by Anne Bennett
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 risin
g 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?’
