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