Lessons in Heartbreak

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘It’s going to be lovely,’ Maisie sighed happily.

  At twenty-one, she was the youngest of the three and yet the one who tried everything first. She’d been first to go out with an American soldier.

  ‘Very polite, kept telling me about his mother,’ she said mournfully when she got back to the nurses’ home and the others pressed her for details. ‘Said English girls were ladies. We’d all be ladies if nobody ever put a hand on us.’

  ‘You’d be furious if he tried anything,’ pointed out Diana, who had finally got the measure of Maisie after almost three years of living in each other’s shadows.

  ‘Three hours hearing about his mother put me right off,’ snorted Maisie, not even bothering to respond to Diana’s remark. They were all so comfortable with each other: like sisters, they squabbled but always made up. They’d been through the fire together. It had created an unbreakable bond. ‘It was like having my Nan in the room, squawking, “If you let the dog see the rabbit, it’ll end in tears, my girl! Get the ring first!” And talkin’ of rings – I hope someone will take pictures of us at the wedding,’ Maisie added. ‘I want to see proof of me in my finery.’

  “Course they will,’ Diana said. ‘Pictures for posterity.’

  Lily didn’t know what they’d have done for clothes if it hadn’t been for Diana’s generosity. She had trunkloads of stuff: evening gowns and day suits she’d donated to the Impoverished of Hampstead Fund, as they called it. Maisie’s nimble fingers could take in or let out any garment. As Diana and Lily were almost the same size, not much alteration was required, but a few inches had to be taken off all the hems so they’d fit her.

  Thanks to Diana’s capacious trunks, Maisie would be wearing a grey linen and silk suit and a dashing little silver feathered hat for Sybil’s wedding. Diana was to be a bridesmaid in one of her mother’s old Mainbocher gowns in a sea blue that made her English cream and roses complexion look even more beautiful, and Lily was to wear a crêpe de Chine navy spotted dress with a Chinese collar, a nipped-in waist that made her look like a very slender hourglass, and a swirling skirt. The only fly in the sartorial ointment was the lack of shoes. Diana’s feet were much bigger than Lily’s, too big for them to share shoes, so Lily would have to wear her hospital shoes, a pair of brown lace-ups sturdy enough to walk from London to the church.

  ‘You’ll still look smashing,’ Maisie had said loyally when they’d tried on their respective outfits.

  With Diana’s great-aunt’s jade earrings bringing out the hints of viridian in her eyes, and her chestnut hair a mass of glossy curls, Lily knew she would look her best. But the shoes would not be the only thing to give it away.

  Servants were far greater snobs than their masters and the person who’d said a good butler could ascertain a person’s social class from just one glance had not been lying. Lily knew that her background would be immediately apparent to all below stairs at Beltonward.

  ‘Come on, girls,’ she said now, getting up from her seat in the sun. ‘Let’s go out for tea: I’m starving.’

  Beltonward was Lily’s worst nightmare. From the moment the old truck they’d got a lift on lurched over a hill and Diana cried: ‘Look, there it is,’ pride overcoming the politeness that made her play down her family’s wealth, Lily felt her heart sink to the soles of her shoes. Beltonward was a vast mansion, built along the lines of the huge houses commandeered by the Army, Navy and Air Force as bases for their operations. The only factor that had left Beltonward in private hands was its location far from anywhere. It was perfect as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers, having acres of land for men to roam about and try to forget what they’d seen.

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ Maisie said. ‘You must be a bleedin’ princess, love, ‘cos your dad would need to be a king to keep this place going.’

  ‘Oh, Maisie, shut up,’ snapped Diana, with an unheard-of irritability that showed Lily that she wasn’t the only one anxious about the wedding.

  Maisie shut up.

  When the truck deposited them at the huge front door, two elderly gentlemen appeared.

  ‘Daddy,’ said Diana, leaping forward to hug the shabbier of the two. At least seventy, with a few strands of silver hair on his brown, liver-spotted head, he wore a much-darned knitted waistcoat, a pale blue shirt and silk foulard, and an amiable expression on his lined, bespectacled face.

  ‘Maisie and Lily, this is Daddy, Sir Archibald Belton, and Wilson.’

  Try as she might, Lily couldn’t bring herself to call a man older than her father by his surname without some prefix. Wilson. No, couldn’t do it.

  ‘Hello, Sir Archibald, how do you do, Mr Wilson,’ she said.

  Sir Archibald’s face didn’t flicker but Wilson looked marginally shocked.

  Oh well, thought Lily, in for a penny, in for a pound.

  She picked up her small valise.

  ‘Wilson can take your bags, m’dear,’ said the genial Sir Archibald.

  ‘Not at all,’ Lily said cheerfully. ‘I’ll carry it myself.’

  Beltonward might have been stripped of most of its artwork (the valuable stuff was in the enormous cellar, along with the dwindling collection of wine – Sir Archie was said to be desolate that all his precious hock was gone), but the building itself still held treasures. As Sir Archie led them inside, chatting happily to his daughter, linking arms with her, Maisie and Lily were able to look around a vestibule – far too grand to be a hall, Lily grinned to herself – with a huge staircase stretching elegantly in front of them. A few portraits still hung on the faded damask red walls. Men with long Borzoi noses like Sir Archie, and powdered and berib-boned women like poor horse-faced Sybil, stared down at them, saying Yes, we’re rich and powerful and masters of all we survey.

  Plasterwork picked out in tattered gold leaf caught the light and the vast vaulted ceiling was painted with frolicking cherubs and goddesses scampering through sun-lit clouds.

  Two giant cracked blue-and-white vases decorated with peeping Chinese girls stood at the turn of the stairs and Lily knew enough from Rathnaree to recognise that they were worth something.

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ whispered Maisie as they climbed the marble steps, ‘I was never interested in marrying a toff, but I can see the attraction now.’

  ‘Not if you had to clean the steps yourself, you wouldn’t,’ Lily whispered back, thinking of the yards of marble at Rathnaree and knowing that, no matter how much money she had, she’d still hate to get another human being to clean her floors.

  ‘Good point.’

  Maisie and Lily were to share a room and when they were alone, Lily sat down on one of the twin beds. The coverlet was pure white, quilted cotton. It was the newest thing in the room. Everything else was very old and faded, including the heavy floral curtains and the threadbare carpet.

  ‘Gawd, not quite the Ritz up here, is it?’ Maisie said.

  ‘Family rooms,’ Lily explained. ‘These are where family and friends of the children stay. The proper guest suites would be better, but nothing too showy. It’s bad taste to have the place too grand.’

  ‘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.