In Her Mothers' Shoes (16 page)

The tram stopped to let people on and off and, with all seats taken there was a crush in the aisle. She knew she should be offering her seat to the elderly, but she didn’t dare look up. If there was a little old lady who needed a seat, too bad: she’d have to find one elsewhere. Lizzie kept her head down and made a fine study of her purse, the soft pigskin one her mother had given her. She followed the swirls in the leather with her finger.

‘Ticket please, miss.’ That voice.

It was right beside her. It still caused a ripple of excitement, even after all he’d done. She held out her coins without looking up.

‘Karori, please.’ She waited for the ticket to be handed back. She heard him drop the money in his bag and the snap of the clicker making a hole in the ticket. She could picture it, a jagged-edged gap right in the little square that said ‘Journey Out’ and ‘3’ to mark the number of sections she was travelling. But there was no ticket. She waited.

‘Your ticket, Miss.’ She raised her eyes slightly and there was her ticket, hanging down between his thumb and forefinger, waiting for her to take it. She reached up. The ticket jerked away higher. Her eyes followed it to find the owner of the thumb and finger grinning at her, clearly aware of her identity and not a single qualm about seeing her again.

Suddenly the fear and mortification left her. That taunting grin, the grin that had got her into all that trouble in the first place, the grin that had turned into a sneer when she’d told him about the baby, how dare he look at her like that?

She narrowed her eyes and gave him a furious stare, snatching the ticket from his hand then turning away and looking out the window.

‘I say, what side of bed did you get out of this morning?’ she heard him say sarcastically under his breath.

Not your side, thank goodness, she wanted to say, but didn’t, and continued to stare out the window, ignoring him completely for the rest of the journey.

But she couldn’t stop thinking about him and the baby – his baby; her baby; the baby she’d never hold.

Leaving Bleak House was a wrench, but also a relief. She was sad to say farewell to her friends, the closest friends she’d ever had. She’d made a point of returning from the hospital across to Fitzgibbon House at a time when she knew they’d be gathered in the lounge – the two that were left from their group and the other girls she come to know. Jessie was there, and Meg, and that was it. They’d just had time for a hug and Miss Mayhew appeared to hustle her out the door.

But at the same time, she was overjoyed to be at last going home. She couldn’t wait to see the gates disappear out the back window of Miss Mayhew’s car, to get on the boat train then the ferry, wave that bright red Lane’s Emulsion sign goodbye and sail out of Lyttelton Harbour never to return.

The whole family was at the Wellington dock to meet the ferry. Her mother ran forward up the gangplank to meet her and took her suitcase.

‘Welcome home, Lizzie.’

‘Mummy!’ She flung into her arms and breathed in the familiar Shalimar perfume, willing herself not to cry, not in such a public place with hundreds of people milling around staring. He mother looked beautiful, in a dove grey tailored woollen suit, a jaunty grey hat and matching court shoes – the immaculate style that Lizzie realised, to her surprise, she’d missed so much.

‘You’re looking well,’ her father said, waiting his turn.

‘I am, now,’ she said, giving her father a more subdued hug, feeling the reticence behind his embrace.

Jerry, under the false impression that she’d been to a posh finishing school in the South Island, teased her about being above them all now; Penny, not quite understanding what a finishing school was, asked if she’d brought her a present because it was her birthday next month.

Penny had chattered all the way home, asking interminable questions about her schoolfriends – if only she knew! – and what the girls did all day. Lizzie had made up stories about walking up and down the room with an encyclopaedia on her head for deportment lessons, and practising her vowels to imitate the King’s English. Penny seemed satisfied. Her father’s face remained unreadable.

Later that night, when Penny was in bed and Jerry was in his room pretending to do his homework, Lizzie summoned the courage to talk to her mother alone. She was in the living room reading through committee papers. She waited until her mother looked up then asked if she had a moment to talk.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Did the Matron tell you anything about what happened?’

Her mother looked surprised. ‘Why? What happened?’

‘Did they tell you it was a baby girl?’

‘No.’ Her mother shifted uncomfortably. ‘Don’t . . .’

‘I wasn’t allowed to hold her.’

Her mother put her hand up to her mouth and gave a stifled cry. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’ She tailed off.

There was a moment’s silence while Lizzie waited for her to continue. But she looked away, blinking quickly. After a while Lizzie said, ‘She went home to her new family with the layette I knitted her.’

‘Yes, you told me you’d knitted something.’ Her mother looked back at her and forced a smile. ‘I was very impressed.’

‘I got quite good at it.’

‘It will stand you in good stead for the future.’ The smile became more natural, more relaxed. ‘I could never quite grasp how to do it, all that plain one, pearl one. It just didn’t make sense to me.’

‘Maybe I could show you.’

‘Maybe you could.’ Her mother patted the seat next to her on the sofa.

Lizzie sat beside her. ‘The nurse said she was a very good baby. She didn’t cry a lot, took her bottle first thing. She had thick dark brown hair, all in curls. And a rosebud mouth.’

Her mother slipped an arm around her and gave her a gentle squeeze. ‘I expect she would be beautiful, being a Hamilton.’ 

‘Matron said she went to a good family. A nice couple who hadn’t been able to have a baby, who had plenty of money and lived in a nice suburb. She said they were going to call her Katharine.’ She pulled a face. ‘That’s not what I wanted for her name. I decided to call her . . .’

Her mother leant forward and held up a finger to Lizzie’s lips, stopping her saying the name. ‘Don’t tell me. I’d rather not know.’ With her other hand, she squeezed Lizzie’s shoulders again.

‘But Mummy, I want to tell you. I haven’t been able to tell anyone else.’

‘Look, dear, I know you’ve been through a very difficult time.’ She dropped her arm, faced her daughter and took both her hands in hers. ‘But it’s over now. You have to put it all behind you and move on. And the best way to do that is to forget all about it . . .’

‘But how can I? I can’t just forget . . .’

‘Yes you can, and you must. You must never speak of her again, not even to me or to Daddy. Do you understand?’ She dropped Lizzie’s hands and looked pleadingly at her daughter.

Lizzie shook her head, no, she didn’t understand. Not for one moment.

‘These things are best left unsaid. Otherwise you’ll find yourself dwelling on it, and you won’t be able to get on with your life. And that’s the most important thing, don’t you agree?’

Lizzie nodded, yes.

‘Good. You’ve your whole future to plan now. We’ve got to find you a job, something you’d enjoy doing, something that will take your mind off it all.’

‘But what if I . . ?’

‘You’ll be fine. Positive thinking, that’s what you must do. Think only of the future, not the past. You wrote in your letters about wanting to be a draughtswoman.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I think that’s a splendid idea. Your father has been talking to a friend of his who owns an architectural practice and he thinks he might have an opening.’

The opening had been for the most junior of dogsbodies, but at least it was a start. And it got her out of the house every day.

‘Next stop, Karori shops!’ Peter’s voice seemed right in her ear. She looked away from the window and into the aisle, being careful to keep her head down.

He was right next to her. The tram started to slow with a squeal of brakes on the rails. There was nothing for it but to stand and edge past him to the back door.

For a moment, as she brushed past, she couldn’t avoid looking at him. His expression was mocking and hard. Why hadn’t she seen that before?

She said nothing and walked as fast as she could to the back, waiting for the tram to stop. It was still moving slightly when she jumped down onto the street, careless of the drop to the asphalt below, and hurried away. She did not look back, not even after she’d rounded the corner for the long climb homeward.

She’d show him. She wasn’t going to let someone as mean and vain as Peter get her down. She’d make sure she caught the Karori tram with her boyfriend Steven as often as she could so Peter could see them together and how happy she was. 

Steven Davidson was everything that Peter wasn’t – he was kind and he genuinely cared. And he was clever too, and was going places. Not like Peter. The only place Peter was going was up and down the wooden-slatted aisle of the Karori tram. She believed Steven would go far – and that her father would see the potential in him too. A junior in the government survey office, Steven had got top marks in his exam at the end of last year. He’d told her, so proud, on their first date. Well, it wasn’t exactly their first date, if you counted the time they’d walked outside the ski lodge on that trip with Julia two years ago. She could tell then that he’d liked her from the way he kept singling her out, teasing her about little things like her thick hockey socks, her freckles, her short legs. He hadn’t said much, but over the course of an evening around the big stone fireplace and its crackling log fire, it had added up to more attention than she’d had before from a boy her age.

But after the ski race, after he’d fallen against her and they’d gone outside – nothing.

Of course she’d been out of town for nearly six months and hadn’t seen anyone from that old life until she’d spoken to him on the beach last summer when she and her family were staying at Waikanae.

She’d never forget his tiny dinghy with its feeble outboard motor putting slowly over to Kapiti Island – just herself, Steven, his friend Mike and his girlfriend Selena. It had been okay on the way over, the sea calm, not a breath of wind. But on the way back, a stiff breeze threw the waves over the gunwales and their combined weight threatened to sink the flimsy craft as soon as they were out of the lee of the island. Mike had treated it as a huge joke but Steven had taken his responsibility very seriously and steered a steady course back to the welcome shallows of the Waikanae beach.

He was good like that, she’d come to realise – steady as she goes, solid, reliable, appearing older than his twenty years, his maturity boosted by his thinning hair and steel-rimmed glasses that he was always losing. Not the sort of chap to set the world on fire. But not as dull as he might at first seem either.

She remembered the excitement in his eyes that Sunday afternoon he’d taken her home and opened his drawer of photographic prints. Some of them had taken her breath away.