Daughter of Mine

Betty and Pat were agog when she came into the room carrying them, and the flowers did give Lizzie a welcome boost, for she’d begun to feel very low. Before Tressa’s wedding it had been rush and bustle, arranging everything, and then there’d been the wedding itself, and though she’d accepted the fact she would miss Tressa, she hadn’t realised how much until everything was over.

‘Is that the same Steve who was at the wedding?’ Betty said, scrutinising the card.

‘Aye.’

‘Is he aiming to get back with you or what? You said you was just friends.’

‘We are,’ Lizzie declared, and hoped Steve still saw it that way and he wasn’t harbouring false romantic hopes. But surely, she told herself, I am overreacting. He had sent flowers for her birthday. It was the sort of thing friends did. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Steve knows it’s over. I think it’s his way of saying he is sorry that it ended the way it did.’

‘Oh. Right,’ Betty said, and her eyes met those of Pat’s. Both thought the same thing: if Lizzie really thought that, then she definitely was as green as she was cabbage-looking.

Lizzie sighed as she went down for the loan of a vase for the flowers. Although she had no desire to begin any sort of relationship with Steve, she knew the days ahead would be lonely ones for her.

What made things worse was the fact that Betty and Pat had got themselves steady boyfriends and seldom went out with each other, never mind having Lizzie tag along. She didn’t know the others in the hotel well enough to ask if she could be part of their group, and anyway, most of the girls of her age were like Betty and Pat and courting strong.

She tried to rouse herself, but even going to the pictures on your own was no fun, though better than the music hall and you couldn’t turn up at a dance alone and unescorted. As for pubs, well she knew what sort of women hung around in those places. So she ended up going on long, solitary walks.

Every week she went to see Tressa. Tressa, now a married woman and getting heavier by the week, was steeped in domesticity. She didn’t seem like the sort of girl that had gone tripping over the cobblestones of the Bull Ring arm in arm with Lizzie, picking over the bargains and cheeking the costermongers. Nor did she seem the same sort of girl who’d once spent two weeks’ wages on a pair of shoes from Marshall and Snelgrove’s—that she really ‘had to have’. Lizzie remembered howthey used to giggle as they tried on the fancy hats in C&A Modes and acted all lah-di-dah and how they searched the racks of clothes to find something new to wear to go out in that night.

For Tressa, those days seemed so far away they might never have been, and she had no interest in hearing what Lizzie had done or seen. Most of her sentences now began, ‘After the baby is born…’ and Lizzie realised that Doreen, who awaited the baby’s birth with the same excitement, was now more important to Tressa than she was, and it was a blow to take.

Lizzie began to feel increasingly lonely, but she tried to keep any self-pity out of her voice in the letters she wrote home every week. That October she went alone, Tressa being too near her time, to the marriage of her sister Eileen to Murray O’Shea, the man she’d been after for years. Lizzie didn’t know why she wanted him, for, as her father said, the man would neither work nor want. But there was no accounting for taste, and Eileen was blissfully happy. Lizzie, not wishing to spoil the day for her, wore the bridesmaid’s dress she thought she looked hideous in without a word of complaint. Back home in Birmingham she felt more alone than ever, and she viewed the coming winter with depression, knowing soon even her walks would be curtailed.

One evening in early November, Lizzie was queuing alone at the Odeon cinema to see Cavalcade, which many of the girls at the hotel had enthused about, when she spotted Steve in the crowd in front of her.

She was pleased to see someone she knew and she called to him. He was with Stuart and two chattering, giggling girls, but she saw that too late and he was already pushing his way through the people towards her. ‘Lizzie,’ he breathed. ‘How have you been?’

‘Oh, grand, you know,’ Lizzie said. ‘I didn’t realise you were with friends.’

‘That’s all right.’

There was an uneasy silence and then she said, ‘Thanks for the roses in July. I meant to send a note.’ She had agonised over what to say and in the end decided to say nothing, and she wasn’t to know how longingly Steve had waited for some acknowledgement.

‘Were they all right?’

‘They were beautiful. Every girl in the hotel was envious,’ Lizzie said, and then, seeing Stuart’s neck craning over the queuing people, she said, ‘Shouldn’t you go back to your friends?’

‘They’re not,’ Steve said. ‘I mean, they are just two girls we picked up in the pub. I’ll just put Stuart…’

‘No, wait. Steve…’ But he’d gone and the crowd closed about him. In minutes he was back.

‘Right, sorted that. Now where shall we go?’

He didn’t say that Stuart had called him the stupidest bugger he’d ever seen. ‘We were in for a good night here, mate, with these little goers.’

‘Come on, man, I’d do the same for you.’

‘Oh go boil your head, Steve. You need it looking at.’

‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

Steve betrayed not a word of this altercation on his face as he stood before Lizzie and said, ‘Just say the word, Lizzie. We’ll do whatever you want.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘D’you fancy going dancing up West End?’

‘With you?’

Steve looked around him with exaggerated care. ‘Well,’ he said at last with a grin, ‘I can’t see any other bugger offering.’

It was on the tip of Lizzie’s tongue just to say no and thank him. And then what? She could hardly go into the cinema with Steve now, after he’d apparently dumped one of the girls he was in the queue with to be with her. And yet…

‘Come on, Lizzie,’ Steve pleaded. ‘It will be as a friend. Straight up.’

If she didn’t go, ahead of her was a lonely night spent in the bedroom of the hotel, and she loved dancing. But it was going out with Steve again. ‘As a friend only, nothing more,’ she said at last. ‘Promise me?’

‘As a friend only,’ Steve said, drawing her away from the crowds surging into the cinema. Then he lifted his finger and gave it a lick. ‘See this wet, see this dry,’ he said with a smile, ‘cut my throat if I tell a lie.’

Lizzie gave him a push. ‘Fool!’

Steve laughed and grasped Lizzie around the waist and felt his heart thudding against his chest.

Steve behaved like a perfect gentleman that night, and the night he took her to the pictures and she saw Cavalcade in the end, and the time he took her to see the hilarious but saucy Max Wall at the Hippodrome. One night they spent a quiet evening at the pub, and though Lizzie allowed herself two port and lemons before switching to orange juice, Steve didn’t complain or urge her to drink something more exciting.

Gradually, she began to relax in his company and remember the good times of their earlier courtship. It was a novel experience for Steve to try and please a lady knowing there would be nothing in it for him, and Lizzie didn’t know what it cost him to keep his hands by his sides when he longed to encircle her and to kiss those lovely lips he watched yearningly.

Without his street women, he couldn’t have managed, though now he’d begun to feel guilty about going from Lizzie straight to the bed of another. He didn’t tell Stuart this, though, for he was aware that Stuart already thought him clean barmy. ‘Variety, man,’ he said, when they were both making their way home after such a night. ‘Spice of life. Nothing quite like it.’

Tressa’s son was born on Wednesday, 7

December, and Steve came that evening to tell Lizzie the news after it had been phoned through to The Bell public house and the landlady had come up with the message. ‘We could go up of the weekend,’ he said.

Lizzie hesitated. She wouldn’t like Tressa and Mike to get any ideas about her and Steve, and yet she was off-duty all day Saturday until seven o’clock, and she had to go and see Tressa sometime and ooh and ah over the child. It would be silly for her to go on her own, and so she nodded. ‘All right.’

In the end, she was more affected by the child, Phillip, than she ever thought she would be, and she didn’t have to pretend to be awed by the diminutive but perfect little person Tressa gave her to hold, with his tiny fingers and even smaller toes. His skin was flawless, his lashes making perfect crescents on the top of his cheeks as he slept, and Lizzie smelt that very special baby smell. Suddenly she was filled with a deep longing for a child of her own, a feeling that took her totally by surprise.

‘Are you and Steve…you know?’ Tressa asked when the men had gone off to wet the baby’s head.

‘No, but we are friends,’ Lizzie said. ‘Mind how I told you we had a talk about everything at your wedding?’

‘Aye, I remember all right,’ Tressa said. ‘And I hope you know what you’re doing. Steve doesn’t seem to be looking at you with the eyes of a friend, if you know what I mean?’

Lizzie told herself Tressa must be mistaken. Steve never touched her besides holding her shoulders gently and giving her a kiss on the cheek. Surely if he thought of her any other way he’d have tried something else. She hoped he never went down that road, for then she’d have to put a stop to it straight away, and she had to admit that going out with him was far better than sitting alone in the bedroom of the hotel.

Lizzie barely saw Steve once the Christmas festivities got underway, and she was surprised to receive a package on Christmas Eve. She took it to her room and opened it out. There was a velvet box inside, and in it, resting on a nest of navy silk, was a beautifully fine gold bracelet. When she lifted it out there were gasps from Betty and Pat and Marjorie, who now occupied Tressa’s bed.

‘Will you look at that?’ Pat breathed.