The Unknown Bridesmaid (13 page)

‘Thank God,’ Julia’s mother said, ‘she never stops talking.’

‘Her baby died,’ Julia said, ‘just like little Reggie.’

Julia’s mother said, ‘She told you that, did she? Just like Doris, just like her, typical.’

‘Of what?’ Julia asked, and was told not to be irritating. As usual, this didn’t make sense, but Julia didn’t point this out. She wanted to hear about the funeral.

Later, she went with Aunt Maureen to the cemetery. Julia’s
mother never knew about this. Julia had tried asking her mother if she could go and look at little Reggie’s grave, and her mother was appalled. ‘What an idea!’ she said, and that was that. But Aunt Maureen, when Julia got her on her own, responded quite differently. ‘Of course, my pet,’ she said, ‘of course you can, we’ll go together, no need to mention it to you-know-who.’ Julia knew who. She was spending the day with Aunt Maureen anyway, while her mother went to see a solicitor about something to do with money. Julia didn’t know what it was all about, all questions being ignored, but the visit to the solicitor was important enough, Julia noticed, for her mother to dress in her best outfit and put lipstick on. Julia was told to go straight to Aunt Maureen’s after school, which she did. Aunt Maureen gave her a glass of orange juice and a biscuit and then they went down to the cemetery, closing the door very quietly behind them because Iris was resting.

Julia had only ever been in one cemetery, the one where her father was buried. Her mother didn’t believe in what she called ‘making an exhibition’ of herself by frequent graveside visits, but on the anniversary of her husband’s death she and Julia always put flowers in the metal holder before the gravestone. Julia rather liked the ceremony of it. She felt important, and enjoyed filling the holder with water and arranging the flowers. Tulips, the flowers were always tulips, white ones. Julia sometimes suggested yellow or red tulips but her mother just gave her a withering look and bought white ones. They would stand in front of the grave for a moment or two, Julia’s mother with her eyes closed, and then she would say, ‘Come on, that’s enough,’ and they’d leave. Julia was never sure what her mother’s closed eyes signified. She’d scrutinised her mother’s face, when the eyes were closed to see if any tears were leaking out, but they never were. Once, she’d asked her mother if closing her eyes meant she was praying, to which her mother replied, ‘Certainly not.’ So Julia concluded that when her eyes were closed her mother must just be
remembering her father. She liked that thought, but never put it to the test, in case her mother disillusioned her.

But the cemetery in which little Reggie was buried was nothing like the place where Julia’s father lay. Julia’s father’s grave was in a small cemetery, a churchyard, in fact, a pretty place on a hillside. Little Reggie was buried in a vast cemetery lying between two thunderingly noisy main roads. Aunt Maureen led Julia under an archway and then up a long, broad path that was almost another road. There were flower beds at intervals, full of rigid rows of violently coloured blooms, and beyond them masses of gravestones, crosses and angels and peculiar stone columns. They seemed to walk forever along this gruesome highway, the thought of so many people under the earth horrifying Julia, but then Aunt Maureen turned off along a narrower path, and then almost immediately turned again, down a grassy path this time, until they came to some trees planted in a circle. ‘Here,’ Aunt Maureen whispered, ‘it’s where they lay the babies to rest.’ Inside the circle of trees the wind that had been stinging their faces all the way up the main path was lessened. They were sheltered, standing there, and the sound of traffic could no longer be heard. ‘There,’ Aunt Maureen was saying, still in a whisper, ‘that’s little Reggie’s place. There’ll be a stone later. An angel, white marble, we think, with his name and dates on.’

Julia never told her mother she had been to the cemetery and Aunt Maureen kept quiet about it. Weeks later she took Julia aside and asked her if she’d like to ‘slip off’ again, to visit little Reggie and see the stone angel. But Julia shook her head. She’d seen the grave once. She could visualise the stone angel well enough. Little Reggie was dead and buried, and the police asked no more questions. ‘We just have to get on with life,’ Julia’s mother said. She said this repeatedly. If Iris was in the room and heard her, she left it. But Julia agreed with her mother. She had to get on with her life, and part of getting on was not to think about her mishap with the Silver Cross pram. Ever.

THE CONFERENCE WAS
in Manchester. Julia went by train, dreading the arrival at the station, fearing she would be troubled, even after the thirty-year gap, by upsetting memories, but none surfaced, which seemed like a victory of some sort. Manchester, as she passed through the streets in a taxi, looked much the same. It was raining, hard, and the grimness she recalled hadn’t changed. Colleagues of hers were fond of Manchester and could never understand her aversion to the city. They’d told her she should go again, she would be surprised at how vibrant the place now was, how cleaned up and splendid. She could see no sign of splendour out of the rain-battered taxi windows.

She was staying one night only, sufficient time to fit in two sessions at the conference, both of them to do with trauma experienced by children. The speakers were known to her and were highly regarded in their field. She’d read the book one of them had recently published (and which she privately considered she could have written better herself) and the paper the other had contributed to an American journal. She reread the paper that evening, in her hotel, after a room-service meal, marking it with pencilled queries. She wasn’t intending to ask any questions of the speaker, but just in case she might be tempted she wanted to be prepared. She’d sit at the back, as near to the door as possible. These sessions
could go on far too long, in spite of the best efforts of the organisers. She intended to slip out if it all got too much.

Although tired, she didn’t sleep well. The hotel was not exactly noisy, but there was a constant padding about along its corridors and the frequent opening and closing of doors. At six she got up and had a long, hot shower, and then made herself tea. There was a selection of individual tea bags, all neatly stacked in a box. She remembered the contempt Aunt Maureen and all her generation had for tea bags of any kind. Loose tea and a proper teapot had to be used at all times. Watching her Darjeeling bag float in the hot water, pressing it down with a spoon until the water was the right colour, Julia saw in her mind’s eye the look of disgust on Aunt Maureen’s face and heard her say that’s not proper tea, Julia.

For months, all that grief had floated on tea, until one day Iris said she preferred coffee. Just like that; Julia had been there. ‘I prefer coffee, Mum,’ Iris had said. Aunt Maureen looked aghast and said she didn’t have any coffee, as Iris knew perfectly well. They were a tea-drinking household, and that was that. Iris said she’d bought some coffee from a new coffee bar, which was also a shop, near where Iris now worked as a secretary in a solicitor’s office. Julia and her mother had passed it, and the aroma drifting out as the coffee beans were being ground was overpowering. Julia loved it but, predictably, her mother did not. She said it made her feel faint, it knocked her out as if it were a poisonous fume. ‘Iris is going to buy some ground coffee,’ Julia had volunteered, ‘and a machine to make it in.’ ‘Her mother won’t like
that
,’ Julia’s mother had said, with grim satisfaction.

The machine was a percolator, and Iris kept it in her bedroom, only bringing it down to the kitchen when her mother wasn’t in it because the mere sight of it resting beside the teapots
could upset her. Julia loved to watch this strange machine bubbling away, though she found the actual coffee it produced a bit strong. So did Iris, but she persevered bravely and came to like it. Julia went with her sometimes to buy the coffee. She’d imagined the man who managed it would be foreign, Italian or French maybe, and old, but he was young and English, and though not conventionally handsome (in Julia’s opinion) he was tall and strong-looking and had black curly hair, worn quite long. He gave Iris a great welcome, and Julia saw how she blushed and smiled and, on the way out, hummed.

‘Do you like him?’ Julia ventured.

‘Who?’ Iris said.

‘The coffee man,’ Julia said.

‘Oh, him? Well, I don’t know him, do I? I just buy coffee there sometimes.’

‘He likes you,’ Julia said, and Iris laughed and said she was being silly.

It was good to hear Iris laugh, of course. Julia’s mother and Aunt Maureen agreed; they commented to each other that ‘things’ were ‘looking up’ and ‘turning round’, and it was about time. ‘I think,’ Julia heard Aunt Maureen say, ‘it’s that Michael Osborne in the office, you know, the boss’s son. He seems, from what she’s said, to pay a lot of attention to her.’ Julia kept quiet. Maybe Iris wouldn’t like the coffee man mentioned, but she was sure he, and not this Osborne man, was the one making Iris happier. Maybe Iris would prefer this to remain a secret, and Julia was still good at keeping secrets. It had only just recently struck her that other girls were not. At school, secrets were traded ruthlessly. Girls told by other girls not to tell a soul almost immediately told someone else, adding ‘Keep it quiet’ to cover themselves. The secrets involved were not, in Julia’s opinion, interesting, or even worthy of the name ‘secret’.
She
knew what a secret was. She had one, and had never told anyone, and never would.

She wondered often whether Iris perhaps felt the same about secrets. She had never, Julia knew, revealed what it was that Reginald had given Julia to give to her. After a long time she had unwrapped it, but afterwards had carefully rewrapped it so that no one could see that it had been unwrapped. No one except Julia, who had seen it in Iris’s bedside cabinet drawer one day and spotted straight away that the little white ribbon had been snipped off and not replaced exactly in the centre. She shouldn’t have been looking in drawers, of course. This, as her mother had told her long ago, was snooping, and a very unpleasant activity, something to be ashamed of. But Julia was not particularly ashamed. A little bit, yes, but not much, so long as no one found out. All she did was gently slide drawers open, and just look. She didn’t touch. She simply liked to see what others had in the drawers of their different bits of furniture. What was wrong with that?

She had been in and out of Iris’s bedroom quite a lot while little Reggie was alive. Iris was always sending her to get something to do with the care of the baby, so Julia had plenty of opportunity to have a quick look in Iris’s familiar drawers. Reginald’s secret after-the-wedding present was always there, never touched again after its one unwrapping, or so Julia reckoned, but kept tucked in the back left-hand corner of the small, shallow drawer, behind a packet of tissues (opened) and a pair of spectacles in a soft leather case. After little Reggie died, Julia was not as often in Iris’s bedroom because Iris herself practically lived there, with the curtains drawn, but as things improved, and Iris began getting up, she would send Julia up to her room to get some item she hadn’t the energy to go and get herself. Julia would go to collect the nail scissors, or whatever it was Iris wanted, and she sometimes allowed herself a quick peep in the drawer which held Reginald’s present, just to check it hadn’t been thrown out. She was always pleased to see it was there, and would touch
it lightly with one finger, nothing more. She had no wish to ask Iris about this object. It appealed to her, in an odd way, to have it remain mysterious.

Then one day, eight months after little Reggie died, Julia and her mother were summoned by Aunt Maureen who said she had some news. Julia heard her mother on the telephone saying, ‘News? What sort of news? Good, or bad?’ Whatever the answer, Julia’s mother responded by telling Julia to get her coat on, quickly. The news, which was described by Aunt Maureen as ‘a shock’, was that Iris had become engaged. No, not to Michael Osborne, which Aunt Maureen could have understood, and welcomed, but to a man who sold coffee, who was half Italian and had an unpronounceable surname. Julia smiled.

‘What are you grinning at?’ her mother said.

‘He’s nice,’ Julia said, ‘he has curly black hair.’

Aunt Maureen and Julia’s mother stared at her, their expressions similar, a mixture of barely suppressed curiosity, and distaste.

‘
Curly
black hair?’ Aunt Maureen queried, as though curls in themselves were deeply suspect in a man.

Julia nodded. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘he ties it back in a ponytail.’

Stunned silence.

‘Not with a ribbon,’ Julia added hastily, ‘just with an elastic band, I think. Iris likes it tied back.’

‘How do you know?’ Aunt Maureen asked, her tone incredulous.

‘I asked her,’ Julia said. ‘I asked her, “Do you like Carlo’s hair loose or tied back?” and she said—’

‘Carlo?’ her mother queried.

Julia nodded. ‘Carlo Annovazzi,’ she said, lingering on the surname, breaking it up into three syllables and emphasising the ‘Anno’, making it long drawn-out, the way Carlo himself did.

‘What a name,’ Aunt Maureen said, and then, ‘Why she couldn’t fall for someone English I don’t know, someone like—’

‘Maureen!’ Julia’s mother said warningly.

‘Well,’ Maureen said, ‘someone like him, where’s the harm in saying that, what’s wrong in a mother wanting her daughter to get engaged to an Englishman and not a foreigner?’

But Carlo Annovazzi was not really a foreigner. He’d been born in Manchester, of an Italian father and an English mother. His father was born in Naples but came to Manchester with his parents and two sisters when he was two. All that was foreign about Carlo was his name. Otherwise, he was Manchester born-and-bred. He talked like a Mancunian, and couldn’t speak more than a few phrases of Italian. All this emerged the very first time Iris brought him home, and helped a great deal to make Aunt Maureen reconciled. She didn’t like Carlo’s job though. Selling coffee, no matter how fashionable the place it was sold in, or how good the coffee, was not a profession. Carlo was a shopkeeper. A shopkeeper and a salesman and that was that. ‘Maureen,’ Julia’s mother told her, ‘you are a snob, you always have been.’ Maureen said she didn’t care. If wanting the best for your daughter meant you were a snob, then she was happy to be one.