Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ The war was only four months old and neither the Major nor Lady Irene felt it was anything to worry about. Nobody thought it unsafe for Isabelle to be careering around Italy in a Hispano-Suiza with chums like Monty Fitzgerald and Claire Smythe-Ford. The unspoken message, one Lily heard loud and clear, was that money and class would see a girl like Isabelle Lochraven out of any difficulties.

      ‘Why leave then?’

      So many answers ran through Lily’s head: because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life catering to your whims like my poor mother, was foremost. She suspected that Lady Irene knew this. It was a conversation Lily didn’t want to have.

      ‘It’s been my dream to be a nurse since I was a child,’ Lily said, truthfully.

      ‘Which doctor did you say you were going to work for?’ Lady Irene pressed.

      They were in the small sitting room beside her ladyship’s bedroom. It was Lily’s favourite room in the house. Her own home was a comfortable cottage with sturdy, much-loved furniture, and Rathnaree was very much a country house without frills and furbelows, but the small sitting room was the one room in the house that had been decorated to reflect Lady Irene’s taste and it was a little oasis of femininity. The high windows were swathed in silk curtains decorated with pale pink and blue flowers; the heavy old fireplace had been replaced with a marble one where Roman nymphs frolicked with fauns, and the furniture was delicate and gilded.

      ‘Dr Rafferty,’ replied Lily.

      ‘Oh, I don’t know him.’

      The Lochraven family didn’t bestow their custom on the local Tamarin GP. When the need arose, a doctor was driven from Waterford city.

      ‘You must do as you wish, Lily,’ Lady Irene said, signalling that the interview was over.

      Lily escaped gratefully. She disliked Lady Irene so much and lately she found it harder and harder to hide her dislike.

      Lily wasn’t sure when she’d lost respect for her employer: possibly round the time she was fourteen and her mother had fallen from her bike cycling home from Rathnaree late one night after having waited until two in the morning for the last of the dinner-party guests to go home.

      The next morning, she’d been back at work at seven as usual, black and blue with bruises, and stiff from her fall. Lady Irene had mentioned finding some arnica for her – she’d never found it – and in the same breath had told Lily’s mother about an impromptu shooting party the Major was having that day.

      ‘Only seven guns, Mrs Kennedy, nothing too much really.’

      Lady Irene called Lily’s mother Mrs Kennedy, as if respect was all about the correct titles and nothing to do with actually caring for the person.

      She cared for no one. She didn’t even care for her precious belongings – her clothes were left strewn on the floor as she stepped out of them. Irene’s clothes were exquisite – undergarments of crêpe de Chine and finest silk, in peachy coral shades that flattered the skin, never the heavy woollen vests and vast interlocked gusset things the Kennedy women wore, greyed from washing, harsh against the skin, unflattering as could be.

      If she ever had any money in her life, Lily swore she too would have silken petticoats and négligés that swept the floor carelessly. And if she ever had money, she’d have someone to help her around the house, but she would treat that person with genuine respect. Irene Lochraven, Lily felt grimly, firmly believed that birth had made her better than Mary Kennedy.

      Unfortunately, Lily’s mum believed that too. Why couldn’t she see that the only thing separating the Lochravens and the Kennedys was money, nothing more?

      ‘You’ll write, won’t you?’ her mother asked now, sipping her tea quickly, the way she did everything.

      ‘Of course I’ll write, Mam,’ Lily said. ‘Just ‘cos Tommy’s a hopeless letter writer, doesn’t mean I will be. I’ll tell you everything.’

      ‘I’ll miss you,’ her mother added. ‘I’ll pray for you.’

      ‘I’ll pray for you too, Mam,’ Lily said.

      She felt guilty to be going, but excited too. When it became plain that the war was far from the little blip the Lochravens had insisted it was, she and Dr Rafferty had talked about the opportunities for nursing in London. When Tommy had signed up, it had spurred Lily on. There was a whole world out there waiting to be discovered, and she was eager to be a part of it.

      

      Two days later, Lily sat on the edge of the hard bed and patted the smooth coverlet washed to pansy softness. She was relieved that she only had to share a room in the nurses’ home with two other students. The formal letter from the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead had included few details of the residential arrangements, other than listing their new address: the scarily double-barrelled Langton-Riddell Nurses’ Home.

      On the ferry to Holyhead, Lily had taken out the letter and smoothed it flat on her lap, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Yet when she’d reached London, she’d known she was.

      It was her third city in as many days: Waterford, Dublin and now London, and instead of feeling scared in the crowded streets so unlike the rolling hills of Tamarin, she felt alive, excited, happy.

      How could she have been scared? She loved this: all the people, the busy streets, cars and trams racing past, and vast elegant buildings that made Rathnaree look like a hovel.

      Now that she was in the nurses’ home, Lily was glad to see that her visions of dormitories with trainee nurses squashed together were wrong. It was a relief to find this lovely albeit tiny room in the eaves. So far, only one of her two roommates had arrived, a woman who was probably only the same age, twenty-one, yet looked a lot more sophisticated – and a lot less impressed with their quarters.

      The room had all that Lily needed: heavy curtains for warmth, a wash stand with floral bowl and matching jug, a rather elderly chest of drawers with a mottled mirror on top that looked quite serviceable as a dressing table, and beside each of the three iron-framed beds with their neat covers was a small stool, hastily conscripted into use as a night table. On either side of the door were nails for clothes to be hung on.

      Lily had slept in much worse.

      But the Honourable Diana Belton, who was now looking around her with something akin to shock, clearly hadn’t.

      Vivi, who was impulsive and always rushing in, would have fussed over Diana, asking her if she was all right. And once, Lily would have too. But today she held back.

      She’d grown up beside a big house, had learned at her mother’s knee that the people in big houses were different.

      ‘Special,’ her mother would say when she sat wearing her eyes out mending a frippery of lace for Lady Irene. ‘Isn’t this beautiful, Lily? Feel it – wouldn’t it make you feel like a princess to wear it?’

      Why did money and land and silken lace make them different? Lily wanted to know. Weren’t they all the same, all God’s people?

      Here, in London, she wasn’t Tom and Mary Kennedy’s daughter, who had made a very good lady’s maid. Here, she was the same as the Honourable Diana: a trainee nurse. She had no plans to strike up a conversation or to apologise for their quarters to this girl in her tweed СКАЧАТЬ