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

‘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.

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.