Maybe it was Madge’s twins’ birthday party and Madge ordering such a fancy cake that had reminded her. There was hardly enough room for all the icing on the top, never mind the candles. She’d even asked for the year – 1957 – in pink icing, as well as both the twins’ names and ages, and fancy scrolls all round. Julie, no doubt, would never need any reminder.
‘What age would she be now?’ Madge asked Julie.
Catriona hastily intervened. ‘Maybe Julie would rather not talk about it, Madge.’
Madge shrugged. ‘It was her that started it. She said it would be her wean’s birthday today.’
‘It’s OK,’ Julie said. ‘She’d be twelve.’
Madge took a big slurp of tea and a bite of her biscuit. ‘Ever wonder where she is or how she’s getting on, hen?’
‘Every day. Every single day.’
‘Och, you regret it. I thought you would, hen. I go on something awful about my weans. I mean, they drive me nearly demented at times, but I wouldn’t be without them. I could never have given one of my weans away.’
‘Madge!’ Catriona hissed. ‘For pity’s sake!’
Julie lit a cigarette. ‘You were in a different situation to me, Madge. I’d just lost my man. I was devastated and I got stupid drunk on VE night.’
‘But you said …’
‘I know what I said at the time.’ She gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘A married man who adored me, but he couldn’t leave his wife. Or was it that I couldn’t split up his marriage? Something like that. I was just saving face, Madge. The truth is I just got bloody drunk. I’ve no idea who the father is, never did know.’
‘I wish,’ Catriona said gently, ‘you’d have tried to manage. We’d have helped you, Julie. I told you at the time that you’d always regret giving up your wee girl.’
‘Oh yes,’ Julie said bitterly. ‘Go on, enjoy the “I told you so’s”.’
‘I’m not enjoying any such thing. I’m sorry I said that. It was thoughtless of me. I just wish things could have been different for you, that’s all.’
‘Aye, OK.’ Julie sucked at her Woodbine, then blew a quick puff of smoke towards the ceiling.
Madge said, ‘Have you thought about trying to find her?’
‘Oh, I’ve thought about it. But how would I work that miracle? Do you think anyone’s likely to tell me where she is? No chance, pal.’
Catriona nibbled worriedly at her lip. ‘There’d be no harm in trying, I suppose.’
Julie took a deep breath. ‘I said it at the time and I’ll say it again: it’s the child I’ve got to think about. It’s what’s best for her that mattered to me then, and I feel the same now. I’m a single working woman living in a wee room and kitchen in the Gorbals. What kind of life could I give a twelve-year-old girl? I bet she’s living the life of Riley just now with some posh couple in a big villa in Bearsden. Or maybe even up north someplace and going to a posh private school. Good luck to her, wherever she is.’
‘Nobody could give her a mother’s love like you,’ Catriona said.
‘Oh, aye, in between working all day to make enough money to pay the rent and feed us, you mean?’
‘We would help, wouldn’t we, Madge?’
‘Sure we would, hen. Nae bother.’
‘No bother!’ Julie laughed again. ‘That’s all you need with your seven kids, and Catriona with her big house and two boys and her helping out in her man’s business as well. Oh, aye, no bother at all!’
‘She’s OK.’ Madge jerked a head in Catriona’s direction. ‘Talk about living the life of Riley? She’s got a man that dotes on her and gives her everything she wants and more. What about that television set? She had that long before anybody else, and it was bought for cash as well. We had to get ours on tick. She’s even got a bloody washing machine – and a telephone. A telephone!’
A hint of bitterness crept into Catriona’s voice then. ‘You’ve always thought I was lucky, haven’t you, Madge?’
‘You’re damn right I have, hen. If you’d had the life I’ve had to suffer, especially with that big, two-timing midden I’m married to, you’d know exactly why I think you’re damned lucky.’
‘For God’s sake!’ Julie stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Don’t let’s start a fight. We’re supposed to be best pals, remember?’
Madge’s big frame suddenly shook and bounced with laughter. ‘Here, the pair of you would know all about it if I started a fight. I’d flatten you both before you could say Jack Robinson.’
‘Or Alec Jackson?’ Julie grinned.
‘Watch it, you!’ Madge warned, but still with bouncing good humour. ‘You’re a cheeky wee sod, so you are!’
They surfed away on the swell of Madge’s laughter to speak about other things. How great it was that sweetie rationing had stopped, for instance. They kidded Madge on about how she used to pinch some of Alec and the children’s sweetie coupons.
‘Och, I’m a right rotten pig, so I am.’ Madge took them seriously. ‘Me and my bloody sweet tooth!’
They all agreed what bliss it was that sugar and eggs were now derationed. They all loved too the new dish that had been created for Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation. It was called Coronation Chicken and was absolutely delicious. Their mouths watered at the thought.
‘I’ll be getting like the size of a double-decker bus before long,’ Madge laughed. ‘God, I enjoy my food, so I do.’
They had been having a lunch of tea, sandwiches and biscuits in the restaurant in Copeland & Lye’s, where Julie was one of the sales ladies in the underwear department.
‘It’s time I went back to work,’ Julie said. ‘I’m not a lady of leisure like you two.’
‘Now, that is a laugh!’ Catriona said, without sounding amused in the slightest.
Julie took out her powder compact and studied her pert features and sad eyes and the tendrils of glossy hair curling from under her hat. Before rubbing her powder puff over her nose, she said, ‘I thought I saw a grey hair yesterday.’
‘You’re needing glasses, hen. If you’d as many grey hairs as me, you’d have something to worry about.
Catriona assured her, ‘You’re a good-looking girl, Julie. I can’t understand why you haven’t married again.’
‘Girl? I hate to disillusion you, pal, but the three of us have long since passed the stage of being girls.’
‘Don’t be daft. You can’t even be in your thirties yet.’
‘There’ll always be a bit of wean in wee blondie.’ Madge jerked her head towards Catriona. ‘Talk about luck.’
‘Oh yes, my life of Riley again! My big house and my television set and my washing machine and my telephone, not to mention my saintly husband.’
‘I was thinking about the way you’ve never been lumbered by a mob of weans. See them weans of mine? I could murder them at times, so I could.’
She shoved her red beret further back on her head. ‘See all my grey hairs? That’s worrying about them weans, so it is.’
Julie tucked her powder compact back into her handbag and took a last sip of tea. ‘I’d better go. See you.’
‘Not if I see you first, hen,’ Madge laughed.
‘Aye, right.’
She waved them goodbye and clipped away on her black, high-heeled court shoes. She knew she looked smarter than her two friends, in her black tailored costume and pristine white blouse. The knowledge gave her spirits a triumphant lift. She believed in keeping up appearances and had always succeeded in putting on a brave front. But her triumph was short-lived and her bravery superficial. Alone in bed at night, she often suffered tornadoes of grief and regret. She wept. Sometimes she’d give up trying to sleep and get up, make herself a cup of tea and sit nursing it on the fender stool close to the dying embers of the fire.
Her hole-in-the-wall bed in the kitchen was cosier than the one in the front room. The front room was always cold as the North Pole. Sometimes she didn’t bother lighting the gas mantle in the kitchen. She just crouched underneath it, watching the feeble light from the black iron grate flicker around the cramped room. It picked out the ghostly form of the scrubbed table, the wooden chairs, the high shelf on which sat her best china and two china dogs, or ‘wally dugs’, as they were known to most Glaswegians.
The light made grey shadows of the sink and the swan-necked tap under the window and, when she filled the kettle, she could gaze out on to the back court with its overflowing midden and the occasional darting of rats. It was the front room that had the view of the street below. The street was always full of interesting, lively bustle during the day and, on long summer evenings, she liked to sit there watching Glasgow life go by. At weekends, she sometimes went out to visit friends or with one or two of the girls at work to the cinema. It depended if there was a good picture on, or if the other girls weren’t going out with boyfriends. A date with a man always took precedence. She’d once gone to the dancing in the Barrowlands Ballroom with Flora. Flora had been stood up by a bloke and, at the last minute, had persuaded Julie to go to the Barrowlands as a kind of ‘I don’t care’ gesture of defiance.
Flora had insisted she preferred a girlfriend’s company any day. She was lying, of course, and the disaster of an evening hadn’t been helped by the manager ordering them off the floor for dancing together.
The older women who got married always left work to concentrate on the care of home, husband and eventually children. As a result, Julie either had to go out with younger women or fall back on her real friends, Madge and Catriona. They had stood by her through thick and thin for years and she was grateful to them, although pride had always prevented her from showing her feelings.
It had been true what she’d said to them about her wee girl. She just wanted the best for her – always had done. Yet, at the same time, she longed to find her, to see her. She told herself it was just to make sure she was all right. But, oh, in her heart, she knew it was more than that. She felt again the agonising wrench when the nurse came and took the baby away. She suffered the acute pain as if it had happened only yesterday.
And she wanted her back.