In Her Mothers' Shoes Read online

  ‘Don’t take too long in there,’ he called after her. ‘We’ve got to go.’

  She grabbed the toilet paper – there were just a few leaves of the coarse Jeyes paper left in the container – and stuffed them in her pants, pulled down her gym frock and did up her blazer.

  Peter was hovering in the doorway.

  ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  She followed him into the night. It had stopped raining. Hurrying to keep up with him, she splashed straight through the car-park puddles, getting her school shoes wet. They reached the tram. Its red and cream paintwork shone from the recent rain-washing; its blunt nose faced towards Karori and the city; its sign above the front window read Newtown Depot. Through the open front door she could see Jack watching her closely.

  ‘You’re still here, Jack? That’s good of you.’ Peter and Jack laughed like conspirators. Lizzie could hear a new tone in Peter’s voice, almost triumphant, as if he’d won the hurdles. Jack nudged him as he jumped nimbly aboard and brushed past the driver. He was grinning.

  ‘About time, Pete my boy. I was going to go without you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that. You’re not allowed to.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. I’ve driven without a conductor before and I’ll do it again if I have to.’

  Peter turned to Lizzie, hanging uncomfortably back from the tram’s lights. ‘You want to come back in the tram as far as your street? No charge, of course.’

  ‘Yes, please.’ She didn’t want to be parted from Peter now, not for a minute and dreaded the moment when she would have to get down off the tram and say goodnight.

  ‘Climb aboard then.’

  She pulled herself up the steep, high iron step, trod carefully along the grooved wood floor, slippery from the rain, and perched uncomfortably on her usual wooden slatted seat. But this time Peter didn’t come back to sit beside her. Instead, he was talking animatedly to Jack, stopping frequently to roar with laughter. Lizzie couldn’t see what was so funny. She didn’t feel at all like laughing. She wanted to be cuddled, to be told everything would be all right. She shivered. Jack usually left both front and back doors of the tram wide open, even at this time of year. She hadn’t noticed until now, though, just how the wind whistled through.

  She shivered from the cold and from fear. Fear of consequences. Would Peter lose interest in her now, like Julia had said? Would he try to avoid her next time she caught the tram? And why was he ignoring her now and cracking jokes with Jack instead? And why was she bleeding? Her period wasn’t due for another two weeks.

  Julia would know. Julia knew everything. Well almost everything. Julia had brought that book to school: You and Your Body it was called, with page after page of line drawings of girls with small breasts – not at all like hers, which only just fitted into her new Maidenform bra her mother had been so embarrassing about in the middle of Kirkaldies’ ladies fashions.

  ‘My daughter is growing so fast, she needs a new brassiere again,’ she’d said to the saleswoman.

  Lizzie had cringed, wishing she’d stayed in the shoe department trying on those baby louis heels. It was bad enough having the biggest-size bra in the class without having to go another size up.

  The girls in You and Your Body didn’t have to worry about getting an outsized bra. Their chests had two firm little semi-circles with neat dots for nipples, and they didn’t have any unsightly hair between their legs like hers. She and Julia had giggled over that – over how unrealistic the pictures were.

  ‘They don’t look like us at all,’ Julia said.

  ‘I wish I was that slim.’ Lizzie held up the picture.

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Not like that.’ She pointed to the tiny semi-circles.

  ‘You’re lucky.’ Julia looked down at her emerging bumps. ‘Boys like them big like yours.’

  Julia always knew that sort of thing.

  Julia had said that once you’d done it, once you’d gone all the way, they didn’t want to know you. Was that true? She stared at him, scared. She couldn’t believe he wouldn’t want to see her again now they were so close, now she’d done what he wanted of her.

  Lizzie looked out the tram window at the wet street glistening under the street lamps. If only she knew as much as Julia. Would she have gone all the way with Peter? She doubted it somehow. Julia was good at talking about daring things like going all the way, but she lacked the daring to do it.

  Like the time they’d met Steven and the other boys in the tramping hut. Julia had flirted with one of them, she’d been so obvious it was embarrassing. But when he’d called her bluff and asked to ‘take a trip outside’ with him, she’d backed down at a hundred miles an hour.

  Steven hadn’t been forward like that. Until the ski race last month, he’d been quiet, shy even; had looked at his thick black rugby socks with their yellow stripe round the top when Julia’s flirting became too much to bear. But when they’d walked back to the bunkrooms together, she’d wondered if perhaps he’d be a better choice than Peter. Except he hadn’t kissed her and the next day, he’d barely acknowledged her, looking away when it was time to get on the bus, sitting with his friends instead of her.

  Lizzie had always felt that ‘going all the way’ would elicit feelings of elation and achievement; the way it had sounded during Julia’s breathless delivery, the least she expected was fireworks and rainbows to appear. But there were no skyrockets, no pots of gold. She felt soiled and slightly foolish, her uniform grubby, her underpants bloodied.

  They were getting near her corner. Annoyed, she stood up and walked down the front. She said, ‘I’m getting off in a minute.’

  ‘Oh, are we there already?’ Peter looked surprised, though whether that was surprise that they were nearly at her stop, or surprise that she was still there, she couldn’t tell. ‘Better let her off then, Jack.’

  Lizzie was sure she’d seen Peter wink at the driver. She could feel her cheeks go warm, the way they did when her father treated her like a child in front of his friends.

  The tram squealed slowly to a halt. Desperate for some contact, she took Peter by the arm and gave it a slight squeeze.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’ He shook off her arm and grinned. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  She waited a moment for her usual kiss, but it was not forthcoming. She climbed down to the asphalt.

  ‘See you then.’

  He didn’t answer. She stood on the wet pavement, desolate, as the tram trundled noisily up the hill out of Karori on its way into town. The last she saw of him was his arm waving out the door as the tram disappeared from view.

  Trying to muster up some courage, Lizzie slung her schoolbag over her shoulder, looked to see the way was clear and crossed the deserted street. Lights from under the verandas of the familiar butcher’s, baker’s, shoe repairer’s and corner store shone brightly but all were closed. She felt very alone.

  She turned the corner into the street leading up to her home. Only a slight rise to start with, the pavement soon became steeper and she found herself a little out of breath. She paused to recover.

  If I were as fit as Peter, she thought, I could run up this hill in no time at all. She choked back a sob. Just thinking of him hurt. ‘See you tomorrow,’ he’d said. But there was something in the casual way he said it, while not even looking at her, that made her anxious.

  He’d been on the Karori route for the past three months; did that mean he’d be on it for the rest of the year? Or could he change his route like he changed his white shirt?

  The what-ifs were swirling round in her head when it started to rain again.

  Lizzie had no raincoat, no cover other than her school blazer. That morning, as she’d left for school, her mother had warned her rain was forecast and told her to pack her raincoat.

  ‘Yes, Mummy,’ she’d said, and promptly ignored her. A voluminous, school-issue raincoat would not be the right look for seeing Peter that night on the way home f
rom town. She’d also hidden her school hat and gloves in her bag – she hated them.

  She started up the hill again, quickening her step, thoughts of her mother now joining the other anxieties.

  What would her mother say?

  She’d gone into town after school and waited there until the appointed time when she was to catch Peter’s tram; she knew she would be late home, but she had no watch and no idea how late. Peter had told her not to turn up until it was dark and after the evening rush-hour.

  And what would her mother say about the underpants? Lizzie was so horror-stricken at the thought she stopped walking for a moment. Clearly she would have to get rid of the evidence, hide them somehow. She remembered the burner beside the kitchen stove. If she could spirit the panties in there when her mother wasn’t looking she might get away with it.

  Water trickled ran down her nose – her hair was dripping wet. She started up the hill again.

  At last, drenched and cold, she arrived at the bottom of the long, curved drive up to their house.

  Through the trees she could see the outline of the rambling, two-storey weatherboard mansion perched on the top of the hill, silhouetted against the sky. The upstairs curtains were closed. Downstairs, the sitting room lights were blazing, but the trees obscured the lower part of the big picture window so she couldn’t tell if her mother was standing there, watching out for her wayward daughter to come home.

  Both front and back door lights were on – not a good sign. She paused, scared and ashamed. Then she started to shiver.

  She knew she had to get inside. Surely the lecture she’d get from her mother would be over in a few minutes and then she could get warm. Maybe even a hot bath?

  This thought spurred her on up the drive, up the steps and in the back door, hoping to evade her mother momentarily. Her mother spent most of her evenings in the big formal sitting room, either entertaining or playing two-handed bridge with her father when he was home from his club.

  She was right. The kitchen was empty, but there was a wonderful aroma coming from the oven. Mrs Mullen, who came in three times a week to help with the domestic chores, would have prepared the evening meal. And it was always delicious; Mrs Mullen clipped recipes from Good Housekeeping and took pride in discovering new tastes, even using fresh herbs from the garden.

  Lizzie opened the oven door – an aromatic casserole and a baked potato lay within – and was tempted to seize the dish and devour it at once. Then it dawned on her that it was only a meal for one. Where was everyone else’s dinner?

  She looked at the clock on the mantel and gasped. Six-thirty. She hadn’t realised it was that late. The family would have eaten, done the dishes and dispersed. Jerry would be in his room doing his homework – or pretending to – and Penny, just six years old, would already be in bed.

  She put down her wet schoolbag, took off her soaked jacket, hung it on the back of the kitchen chair, and removed her socks and shoes, which had left a dark rain-stain across the top of her feet.

  Just as she was shoving the second sock in the bottom of its shoe, she heard the tap-tap of her mother’s heels in the hall.

  ‘Lizzie, is that you?’ her mother called as she rounded the door. ‘Where have you been? You’re soaked. You’ll catch your death.’

  Her mother was wearing her usual after-dinner attire – pearls, an elegant, tailored floral dress reaching just below the knee, matching heels and flawless stockings. Her hair, her clothes were always beautiful. Even now, even when Lizzie appeared before her like shipwreck flotsam, dripping all over the kitchen floor, her mother’s demeanour gave the appearance of being unruffled, though Lizzie knew this could be deceptive. For a moment, her mother was poised in the doorway, as if waiting for a camera flash. Photographers loved Helena Hamilton; she was handsome, if not quite beautiful, and had been ever since her coming out party in 1926. These days it was the National Council of Women who gathered at their home for meetings and fund-raising events that captured the photographers’ attentions. Lizzie loved studying the paper the following day, reading out any report that mentioned her mother’s name, cutting out the photos with her in them and pinning them inside her wardrobe door. One day, she hoped, she would be famous like that.

  Lizzie took a deep breath to quell the shivering welling up from within. ‘I know.’

  Her mother swooped on her, enveloping her in Shalimar perfume. ‘We need to get you out of your wet things, you poor thing. You’re frozen.’

  Lizzie’s teeth chattered in agreement.

  ‘What happened to the raincoat I gave you this morning?’

  Lizzie couldn’t speak for her chattering teeth. And there was no answer to that, anyway.

  ‘And look at the time. Where on earth have you been?’ Her mother stood back, studying her. ‘You were supposed to be home at half-past five.’

  ‘The tram was late.’

  ‘Late? The tram was surely not an hour late!’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ She should have had a story ready. What was her story?

  ‘So tell me the truth then, what have you been doing all this time?’

  ‘Julia and I went into town after school and then I went home to her place. And then I had to wait ages for the tram.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, young lady. You can’t have been at Julia’s. Her mother would have phoned. She always does when you visit her.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The truth, Elizabeth, please.’

  ‘I don’t know. I caught the tram home and it was late. That’s all.’

  Her mother pursed her lips. ‘I can see I’m not going to get any further. Maybe your father will get some sense out of you when he comes home.’

  Lizzie knew her father could be strict, but more than likely he wouldn’t care. He involved himself with his children as little as possible, ignoring them most of the time he was home – which wasn’t until late during the week, while at weekends he would be absorbed in the garden, disappearing into his vegetable patch for hours at a time.

  The immediate confrontation over, she started to shiver uncontrollably.

  Her mother’s stance, annoyed after the dissembling and excuses, softened visibly. ‘Come on upstairs and get those wet clothes off. I’ll run you a hot bath.’

  Chapter 2

  Wellington. August, 1950

  When the vomiting started, Lizzie could no longer block out the fear she’d kept locked away. What if she were pregnant? There’d been a girl at school in the upper sixth who was sick in the corridor and everyone said she was pregnant. That was the last day she’d ever been seen.

  She remembered the girl in her class, Marjorie, who’d been so upset last year when she thought she was going to get pregnant because her boyfriend had taken her down to the beach one night, lain next to her on the sand and put his hands ‘there’. But Julia had said hands were not responsible; Julia’s big sister had told her a boy’s penis (they’d laughed so much at the word ‘penis’) had to be produced for pregnancy to occur.

  When Lizzie felt the initial queasiness, she wondered if there might be more to it, especially when the feeling returned day after day, first thing in the morning. She looked it up in the dictionary, the encyclopaedia, even her mother’s crossword thesaurus. She tried the school library in the biology section and learned a lot about the procreation of frogs and mice, but nothing about real people. She borrowed Julia’s You and Your Body, saying she wanted to read it properly, but the detail about what happened when the egg travelled down the fallopian tube was a bit vague. She pinched her mother’s Good Housekeeping magazine, in case there was something in there, but she remained almost as ignorant as when she’d started.

  In the end, she blocked it from her mind.

  It was at church last Sunday that the queasiness became worse; throughout the interminable sermon she’d felt like being sick and only the total embarrassment of having to rush outside, with all eyes on her, prevented her from leaving.

  Lying in bed now, staring at th
e ceiling and waiting for the nausea to diminish, she realised that she was actually going to be sick and rushed to the toilet, only just making it in time. As she passed the bathroom door, she could hear her father splashing in the basin, shaving. The splashing stopped.

  ‘Is that you, Elizabeth? What’s going on?’

  She couldn’t reply; another wave of nausea overcame her. Maybe she had a stomach bug. One of the girls in her class had been home nearly all week with an upset tummy. That would make sense. A bug. Or maybe something she had eaten – Mrs Mullen’s curried chicken might have caused a reaction. That could be it.

  ‘I’d better get your mother.’

  As Lizzie heaved again into the porcelain bowl, she heard the bathroom door open and the pad of her father’s slippered feet along the hall carpet to the bedroom.