Daughter of Mine Read Online Free Page A

afterwards.’ Lizzie heard the words but they didn’t seem to matter. Nothing did, and she just grinned again. Tressa sighed and said wearily, ‘What’s the use of talking to you? Turn around and let me see if I can work some sort of miracle.’
    There were not enough grips to put Lizzie’s hair up the way it had been and Tressa was forced to leave some of it loose, but it looked good even so. When Lizzie had obediently drunk the water, Tressa, surveying her, thought she’d done the best she could in the circumstances and led her back onto the dance floor.
    Steve was sitting with Mike, and when he saw Lizzie framed for a moment in the doorway he thought he’d never seen anyone lovelier. Her face was no longer flushed and she had regained her creamy complexion, and her hair, though tidy, was now allowing waves to fall down her back and tendrils of it framed her face. He stepped forward quickly to claim Lizzie before someone else did, a large glass of punch in his hand. She lifted it to her lips, her eyes met Tressa’s, who raised hers to the ceiling as Lizzie took a large gulp.
    The next morning, when Lizzie opened her eyes because Tressa was shaking her, she felt as if she’d fallen into the pit of Hell. A thousand hammers were beating in her head, her eyes throbbed and she felt sick. ‘Leave me alone.’
    ‘No way will I,’ Tressa said. She was glad the other two girls that shared the room were not there, for they were on breakfasts this morning while she and Lizzie weren’t on duty until six, and looking at her cousin’s comatose frame she was glad of it.
    Tressa expected Lizzie to feel bad. Mike had said she’d have a bad head when she woke in the morning. They’d had to nearly carry her home and she’d almost tumbled down the stairs as Tressa forced her up them, her arm around Lizzie’s waist; and now she lay like one dead, while Tressa’s insides were filled with delicious excitement at seeing Mike again, and she was letting no drunken cousin spoil it. ‘Get up!’ she commanded, giving Lizzie a shove.
    ‘I can’t.’
    ‘You can and you bloody will. We’ve got Mass at eleven o’clock and the fellows are going to meet us outside.’
    ‘The fellows! What fellows?’
    ‘God, Lizzie! What fellows do you think? Mike and Steve, of course. We arranged it yesterday. Don’t you remember?’
    Lizzie shook her head, but gently. She remembered very little, but she recalled her earlier feelings about Steve. ‘I don’t think I like Steve much,’ she said.
    Tressa looked at her scornfully. ‘Oh aye,’ she retorted sarcastically. ‘Is that why you danced with him all night and went out with him into the night, arm in arm, and came back with your hair looking like you’d been pulled through a hedge backwards and your bodice nearly unbuttoned?’
    Lizzie sat bolt upright in the bed, putting her hands to her aching head as she did so and fighting nausea. ‘I didn’t,’ she breathed, horrified. ‘Say I didn’t?’
    ‘You did. You were all over him and his hands were everywhere when you danced and you never said a word. You couldn’t get close enough. Even when wesat down, you sat on Steve’s knee and nuzzled into his neck. It was embarrassing. Do you remember none of it?’
    ‘No. Oh God!’ Lizzie said. ‘I can’t even remember how I got home.’
    ‘They walked back with us,’ Tressa said. ‘I could never have managed you on my own. I told you that punch was alcoholic, for all the good it did. You just kept knocking it back.’
    Lizzie couldn’t remember Tressa telling her that, couldn’t remember anything much. But, whether she could remember it or not hardly mattered. According to Tressa, those glasses of punch had caused her to do God knows what with a person she had just met and in her sober moments hadn’t cared for. The evils of drink—Jesus Christ! Her mother had been right all along.And she felt so ill. ‘Tressa, I feel like death. I don’t think I’ll make Mass this