In Her Mothers' Shoes

by Felicity Price

  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.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ she’d said, amazed. ‘You have such a good eye for finding the right angle.’

  His best photos were on the wall of his parents’ lounge – black and white shots mostly of sunsets off the beach, ripples across the sand, the backlit wings of a seagull in flight, hi
s father out fishing, reeling in a heavy line.

  ‘One day I’d like to have my own darkroom,’ he said. ‘I develop all my own films but I can only print up the best.’

  He used the darkroom at the Kapiti Camera Club and attended their meetings whenever he could.

  In the last three months, as their friendship had firmed, he’d taken her on two of the camera club field trips, combining his love of the outdoors with photography, lugging his heavy camera and lenses wherever he went and pulling it out whenever something caught his eye.

  Looking at the negatives on their return, she’d noticed a remarkable number of shots of her – shots she didn’t recall being taken. She’d smiled, pleased, but hadn’t said anything.

  Tomorrow night he was meeting her in town after work and taking her to the movies to see Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. She would have to go through her wardrobe tonight – what there was of it – and find something decent to wear, something she hadn’t worn already on a date with him, something that would make her hips slimmer and her chest smaller. Julia used to say she was lucky to be so well endowed; she’d give anything, she’d say, not to have to pack cotton wool inside her bra. But Lizzie wished she could get rid of some of her natural padding; it was an embarrassment. It was even more embarrassing since the baby, her breasts had been so big then and even now, over a year later, they were much bigger than other girls her age. It made buying dresses and blouses so difficult because most of the clothes in her size were only fit for old ladies. She hated being different; if only she could be like other nineteen-year-old girls, without such a shameful secret.

  She puffed up the driveway and climbed the steps up to the front door, wishing as she always did at this point that she was a lot fitter. Having the baby certainly hadn’t helped her physical condition; she’d put on weight, especially since coming home. It was as if she was eating to compensate for the loss – the loss that threatened to overwhelm her almost every day, the loss that still made her arms ache every time she remembered that moment after giving birth when the baby was taken away.

  Standing on the front porch and looking across to the hills - misty and mauve as the sun tracked behind them, the houses beginning to light up as the twilight settled over the valley - Lizzie again felt the familiar ache. Where was she now, baby Katharine? Was she happy in her nice home with the nice couple? The man working away in a bank, the woman at home with the baby that should have been hers, were they looking after Katharine properly? Were they giving her all the love she would have given?

  She felt the locket hanging at the end of a silver chain right above her breastbone, close to her heart. Inside was a tiny lock of her baby’s hair, a snippet: dark, fine, slightly curled.

  The nurse had brought it out to her after seeing Lizzie’s distress. She’d thought the nurse had disappeared for good, had felt no sympathy, but she’d returned later, when the hospital was quiet and Matron had gone home for the night, producing the few wisps of hair.

  ‘Don’t you dare tell anyone I gave this to you,’ the nurse said. ‘It’s more than my job’s worth.’

  She’d treasured it, keeping it inside her diary until she’d found the little locket at the bottom of her mother’s jewellery box.

  ‘Can I have this, Mummy?’ she’d asked one night.

  ‘That’s your grandmother’s,’ her mother said, holding the fine silver and turning it over in her hand. ‘I suppose she wouldn’t mind if you had it.’ Her mother undid the clasp and clipped it around Lizzie’s neck. ‘There, it suits you.’

  ‘Thank you. I promise to look after it.’

  ‘What are you going to put inside it? A photo? Your brother and sister perhaps?’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  Her mother was grinning. She was joking.

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing yet.’

  She’d never told her mother what was inside. She’d never tell anyone. Except perhaps Steven. But even then, not for a long, long time.

  ~ ~ ~

  Lizzie loved Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday playing the part of an escaped princess who fell in love with a commoner. Coming out of the theatre, Steven seemed surprisingly romantic, taking her arm and holding her close. He said he’d like to take her somewhere for a coffee or a meal.

  ‘I know just the place,’ he said, leading her across the road and into a narrow, dimly lit dining room with a high counter on one side and a series of small tables lining the other. Each bore a candle burning on top of an empty sherry bottle, the wax dripping down in thick teardrop cascades towards the crisp white linen-covered table-top with its array of silver cutlery. She felt very grown up. Steven had taken her to milk bars, he’d taken her home to have dinner with his parents, but he’d never taken her anywhere as sophisticated as this.

  They sat down on the dark wooden ladder-back chairs and a waitress in a long black satin skirt and a frilly white high-necked blouse brought over a menu.

  ‘What would you like, Lizzie?’ Steven said. ‘Coffee? Something to eat? I’m feeling a bit peckish, myself. You can have anything you like. My treat.’

  She smiled at him then opened the plush red velvety, gold-embossed cover of the menu. What would a young sophisticate choose? She didn’t want to look as if she was out of her depth. Her parents had taken her out to dine before, but they’d been large brightly lit rooms in hotels and her mother had been quick to tell her what to do, what to order, how to choose the right knife and fork. Here, it was completely different.

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘I think we should start with a coffee – or would you prefer a glass of sherry?’

  ‘Oh, no, thank you.’ Lizzie shook her head then wondered if perhaps she should have said yes. That’s what a sophisticated young lady would have done. Trouble was she hated sherry. It burned her throat and made her gag.

  ‘Righto, then. We’ll have coffee then perhaps something to eat. Would you like to start with the soup, cream of chicken? No? Then how about the sole meuniere? Filet mignon, perhaps, or beef tournedos?’

  Lizzie was annoyed with herself. She never had any trouble ordering when her mother was there. Why was she so tongue-tied now? She was fast losing her appetite. She ran her finger down the printed words, trying to pick out a French name that was familiar, wishing they’d put the prices next to each dish so she didn’t choose the most expensive. Steven wouldn’t be able to afford lobster thermidor on his wages, she knew that much and kept looking.

  ‘I’ll have the soup, I think,’ she said at last.

  ‘Just the soup, nothing else?’

  ‘No, I’m not very hungry.’

  ‘Maybe some dessert later then?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She flashed Steven a grateful smile. He was being so sweet.

  He ordered for them both and the waitress brought their coffees over almost instantly.

  Unusually nervous, Lizzie took a sip. It was too hot. She swallowed it quietly, holding back a cry of pain. She could feel it burning her tongue and the back of her throat as it slid down. Why was she so on edge? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been to a restaurant before. Was it because this was such a special place, small and intimate and so sophisticated? Or was it because she was with Steven and it was the first time he’d taken her anywhere as elegant?

  ‘You’re very quiet, Lizzie. That’s not like you,’ he said, interrupting her thoughts.

  ‘Am I?’ She should say something, but what? Words, usually slipping so easily off her tongue, were failing her. He was looking at her expectantly. She swallowed. Seeking inspiration, she looked around. ‘This is such a lovely place,’ she said lamely.

  ‘Yes, one of the chaps at the office recommended it. I wanted to take you somewhere special.’ He paused and looked closely at her. Was there some singular meaning to this? ‘You see, Lizzie, we’ve known each other a while now and I think we get on pretty well.’ He was looking at her that way again. She wondered if she was expected to say something. He cleared his throat and shifted
awkwardly on his seat. ‘I was thinking perhaps we could get married, you and I.’

  ‘Heavens,’ was all she could think of to say. Was he proposing? Then why wasn’t he down on his knees? That’s what the men did in all those romantic novels she’d read.

  Suddenly, as if he’d read her thoughts, he pushed back his chair and knelt beside her, taking her hand. ‘Lizzie Hamilton, will you marry me?’ Then he let go of her hand, fumbled in his jacket pocket, pulled out a blue velvet-covered box and flipped it open. Inside, nestled on white satin, was a solitaire diamond ring.

  Everything went quiet and very still. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the waitress stop in her tracks on her way to one of the tables behind them.

  What was she waiting for? Of course she should marry him. She liked him, didn’t she? He was right, they did get on well. And she couldn’t be too picky. She was damaged goods, wasn’t she?