Lessons in Heartbreak

by Cathy Kelly

  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.

  Sybil and Philip had danced to a couple of waltzes first for the benefit of the older members of the party, then Philip’s jazz records went on.

  ‘I love this music,’ Sybil said dreamily, as she whirled round in her new husband’s arms.

  Suddenly, their happiness got to Lily. Tamarin had been in her mind and her heart all day and she felt a huge pang of loneliness. What was she doing here? She took her glass and wandered out to the terrace.

  When the war was over, she would go home. Whatever she’d been searching for wasn’t here. At least at home she’d be among her own people and if she felt out of step with them…well, she’d discovered that she felt out of step everywhere.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice.

  She turned her head and found Philip’s best man beside her, the naval officer. She wasn’t sure of his rank: she’d never had Diana’s ability to read insignia and battledress ribbons.

  ‘Are you escaping too?’ His accent was soft, a hint of a Scottish burr in there somewhere.

  Lily gazed at him for a moment. She’d become an expert in saying the right thing – part of learning how to live in a different country was the chameleon ability to blend in. But at that exact moment in time, she was fed up with blending in. Thinking of home made her sense of alienation spike.

  ‘Yes,’ she said bluntly. ‘I feel as if I don’t belong. I don’t know anyone here, except Diana and Maisie. I don’t want to talk about old yachting trips in the Med,’ she added, her gaze on the bride as she whirled past the terrace door.

  ‘War makes small talk difficult,’ he agreed, his eyes following hers and alighting on the new Mrs Stanhope. ‘It’s hard to care about trivialities when…’ he edited himself, ‘when so much is going on.’

  Lily looked at him with renewed interest. She’d half been expecting him to say, ‘Cheer up, old girl. Another drink?’ As if blotting everything out with gin was the correct answer to all life’s problems. But this man didn’t have the gay, polished charm of Diana’s officer friends, men who’d joke with that quintessential upper-class British charm even in front of the firing squad. He was rougher hewn, tougher. Even his wide square face with the flat prizefighter’s nose and deep-set eyes gave him more the look of a peasant turned warlord than an aristocrat.

  ‘My excuse is being an outsider, but surely you must know everyone here?’ she probed.

  ‘Quite a few of them,’ he agreed. ‘Philip and I were friends at school.’ He held out a big hand. ‘Lieutenant Jamie Hamilton,’ he said formally.

  Lily stared at him. She took his hand and felt the same shot of adrenaline she’d felt in the chapel when he’d stared straight at her.

  ‘Jamie, that and your accent tell me you’re not from around these parts,’ she said to hide how jolted she felt.

  ‘I’m Scottish, from Ayrshire,’ he said. ‘And you’re Nurse Lily Kennedy from Ireland.’

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled. It would be plain to anyone listening to her that she was Irish, but she wondered how he knew her name.

  ‘Difficult job,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, looking at him, ‘very difficult.’

  ‘Does it get to you?’ he asked. ‘Seeing the injuries, the death.’

  Few people ever asked Lily questions like that. Perhaps it was because everyone in London saw the results of the war day-in-day-out. Plus the fact that most people would prefer to talk about anything else. Even when somebody died, the period of mourning seemed to be growing shorter and shorter, as if people were afraid to think about death. To acknowledge death, to linger over it, was too depressing; the only sensible survival option was to turn their faces bravely towards the next day and move on.

  ‘Yes,’ she said to Jamie Hamilton now, ‘it does get to me. Especially the children. Last week two little boys were brought in – brothers, they couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. They were still in their blue-and-white striped pyjamas, looking like they’d just been picked out of their beds, fast asleep. And they were dead, from a bomb. I keep thinking about them.

  ‘It’s four years since I started my training, and I think if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have become a nurse. I had a misty idea that it was about helping people, giving comfort, being this kind being in the middle of someone’s pain. And it’s not like that: it’s about desperately trying to keep people alive, all at a frantic speed, watching them die terrible deaths, being powerless a lot of the time…I don’t know how to describe it,’ she said. ‘But there’s an adrenaline rush too, when you’re working in theatre or on the wards on a very busy day and you’ve got to keep going because, if you don’t, someone will suffer.’ She stopped, feeling out of breath from all she’d said.

  ‘Do parties help you unwind, or just make it worse?’ he asked.

  Lily laughed. ‘A bit of both,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely to forget about it all for a while and dance, and then, I feel I
shouldn’t be forgetting about it.’

  She turned away from him to watch the dancers inside.

  ‘I feel the same way,’ he said. ‘When you’re in the middle of the war, you want to be away from it, and when you’re away from it, you want to be there again.’

  ‘Where do you serve?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m first lieutenant, second-in-command, on a submarine. I was injured out a month ago.’

  She noticed he didn’t tell her where in the world or how he’d been injured. Submariners, she’d heard, held their cards close to their chest.

  ‘You work with Diana, don’t you, in the Royal Free?’

  She nodded. Two could play the game of keeping their cards close.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked.

  ‘A little place called Tamarin, in the south of Ireland. You won’t have heard of it, it’s on the coast, very pretty, very quiet, very unlike London.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘Because I wanted to be a nurse and I couldn’t afford to pay for training at home. My father’s a blacksmith and my mother is a housekeeper in a house not unlike this one, only not as big,’ she said. I’m different, she was saying. This is who I am. If you like me, you’ll stay. But I won’t pretend. I’m not from your world.

  From inside, they could hear the sounds of Maisie singing ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk…’ It was Maisie’s party piece. She had a beautiful voice and would have them all dancing soon. It was a gift, the gift of charm and making people like her. Lily knew she didn’t have that gift herself. She was too wary, too inclined to stand on the sidelines and watch.

  Jamie was watching her now. She felt something inside her quiver at the way he looked at her, something shift.

  ‘I think we’re the only two people not laughing and joking,’ Lily said suddenly, as great peals of laughter came from inside. ‘I’m surprised Sybil hasn’t had us thrown out. She’s very keen on the whole wedding being done perfectly.’

  Jamie moved closer so that he was standing right beside her. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but I’m enjoying myself.’

  ‘Are you now?’ she asked, moving past him. ‘I do hope you keep enjoying yourself, Lieutenant. If you’ll excuse me.’

  She went to the cloakroom, where she splashed water on her flushed face, then tried to repair the damage with a dusting of the English Rose powder that didn’t really suit her but was all she had left. Her precious Chinese Red lipstick was down to the very stub and she used a hairpin to eke a last bit out to smear on to her full lips.

  Bright eyes shone back at her in the mirror and she felt an unaccustomed surge of pride in her appearance. Her skin was flawless cream without a single freckle and it contrasted with the rich chestnut hair swept back from a fine-boned oval face. The spark of intelligence in almond-shaped eyes shifted her looks from mere prettiness to an arresting, wild beauty.

  After she’d told Cheryl off, the other nurses had taken to calling her the Wild Irish Girl. It had been a compliment, she supposed, showing that they saw her as self-composed, strong, and confident. She had something to be grateful to the Lochravens for. Watching Lady Irene had taught her the virtue of calm self-possession and Lily’s determination to be different from every other member of the servant class on the Rathnaree estate had given her a queenly bearing.

  ‘You’re not looking bad, Nurse Kennedy,’ she told herself.

  The gramophone was playing Glenn Miller when she returned to the drawing room, and everyone was dancing, determined to squeeze the last bit of enjoyment out of the day. It was nearly eight and she knew that many of the guests would be leaving soon, hurrying back to barracks or their postings before nightfall. The party was winding down.

  Diana had whispered to Lily that the groom’s leave had been cancelled: nobody knew why, but there was some talk about a big offensive. Sybil didn’t know yet.

  ‘He’s going to have to leave this evening. The honeymoon’s on hold. Wouldn’t like to be him, poor boy.’

  Lily stood and watched the dancing, breathing in the melody and swaying on her feet. She tried to shut out the speculation about the big push that would be taking the menfolk away. Whatever it was, they’d soon find out the hard way, when the casualties were wheeled in and a twelve-hour shift turned into an entire night with both shifts working in tandem.

  ‘Do you care to dance?’

  He was beside her, taller than she was, and suddenly Lily could think of nothing she’d like more.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘I’m not very good –’

  She was too tall and most partners seemed to prefer smaller women.

  ‘Me neither,’ Jamie said, with a smile that lit up the hardness of his face.

  He was lying. From the moment he took her hand, Lily felt his rhythm and energy join with hers. It was like being sprinkled with magic dancing dust. The music was loud, all-encompassing, and they fitted into a space on the floor seamlessly. Lily wondered whether everyone else could see the electricity between them. Surely they must? Jamie’s hand pressing into the intimacy of her back felt as if he was touching her flesh, stroking her skin erotically, and not the silken crêpe fabric. She could sense the great strength of his wrist as his other hand held hers tightly, and under his uniform, her fingers felt powerful shoulder muscles move. It wasn’t like dancing: it was like making love.

  The music rippled to an end and they stopped dancing and stood staring at each other.

  ‘Let’s hear it again!’ cried Sybil, like a child, and someone scratched the needle over the gramophone record.

  Lily hadn’t realised she’d been holding her breath until the music started again.

  ‘I don’t want it to stop,’ he said, his voice close to her ear. Lily closed her eyes and allowed herself to be pulled closer. While around them, couples danced with exuberance, she and Jamie moved as if to different, slower music.

  She stared up at him as his dark eyes bored into hers, telling her that he wanted her just as much as she wanted him.

  A whoop from behind made them turn to see Maisie being whirled by one of Philip’s American friends, a blond Army captain who was matching Maisie’s fabulous jitterbugging, swinging her as if she was a doll, her skirts flying.

  Seeing Maisie broke the spell. Lily gave herself a mental shake. What had come over her? She’d been around too long to dally with a handsome man in uniform. That wasn’t her plan. And Jamie, no matter how attractive she found him, was from that other world, Diana’s world.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I think I’ll sit down,’ she told him quickly, determinedly not noticing the disappointment briefly etched on his face.

  ‘Can I get you something to drink?’ he asked, a mask of politeness up.

  Lily would have preferred it if he’d said: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ But his type never would. That was the one joy of the upper classes: they took it all on the chin. A lad back home from Tamarin would have demanded to know why she’d stopped dancing.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Lily said, just as politely. ‘I got a bit carried away there with the dancing.’ And with you, she wanted to say. ‘I think I’ll sit the next one out.’ She spied Diana standing on the fringes of the group, watching and smiling. ‘Diana’s a marvellous dancer.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, jaw solid.

  ‘Good, then you know what a wonderful girl she is too,’ Lily added. She wasn’t sure why she was doing this: urging Jamie to go over to Diana. But he was everything Diana wanted in a man and Lily loved Diana like a sister. Diana longed to be in love and Jamie was, Izzie sighed to herself, special.

  ‘You’re sending me to dance with Diana?’ he asked, mildly amused.

  Lily felt a spark of anger at his amusement. What was he laughing at?

  ‘She’s probably more your type,’ she said. Damn, that sounded wrong. ‘I mean, you come from the same –’

  ‘– background?’ he provided.

  ‘Yes,’ she snapped.

  They’d moved away f
rom the dancers now and were at the other end of the room where people were sitting on sofas and chairs, chatting and drinking.

  ‘Is that important to you?’ he asked. ‘Background?’

  ‘I bet it is to you.’

  ‘Not really. Not with the right person.’

  ‘Good luck finding the right person,’ she said sweetly, then went to sit beside Diana’s maiden aunt Daphne, who was stone deaf.

  That would show him, she thought, shouting greetings at Aunt Daphne and all the while watching Jamie, who was still standing close by, smiling at her in a way she could only describe as wicked. He caught her eye and one dark eyebrow lifted marginally, as if to say, I see your game, my dear.

  ‘Lovely music,’ she shouted at Aunt Daphne, then cursed herself because poor Daphne couldn’t hear very much of anything, much less the music.

  ‘What?’ screeched the old lady, cupping an ear with one hand while the other held a glass brimming with one of Wilson’s Gin and Italians.

  After half an hour of Daphne, and watching Jamie out of the corner of her eye, Lily felt some of the tension leave her when she saw Sybil storm by in tears. If Philip had to leave that night, she assumed that Jamie would go with him. When Jamie was gone, she could relax.

  Fifteen minutes later, a red-eyed Sybil and the rest of the wedding party assembled in the vast hall for the leave-takings.

  ‘I can’t throw my bouquet,’ Sybil wailed to her mother, who was fussing over her, trying to dab at Sybil’s face with a handkerchief.

  ‘Chin up, darling,’ said Lady Evangeline.

  ‘I can’t!’

  ‘Oh, darling, we’ll have another party for your wedding, soon, I promise,’ Philip could be heard saying.

  ‘Promise?’ sniffled his bride.

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Poor bloke, I feel sorry for him,’ Maisie whispered to Lily. Maisie was definitely tipsy now, rosy-cheeked and sleepy from the cocktails. ‘Doesn’t know what he’s got himself into, I reckon. He’ll soon find out.’