In Her Mothers' Shoes (11 page)

‘Maybe it was her father who …’ Jessie stopped soaping herself and put her hand to her mouth, not finishing the sentence.

‘Jessie! That’s a terrible thing to say.’ Meg turned off her taps and stepped out of the shower, away from Jessie and the others.

‘No, that’s not possible.’ Lizzie thought they were being ridiculous. ‘Fathers don’t do that with their daughters.’

‘Don’t they?’ Jessie looked incredulously at Lizzie for a moment then suddenly changed her expression to one of conciliation. ‘No, of course they don’t.’

Lizzie shut of her taps with a determined twist, stepped out of the shower onto the wet duckboard and started to towel herself dry. How could Jessie suggest such a thing? She was sure Pearl had done it with one of the boys on the farm. She’d as good as said so and Pearl wouldn’t lie to her. There were no secrets among any of them.

They were in this together, ‘the bad girls’, the girls who’d got caught, the girls who wore their disgrace out front, right where everyone could see it, so that the monthly trips to town to go to the library became a lesson in public humiliation.

Passers-by sniggered openly as the girls walked by, two-by-two, an ungainly crocodile weaving along Worcester Street and through the doors of the solemn brick central library building.

‘It’s so embarrassing,’ Lizzie had said the first time it happened. She felt like cringing. This was quite different to the last time she’d walked in a crocodile with the girls at Marsden on an outing to the zoo. She was used to overhearing comments of admiration at their neat formation, their tidy uniforms, their obedient demeanour, not sentiments of disgust. She wished she could be invisible.

But Jessie was striding along beside her, swinging her arms nonchalantly. ‘No it’s not,’ Jessie said. ‘Why would it be embarrassing? We don’t know a single one of those people.’

‘And even if we did, I wouldn’t care.’ Meg, in front of Lizzie, waved an arm dismissively.

‘But imagine what they’re saying to each other,’ Lizzie said. ‘Imagine what they’re thinking.’

‘They’re judging us,’ Pearl said.

Lizzie turned back to see her shrinking from the stares.

‘I hate it,’ Pearl continued. ‘They should mind their own business.’

‘What does it matter what they’re thinking?’ Jessie shrugged. ‘You worry too much, you two, what other people are thinking of you. All that matters is what you think of yourself.’

‘And what your friends think,’ Christine added, catching them up.

‘Yes, the people that really know you.’ Anahira was ahead of Lizzie, walking next to Meg.

‘Not horrible busybodies like them.’ Suddenly Lizzie felt hot with anger at the women across the street who were staring; she poked out her tongue at them.

‘Lizzie!’ Meg giggled. 

The women looked horrified, turned their backs and walked away.

‘That’ll show them not to judge us.’ Jessie grinned at her.

‘You shouldn’t have done that, Lizzie.’ Pearl was looking away from the women. ‘You shouldn’t draw attention to us.’

‘You should try it sometime, Pearl. It makes you feel a lot better,’ Lizzie said.

Pearl looked at her resentfully.

They passed an old lady hesitating at the exit of a shop doorway, who had held up her hand to shade her eyes from the awful prospect of the obviously pregnant ‘wayward girls’. ‘I dare you.’ She nudged Anahira and Meg then turned to Pearl and Christine behind.

All of them except Pearl stuck their tongues out at the old lady as they waddled by. Despite the blocking hand, the woman obviously saw, because she drew up her shoulders, pursed her lips and returned inside the shop.

The girls burst out laughing – all except Pearl.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll get us all into trouble.’

Jessie stopped laughing and turned back to Pearl. ‘Nonsense.’ Then she looked across at Lizzie. ‘It felt good, didn’t it?’

Lizzie couldn’t answer for a moment, she was laughing so much.

‘Girls, pull yourselves together back there,’ Miss Mayhew called from the front of the crocodile. ‘You’re making a public exhibition of us all.’

At that moment, they arrived at the library where they had free reign to select the books of their choice. For Jessie, predictably, books about medical complaints and human biology; for Christine, magazines like
The Weekly News
and books about child care, even though she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to keep the baby; for Meg and Lizzie, any of the classics or the latest novels they could get their hands on, starting with the authors she knew, like Noel Streatfeild, enjoying again the perils of Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, the three adopted children in
Ballet Shoes;
reliving the Waterbury children’s train-watching spy story in Edith Nesbit’s
The Railway Children;
before moving on at Meg’s suggestion to Lizzie Sutcliffe’s new book
The Queen Elizabeth Story.
Her reading had moved up a level when she borrowed Jessie’s copy of George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
and her most recent discovery, her first real adult fiction, had been Nevil Shute’s
A Town Like Alice.

Library visits represented the highlight of each month. Every day she painstakingly marked another cross on her home-made calendar – topped by a rose-tinted painting of her home – counting off the days to the birth and the day she could at last return home. Library day, marked in heavily scored HB pencil, was a welcome milestone in the horrendously long path of gestation, as were the weekly letters from her mother. Kindly but never emotional, filled with news from home – Penny’s achievements at school and at her new ballet classes; Jerry’s scores on the rugby field – there was no mention about how she, Helena Hamilton, was feeling about having her daughter so far from home in such an alien environment. Not that Lizzie told her the whole truth about just how drear her existence had become. Her mother would never believe it. She seemed to think her daughter was at a private school boarding house with the sort of jolly japes and iced lemonade serialised in those British girls’ annuals her mother used to buy.

Lizzie could remember the way they spoke: ‘Well played, Pip! Jolly well played!’ for the heroine, while the bad girls were ‘beastly’, ‘rotten’ and ‘mean’. The worst they got up to was ‘ragging’ a girl’s study or pulling a girl’s hair. Pregnant teenage girls were unheard of.

Her mother had sent her one of those thick story books,
Popular Stories for Girls
, last month in a parcel with one of her famous fruit cakes (they’d eaten it all within the week), some warm socks, and a painting of the family (or at least that’s what her mother said it was of) by Penny. Penny had stuck a note on the back of the painting – her big-print notes were often included with her mother’s – saying ‘I miss you Lizzie,’ which she’d had to put out of sight very quickly until her eyes stopped prickling. 

She’d opened up the
Popular Stories for Girls
eagerly, hungry for something new to read, but had soon realised it was intended for girls much younger than her. Why couldn’t her mother see she was a young adult now? An adult, in fact. Carrying a baby surely qualified her for something more grown-up to read than a schoolgirls’ breathless story book. She’d put it away in the bottom of her cupboard, not wanting the other girls to see.

Library books remained her salvation. Although getting there was a mission, involving catching a bus into town then walking from Cathedral Square down the main street and across the river to the big red-brick library building.

She’d learnt to shrug off the stares but each month it became a little more difficult; the more advanced their pregnancy, the slower their steps. Her pelvis ached, the bones at the top of her legs felt sometimes as if they were splitting apart, as if the baby were preparing to pop out any minute. At the same time, burning liquid kept bubbling up in her throat and her stomach felt as if it had been squashed to one side of her body. Every time she ate anything but the blandest of food, it churned round inside. There seemed to be no respite. And she always felt so tired. The only relief had been promotion out of the laundry into the garden.

And now it was nearly Christmas Day.

After just a little over two months in residence, Lizzie was familiar enough with the place to know that Christmas at Bleak House wouldn’t be a joyous celebration.

At home, her mother would getting out the Christmas decorations – the sparkly Kewpie doll masquerading as a fairy for the top of the tree, the many-coloured shiny balls and bells, the tinsel garlands, and her own cut-out silvery-painted stars hung at the back where the N.C.W. ladies wouldn’t see; the baby Jesus in his manger tableau that went above the fireplace, the fir wreath at the front door – all much admired at Christmas parties, when she and Penny would hide at the top of the stairs and watch the guests arrive in their fur stoles and high heels. Later in the evening, the sisters crept out again to their hidden perch and giggled as the guests departed, tiddly from the sherry and whisky Daddy put out in his crystal decanters.

What she would give now to be helping with the devils on horseback hors d’oeuvres and the fiddly little curried egg sandwiches, to be taken to Kirks to buy a new pair of patent leather shoes, to be counting her pocket money to see if she could afford Penny’s ballet book or Jerry’s rugby socks.

They’d been warned by Matron that there would be the usual drudgery tomorrow to keep Fitzgibbon House and its neighbouring maternity hospital in vegetables and clean linen. Christmas Day would be like any other day.

‘We all still have to eat, girls, and there will still be nappies to wash, sheets to launder and fruit and vegetables to be gleaned. So don’t think you’ll be having a lie-in on Christmas Day.’

It was to be like any Sunday, she’d added. Up at six as usual, chapel before breakfast, followed by domestic duties, walking to church, a light lunch then a short rest before preparation of Christmas dinner.

‘You’d think we’d get one day off in the year,’ Meg grumbled as she dug out new potatoes on Christmas Eve. Lizzie was surprised to find she quite enjoyed gardening during the warm summer days. Being outside in the fresh air was certainly better than stoking fires and scalding herself pulling sheets out of the boiling scummy water. Her hands, still dry and cracked from the laundry, were now deeply lined with rich brown soil.

‘What would you expect at Bleak House?’ Lizzie said, scooping up the earthy potatoes, rubbing as much soil off them as she could before dropping them in the heavy sack. ‘Why pay for someone else to do it when they’ve got a ready source of slave labour for free?’

‘It’s inhumane,’ Jessie said.

‘It’s good preparation for being a doctor,’ Christine called from behind the runner bean stands. ‘You won’t get Christmas Day off when you’re on the wards.’

‘If I make it as an obstetrician, I’ll be delivering babies with any luck.’

‘I wish you could deliver my baby right now,’ Christine said, cradling her bump. ‘It’s kicking like mad.’

‘You’re lucky, I haven’t felt any little kicks yet.’ Lizzie was getting worried about the lack of movement, but Jessie said it could happen any time, even after five months, and she wasn’t quite there yet. Mind you, she wasn’t sure just how much Jessie really knew and how much was bluster, pretending she had a lot more medical know-how than she’d ever had time to acquire.