The Unknown Bridesmaid (22 page)

It was easier and more effective to sabotage anything Elsa did. She did this very, very carefully, never going too far. She removed things from Elsa’s school bag, things Elsa had packed neatly the night before, and put them in the living room under a cushion or beneath the television, in the shelf that held the video. Elsa would come home from school upset because she’d got a detention after failing to hand in the homework due. She was absolutely certain she’d put the exercise book in her bag, but it hadn’t been there. Carlo would say she was getting careless, the book must be somewhere, and they would all start looking for it, and when it was found Elsa would be left without any defence. No one believed she had ever placed the book in her bag.

This kind of thing was trivial but, to Julia, immensely satisfying. It was wrong, and she knew it was wrong, but nobody was really harmed, not even Elsa. There were other petty pieces of mischief she carried out, damaging to Elsa,
but it was not until she started lying to Carlo that she began to step over a line she had always assured herself was there.

Julia went to Aunt Maureen’s funeral, a small affair, only Iris and her family, some elderly cousins, some neighbours, no more than twenty-odd people in the church. Aunt Maureen, Julia reflected, counting the heads, would have been offended by such a turnout. They were mostly dressed in black, though, which would’ve mollified her. And the older women wore hats, as Julia herself did. It was her magistrate’s hat, never worn. She’d bought it recently, when first appointed to the bench, under the misapprehension that women JPs had to wear a hat. She had suffered such embarrassment discovering no hat was required and she was thought odd to be wearing one, as though a parody of a female magistrate.

There was quite a lot to clear out of Aunt Maureen’s house, where she’d lived for almost fifty years, managing to avoid being moved into a home, though it had been a close-run thing the last eighteen months. Julia stayed to help. ‘Some of all this stuff might be your mother’s,’ Iris said. ‘Mum took a lot of things to keep for you, remember?’ Julia didn’t remember. The time of her mother’s death had become swallowed in a fog that had never really lifted, and she’d come to believe she never wanted it to. But she said she’d help, she’d share the job of clearing out her aunt’s house. She stayed with Iris for three days after the funeral, going over each day to her aunt’s old house. The furniture went first, collected by a charity Iris had contacted, and then the clothes and shoes and bags, all bundled into bin liners and taken to an Oxfam shop. Iris didn’t want any of them, not even the excellent quality, fairly recently purchased cashmere cardigans. ‘It was ridiculous,’ Iris said, half laughing, ‘Mum going on buying these things when she hardly went out and had
plenty anyway, but she loved shopping.’ As you do, Julia thought, but did not say. She’d never worked out what the relationship between Iris and her mother had been. Yes, they were ‘close’ but was it a stifling closeness, or an easy, relaxed one, and had it changed during Aunt Maureen’s last years? Iris didn’t seem too upset by her mother’s death. There were no tears, no betrayal of any emotion as she dealt with her mother’s belongings.

The drawers were the problem. Not the drawers with clothes or linen in them, but the ones in the bureau in the sitting room, and in the dressing table in the bedroom. They were both crammed with papers of various sorts and each item would have to be looked at in case they included unpaid bills or bank details or investments. Julia settled down to the dressing-table drawers, three of them (but two full of jewellery). It was raining, and the wind was bashing the rain against the windows, just like it had done on the morning of Iris’s first wedding. The memory depressed her. She wondered if Iris was remembering it. The house felt cold, though it was June, so she put down her shivers to the chilly atmosphere, but knew that had nothing to do with them. She didn’t like this house, she never had done. Pressing in upon her was a threat. She was threatening herself. I dare you, confess, she said in her head. Go on, do it, now. This is your chance. How many years is it? So many. Get rid of it, don’t let it linger there forever, niggling away every time the behaviour of some child touches it. But then she shook her head. There was nothing to confess. No, that was not it. There
was
something she ought to tell Iris but telling it would do no good. It would do harm. The only good it would do would be to herself. She might, through confessing, rid herself of this worry which had embedded itself all these years in her mind. When it surfaced, it was like a discordant note being struck. It made her wince, and then it was gone.

‘Julia,’ Iris called up the stairs, ‘come and look at this.’

PHOTOGRAPHS.
JUST TWO,
both black and white, one of them torn across the top right-hand corner. They seemed, at first glance, to be the same, except for the tear in one of them. ‘That,’ said Iris, ‘is your father. But the woman he’s got his arm round is not your mother. It must be “her”.’ There was no mistaking how Iris said ‘her’. Julia made no comment. She held the snapshots up to the light and scrutinised them, as though the very action of doing this might reveal something. She wasn’t sure if she recognised the young man in the picture as her father. Could be, but she couldn’t say for certain, though Iris seemed able to. The woman she definitely had never seen. The phrase ‘buxom wench’ sprang ludicrously into her mind. Her father (allegedly) with his arm round Aunt Maureen’s ‘buxom wench’.

She hadn’t known that Iris knew about the buxom wench, but she realised she should have guessed. Aunt Maureen wouldn’t have been able to keep the information to herself forever, and who better to astound than her own daughter. ‘It was a long time ago,’ Iris said, in her most sympathetic tone. Julia thought this must mean that she was looking shocked at being presented with these photographs, so she smiled at Iris and said it was indeed a long time ago and not really all that exciting. But Iris was looking at her, still, with concern.

‘I’m sure he loved your mum, Julia,’ she said. ‘I mean, he was only a teenager when he . . . when . . . I mean, that’s what used to happen.’

‘I know,’ Julia said, ‘it doesn’t bother me.’ She tried to be brisk. ‘What bothers me,’ she said, ‘is how did your mother come to have these snaps?’

‘I expect they were among
your
mum’s things,’ Iris said.

Julia raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘I don’t think my mum would’ve kept a picture of my father with his buxom wench. She’d have destroyed it, hated it.’

‘Well,’ Iris said, ‘I don’t know how it came into my mother’s possession, unless someone sent it to her, because she was your mum’s sister.’

‘What would’ve been the point?’ Julia said. ‘How would anyone have known her address? And why didn’t
she
either give it to my mum, or tear it up herself?’

There were no answers. They spent the rest of that day finishing off the paper stuff, the letters and bills (all ticked, with ‘paid’ scribbled across them) and statements and policies. It had looked overwhelming and untidy, but in fact there was some sort of order. There were no more discoveries to intrigue. Julia took the two little photographs, slipping them into her bag. ‘Might as well keep them,’ she said to Iris, ‘they’ve lasted this long.’ Iris nodded, pretended to be uninterested, but Julia saw in her expression the same sort of ‘you-don’t-fool-me’ look that Aunt Maureen’s face used to show in direct contradiction to something she was appearing to agree with. But Iris was not her mother. She was kinder, she would say no more, Julia knew.

It occurred to Julia, when she lay awake in her old room in the Annovazzis’ house, that she might have a half-sibling somewhere. What she couldn’t decide was whether she would like to find out and, if it were true, meet this half-sibling. And that’s when the thought of her mother’s pain became distressing, as such thoughts always did. Stupid,
self-indulgent distress she had tried so hard, and for so long, to eradicate from her mind. Her mother had suffered the humiliation. She had borne it, and now she was dead, and this pain was long since over. To imagine it, to empathise to such a degree that it was being suffered all over again was not just stupid but masochistic. It had to be controlled, dealt with, this obsession with a tiny fragment of the past.

But Julia thought she would keep the photographs.

The word ‘blackmail’ was not used, but it was clear it was implied. A ten-year-old girl had been found to be consistently exerting pressure on other children to give her money. She used threats and carried them out. Those who did not pay had books stolen, paint poured over clothes, shoes filled with mud. All relatively minor acts, but hurtful to the children involved. It was felt by the girls’ teachers that any minute worse could happen, that some assault would take place, and so the school was not ignoring these signs of real trouble brewing. The mother had been contacted and said she didn’t care what the school did with Olivia, it was up to them.

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.