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
