When Julia went downstairs, she saw that the lamp in the sitting room was still on, and there, still sitting on the sofa, in exactly the same position, was Iris, asleep, her head lolling forward. She was snoring slightly, more of a wheeze than a snore, and this emphasised the pathos. Iris would be mortified to be found snoring. Women, in her opinion, didn’t snore, only men. Julia went into the kitchen and wondered if she dared to boil the kettle or would it waken Iris? She wanted Iris kept asleep for as long as possible, giving her time to make some tea and leave the house. She couldn’t leave without a hot drink and some toast.
Of course she was not going to go to the hospital and say sorry to Carlo. How she could have imagined in the early hours of the morning she’d do such a thing she didn’t know. The idea was ridiculous. She made tea, and took a slice of bread from the bread bin and popped it into the toaster. When it was ready, she stood nibbling it and sipping the tea, her hands round the comforting warmth of the mug. She should make Iris some tea and toast and take them through to her. Her fear of the night before had gone. She felt such a sudden tenderness for Iris. Another mug filled with tea (she remembered Iris liked milk and one sugar) and another slice of bread toasted; she carried them through to the sitting room, wondering how best to waken her.
But she was now awake, the small noises of kettle and toaster in the next room bringing her out of her sleep. She looked startled, as Julia entered, giving a little ‘Oh!’ of surprise. ‘I’ve made you some tea,’ Julia said, in a whisper, and held the mug out. Iris took it, her hand quite shaky, but she managed to drink a little. Julia didn’t sit down. She was standing there, about to say she was going to leave now, and dreading Iris’s reaction whatever it might be, when the telephone rang. Iris turned her head and looked at it in apparent astonishment, as though she had never heard a phone ring before. It went on ringing but she seemed paralysed. ‘Shall I?’ Julia said, and moved towards the table where the phone rested. But suddenly Iris stood up, slopping some of the tea from her still full mug, and moved stiffly to the table, putting the mug down carefully before lifting the receiver. Her back was now to Julia, who quietly left the room and put on her coat, which she’d left the night before on the peg behind the door, and picked up her bag from the foot of the stairs. She hesitated only a moment at the front door, straining to hear Iris’s voice so that she might interpret from it whether this was a call from the hospital or from Elsa or Fran. Whoever was calling, Iris was speaking to them in an even tone, not saying much at all except yes, OK, I’m sure, no, I don’t think so, or at least this was all Julia could hear. No panic, anyway, no cry of anguish. Good.
She hoped the bus stop hadn’t changed. It was a good distance away but she remembered how to get to it and knew there was a bus, or there used to be, that went to the station. No chance of flagging down a taxi. Taxis didn’t cruise round this suburb, and she hadn’t wanted to order a minicab. She walked briskly, glad to have left her cousin’s house without any scene, without encountering Elsa or Fran. They would all think less of her, for sneaking away, but she didn’t care zwhat they thought. If Carlo was dead, Julia would be wiped out of Iris’s mind; if he were still alive, then Julia had escaped and she would know she couldn’t be brought back. Julia hoped this reasoning was correct.
London suited Julia. Other girls from the North might find the city intimidating but she did not. She thought it was exciting. Walking down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace thrilled her, making her feel part of all the events she’d seen in films and on television featuring the location. Much of her free time was spent simply walking from park to park, and along the river, and she never grew tired of trawling the city. Manchester and the Annovazzi family began to recede quite alarmingly in her memory.
‘Alarmingly’ because she’d spent so many years of her life there, a time when everything went wrong, or so it seemed to her in retrospect. It scared her to think of all the wrong turnings she’d almost taken. Well, no, some of which she had taken, only she’d got out of them in time. The letters to Carlo episode particularly bothered her, and so did not knowing the effect the second silly letter had had. It made her blush with shame to recall what she’d written, dragging that shop assistant Ramola into her plot. Would she have got into trouble? Would Carlo have approached her, accused her, sacked her? Julia was glad to be in London, far away from any possible consequences of her foolishness.
Iris wrote to her throughout her years as a student, sweet little notes wondering how she was getting on, and telling her what Elsa and Fran were doing, a predictably boring list of swimming triumphs and school concerts and details of who had had a tooth filled or her hair cut short. Sometimes she mentioned Carlo, but not often. His business was doing well, but he was finding managing it tiring and was thinking of appointing a general manager. Iris always ended by saying how often she thought of Julia, and how they all missed her and hoped she wasn’t feeling lost in the big city, or lonely. That last bit made Julia laugh – as if! Where she’d felt lost and lonely was in Manchester, living with the Annovazzis, being utterly out of place, desperate to be free.
She replied only once to Iris, a few weeks after she arrived, telling her how happy she was, how settled, and then that she was going to be working very hard and wouldn’t have time to write very often. She didn’t go ‘home’ (what Iris called ‘home’) for the first Christmas, which upset Iris, because (she wrote) Christmas was a family time. Not to Julia it wasn’t. She worked on the post and in the evenings in a bar and managed to save enough money to join a trip to Austria, skiing. They drove there in a van, four of them, and stayed in a hostel and she had the best Christmas she’d ever had.
When she graduated, Julia hesitated over whether to give Iris the address of the flat she was going to be sharing with three other friends. She didn’t want to be tracked down, but on the other hand she didn’t think it wise to disappear entirely or Iris might have one of her fits of anxiety and report her missing, so, reluctantly, she sent a card with her new address, telling Iris that she was training to be a chemistry teacher. Immediately, a letter came from Iris, saying how relieved she was to hear Julia was alive and well because she’d begun to dread something awful had happened, and she felt so responsible for her welfare, and had done ever since Julia came to live with them. The letter was thick with reproach, and all of it was justified, but, as ever, it only deepened Julia’s rage that she should be made to feel guilty and ungrateful. She didn’t acknowledge this letter at all.
Then, four years later, by which time Julia was no longer teaching, Iris wrote asking if Elsa could come and stay for one night the following week. She could sleep on a sofa, or even on the floor, and would be no trouble. She was coming for an interview at Goldsmiths Training College, though Iris would much prefer her to have applied to a college in Manchester and didn’t know why it had to be London. Julia wrote back swiftly saying she was very sorry but she wouldn’t be at home that day and neither would her flatmates, so it wouldn’t be possible to have Elsa to stay. She wished her good luck with the interview. There was, to her relief, no response, though she was pretty sure Iris, and certainly Elsa, would have seen through her excuse.
But Elsa turned up, not on the night her mother had asked if she could stay but the night before. Julia didn’t recognise her, which was hardly surprising given the fact that Elsa had been only ten when she last saw her and was now seventeen. The spectacles had gone, and so had the gawkiness. Her height was now in proportion, and she was trendily dressed. Completely self-assured, she said, ‘Hi, Julia,’ and when Julia didn’t react, ‘I’m Elsa.’ She stepped inside, taking off her rucksack and putting it on the ground. ‘Nice to see you too,’ she said, smiling, perfectly at ease, as Julia still just stood there. ‘Took ages to find this street,’ Elsa said. ‘I got lost twice, there are so many Victoria Streets.’
No one else was home that night, so there were plenty of beds. Julia found clean sheets and made a business of putting them on, and then she offered Elsa some
bread and cheese, which was all she had. Elsa sprawled on the sofa and munched away and Julia felt more and more that she was the interloper. ‘Mum misses you,’ Elsa said, ‘she’s always going on about you.’ Then, with a pause, ‘Drives us all mad. She’s never taken the hint, has she?’ Julia didn’t ask what hint. She was concentrating on being civil but distinctly frosty. If there were any hints to be taken Elsa was staring them in the face. Elsa, she reasoned, must have come with a purpose, even if it were one as obvious as merely to annoy her and catch her out, force her into giving the hospitality she’d been determined not to offer. ‘Mum’s quite hurt that you don’t come to see us or keep in touch. Dad tells her not to be so touchy. He says they did their best for you and it’s not their fault if you reject them.’
When Julia didn’t respond to this either, Elsa put her head on one side and studied Julia. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘I don’t really remember your mum, but somehow I think you look like her now. Do you? Do you think you look like her?’
‘Why have you come here, Elsa?’ Julia said. ‘Not just to wonder if I look like my mother, I’m sure.’
‘No,’ Elsa said, ‘that’s true. I needed a bed for the night, but I could have afforded a hotel, couldn’t I? Instead of trailing all this way here. So why did I bother eh? Well, curiosity, of course. To see what you looked like now. I haven’t got very good memories of you when you lived with us, but then I don’t suppose you’ve got good memories of me.’
‘No,’ said Julia, ‘I haven’t.’
‘But you’ll have them of my mum, I’m sure? She was always kind, wasn’t she?’
Julia nodded.
‘And my dad? Wasn’t he kind too?’
Again, Julia nodded. She was about to say something, about to ask Elsa to stop fooling about, and to say whatever she was bursting to say, but Elsa carried on.
‘You caused my dad a lot of trouble,’ she said, ‘I wonder if you remember that? I’ve always wondered why you were so horrible to him. It didn’t seem to make sense. Was it because you were jealous of me? Jealous, because you didn’t have a father? Was that it?’
‘I think we should both go to bed,’ Julia said, and got up and left the room. It was the point at which she wilfully rejected the opportunity she’d been given, and it never came again. In the morning, when she came down, Elsa had gone, leaving her worried and uneasy.
X
THERE WAS A funeral, of course, but Julia didn’t go to this one. She didn’t send a wreath, or flowers, either. But a week later she wrote to Iris, a careful letter, saying that she had been sorry to hear about Carlo’s death but that she had thought she would not be welcome at the funeral. She was grateful, she wrote, for everything Iris and Carlo had done for her, and she was sorry if she had not always been as appreciative as she should have been. She made no reference to having been asked to apologise to Carlo for something Elsa had apparently accused her of. A generalised apology was, she reckoned, enough.
She didn’t expect to hear from Iris ever again.
The feeling of guilt was stronger than it had ever been. She was never going to see Iris again, but Julia thought about her cousin constantly, going over and over their history, starting with being her bridesmaid and ending with the scene in her house the night Carlo died. She’d carried this guilt, for all the wrong things she’d done, for years but it had never been so intense, never eaten away at her as it was doing now. Again and again she told herself that nothing could be done about it that had not already been done. Guilt had to be admitted and accepted and then absorbed. Who, after all, was not guilty of something less than admirable in their life?
But in her own case, the list was long. Guilt had shaped her life. It had made her, she was sure, a closed-up creature, always wary, suspicious that she might be found out long after there was anything to find out. She had never allowed anyone to get too close in case she let slip any of her grubby little secrets. She’d been a child when she failed to confess that she’d tipped the baby’s pram, and her silence could be explained by fear of the consequences, if she told the truth, not only for herself but for her mother. But later? What was the excuse then? She told herself, comfortingly, that she couldn’t really remember exactly what had happened. Maybe the baby’s head hadn’t been knocked at all. Maybe she hadn’t really stolen money, nor done any of the other things she was ashamed of. Who could be sure of anything in their childhood?
On many different occasions, she’d thought of walking into a police station and saying that when she was eight she might have caused the death of a baby. What would the police do? Pull out a file on the case? But it would have in it, if it existed at all, the coroner’s verdict which (though she didn’t know exactly what this was) absolved anyone from blame. She would be an embarrassment, and, as ever, the refrain ‘what good would it do?’ ran in her head. It would only distress Iris, and it was Julia’s conviction that Iris’s life had not been blighted irrevocably by her son’s death. She never mentioned it, and when her mother had sometimes done so Iris had said firmly that it was in the past and she didn’t want it mentioned. Once, when Elsa had seen a photograph of her mother with a baby, at her grandmother’s house, she had asked Iris if it was herself. ‘No,’ Iris had said, in Julia’s hearing, ‘it was another baby, before you were born.’ She had shown no emotion, was brisk and matter-of-fact (it was nine years afterwards) though Julia, listening, had felt afraid.
Guilt, she’d discovered as she grew up, could be lived with. She even, at one stage, convinced herself that she’d been brave, bearing the guilt, keeping it to herself, though she’d disabused herself of this notion later. The guilt about the other lesser acts of dishonesty was easier to deal with. They were familiar in her work where she repeatedly saw the lying and cheating and general nastiness exhibited by some children. Her own behaviour in the past fitted a pattern. Where she was lucky was in not having her various deceits exposed. She’d been given the chance to leave them behind, label them to herself as a phase in her development, whereas other children were not so fortunate. And she, unlike so many of them, had been treated kindly. The guilt about how she’d reacted to this kindness was the hardest and most complicated guilt to absorb.
Everything, in every person’s life, led back to childhood, a truism which she’d found could not be stressed enough. Childhoods did not explain or justify all subsequent behaviour, of course not, but they were the obvious starting point for any understanding. She’d thought long and hard about her own childhood experiences, searching for key moments and influences, and discovered how difficult it was to be sure of them. Again and again she came back to the secrecy surrounding her father, how she’d known so little, and how her mother had been determined that she should know nothing. The lesson she reckoned she’d picked up was that hiding information was not just permissible but a good thing. It had to be done. Not concealing things was weak, if the revelation might damage you. There was, in fact, no need to call the habit one of concealment. It could be called a policy of self-protection.
It was a filthy, wet morning, the sky a sullen grey, the pavements dark with rain. Getting up had been hard, the house so cold that Julia shivered making herself coffee. The central heating system had failed the day before and there’d been no chance to call someone to come and put it right.
The bus that took her to the magistrates’ court was packed to more than capacity but the driver had let extra passengers on, out of pity for their drowned state, at the last bus stop. A double buggy jammed the exit doors, the young woman holding the handle looked defiantly at a man sighing pointedly as he tried to make a space for himself to the right of it. Another buggy blocked the aisle, the area allowed for buggies already full. Julia closed her eyes. She thought of all the bus rides to school in Manchester on mornings like this, and how she’d endured them by fantasising about her life after school, a life which would be full of sun and warmth and light and fun. Once she’d wished that there existed a means of looking into the future, so that she co
uld see herself in that happy place, but now she was grateful it did not exist. She wouldn’t have wanted to see herself on this bus, clad in a black raincoat not dissimilar to her old school raincoat, and black boots, on her way to a magistrates’ court, there to be depressed even more by what would pass before her.
She arrived late. This was good. It cut out the biscuits and chat. The other two magistrates were waiting for her in the corridor, relieved that the session didn’t have to be cancelled because she hadn’t turned up. She had time only to hang up her dripping wet coat and then they were straight into court and onto the first case. In contrast to herself, Julia felt the woman glowed with energy and optimism. She was dressed in an alarming collection of colourful garments, a dizzying array from her hat down to her socks and multicoloured shoes. It hurt the eyes to look at her. At first, it all looked a mess, a jumble, some sort of sartorial disaster, but gradually Julia realised there was a degree of coordination. The colours were in the same spectrum, violent pink deepening to dark purple, a magenta merging into lilac. It must have taken hours to put together. The charge was a serious one. This flamboyantly but well-dressed woman, aged forty, hitherto a respectable shop assistant in a department store, had stolen a baby. She had taken the fifteen-month-old girl, asleep in her buggy, and wheeled her out of the supermarket while the mother was struggling to control her other child, a three-year-old boy, who was pulling boxes of cereal from the shelves. The buggy had been at the end of the aisle, the brake on, a wire basket, half full, laid down beside it, while the mother ran down to stop the boy and followed him when he raced round the corner to the next aisle. It had taken perhaps three minutes for the boy to be hauled back to where the buggy and the mother’s wire basket had been parked, but in that time the accused was out of the car park and halfway down the street outside and lost in a crowd.
The Unknown Bridesmaid Page 22