Lessons in Heartbreak (28 page)

‘I would, if I lived here,’ Maisie sighed, opening drawers and poking around.

‘That’s why you and I would never make toffs’ wives,’ Lily laughed. ‘We’d want round-the-clock heat, silk bedspreads like Greta Garbo’s and a Rolls-Royce, and the posh boy would want old curtains, no heating, and us darning his socks rather than buy new ones. Rich people don’t need to show off the fact that they’re rich.’

‘They’re odd, that’s for sure,’ Maisie said.

They tidied themselves up to meet Diana’s mother and the other guests.

‘Mummy’s in the little drawing room,’ Diana said as the three of them headed down the massive staircase once again. ‘She can’t wait to meet you.’

She’d changed from her travelling clothes and looked younger somehow in a pair of old jodhpurs and a light jersey. Lily felt as if she were seeing a new side to her friend now that she was at home. Again, she thought of her own home in Tamarin. She imagined taking Diana and Maisie there and showing them all the places she’d played as a child. The woods where she and Tommy played hide-and-seek, the stream where they’d lain on their bellies, dangling fingers in the cool water. She thought of introducing them to her mother, how they’d take to her instantly. Everyone loved Mam; she was so
warm, so kind. Except, her mother would be different with Diana because Di was one of
them.
Why did it matter?

The small drawing room was on the left side of the house, where the family lived, as opposed to the east wing, which was currently occupied by the sanatorium.

Diana’s mother got to her feet and held out her arms as soon as she saw them.

‘How wonderful!’ she cried, with genuine delight. She was the image of Diana, only an older version, with the same sweet face, dancing smile and hair dotted with grey.

‘Hello, Lady Belton,’ said Lily formally.

‘I do feel as though I know you, girls,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard so much about you, and how kind you’ve been to Diana. I can never thank you enough.’ She beamed at them with such warmth that Lily finally felt herself relax. Perhaps it was going to be all right, after all.

Sir Archie, for all his amiability, was very much an old-style gentleman: charming, yes, but no doubt fully aware of his rank. But Lady Belton was much more in Diana’s style: kind to all, irrespective of background. Lady Irene would not have liked her one little bit, Lily thought with amusement.

Dinner was ‘just the family’, as Diana guilelessly put it. Lily, Maisie, Diana, Lady Evangeline and Sir Archie were joined by Sybil and her fiancé, the firm-jawed, largely silent Captain Philip Stanhope.

Sybil, two years younger than Diana, and a million years away from her sister in terms of temperament, only wanted to talk about her wedding the next day, and fretted about her dress, the flowers and how awful it was that they couldn’t have a proper society wedding because of the horrid old war.

Lily thought of the people who’d really experienced the horrid old war – people like Maisie, who’d lost her mother, and the young men in the other part of the house, battered inside and out by what they’d seen on the front line. Here in
the idyllic world of Beltonward, the war seemed a long way away. Sybil worked with the local Land Army, and Lily couldn’t help wondering how Sybil went about supervising homesick nineteen-year-old land girls who’d signed up to help the war effort and found themselves miles from home, getting up at five to milk cows or drive a tractor.

‘You come from a farm. You should join the land girls,’ Sybil said sharply to Lily, as if she’d been able to see into her head.

‘Bit of a waste of my training, though,’ Lily said evenly.

‘Yes, but you started in Ireland,’ Sybil said, as if that in itself rendered the training useless.

Lily felt the familiar flare of anger inside her. She dampened it down.

‘I didn’t, actually,’ she said. ‘I didn’t nurse in Ireland at all. I worked for a local doctor.’

‘Sibs! Lily’s a better nurse than I am,’ Diana said.

‘If you say so,’ Sybil muttered, staring down her long nose at Lily.

‘Where did you say you came from again, m’dear?’ Sir Archie enquired.

Lily felt herself stiffen. She’d die, just die if he knew the Lochravens. She couldn’t bear a conversation about them, one that could only end with the realisation that Lily had worked as a lady’s maid at Rathnaree.

‘Waterford,’ she said, which was correct, after a fact. Tamarin was in the county of Waterford.

‘Oh, right,’ Sir Archie said.

After dinner, they all retired to the small drawing room where Lady Evangeline sat beside the unlit fire to work on a tapestry of a unicorn in a verdant wood, and Diana, Sybil, Sir Archie and Philip played cards. Maisie and Lily, neither of whom liked cards – Lily had only said it because she was sure the games she’d played at home weren’t the sort Sybil had in
mind – sat on the window seat and talked as they looked out over the grounds.

Wilson, Philip and Sir Archie had assembled all the garden chairs on the small terrace beside the rose garden for the wedding party. The plan was to open the terrace doors so the guests could wander in and out at will. Sybil was still sulking because the convalescents hadn’t been cleared out of the ballroom for her big day.

‘Do you think she and the captain have done
it
?’ Maisie whispered now.

‘Sybil?’ Lily shrugged. ‘Don’t know. They don’t look like they’re at it like knives, do they?’

Philip and Sybil had known each other since childhood, and Lily couldn’t discern any passion between the two of them. She’d seen some of the nurses come home from nights out flushed and with their lipstick kissed off, their hair dishevelled. They always crept in – if Matron found them, there would be hell to pay. Lily always wondered what it would be like to feel such wild passion for a man. She didn’t know if she’d ever experience it. She’d been out with men, of course, but she’d never felt the slightest passion for any of them.

‘I’d sleep with my fiancé if I was engaged,’ Maisie said suddenly and surprisingly. Lily had always thought Maisie the most moral of them all. For all her Christ Almightys and jokes about frolicking with soldiers in the back seat of the cinema, she had been brought up to follow a strict moral code. ‘He could go off to the front and you’d never have been together. At least if you were engaged and you fell pregnant, you’d have something of his if he didn’t come back.’

‘I suppose,’ Lily said, shuddering. ‘There couldn’t be anything worse, could there? Loving someone and having them shipped overseas to who knows what. How would you sleep at night?’

‘Maybe that’s why the three of us are pals,’ Maisie mused. “Cos we don’t have sweethearts overseas. We’re not mooning over men somewhere else, not like those girls who can’t hold a conversation without turning it back to their beloved in Africa or wherever.’

Lily laughed at that. ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘Besides, men complicate things. We’d have to leave the hospital if we got married, and we’d be out on our ear if we got pregnant.’ Neither was even a vague possibility for Lily. Romance was very low down her list of priorities; her job mattered most. And she worked such long hours that it was almost impossible to have a life outside the hospital, although other nurses managed it. Both Diana and Maisie went out to dinner and to the cinema with men, but she rarely did. ‘We see too many sick people and too much death. It puts you off love.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Maisie laughed. ‘I’m still looking. Maybe there’ll be some lovely bloke here tomorrow to whisk me off my feet.’

‘More likely some old duffer will get sunstroke and you’ll have to sponge him down for the afternoon.’

‘Knowing my luck, you’re right!’

The day of the wedding was every bride’s dream: a sunny, cloudless blue sky without the fierce heat that would wilt the flowers begged and borrowed from every garden in the neighbourhood. Lily was up early and she took a long walk through the gardens and into the pastures behind the house where a small herd of cows now grazed contentedly, swatting their tails lazily at flies. If she closed her eyes and breathed in, Lily could almost imagine she was in the fields at home with the familiar scents of the earth and cattle around her. She felt a pang of homesickness.

Back at the house, all was mayhem. Sybil’s voice could be heard wailing about her hair and how someone had run off with her perfume.

‘There was only a little bit left, and I was saving it for today!’ she roared. ‘How could this happen to me?’

Lily and Maisie dressed quickly, and each fixed the other’s hair.

‘Yours is so glossy,’ Maisie said, standing back to admire Lily’s rippling chestnut curls that she’d pinned up at the sides with two tortoiseshell combs. ‘Did you rinse it in beer or something?’

‘Not beer,’ grinned Lily. ‘Perfume!’

‘You’re fibbing?’ giggled Maisie.

‘Yes.’

‘It would serve the horrible little monster right. I don’t know how Diana sticks her,’ Maisie said.

‘Oh, she’s not that bad,’ Lily pointed out. ‘She’s just spoilt and hasn’t seen very much. If she was living with us for a while, we’d rub the corners off her. A few days as an aide in the hospital would bring her down to earth.’

‘Thought you hated her.’

Lily shook her head. ‘No, I was letting the chip on my shoulder bump into the chip on hers, that’s all. I should know better. She’s just a kid, really.’

‘You are a wise old bird,’ Maisie said. ‘Let’s give Miss Uppity Knickers a chance, then.’

‘
Mrs
Uppity Knickers after four o’ clock,’ Lily added, laughing.

The chapel was indeed tiny and simple, with an almost puritanical stone altar and stone pews softened only by elderly velvet kneelers in old gold. Lily felt a gentle shiver of anxiety at just being there: Catholics weren’t supposed to celebrate in other churches, she knew, but still, it was for a wedding, she reasoned. That must be all right, surely? She’d mention it at confession and be vague in her letter to her mother.

By four o’clock, there were some forty guests assembled, including the vicar and a white-haired old lady seated at the organ to the right. Unlike pre-war weddings, Diana had said, most of the family’s friends would be unable to attend, and the few who could were simply rushing in for a few hours and then leaving again. With this in mind, Sybil was not allowed to be late, so it was only ten minutes after four when the bride appeared on her proud father’s arm and the congregation let out a collective gasp. Not for her a wedding dress of parachute silk: Sybil’s gown was Brussels lace, made over from a court dress of her mother’s. She didn’t have her elder sister’s fair colouring or symmetrical features, or Diana’s true loveliness, which came from within, even so, Sybil looked lovely on her wedding day.

The groom clearly thought so; his face softened as he turned to look at her. For the first time, Lily saw the face of his best man, a fellow naval officer. He was taller than Philip and, for a moment, his eyes met Lily’s across the little chapel. Lucent grey eyes locked with Lily’s startling blue ones, and she felt as if a little dart of fire had just lit inside her. Then, his gaze was gone, and Lily was able to study him and catch her breath a little.

The ceremony was short and simple, totally unlike the Catholic marriage services that Lily was used to. When it was over, Sybil and her husband walked down the aisle, Sybil looking triumphant now that she’d got her man.

‘I always cry at weddings,’ said Maisie, patting her eyes with a little lace-edged hanky as they made their way out of the chapel. ‘Don’t know why. My mum always said I was daft for crying. Wish my old mum could see me now.’ For a moment, Maisie’s eternal optimism appeared to desert her and her eyes shone suspiciously brightly.

‘Mine too,’ said Lily, putting her arm round her little friend. She was lying. Her mother would be a bag of nerves to see her
daughter hobnobbing with the aristocracy. ‘Your mum would be proud as punch to see you here,’ Lily whispered. ‘What’s that thing she always said: Bless my…what was it?’

‘Bless my sainted aunt,’ laughed Maisie. ‘Poor Mum never cursed, not like me. She’d have said, “Bless my sainted aunt, Maisie, look at you drinking Gin and It with the nobs.”’

‘May I refresh your glass, miss?’ Wilson, still as stiff as a man with a poker firmly holding him upright, appeared beside them.

Lily felt the weight of his disapproval. Everyone else was lovely to Diana’s fellow nurses; even Sir Archie was charming in that vague way of his. Only Wilson behaved as if they were two beggars who’d wheedled their way into the throne room to run off with the family silver.

‘Why not?’ Maisie drained the last of her drink. Straight gin and a full measure of Italian vermouth: Gin and It, her favourite cocktail. ‘Thanks, love.’ She beamed at Wilson, her pretty face utterly unaffected by his stern demeanour. Lily envied her. How wonderful it would be not to care about the Wilsons of this world; blissfully free from that sense of not belonging. Maisie was comfortable wherever she was, the same as Diana. Both of them had an inbuilt sense of security that meant they never looked at anyone else and wondered what they were thinking. Lily never stopped.

Somehow Lady Belton had managed better than the two pounds of boiled ham that was allowed on ration cards for a wedding. Even though Sir Archie was very strict, even he had only muttered a little when Evangeline had got her hands on pork cutlets and some real bantam eggs for the wedding feast. She’d saved several weeks’ worth of her own hens’ eggs.

She kept four hens in the kitchen garden and looked after them herself. ‘I can’t imagine Mummy looking after chickens before the war,’ Diana had said. ‘She’s very resilient, you know. She can turn her hands to anything.’

The eggs had made delicate egg and watercress sandwiches, while the bantams’ eggs had been hard-boiled and were served with lettuces from the kitchen garden. There was no hope of having a traditional wedding cake so there were lots of little jellies with flowers for decoration and a tiny single-tier sponge cake. It all looked absolutely beautiful and, for once, even Sybil couldn’t complain.

Lily watched her losing her rigidity as she drank some of Sir Archie’s precious champagne. It was a lovely day and people wandered out on to the terrace, sitting on the chairs to enjoy the mid-May sunshine.