Snow Angels

by Nadine Dorries

  ‘It’s because there’s free booze,’ Dessie the head porter had joked. But Victoria was more inclined to believe Mrs Duffy, the housekeeper from the Lovely Lane nurses’ home.

  ‘It’s because St Angelus is all one big family,’ she had said. ‘Once you are in, you can never leave.’

  Teddy had given her away and her only sadness was that her friend, Dana, had left Liverpool and retuned to Ireland after Teddy had broken her heart in the cruellest way. Victoria had still not forgiven him and Teddy’s visits back to his old home had been strained to say the least.

  Roland kissed her hair and held her as tight as he dared. ‘Well, this is one day when I won’t be watching the clock, waiting to get back to you, just in case anything happens. And, at the weekend, we have Teddy coming home.’

  He felt Victoria stiffen in his arms. Roland had handled her family’s estate when Victoria’s own father had died and he had told Victoria where Teddy was training. In a roundabout way, Victoria had become a nurse at St Angelus as a result of encouragement from Roland, desperate to follow in her mother’s footsteps and to get away from the well-meaning clutches of her Aunt Minnie and be someone who did more than sit around waiting for an equally well-meaning husband to turn up.

  Despite opposition and disbelief from her aunt that she would do such a thing, she applied to be a nurse and had been amazed to have been accepted. There were times now, when choosing the wallpaper for the nursery or making Roland his favourite supper, she laughed at the situation she found herself in.

  ‘Is Dana one of your visitors today?’ Roland asked.

  Victoria leant back and looked up at him. ‘She is, with Pammy and Beth. She came back from Ireland two weeks ago. The train gets in at eleven thirty and then they are getting the four o’clock back so I booked a car to meet them through Mrs Stinky Face, just as you said,’ she grinned.

  ‘Vic, it’s Mrs Strickland, as you well know.’

  Victoria pulled a face. ‘Yes, I do. Mrs Strickland, your secretary, who hasn’t had a nice word to say to me since the day we were married.’

  Roland looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, she’s very old school; she was more my father’s kind of person.’

  ‘Yes, I know, and that’s why you keep her on, but honestly, you would think I was unclean the looks she gives me. It’s not a crime to be three months pregnant when you get married. Anyone would think I had been the first. Matron must have known and she was no different towards me at the wedding – and in my world, her opinion of me counts more.’

  Roland looked guilty. ‘I know but remember, she knew your parents too. They were my father’s clients and she probably feels… oh, I don’t know, a sense of responsibility towards us. She is a big softie really.’

  Victoria looked doubtful. ‘Oh, she’s never really liked me. Probably didn’t approve of Daddy drinking, Mummy struggling – and suicide, well, that’s just a no-no in any polite society. The fact that Daddy lost all the money before that, and then there’s Aunt Minnie – well, she takes some adjusting to, even I don’t like her sometimes. She’s just too bossy and she thinks I’m just like my father and I’m nothing like him.’

  Roland felt his heart melt as he pulled on his overcoat. ‘Victoria, can we talk about the remarkable you? The beautiful, clever, caring, hard-working you? Mrs Strickland is very lucky to know you, Aunt Minnie is lucky to have you as her niece and I am the luckiest of all because you are my wife and the mother of our little sproglet, fast asleep in there. You are very definitely not your father.’ His eyes lingered over her enormous belly. It was as if no woman before Victoria had ever been pregnant. ‘You, my gorgeous wife, are amazing and you don’t have to worry about anyone not liking you – every single person I know loves you, but none as much as I do. Now. I am going to be late.’

  He dashed to the door as she shuffled along behind him in her bedroom slippers, her long, ash blonde hair swinging in a ponytail down her back. ‘Why did you ask was Dana coming especially?’ she asked as she opened the door and leant against it to protect herself from the wind whistling down from the moors.

  Roland placed his hat on his head and tapped the top to keep it in place. The moors ran away from the front of the house, the view, broken only by the silver birches and the old oak in the corner of the garden in which could still be seen the remnants of the tree house Teddy and Roland had played in as boys. The front lawn was large and sprawling and the beds manicured, the soil’s surface glistening in the morning frost. He took his keys from his pocket.

  ‘Oh, no reason… just that, well, Teddy, you know…’

  Victoria sighed and shook her head. ‘Roland,’ she said, turning his name into an accusation. Dana had been the first of the nurses to fall in love with a doctor at the hospital. She and Teddy had become the golden couple and all had been well until Teddy’s road accident. And if that hadn’t been enough, in what seemed to everyone to be an act of madness, he had cheated on Dana who, unable to cope with the shame, had returned home to Ireland to ponder her future. ‘Do you want me to have a word with her? You do, don’t you?’

  Roland’s face broke into a smile. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, but he is just so lost without her. I think something happened to him after the accident and he wasn’t himself, but he is so much better now. Oliver Gaskell told Teddy how sometimes it’s difficult for people to adjust to trauma and accidents such as the one Teddy had. He told me Teddy would do anything to win Dana back.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he would – and that just shows you he has not recovered from his head injury and is completely mad if he thinks she would even give him the time of day. I think that accident affected his brain more than you think.’ She flicked back her hair, a sure sign of irritation.

  Roland had one more try. ‘I know that, darling, but Oliver Gaskell said that when people are incapacitated for a long period of time and they had been close to death in the way Teddy was, the frustration and the anger makes them behave in a way that is unnatural to their personality and do things they wouldn’t normally do. Remember, Teddy very nearly died. He was months off work and unable to walk. He did think his career as a doctor was over and to him, well, that was as good as saying his life was over. The poor chap was in a very bad place.’ He looked pleadingly at his wife.

  ‘Roland, I know he was incapacitated for months. It was Dana who nursed him back to health and it is as the result of her care and attention that he healed as well as he did. What he did to her was an outright beastly betrayal. The man was a sex maniac. She had to go away into hiding because she couldn’t bear the shame. He ruined her life, going off with that tart of a nurse after she had done so much for him.’

  Roland burst into laughter. ‘Victoria, my brother did not behave well, but you cannot call the poor chap a sex maniac. He didn’t get any, that was the point.’

  ‘Roland, stop. Dana even came and lived here and looked after both of you when he was recovering from surgery. Matron was so good about all of that – and then he went and did the unspeakable with that horrible, disgusting woman.’

  She almost spat the last words out and Roland knew he was beaten. ‘Does it help that the nurse Teddy had his affair with has married a very wealthy surgeon from a London hospital and has left a trail of broken hearts behind her?’

  ‘No, it does not.’ Victoria was emphatic. ‘Poor Mrs Duffy had to travel all the way to Ireland on a pretend holiday to persuade Dana to come back. It was a good job she had become almost pen pals with Dana’s mother. If I even mention Teddy’s name, Dana might chew my head off though she’s so much better now.’

  ‘Will you at least try?’ asked Roland as he opened the car door. ‘I’m guessing if she is coming back here to the house, where she spent happy times with Teddy, she may not still be as angry as you think.’ Half in the car, he frowned and got back out again. ‘Vic, I’ve had an idea; why don’t we have a Christmas party? We could invite them both, letting them know that they are both invited – and then it’s their choice whether they c
ome or not and we can just let nature take its course. Oh, God, stupid me, no we can’t, not that close to your confinement. I am such a blithering idiot.’

  Victoria sighed, looked exasperated, saw the look in her husband’s eyes and instantly melted at the expression of pain that crossed his face. She found the whole situation with Teddy so hard to understand, because she knew in her heart that her Roland would never have behaved in such a way in a million years.

  ‘Roland, you are grasping at straws. Do you think I would want to be anywhere near you if you had behaved like that?’

  Roland came back to the door and took hold of her hands. ‘Vic, we had a different kind of relationship. That’s how we have ended up married so quickly and with sproglet on the way. Dana and Teddy… it was different with them. Dana is strictly Irish and Catholic. For the same reason that we don’t wish to be judged for sproglet, we don’t judge others’ behaviour either, do we?’

  Victoria blushed with shame. If people wanted to judge her and Roland, they didn’t need to search hard to find good reason and they were mainly with her. A shotgun wedding, her bankrupt, alcoholic father who’d shot himself, and her crazy Aunt Minnie who still thought it was 1930 and life was all about dry Martinis at six and never-ending bridge parties.

  ‘Gosh, is it a fact that pregnancy makes you short tempered and pious?’ she said. ‘Roland, I’m sorry. I promise that if the moment arises, I will see how Dana feels. You, my darling, are right: life is complicated and none more than mine has been. The party could be a good idea. I’ll talk to Mrs Hunter and see if she is up for it. But I’m blooming freezing now, so go on, go and get to work.’ She pushed her husband away and blew him a kiss. ‘Mrs Hunter will be here in a minute and she is teaching me how to make a lemon and lime Victoria sponge with an elderflower butter cream filling and lime icing for my visitors. We might even save you a slice, if you’re lucky.’

  Roland grinned. ‘You had better,’ he said. ‘It sounds delicious.’

  She blew him another kiss and the car door slammed, the engine fired up and Roland sped off down the long gravel drive. As she closed the door, Victoria pressed her hands against the wooden frame and took a panting breath as her abdomen was seized by yet another sudden tightening. It had been harder than the earlier Braxton Hicks and had lasted for longer. ‘Labour, I am not looking forward to you,’ she said when it had passed and made her way back to the fire and the last cup of tea in the pot.

  Chapter 7

  It had long been Mrs Duffy’s routine to catch the six twenty to the Lovely Lane nurses’ home where she had worked as a housekeeper and replacement mother to sixteen nurses since before the war years. Of late, she had found getting up in the mornings a little harder than usual and, just a week ago, she had confided in her neighbours, Biddy and Elsie, as they waited at the bus stop. It was a conversation she regretted and she had altered her lifetime routine as a result which had left her feeling very much out of sorts.

  ‘Honestly, some mornings it feels as if I have woken in a fog and it won’t clear until I’ve had a second cup of tea,’ she had said to Elsie. ‘I’m finding it harder and harder to get out of bed. I’m all right once I get going, mind, it’s just the getting up.’ She had laughed, expecting her neighbours, Elsie and Biddy, to join her in making a similar complaint, but she was bitterly disappointed.

  ‘Isn’t it about time you retired?’ Elsie had observed over the top of her glasses and beneath the clear, thin plastic rain hat she wore to cover her curlers, which crackled as she moved. The once-white cotton ties beneath her chin, now stained orange with foundation and powder, flapped against her double chin as she spoke. ‘You must be cracking on now and no one will thank you if you get taken out of that nurses’ home in a box one day. Least of all Matron, the fuss it will cause.’

  ‘Well, it will be a long time before that happens – and I doubt you will know about it, because you’ll have been long gone yourself.’

  This was quite a bold retort for Mrs Duffy, a widow who had made avoiding confrontation in a hospital full of working women, where arguments and spats often took place, her absolute business and, as a result, had managed to avoid a cross word during the entire time she had worked at St Angelus. Mrs Duffy unfastened and refastened the button on her coat in agitation, aware that her heart was beating a little faster.

  Ida Botherthwaite broke the moment as she arrived in the bus stop carrying her string bag before her. ‘Morning, Ida,’ Biddy and Elsie said, but Mrs Duffy was silent, too cross to speak.

  ‘Morning,’ said Ida as she extracted a packet of Swan Vesta matches from her pocket and from inside the box, carefully extracted half a Woodbine with a pinched tip, having smoked the first half with her morning tea before she left the house and, striking a match, lit up the second half. Ignoring the three women, she fixed her gaze down the road, looking out for the bus.

  Ida worked as the mortuary cleaner. During the war she had shopped Biddy to the Home Guard for not closing her blackout curtains properly. It was a transgression of trust that had never been forgiven nor forgotten and, as a result, Ida was not one of the inner circle of St Angelus staff. The three women, in one subtle movement, turned their backs to Ida. It wasn’t just the wartime indiscretion, bad enough as it was. Ida was a complainer and never had a good word to say about anyone or anything. This was not a unique personality trait, but she was the only woman in the hospital who made churlish comments about Matron and no one liked that. When she worked days, Ida sat with the toilet cleaners, the lowest ranking amongst the domestics in a hospital where everyone had a place at morning coffee, and she resented the fact that, despite her husband’s position – a man who could hire and fire and therefore hold the fortune of a family in the palm of his hand – she was relegated to the lowest-ranking table in the canteen.

  Ida felt wronged and lacking in status. Bertie was not only the foreman of the largest local building company, he was working on the contract at the Lovely Lane nurses’ home to build the new nurses’ rooms and housekeeper’s accommodation. Ida’s position as the mortuary cleaner did not reflect well on him and she knew it. He had once told her one of the jokes about a mortuary cleaner that the lads had passed around the site and she had been filled with shame at their laughter.

  ‘I think they meant you, queen,’ Bertie had said, without a shred of sensitivity, and every day since then she had smarted at the thought that the men who worked for Bertie were using Ida and her job as a means to diminish his status as their boss.

  Ida was very aware of status. She craved it for herself, resented it in others, even her own husband. Mrs Duffy turned to face Ida, wondered should she speak to her as a way of demonstrating her displeasure with Biddy and Elsie, and decided, even in these circumstances, against it. To stand alone was preferable to standing with Ida, but Ida had caught her eye.

  ‘How’s our Gracie working out?’ she asked.

  Mrs Duffy sniffed, this was no reprieve. ‘I’ve no complaints, I’m sure, but I don’t need her. Matron must have money to burn, if you ask me.’

  Elsie interjected, ‘Well, she’s keen enough. I saw her running for the six fifty, so she’s in before you, Mrs Duffy.’

  ‘I don’t know how you manage, looking after all those nurses,’ said Biddy to Mrs Duffy. ‘I know just how messy they are when they come to the school for their lessons. Lord above, they wouldn’t even dream of putting their chairs back under the desks, or cleaning the tea room after them. It’s a wonder the wards aren’t filthy, messy places. Girls, honestly! Give me boys any day.’

  Elsie was not about to let the conversation about Mrs Duffy’s age drop, despite Biddy’s efforts to swerve it away onto safer ground. She sniffed and set her jaw in defiance. Ignoring Biddy and speaking directly to Mrs Duffy, she said, ‘You need Gracie,’ and turning to Ida, went on, ‘And for your information, I recommended Gracie to Matron, and believe me, it wasn’t missed that her own grandmother had failed to mention her, Matron being as desperate as she is for staff
. Anyway, what a thing to say, that I certainly won’t be long gone. You are very mistaken there. You’re older than me, surely, Mrs Duffy. You are just a bit further down the road, that’s all.’

  Mrs Duffy turned with the speed of a bullet leaving a gun, ‘Ex-cu-se-me,’ she said, ‘you certainly are down the road, every week, in curl up and dye. You keep that hairdresser going the amount of the black stuff they put on your hair. But, I’ll tell you what, Elsie, you can’t dye out the wrinkles, oh no, they are there for all to see.’

  Biddy raised her eyes to the heavens and shook her head. The morning was already ruined and it was only seven nineteen.

  ‘And as for getting on? Getting on? You speak for yourself. I heard you fell asleep on the job at Matron’s party, both of you, when you were looking after little Louis. I can assure you, I have never done that, not when he’s been in my care. Always alert, always on the lookout, I am, never so much as rest my eyes, I don’t. I was shocked to my core when I heard that.’

  She dug about in her holdall bag to retrieve her purse for the fare just as Ida threw the last shreds of her cigarette to the pavement and ground it out with the toe of her shoe. ‘Oh no. You won’t ever hear anyone tell you that I fell asleep on the job, certainly not when there was a child in my care.’

  Elsie and Biddy had both worked in the hospital long enough to know that from the Porter’s lodge, to the kitchens, the storerooms to the wards, across the hospital the impending retirement of Mrs Duffy was a keenly discussed topic. The ensuing vacancy was one that would be keenly fought over, not least by Elsie’s own daughter, what with Jake being the under-porter and Elsie working as Matron’s housekeeper. The new accommodation for the nurses’ home housekeeper was being built along with the new nurses’ rooms and everyone knew it. Jobs at the hospital were invariably filled by members of family of those who already worked at St Angelus and the new housekeeper’s accommodation had been the topic of the canteen for months. Discussions ranged from the central heating that was being fitted, to the tiles on the kitchen floor instead of concrete. No one doubted that Mrs Duffy knew her job was being watched and desired and was holding onto it for dear life in the hope that she would move into the new, self-contained rooms. ‘The only way she will leave that place, is in a box,’ was a daily comment in the basement kitchens at St Angelus where the head cook herself coveted the job and the accommodation and, most especially, the central heating.