The Unknown Bridesmaid (26 page)

‘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.

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.