Daughter of Mine Read Online Free PDF Page B

drinks before being delivered back to the hotel.
    Tressa was happily tipsy and confided to Lizzie when they reached their room that she was in love with Mike.
    ‘How can you be?’ Lizzie demanded, shocked. ‘You’ve only just met.’
    ‘Sometimes a person just knows these things.’
    Lizzie was still doubtful, but whether Tressa was in love with Mike or not, Lizzie knew that with their shift rota there would be little chance of her seeing Mike before the New Year. Christmas was almost upon them, one of the busiest periods of all at the hotel, where time off was minimal or altogether non-existent, and any free time they did have was usually spent sleeping the deep sleep of the totally exhausted.
    All Tressa could talk about, though, was Mike. ‘I love him,’ she declared. ‘Wait till you love someone, you’ll sing a different tune then. It’ll hit you like a ton of bricks, I bet.’
    ‘Maybe,’ Lizzie said. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. It hasn’t yet anyway, and remember, when you marry it’s for life, Tressa.’
    ‘I know that,’ Tressa replied, ‘but if I wait a lifetime I’ll want no one else. How d’you feel about Steve?’
    ‘He’s all right.’
    ‘Come on, why don’t you give the man a chance?’
    ‘I have. I am. I just don’t feel that way about him.’
    ‘He’s smitten with you.’
    ‘How d’you know?’
    ‘You just do, the way he looks at you. His eyes never leave you. You must have noticed.’
    Had she, and refused to acknowledge it? She didn’t know, but it was obvious Tressa was right because when they next went out with Mike and Steve in January, Steve asked her to tea the following Sunday to meet his parents, as she was free until seven o’clock that evening.
    ‘Why don’t you want to go?’ Tressa asked later. ‘I’m going to see Mike’s.’
    ‘I know, but you and Mike…well, it’s different.’
    ‘Lizzie, all you have to do is smile and be polite. What’s so hard?’
    ‘It’s not that. It’s the complexion Steve will put on it. It means something, surely, when you meet the parents?’ Lizzie bit on her thumbnail in consternation. ‘I mean, maybe it would be better to end it now, stop him getting ideas.’
    No way did Tressa want Lizzie doing that, but she didn’t say this. Instead, she said, ‘How will you tell him? Do you know where he lives?’
    ‘No, well, only vaguely.’
    ‘So, you’re going to wait until he comes, when everyone’s gone to the trouble, made tea and all sorts, and you’ll let him go back alone to face their ridicule and scorn?’
    Lizzie hadn’t thought of that. ‘You think it’s better to go through with it then?’
    ‘I think it’s the only thing to do now. You should have told him straight at the time.’
    ‘I meant to. He sort of took me aback a bit.’
    ‘Well, I think you’ve got to see it through now,’ Tressa told her, and Lizzie knew in her heart of hearts that Tressa was right.
    Edgbaston was Lizzie’s first experience of back-to-back housing. Steve and Mike had come to meet the girls and as they alighted from the tram on Bristol Street, which was another first for them both, they all went up Bristol Passage, and at the top both girls stood and stared. Lizzie was in shock, and so, she saw, was Tressa. Nothing in their lives so far had prepared them foranything like these cramped and crowded houses, squashed together in front of grey pavements and grey cobbled roads. And so many of them: they went on and on, street after street of them. Even when Lizzie had seen the beggars and poor in the market, she’d not thought of them living in places like this. She’d not think of anyone living in places like this. Her father’s calves were better housed.
    The two men didn’t seem to notice the girls’ disquiet. ‘We’ve come to the parting of the ways now,’ Mike said. ‘You go straight up Grant Street, so we’ll see you later.’
    When they moved off, Steve put his arm around Lizzie. ‘All right?’
    Whatever she