Free The Unknown Bridesmaid by Margaret Forster

bread and Cheddar cheese, and an apple, a Granny Smith, and a tangerine.
    ‘No crisps, no biscuits?’ Julia prompted.
    Another energetic shake of the head. ‘They aren’t good for you,’ Camilla said, ‘biscuits are full of sugar and rot your teeth, and crisps are rubbish. We did it at my other school.’
    ‘It?’ queried Julia.
    ‘Diet, what’s good for you and what isn’t.’
    Very virtuous, and Camilla knew it. She was pleased with her answer, her expression almost comical in its knowingness.
    Julia switched tack. ‘Your mum works, doesn’t she, Camilla? What is it that she does?’
    ‘She’s a physiotherapist,’ Camilla said, ‘at the hospital where my dad works too. He’s an engineer.’
    Julia asked her if she had been to this hospital, if she’d seen her mother at work. Camilla said once, when there was a day off school, and her mother had taken her with her because there was no one to look after her and she was too young to be left on her own. Julia asked if she’d liked the hospital. No, Camilla hadn’t. It was too big and there were smells she didn’t like and once they had to walk past a man lying on a trolley, with blood all over him, and it was frightening. She’d sat on a chair watching while her mum got old people out of bed and showed them how to use a sort of walking frame and the old people didn’t like it and wanted to get back into bed. Then she and her mum went to another ward where there was a man who had to learn to use his arm again and he groaned and groaned.
    There was no stopping Camilla. A chatterbox once started. Julia thought of directions in which the talkativeness could be usefully pushed. Here was a child who had twice been found a long way from home and apparently intent on travelling further if she had not drawn attention to herself and been questioned (in the first instance by a traffic warden, seeing her standing hesitantly at a crossing but never crossing, and in the second by a shopkeeper from whom she’d tried to buy a bar of chocolate with a 10p piece). In both cases, Camilla had been quite calm when challenged about what she was doing in an area such a long way from where she said she lived. She said she was just exploring. Taken to the nearest police station each time she gave her address and telephone number, perfectly self-possessed, and waited to be collected without seeming to have any worries about her parents being angry or distressed by her behaviour.
    They hadn’t been angry but they were bewildered. On one occasion, the parents thought Camilla safely at school, to which they’d delivered her themselves. She had slipped outat break time without anyone spotting her, though quite how she’d managed to do this when the playground gate was locked from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. nobody had established satisfactorily. The teachers didn’t yet know Camilla and none of them appeared to have noticed her disappearance until at least an hour later when for some reason there had been a name- or head-check, and one girl was missing.
    Julia had listened patiently while all this was described by the parents, who blamed the teachers for being ‘slack’. They ought, in the father’s opinion, to have been keeping a watch on a new pupil. He didn’t know how this school had been rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, if a nine-year-old girl could just leave it without anyone noticing for more than an hour.
    ‘And the second time Camilla wandered off?’ Julia asked, knowing this time the school could not be blamed. Camilla had been at home. It was an hour before her parents realised she was not watching the DVD they’d left her (they thought) engrossed in.
    ‘We were decorating,’ the mother said, ‘we were painting the bedroom.’
    Julia nodded. She looked at Camilla, who returned her gaze with a slight smile.
    ‘Why does she do this?’ her father asked. ‘Why doesn’t she tell us why she does it? I mean, think what could have happened? It’s dangerous, we’ve told