Читать книгу Daughter of Mine - Anne Bennett - Страница 9

‘You said it would be all right,’ Tressa said accusingly to Mike as they wandered arm in arm down Colmore Row.

Mike was still getting to grips with the news that his lovely, beautiful Tressa was carrying his child, and yet he knew she had a right to be angry with him. He had promised she’d be all right and that he would see to it. He knew he couldn’t wear anything to prevent pregnancy, the Church’s teaching was clear, but he’d intended to pull out before any damage was done. He hadn’t realised how difficult that would be, how carried away he’d become, so that he’d be virtually unable to do that. So the condition Tressa was in was entirely his fault.

He wasn’t aware she was crying until he felt her shoulders shaking. ‘Don’t cry, pet,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ He turned her away from the city centre into one of the deserted side roads and kissed her gently. ‘Now,’ he said, facing her. ‘You are sure about this?’

Tressa nodded her head. ‘My monthlies were due a week after we became engaged, but nothing happened and it’s been the same this month, and it’s nearly the end of March now.’ She looked at Mike and added, ‘It must have happened that first time.’

Bugger! thought Mike, and he knew it must have. That time he was so buoyed up with the culmination of his dreams, and drunk with lust as much as the drinks he’d consumed, he could no more have stopped than he could have turned back the tide, and this was the result. ‘We’ll get married sooner rather than later, that’s all,’ he said reassuringly.

‘We haven’t money enough,’ Tressa cried. ‘Where will we live and everything?’

‘Look, Tressa, many start with less and manage,’ Mike told her. ‘We have a bit saved between us and I know you’ve been picking up bits and pieces in the market. I’ll put in for any overtime going and as long as you are feeling all right you can work a wee while yet, till the wedding at least.’

‘Where will we live?’

‘We might have to stay with my mom and dad for now,’ Mike said.

Tressa gave a shiver of distaste. Mike’s parents were almost as bad as Steve’s and Mike’s two sisters also adored their baby brother. They’d resented Tressa from the beginning, sensing how Mike felt about her. They were too clever to do this in front of Mike, when they were icily polite, but they had plenty of opportunity to give digs and make comments to show Tressa she wasn’t welcome in their family. Tressa never complained about this to Mike, for she knew the high regard he held his family in and she told herself it was Mike she loved and was marrying, not his family. But then she’d never envisaged living with them.

Mike, catching sight of her face by the light from the lamppost, said quite sharply, ‘It’s no good looking like that, Tressa. It’s my parents or the streets as far as I can see just now.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s just not what I imagined.’

‘D’you think I did?’ Mike snapped, and then he put his arms around Tressa. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he said, kissing her gently. ‘I’m a brute yelling at you. It’s all my fault, because I know you would have waited.’

Tressa knew Mike spoke the truth. However hard it was, she would have held out to keep her virginity till the wedding night if Mike hadn’t wanted it so much. That first night, the night of the engagement, she’d done it fearfully to please him, because she knew he expected it, and she’d been totally bowled over by the experience. Few of the women she had spoken to had mentioned any enjoyment they got from sex, never mind the exhilarating, mind-blowing rapture Tressa had felt. After that first time she’d been as anxious to repeat the experience as Mike was, and so she said, ‘No, I loved you too much to want to wait.’

‘Well,’ Mike said with a rueful grin. ‘See where our loving has got us both?’

‘Aye.’

‘You’ve had time to think and worry about this,’ Mike said. ‘To me it’s like a bolt from the blue. Who else have you told?’

‘No one,’ Tressa said. ‘But I think Lizzie suspects. I’ve been sick a few times in the morning, you see. I’ve even seen Pat and Betty looking at me oddly a time or two. But they’ve said nothing and neither have I.’

‘We need to get things organised,’ Mike decided. ‘I think we should tell Mom and Dad straight away.’

Tressa quailed inside at the thought of that and yet she knew they’d have to know, and fast, for a wedding had to be arranged speedily. ‘What about my mammy and daddy?’ she asked suddenly. ‘They’ll have to give permission; I’m not twenty till July. I’ll have to tell them face to face. We’ll have to go over on a flying visit.’

‘First things first,’ Mike said. ‘Let’s tell my parents tonight and at least get that over and done with.’

‘She looked at me like I was some sort of slag,’ Tressa cried later to the three girls grouped about the bed. ‘She said…she said it…it was all my fault; that…that I’d trapped her son, snared him in some way.’ She looked at them all, her face red and awash with tears, twisting a sodden handkerchief in her agitated hands. ‘It wasn’t like that. Mike and I love each other.’

None of the girls were surprised. Mothers seemed to care more for sons than daughters and they all knew how Mike’s family behaved towards Tressa for she’d told them bits before, but now wasn’t the time to remind her of that.

‘Come on, bab. Don’t take on,’ Betty said. ‘These things happen. She’s likely in shock.’

‘At least your man’s standing by you,’ Pat added. ‘That’s summat today.’

‘That’s not all,’ Tressa said. ‘She says we can’t stay with them. That she’d never live with the shame and that she’s writing to her brother Arthur and his wife Doreen, to see if we can live there after the wedding. I don’t even know the man and he lives in Longbridge.’

‘Where’s that?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Bloody miles away,’ Pat said. ‘You don’t even know these people?’

‘No, but apparently they’ve always had a soft spot for Mike,’ Tressa said. ‘They had four daughters all growing up when Mike was a boy and he used to go and stay with them both. Mike told me this Arthur always wanted him to go into the car industry with him, but Mike said he’d have to live with them and he knew his parents would have been hurt. And,’ she added bitterly, ‘then they might have been. Now, they can’t get rid of him quick enough, and God alone knows what my parents will say when we go over and tell them.’

‘So, if they agree, you’ll go to live in Longbridge?’ Lizzie asked, and suddenly realised how she would miss her cousin. They’d lived only a few miles apart since they’d been born and had lived in the hotel together for two years. They almost knew the secrets of each other’s soul.

But, she told herself, this was no time to think of herself. There was a wedding to arrange, and hurried forward or not, Lizzie was determined to do all she could to make the day a wonderful one for Tressa and one she could think back on with pride.

Saturday, 14th June 1932, and the wedding reception, held in the back room of The Bell, was in full swing. Lizzie had worked hard to keep her promise to make this a day to remember, but she doubted Tressa would look back on it with any sort of pride, though she’d probably remember the glowering looks Mike’s sisters and parents cast in her direction.

But then Tressa’s parents, though they had been bitterly disappointed with Tressa when she and Mike had gone over to tell them they had to get married and speedily, were inclined to blame Mike. Before Tressa had gone to England she’d never even dated a boy, never mind kissed one. And now!

‘The man must have taken advantage of her,’ Eamon said. ‘She was young and innocent and had her heart turned.’

‘Well at least he’ll marry her,’ Margaret had said with a sigh of relief.

When they came over and saw the fawning way Mike’s parents and sisters behaved towards him, they’d been even more incensed, and when the two families had to speak to each other you could almost feel the disdainful animosity between them.

Lizzie wished she could tell them both to behave, for Tressa and Mike’s sakes, if for no one else’s. Neither of the two young people had meant to hurt and disappoint anyone, they had just let their feelings overwhelm them. It wasn’t as if they’d never intended to get married, for goodness’ sake.

Tressa, far from enjoying her day, seemed to be constantly agitated, buffeted as she was between her parents and her new in-laws. Lizzie came upon her in tears in the hall a few minutes after she’d seen Mike’s mother speak sharply to her about something. ‘For God’s sake, Tressa, stop crying,’ she said impatiently. ‘Don’t you see it’s what the old cow wants?’

‘I never knew you were so unfeeling.’

‘I never knew you were so feeble,’ Lizzie retorted. ‘For God’s sake. You wanted Mike and you’ve got him. You know, whenever it was done, Mike’s mother would never have fallen on your neck in gratitude. Here,’ she said, pulling a compact from her bag, ‘wash your face and put this under your eyes to hide the puffiness, pinch your cheeks to give them colour, paint a smile right across your face and go and talk to Mike’s Uncle Arthur.’

Lizzie liked Arthur and Doreen. She saw they thought a lot of Mike, but in an understanding type of way, not as if he was a creature from another, and much superior, planet. They didn’t even seem that shocked about the pregnancy. ‘In my day, young girls were chaperoned a bit more,’ Doreen said. ‘And even then…takes you by surprise, those feelings, and when young people are alone so much, well, it’s human nature really, isn’t it? They were engaged, after all, and you just have to look at them to see they are made for each other.’

And they were. Despite the atmosphere of the place and the families grouped on opposite sides of the hall, their love for each other shone and sparkled between them.

All in all, Lizzie thought, Tressa had fallen on her feet. Mike’s uncle had told her he was a sort of boss in the car factory at Longbridge and had already secured Mike a job on the assembly line. He also had a large terraced house, where there were two rooms downstairs and a breakfast room/kitchen and they said Tressa and Mike were to be given one of the rooms downstairs for themselves, and were to have one of the four bedrooms on the first floor.

‘When the nipper’s old enough, there’s two attic rooms above,’ Arthur told Tressa. ‘Plenty of room for all of us. Tell you the truth, me and Doreen have rattled about in the old house since the girls grew up and moved on, and Doreen at least will be glad of the company. She’s that excited about a baby in the house, and I’ll be glad to get Mike out the brass industry, I’ll tell you.’

‘But it’s so far away,’ Tressa complained to Lizzie.

‘You’ll soon settle down,’ Lizzie said. ‘How far was this place from Ballintra and we settled here fine.’

‘Aye, but we had each other.’

‘And now you have Mike and an uncle and aunt who’ll welcome you, and soon a wee baby too, all of your very own. You won’t be lonely then, and you’ll be too busy to blow your nose, never mind miss anyone.’

And so she could reassure her cousin, but she knew that when Tressa left there would be a gaping hole in her own life. When, later that evening, Arthur said to her, ‘You’ll miss Tressa,’ she could do nothing but nod her head, because she couldn’t trust herself to speak.

She was glad Pat and Betty had been invited, but not that keen to see Steve, who’d been Mike’s best man. It was the first time she had seen him since that awful business in February, when he’d taken a swing at the policeman, and she knew by the glares he was casting her that he hadn’t forgotten either.

Tressa had said that, according to Mike, Steve had taken up with someone called Stuart Fellows, and Lizzie supposed he was the man keeping Steve company at the bar. She wasn’t terribly impressed with him, but she told herself it was none of her business if Steve Gillespie went about with a man from Mars. Anyway, she’d probably not see Steve again when this day was over, and that would suit her just fine.

‘You should have dropped dead with the look that old woman’s giving you,’ Betty said suddenly, and Lizzie glanced up. ‘Oh, that’s Steve’s mother,’ she said. ‘Flo was never keen on me, and Mike told Tressa she blames me for Steve getting locked up that night in February.’

Betty remembered the night well, and Lizzie went on, ‘Tressa said some of the neighbours gave her a hard time about it, but most of that was her own fault. I mean, she’s been blowing Steve’s trumpet for years. You name it, he had it and in dollops, far more than any other boy born this side of paradise, and that understandably put a lot of women’s backs up. They must have thought when they read in the papers that he’d been charged, for assaulting a policeman no less, and for being drunk and disorderly and causing an affray, they had something to make Flo squirm with for a change, pay her back for her bragging. I can’t say I blame them.’

‘How does Steve feel?’

‘I don’t know and don’t really care.’ Lizzie said emphatically.

‘He seems near welded to the bar with that other fellow.’

‘Aye,’ Lizzie said.

As the girls were discussing Steve, so he was saying to Stuart, ‘I was crazy about her, you know.’

‘I can understand it. She’s a looker,’ Stuart said.

Steve shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I mean, when I remember the prison cell and all. God, she did nothing, she just stood at the attic window of that hotel and watched them dragging me away. She didn’t come down and say it was partly her damned fault. Part of me can’t ever forget that.’

‘Put her out of your head, mate,’ Stuart advised. ‘She’s bad news.’

‘That’s it. I can’t,’ Steve said. ‘Despite it all, I still love her like mad. I don’t know why either.’ He didn’t go on to say that when Lizzie had told him it was over he’d wanted to die. You didn’t share that, even with a mate. He’d think you’d gone soft in the head.

Steve looked across the room. Lizzie was still wearing her bridesmaid’s dress of peach-coloured satin with the long lacy sleeves, and she looked breathtaking. The headdress was gone and her hair was drawn up into an elegant chignon, showing her slender neck, and he felt the blood pound in his brain.

He knew he had to at least talk to her. If he lost this opportunity he’d probably never get another and he’d always regret it.

‘Oh God, Steve’s coming over,’ Lizzie said to Betty.

‘So what? You’ll have to meet him sometime.’

‘Why? Anyway, he’s been drinking.’

‘Course he bloody has. It’s a wedding, ain’t it?’

‘Yes, but…’ There was no time to say more for Steve was suddenly beside her.

‘Hallo, Lizzie.’

‘Hallo, Steve.’

Across the room, Flo dug Rodney in the ribs. ‘Go across and tell our Steve to get away from that Lizzie!’ she demanded.

Rodney was too drunk to care who Steve was talking to. ‘For God’s sake, woman, he’s a grown man.’

‘Are you going or not?’

‘Not. Go yourself if you’re so concerned. Rescue your wee, innocent son why don’t you?’

‘Useless, you are! Bloody useless!’ Flo cried, and she marched across the room.

Lizzie saw her coming. ‘Your mother’s on her way,’ she just had time to say to Steve before Flo was in front of her demanding,

‘What d’you want of my son now, you brazen hussy?’

That was rich, Lizzie thought, seeing that it had been Steve who’d come over to her, but she didn’t bother saying this. This was Mike and Tressa’s day and she wanted no scene, so she smiled at Flo. ‘Just exchanging pleasantries,’ she said and Steve urged, ‘Go on back to Dad, Mom. This doesn’t concern you.’

‘Oh, so it doesn’t concern me that this dirty little trollop caused you to be taken in by the coppers?’

Scene or no scene, Lizzie wasn’t standing for that. ‘I did no such thing, and I won’t be called names I don’t deserve.’

‘You do deserve them and more, you brazen, troublemaking bitch.’

‘Mom, that will do.’

‘I’ll decide what will do,’ Flo snapped. ‘That one will have you for a fool and throw you to one side when she’s done with you.’

‘Mom, shut up!’ Steve said, his voice rising in agitation.

‘That’s a fine way to speak to me.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Steve said, exasperated, and he took his mother by the elbow and steered her across the floor to where his father was. Lizzie took the opportunity to slip outside and hoped the night air would cool her cheeks, which were flaming with embarrassment and anger. She leant against the wall. It was still as light as day outside, but some of the heat had gone and she was glad of the little breeze.

‘Thought I’d find you here.’

‘Steve!’

‘Lizzie, are you scared of me?’ Steve asked, worried about the wary look that had come over Lizzie’s face and her widened eyes.

Lizzie looked him full in the face. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘If the boot was on the other foot, wouldn’t you be scared? Look at the size of me to the size of you, and that night…well, I’m not sure what you would have done if I hadn’t got away. And quite apart from that, you could have lost me my job.’

‘I know, and I understand how you feel,’ Steve said sincerely. ‘I’ve regretted that night often and wish I could turn the clock back, for it was never my intention to hurt you. All I can say in my defence, and it is no excuse, is that I was angry and drunk, for I’d seldom drunk as much in such a short space of time. My head was reeling, and then, when you told me it was over…Christ, I think I really went clean mad for a bit. I’m real sorry about it, Lizzie.’

Lizzie saw the true regret and more than a hint of shame in Steve’s eyes and so she said, ‘I do understand that I hurt you a great deal that night, Steve.’

‘Until that moment I’d never pleaded with a woman, you know,’ Steve said. ‘I suppose I was angry that you’d made me look like a bloody fool. Then the next night I saw you all laughing at me as they led me away.’

‘No one was laughing, Steve, believe me,’ Lizzie said. ‘I wanted to come down, but Tressa wouldn’t let me. I watched only because I was concerned. It gave me no satisfaction to see you taken away in handcuffs.’

‘I’m glad of that at least.’

‘Let’s put it behind us now, shall we?’ Lizzie said. She put a hand on Steve’s arm and went on, ‘You are a lovely man and you could find a girl much more worthy than me, one who’d love you back.’

Steve could have told Lizzie there and then he’d tried a variety of girls, all willing, and he’d near drunk the pubs dry, but it had only blurred the image of her from his mind. In his sober moments each day she was there at the forefront of it, tantalising him.

But he didn’t say this, and Lizzie went on, ‘Steve, we knew each other for some weeks, and apart from those two awful nights—the one where I told you it was over, and your reaction and the incident the following night, which was linked to it—we had good times. Let’s at least part as friends?’

That wasn’t what Steve wanted, but it was a step in the right direction. ‘If that’s how you want it,’ he said, and he took Lizzie in his arms as one might a friend and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

Lizzie gave an inward sigh of relief and the guilt she’d felt towards Steve shifted slightly. ‘I must go in,’ she told him. ‘Tressa will be leaving soon, according to her uncle. Will your mother attack me if I go back?’

‘She’d better not. I’ve told my father to keep her at the table and to sit on her if he has to.’

‘I’d like to see that,’ Lizzie said with a grin, and she went back inside and Steve followed.

Three weeks after Tressa’s wedding, a bouquet of twelve red roses was delivered to the hotel. Lizzie had been serving breakfasts when the receptionist sent for her. ‘Someone has an admirer,’ she said, handing Lizzie the bouquet.

Lizzie had never received flowers before. ‘To Lizzie, from your very good friend. Happy Birthday. Love Steve,’ the card read.

‘Friend, my Aunt Fanny!’ the receptionist spluttered. ‘If any fellow sent me flowers, I’d know he’d want to be more than a friend.’

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^th 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.

‘Who’s it from?’ Marjorie asked.

Pat and Betty exchanged knowing glances. Lizzie had explained away the birthday roses, and apparently to her satisfaction, but this was something else entirely. Lizzie was naturally reticent and too worried about being teased to tell Pat or Betty about her meeting with Steve in November, and the fact she had been seeing him since. It wasn’t hard, for their times off rarely coincided and they were too preoccupied with their own love lives to worry overmuch about Lizzie’s, and Marjorie had no idea of any of it. So, as far as Pat and Betty were aware, this bracelet had arrived out of the blue.

It was like a statement, Betty thought; like saying, To hell with being friends. I want something more. And so she said to Marjorie, ‘It’s from Lizzie’s feller.’

‘Steve’s not my feller,’ Lizzie protested.

‘Oh no,’ Pat said, with a hint of derision. ‘Let’s say I wish some non-feller of mine would send me something half so nice.’ And she pulled the card from the box ‘“All my love always, Steve”,’ she read out. ‘Like I said, some friend that Steve.’

The card unnerved Lizzie and she knew she should have a talk with Steve as soon as possible. She withdrew the bracelet and played it though her fingers. It was gorgeous and she knew it would have been expensive. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t accept it.’

‘Don’t be such a bloody fool,’ Pat admonished.

‘I need to talk to him about this,’ Lizzie said. ‘Set the record straight.’ But she knew that was a vain wish. The guests were arriving any time after four o’clock that afternoon, and from when they stepped into the hotel until they checked out on 1^st January she knew she’d hardly stop running. The hours would be long, sleep a luxury she could only dream of, and time off virtually non-existent.

In a way she was glad of it. She was able to push the problem of what to do about the bracelet to the back of her mind.

On 3^rd January Steve took her dancing at the Locarno. She spent some of the tips she’d earned over the festive season to buy a dress from C&A Modes. It was of rose velvet with a scooped neckline and fell to the floor, the bottom section gathered in little pleats. She had her hair piled on her head with combs the same colour as the dress, and peeping from beneath it were dainty high-heeled shoes. On one of her slender wrists was Steve’s bracelet. He was so pleased. He hadn’t been sure she would accept it, especially after what he’d written on the card.

Everything pleased him that night. Lizzie thanked him warmly for the bracelet and said truthfully it was the prettiest thing she’d ever owned, but she chided him for spending so much on it. ‘And who else would I spend it on?’ he asked. ‘Now, Lizzie, my money is my own and I must choose how to spend it.’

Lizzie kissed him gently on the lips in gratitude and friendship and he felt his body grow hot with desire, but he told himself to go easy. Lizzie had noticed nothing untoward and she removed her jacket and said, ‘Do you like the dress? I treated myself.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, surveying it. He was bowled over by the strength of his feelings coursing through him and excited by the prospect of being able to legitimately hold Lizzie in his arms as they danced. He put his arms gently around her and said, ‘And you’re beautiful, Lizzie.’

Lizzie, though embarrassed, was warmed by his genuine praise and realised she’d missed not seeing him over Christmas. Don’t depend on him, she’d warned herself, but the alternative if she didn’t go out with Steve was a dismal one.

She had a wonderful time, so wonderful that when Steve left her back at the hotel she kissed him again on the lips. ‘Thank you, Steve.’

‘You deserved a treat tonight,’ he told her. ‘You’ve been working like a Trojan at this place. You’re thinner than ever.’

‘Och, Steve, don’t worry, I’m as strong as an ox.’

‘Oxen don’t come in such pretty packages,’ Steve said. ‘Look after yourself.’

‘I will, don’t worry.’