, and Iris was on her way to the supermarket, taking Fran with her. Only Elsa was left, getting ready to go to her friend’s house where she was going to spend the day. It wasn’t until almost midday that Julia realised there wasn’t going to be any post, that something must have happened to prevent deliveries.

  The letter arrived on Tuesday. It was wasted. Julia knew that the post didn’t come on other weekdays until around ten o’clock, and by then the house was empty except for Iris. She tried to be heavily casual about asking if there had been any post, pretending she was expecting brochures from the universities she was applying to, and when, on Tuesday, Iris said yes, the strike was over, it had only been a twenty-four-hour stoppage, but there had been nothing for Julia, Julia couldn’t go on to ask if there had been post for anyone else. Iris didn’t mention any letter to Carlo. She didn’t mention at all what had arrived, leaving Julia in an agony of uncertainty. Carlo, when he came home that day, seemed normal, betraying no anxiety or unusual behaviour, but of course, as Julia realised, he had not yet been given the letter. Where was it? Where had Iris put it? There was nothing on the hall table, nothing on the dining-room dresser, both places where letters were put when they arrived.

  She began to think that Iris might have opened her husband’s letter, and had either destroyed it or was waiting to confront him with the contents. But no. Iris was too serene, and quite incapable of any kind of deception. Then, as they were all sitting down to eat, Iris said, ‘Oh, Elsa, I put a letter to your dad down on top of the washing machine, I forgot. Can you go and get it, and the other envelopes, two I think?’ A long, rambling account of how she’d come to put the post on the washing machine in the utility room followed, but Julia didn’t take in a word. She waited, tense and excited, for Elsa to reappear with the letters. But when she did, handing them to Carlo, he said he’d look at them later, he was in a hurry to get to golf. Iris protested that he had to eat, but Carlo said to save him something, he’d eat later.

  ‘Shall I open them, Dad?’ Elsa said, as Carlo went to get his jacket, ‘Tell you what they are?’

  ‘OK,’ Carlo shouted back.

  Julia watched, helpless, mesmerised, as Elsa opened the two bills and called out what they were for, and then the letter allegedly from Ramola. Her face took on an expression of bewilderment, a frown appearing, her mouth hanging open a little in a pantomime of astonishment, but instead of reading the letter out she said, ‘I can’t read the writing on this one, Dad.’

  ‘Oh, give it here,’ Carlo said, and shoved it, with the bills, into his pocket as he rushed out of the door.

  Elsa said nothing. Maybe she hadn’t been able to read the handwriting. Or maybe she had, and in spite of her youth had realised she must not read the message out. It was impossible to know.

  Julia went to bed leaving Iris still sitting there. She said nothing as she got up from the armchair, as quietly as possible, aware that she must not make any gesture which might antagonise Iris further. She must appear contrite even if she resented having to do so. Iris didn’t move. Carefully, Julia tiptoed up the stairs, without putting the light on, and then hesitated. Which room to take? Was Elsa in one? Fran in the other? She hadn’t asked if they were here. The door of what had once been her room, then Elsa’s, was slightly open. She peered round it and saw, in the gloom, a single bed and nobody in it. She lay down on the bed, fully dressed, and closed her eyes. She didn’t imagine she would sleep, but she had to lie down. Her mind was seething but her body exhausted, and her mind would win but at least her body would be rested.

  There was any number of lies Elsa could have told. An expert in lies herself, Julia thought she knew them all but knew, too, that this was impossible. There would always be some twist, some wild piece of invention, which she hadn’t thought of. She set herself to imagine what would have been likely to occur to Elsa, all those years ago, if she had wanted to make her mother hate Julia. But that wouldn’t have worked. Making Iris hate anyone was too much a perversion of her character for Elsa to have managed. So Julia reckoned she would have had to have been accused of, in some way, casting Carlo in a bad light, without Carlo being responsible for whatever was alleged to have happened. What could she have done to Carlo that Iris refused to believe, but now, with him lying in hospital dying, she had decided to believe, and why? Why, at this late stage (in every sense), change her mind?

  By dawn, the light creeping greyly through the window, Julia had come to a decision. It was possible, she’d decided, in these extreme circumstances, to say sorry for an unknown, undivulged, act or word of hers which Iris believed she had committed or said. Sorry was an easy word. Short. What would it cost her to have to say ‘Sorry, Carlo’? Quickly done. Satisfying to Iris. Perhaps satisfying to Elsa, though maybe Elsa would prefer Julia to refuse to apologise until she’d been told what for, and then there would be the scene she wanted. What would Elsa do, if she said sorry to Carlo? Would she then tell? Iris, of course, would assume that she, Julia, had said sorry because she was acknowledging, without needing to say it, whatever Elsa said she had done to Carlo some thirty years ago.

  Iris, Julia told herself, was in a dreadful state of grief. She could not be held responsible for her own behaviour. Afterwards, later, when Carlo died, if he died, she could attempt to find out what Iris thought she had to apologise to Carlo for. If Carlo lived, the same applied, though investigating the truth might take longer. The important thing, the kind thing, was simply to do it: say sorry. And then see what happened. It could be done. In a curious way, the longer she practised saying Sorry, Carlo, in her head, the more it appealed to her. So easy. And there were plenty of trivial things she could apologise for. Her teenage years had been full of irritating and maligning Carlo, of driving him mad with her sulkiness and obduracy, insulting him in childish ways, making him the object of her scorn, mocking him mercilessly.

  She could say Sorry, Carlo, and mean it. Julia began almost to look forward to saying it, defeating whatever plan Elsa had had by doing so.

  Julia wrote no more letters to Carlo. It was too risky. She never discovered whether Elsa had read the last one and understood its meaning, or whether she had asked her father about it. Somehow, she thought this unlikely. But had Carlo mentioned the contents of the letter to her? That seemed unlikely too. It would be best to drop the whole game. Elsa was still very young. She would forget about the letter even if she had after all read it and guessed at its significance.

  Not long after, Julia was ready to leave her cousin and her family. She had a place at University College London, and a grant to enable her to take it up. She intended never to return. In the vacations, she’d get a job, as a waitress or something, and stay in London. Later, much later, when she’d graduated and had a proper job (though she didn’t know what as) and was settled in her own home, the ultimate ambition, she’d return in a car of her own, she hoped, and collect the little table and the rug and the pictures which had been her mother’s.

  Elsa watched her pack. She stood in the doorway of the room, which would now become hers, her arms folded across her flat chest, one leg crossed awkwardly over the other. Julia ignored her.

  ‘You think you’re so smart, so clever,’ Elsa suddenly said.

  Julia didn’t say anything, just finished zipping up the second holdall. She looked round the room one last time. It worried her that Elsa might scratch the surface of the table, or spill something sticky on the rug. She wished she’d asked Iris if she could put these few belongings of her mother’s in the attic. Too late now.

  ‘Can you get out of the way?’ she said to Elsa, who was almost blocking
the door.

  ‘Good riddance,’ Elsa said.

  ‘Get out of the way,’ Julia said, ‘or I’ll have to push you.’

  ‘Push!’ said Elsa.

  Julia promptly picked up one of her bags and swung it at Elsa’s knees. It was a blow hard enough to unbalance her, and she fell backwards onto the landing, then turned quickly onto all fours and stuck a foot out to trip Julia up. The bags and Julia both fell beside her. They both lay there in a heap, with one of the bags now beginning to roll down the stairs.

  ‘You little cow,’ Julia said, ‘I don’t know what you’re think you’re doing, but I don’t care.’

  The doorbell went.

  ‘That’s my taxi,’ Julia said.

  Iris opened the front door and shouted, sounding astonished, that it was a taxi.

  ‘Coming,’ Julia shouted back. They were both on their feet again.

  ‘I’m going to tell Mum the moment you’re gone,’ Elsa said.

  Julia didn’t bother replying. There was nothing to tell. If Elsa made up lies, she didn’t care. She’d made plenty up herself and didn’t care about those either. The only thing that mattered was getting away. She dragged one bag down the stairs and picked up the other which had fallen almost to the bottom.

  ‘Oh, Julia,’ Iris said, ‘I wish you hadn’t ordered a taxi, I wish you’d let Carlo take you to the station, you know he wanted to. This doesn’t seem right.’

  Julia said she was fine, she didn’t want to bother Carlo.

  ‘Give me a hug,’ Iris said.

  Julia was horrified to see tears in her cousin’s eyes. She made the hug as perfunctory as possible, and muttered goodbye and thanks.

  ‘Ring when you get there,’ Iris said, ‘or I’ll worry.’

  Then, when Julia was finally out of the house and putting her bags on the back seat of the cab, Fran came hurtling out, shouting her goodbyes, and there was another delay.

  As the cab moved off, Julia saw Elsa appearing behind Iris and Fran, both of whom were still waving. She took hold of her mother’s shoulders and turned them towards her.

 

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