Lizzie

Lizzie is Lucy’s first and only friend during the years between secondary school and leaving home at eighteen. Their friendship is built from a shared position outside ordinary school life: they accept being stared at, make music together, and try to construct a private language. Though their contact later dwindles to occasional Christmas cards, Lizzie remains a crucial link between Lucy’s isolated past and the family she has left behind.

Identity and Introduction

Lizzie becomes Lucy’s friend at secondary school, when Lucy is speaking again but has already been marked as weird by the other children. Lucy accepts that label and takes naturally to befriending another outsider. At eleven, Lizzie is as tall as the tallest teachers, gangly where Lucy is stumpy, with long, lank hair and a thin, sad face. Together, they make a conspicuously unusual pair, and other pupils stare, sneer, and sometimes tease them.

The teasing does not drive them apart, and no one tries to stop their activities. The two girls enjoy being left alone; the schoolchildren’s insults do not wound them. Their bond offers a form of companionship that does not depend on winning acceptance from the wider group. The contrast between their conspicuous appearance and their ease with one another establishes the friendship as a small, self-made refuge within school life.

Music and a Private Language

Music gives the girls a way to share time without needing to make themselves intelligible to their classmates. Lucy plays the cello and Lizzie the trombone. During ten-minute breaks between lessons, they find a corner of a classroom or the playground and play simple duets, borrowing pieces from the school orchestra or songs they have heard on the radio. Their performances attract attention, but neither the audience’s stares nor the teasing prevents them from playing together.

They also make repeated attempts to invent their own language, usually without much success. French becomes a more sustained shared project: they read Asterix books, copy words from French dictionaries, and talk together in French. When they lack vocabulary or grammar, they invent what they need and imitate French accents they have heard from Debbie Harry on Top of the Pops. They believe they are speaking French, although Lucy later wonders whether any French speaker would have understood them. The effort matters less as a successful language lesson than as a joint attempt to make a world in which the two girls can communicate on their own terms.

That private world never becomes fully secret. Lucy finds the language insufficient to guarantee complete separation from others, a limit that points to a difference between the friends: companionship is meaningful to her, but it cannot satisfy her wish to get beyond the world around her altogether. Lizzie is also frequently absent from school, so their closeness is interrupted even before Lucy eventually leaves home.

Illness and Separation

Lucy recalls Lizzie as repeatedly thinking she was sick and taking time off school. Over the years, the illnesses attributed to her range from cancer and arthritis to lumbago, flu, meningitis, gout, and dengue fever. Lucy acknowledges that Lizzie could not have had all of them, but says she suffered as though her friend had. The account makes Lizzie’s absences consequential beyond the missed school days: Lucy is left lonely without the person with whom she shares music, experiments in language, and the experience of being treated as strange.

Lucy describes herself as strong while describing Lizzie through this sequence of illnesses. That contrast does not erase their affection; instead, it shows how closely Lucy experiences Lizzie’s supposed suffering, even while doubting the literal accumulation of diagnoses. The narrative does not establish which illnesses Lizzie actually had. What it does establish is Lucy’s emotional response to her friend’s recurring absence and the loneliness that persists alongside their companionship.

Their friendship is described as Lucy’s only one until she leaves home at eighteen. In adulthood, they do not write letters to each other. They exchange Christmas cards only every two or three years, each card bearing no more than a signature. This sparse contact marks a real distance from the daily school friendship, but it also preserves a thread of recognition between them across the years and across Lucy’s departure from home.

Adult Life and the Letter

Years later, Lizzie unexpectedly becomes the person through whom Lucy’s family can reach her. Jonathan Fly writes that he encountered Lizzie at Waterloo Station not long before sending his letter. He reports that she is doing very well at the BBC as a high-flying executive, and recalls that she and Lucy used to be very close. Lizzie gives Jonathan Lucy’s work address, enabling him to contact a sister from whom the family has received no news for a long time.

The letter’s arrival initially unsettles Lucy. The British stamps are recognizable, but the round, neat handwriting is not. Lucy thinks first of Lizzie because she is the only person in Britain who knows her work address, then rejects the identification because Lizzie’s handwriting is long and spidery. For a moment Lucy suspects that the letter might come from Lily’s boyfriend, but recognizes that he could not know either her identity or workplace. She opens the envelope and needs several seconds to take in the signature before reading the page: the letter is from Jonathan, not Lizzie.

Lizzie’s role in this reconnection is therefore practical but significant. She is not the letter’s author, nor does the evidence describe a renewed correspondence between the two old friends. Rather, a chance meeting allows her to pass Lucy’s address to Jonathan, turning their surviving connection into a route back to the family. The contrast between the infrequency of their Christmas cards and the importance of this single exchange gives their friendship a quiet afterlife: long after their school routines have ended, Lizzie still knows enough about Lucy to help someone find her.