Lessons in Heartbreak (20 page)

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 suit, necklace of pearls, and fur collar. The Honourable Diana might very well flick back her improbably blonde hair and snub Lily: snubbing her inferiors was no doubt something she’d a lifetime’s experience of.

Diana had remained coolly silent when the trainees had been welcomed by the stern Sister Jones.

‘Up at six, breakfast at twenty past and on the wards at seven,’ Sister Jones had read out, in her cool voice. ‘There will be lectures in the preliminary training school in the basement here and you will be issued with your timetables for those tomorrow. For the first two months, you will work until eight at night with one day off every fortnight. Students are expected to be in the home by ten, when the doors will be locked. Late passes may be given at Matron’s discretion, but only for special occasions: you will then be permitted to stay out until eleven. There are to be no visitors. Understood?’

‘Yes, Sister,’ everyone had murmured.

Then the room assignments had been read out. Lily and Diana had climbed the stairs with their bags in silence, and Diana hadn’t spoken a word since.

She could suit herself, Lily thought irritably.

She got to her feet and took off the very plain worsted wool coat that had never clung to her figure the way Diana’s suit did to hers, even when it was new. And it was far from new now. Lily had bought it three years ago from Quilian’s Drapers in Tamarin, which in itself had felt like an act of independence, because for years she’d bought her clothes under her mother’s supervision in McGarry’s Drapery. She’d felt pleased every time she saw the coat, pleased at that symbol of adulthood,
and satisfied with her first purchase, chosen by herself and paid for with her own money. But now, faced with the glamorous Diana in marvellously cut tweed, she felt lumpen and ugly in it.

She hung her coat up and began to unpack her small cardboard suitcase.

When Diana spoke in a soft, hesitant voice, Lily was so surprised that she actually jumped.

‘I’m Diana Belton. Awfully sorry, we weren’t properly introduced earlier. You must think me a complete boor, but I feel terribly out of my depth here.’

Diana formally held out her hand, still in its suede glove.

‘Lily Kennedy,’ said Lily, proffering her own hand stiffly.

‘You’re from Ireland! Oh, I love Ireland, wonderful hunting. Do you hunt?’

‘No,’ said Lily evenly.

‘No, sorry, no, of course,’ muttered Diana.

‘Why “of course”?’ demanded Lily. ‘Why shouldn’t I hunt?’ She’d been on Lady Irene’s hunter once, a huge roan named Abu Simbel. She’d only ridden him round the yard, and she’d been scared stiff the whole time. Lord knew how people raced over hedges and ditches on horses, galloping wildly after some poor fox. It was beyond her.

‘I’ve offended you – I am so sorry.’ Diana clapped her hands to her perfectly red mouth. ‘I’m so frightfully sorry.’

And she started to cry. ‘I have to make a success of this. My father says I’m behaving like a silly child and he’s very angry with me. Can’t understand why I didn’t stay at home and go into the Auxiliary Territorial Service, says he’s going to cut my allowance and, oh, all sorts of ghastly things, so I have to do this. I have to stick at it. This is what I want, to
do
something with my life.’

Lily sat down beside Diana. They were almost the same size, she realised. Diana had narrow hips, long legs and a considerable bosom, as she did. She’d got Diana all
wrong, she realised now. That cool poise had hidden terrible nerves.

‘My father didn’t want me to come either,’ Lily offered. ‘Wants to know why I’m going off to nurse people in a war he says shouldn’t have happened in the first place. He’s not keen on war: we’ve had a fair bit of it at home. But this is the only way I’d be able to train as a nurse properly, and I wanted to do something too.’

‘Goodness, Daddy thinks war is the only answer,’ said Diana. ‘He’s simply furious his gammy leg prevented him from rejoining his old regiment. He’s stuck with the Home Guard. He doesn’t believe I’ll be any good at nursing. He won’t disinherit me, though – nothing to leave.’

Suddenly they both began to laugh, and Diana was wiping tears away with a silk handkerchief.

‘There’s nothing for me to inherit, either,’ Lily said.

The door opened and a small, freckled face with a mop of fair curls peeped round.

‘Am I in the right place?’ she asked in a strong Cockney accent.

‘This is room fifteen,’ Lily replied.

‘That’s me then,’ said the girl, and came into the room properly, dragging a suitcase that looked bigger than she was. She was tiny, like an older version of Shirley Temple with those curls, but her laughing, cat-shaped eyes made her appear a little more grown up.

‘Maisie Higgins,’ she said. ‘Lawks, crying already!’ She stared at Diana’s tear-stained cheeks. ‘I heard the matron was a bit of a Tartar, but I didn’t think she’d be cracking the whip already.’

The first weeks in the grand old hospital on Gray’s Inn Road were hard and exhausting. Lily and Maisie at least were used to getting up early – Maisie had been an apprentice in a
hairdressers’ – but Diana found it a nightmare. Food in the home was good, despite rationing. But the hardest part was getting used to dealing with actual patients. Anyone thinking there would be a lot of theory and lessons before they worked on the wards had been in for a shock.

Despite being students, they were thrown in at the deep end.

‘This is wartime,’ said one of their nursing tutors that first day as she led them from ward to ward, letting them see the size of the great hospital. ‘Sad to say, but it’s a great time to learn because you’ll see things that you’ve never seen before. A quarter of last year’s intake have dropped out, didn’t have the stomach for it. So, ladies, it’s up to you.’

One of their number vomited at the sight of a burn victim having his dressings changed. Lily felt like joining her. But she forced herself to stand up straight and proud at the bedside. If she was to do this job properly, she’d have to learn to deal with worse sights. She would not be dropping out.

‘You all right?’ she whispered to Diana, who was looking very green under her starched nurse’s cap.

‘Not really,’ Diana murmured, wobbling on her feet.

‘Think how hard it’ll be for the poor man if we all run like headless chickens,’ Lily said, her eyes still on the patient’s face, taking in the terrible charred edges of the burns and the raw pink skin underneath.

‘Righto,’ gulped Diana. ‘I understand.’ She smiled at the man.

‘Well done, Nurse Belton,’ said the tutor. ‘Thought we’d lost you for a moment there.’

‘Not a chance,’ said Diana, squeezing Lily’s hand tightly.

Lily was surprised and pleased to discover that there were women medical students at the Royal Free.

‘Wonder if they’re like us and get the dirtiest jobs?’ Maisie said thoughtfully.

‘Not bloody likely,’ said another of the trainees.

The student nurses undoubtedly got all the worst jobs on the wards, mainly bed-pan duty and sponge-bathing patients. One of the more sadistic ward sisters took an instant dislike to Diana and gave her all the most horrible jobs, including reapplying a dressing to a wounded man’s groin area.

Diana nearly died of embarrassment, she told the other student nurses that evening in the home’s tiny common room.

‘I don’t know which of us went pinker,’ Diana sighed, ‘him or me. Poor chap.’

‘
Poor chap!
’ parroted Cheryl, a tough girl from Walthamstow who never missed the opportunity to tease Diana over her cut-glass accent. ‘Bloody toff,’ said Cheryl. ‘Who’s she think she is – Lady Muck? She should have stayed at home with the butler. We don’t want her sort here.’

It had been another in a series of long days and Lily was dead on her feet. But even so, she could recognise that something needed to be done.

Easing her tired body out of her chair, Lily stood up and put her hands on her hips. ‘You’ve an awful mouth on you, Cheryl,’ she said coldly. ‘Diana doesn’t look down on you, so you ought to stop looking down on her.’

This stopped Cheryl in her tracks. ‘Me look down on her?’

‘Do you look down on me, too?’ Lily went on. ‘Am I a big thick Irishwoman when I’m not here to hear it?’

‘No,’ shot back Cheryl. ‘You’re different…’

‘We’re all different,’ Lily said sharply. ‘It’s high time you got used to it.’

‘Or else?’ Cheryl’s pointed face hardened.

Lily drew herself up to her full imposing height. ‘I was raised right beside a farm. My father’s a blacksmith and my mother’s in service, and I can launder a lady’s camis as handily as help shoe a horse. There were lots of knocks in my life before I came here and I’m not putting up with any more from the likes
of you, madam. I don’t believe in raising my fist to anyone, but if I did, I’d knock you from here to kingdom come and you wouldn’t get up in a hurry, I can tell you. So leave Diana alone.’

‘The wild Irish girl!!’ cheered someone.

‘Fine,’ snapped Cheryl and left the room in a huff.

‘Thank you so much,’ Diana said, grabbing Lily’s arm. ‘That’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me.’

She had tears in her eyes. Lily realised that at some point she’d have to explain to Diana that, when she was feeling vulnerable, she adopted an icy demeanour that gave entirely the wrong impression.

‘Think us three ought to stick together,’ added Maisie. ‘Lily can handle all the trouble, Diana can get us into the posh restaurants, and I can do our hair. What do you say, girls?’

The three of them looked at each other and grinned.

‘Sounds good to me,’ Lily said. Who’d have thought that one of her friends would turn out to be someone every bit as aristocratic as Lady Irene? Wait till she told Vivi.

Izzie, Anneliese and Brendan sat at the kitchen table around untouched cups of tea. The tea made Izzie realise she was home, for sure: only in her birthplace was everybody convinced that, when all else failed, making tea helped.

Her father sat opposite her, looking much older than he had the last time. She hadn’t been home in over a year – how was it that time between visits home seemed to expand the longer you lived abroad?

The plus of emigration was that you never spent long enough at home to be irritated by all your family’s annoying little idiosyncrasies, stuff that niggled when you were in close contact. The minus was that your family aged so much in your absence.

Every time she came home, she had that feeling of watching another frame in a speeded-up piece of film.

Dad was sixty-seven and when she said it fast, it didn’t sound old at all, until they’d embraced in the hospital and she felt that he was no longer her solid father, just skinny, diminished and older. But then, she was older too.

Older, just not much wiser, she thought with bitterness. Joe had left two messages on her phone. She’d listened to his voice
and wished she had the strength to erase the messages without having to hear all of them. But she couldn’t do that. Like an addict, she had to hear his voice, just in case he said what she longed to hear above all else:

I love you and need you. I’m coming to be with you, Izzie
.

But that wasn’t what he’d said. Instead, he’d gone for a safe message that managed to say nothing:

‘I know you’re upset, but please call me back, I hate to think of you away with us not talking, call me.’

Call me.

Izzie knew what she wanted to hear him say:
I was wrong, I love you, I totally understand what you want from me and I was stalling for time in New York
.

But even when she’d gone away from him, saying she didn’t want to see him again, he hadn’t said those words.

For the first time, she began to link up the two Joes – the one she loved, who was funny, warm and sexy; and the business version, who obviously hadn’t become wealthy and powerful by being Mr Pushover. Had she made the classic female mistake of thinking that underneath the tough businessman was a teddy bear only she could see? And all along, the only thing underneath the tough businessman façade was a tough man.

‘I do love you, but it’s not that simple,’ he’d said.

She’d known it wasn’t simple. And she’d done her best to block that out because the lightning strike of love was so strong that it had seemed it must be their destiny to be together. This wasn’t a scheming, sex-fuelled fling: it was the real thing. True love trumped a marriage that was a marriage in name only, surely? Or so she’d assumed.

Assume makes an ass out of me and u
, as somebody once said.

Izzie Silver might be a dumb broad, but nobody was going to make an ass out of her twice.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said her father, clearly desperate to break the silence round the kitchen table. ‘Is it possible Jamie is a brother of Lily’s, somebody who died when she was young and that’s why we’ve never heard of him? Infant mortality was terrible eighty and ninety years ago. If Jamie was her little brother, it would all make sense…’ Brendan’s voice trailed off. ‘Maybe Edward knows, or maybe there’s something in the family records.’

Even in her exhausted, jet-lagged state, Izzie was astute enough to sense Anneliese sitting up uncomfortably when Brendan spoke. It was the mention of her uncle Edward’s name that had done it, Izzie decided.

Dad had said something when he phoned her in New York about Edward seeming oddly reticent about speaking to his wife. Dad hadn’t known what was going on, but Izzie knew now, without anybody telling her in words, that there was something wrong between her aunt and uncle.

‘If Edward knew about another uncle who’d died, he’d have told us years ago,’ she said now, and again she could sense Anneliese relax a little. ‘You know how close Gran and I were.
She’d
have told me about a little brother who died, wouldn’t she? There was just her and Tommy, I’m sure of it.’

‘Well,’ said Anneliese glumly, ‘we don’t know who this Jamie person is, so maybe we don’t know as much as we thought we did. Even when you know people terribly well, you can discover they have secrets from you.’

‘True,’ agreed Izzie, thinking of Joe and how she’d been deceived by him. Or maybe he hadn’t deceived her. Maybe she’d wanted to be with him so much that she’d been blind to reality.

Still, it was harder to know people than you thought. And for whatever reason, dear Anneliese clearly felt the same way.

‘Do you think Lily will ever come back to us?’ Anneliese said listlessly.

‘Nobody knows, love,’ Dad said. ‘It’s up to God now.’

The three of them had stayed in the hospital for an hour with her grandmother and after that brief moment of lucidity when Lily had cried: ‘Jamie!’, there had been nothing else, just her grandmother lying there, still absent. She hadn’t opened her eyes or moved or said anything. All the hope that Izzie had felt on the flight over had melted away.

The young doctor who’d talked to them really hadn’t known what to say.

‘Sorry, there are no straightforward answers right now.’

At least she was being frank, Izzie thought. The young woman’s honesty was preferable to the ‘I am the doctor, I know everything’ mode of communication.

‘We’ve done a CT scan, she’s on heparin to arrest progression or prevent recurrence of further strokes, but I’m afraid there has been a considerable bleed in your grandmother’s brain. And when there’s coma following a stroke, it does present an unfavourable prognosis. It’s not all doom and gloom, there might well be spontaneous neurological recovery, but we really don’t know if that will happen. It’s a matter of waiting now, I’m afraid.

‘The added problem is that, because of your grandmother’s age, there are other risks now, including heart problems and pneumonia. And I’m afraid her heart activity has been a little erratic in the past twenty-four hours. That’s our primary concern.’

‘There’s a problem with her heart too?’ Izzie buried her face in her hands. It kept getting worse. ‘I thought, because she talked, that she might come out of this. It’s got to be a good sign, hasn’t it? It means she’s coming back, right?’

‘I’m sorry, it’s not that simple,’ the doctor said. ‘Who knows what your grandmother is seeing or believing right now? People in her position can respond in some way to voices, so it is perfectly natural that your voice sparked something in her,
but as to what she was thinking, I don’t know. As to whether she will ever come out again, we don’t know that either. We’re monitoring her and trying to keep her vitals stable.’

‘And if she doesn’t come round properly?’ Anneliese asked what Izzie couldn’t bear to.

‘Every case is different. If a person in her condition hasn’t recovered in some neurological way within the first three weeks to a month, then it doesn’t look good, I’ll be honest with you. We’ll have to wait and see. Right now, we want to keep her stable and see what happens next.’

The first three weeks to a month? Izzie felt ill at the thought of watching her beloved gran fade away over a month. When they left the hospital, she was conscious of a sensation of emptiness in the world.

Twenty-seven years ago, when her mother died, she’d felt the same thing. It was, Izzie remembered, like part of the earth had crumbled away leaving a huge, gaping hole.

The difference was that there had been some time before Mum had died, some warning. Not enough, but it had at least given Izzie a chance to say goodbye.

The thought of that goodbye gripped Izzie’s heart tightly. Move on, think about something else, she told herself.

Anneliese moved her chair to sit beside Izzie. God, she was so intuitive, always had been. She and Gran had been brilliant when Mum died. It wasn’t the same as having Mum to turn to, but they’d been there for her, forming a sort of parental triangle with her father. It was a new family of sorts: not conventional, clumsily made up, but still a family.

Now it was coming apart and there was another gaping hole there. But it had all happened so quickly. There had been no time to prepare, no time to say all the things that hadn’t been said. Gran might die without ever smiling at Izzie again or telling her that it would be all right, that she was loved…

Izzie couldn’t bear it.

She squeezed her eyes shut. She wouldn’t cry again because, if she started, she genuinely didn’t think she’d be able to stop the grief from pouring out, and it hurt too much. Anneliese reached out and wrapped her arms around Izzie, saying nothing, just holding tightly.

‘Parish records,’ said Dad suddenly. ‘We could search the old parish records for births and deaths to see if there’s a Jamie or a James anywhere.’

‘Yes, Dad.’ Izzie untangled a hand from her aunt’s embrace to take his hand in hers, and they sat, making a clumsy, irregular trio around the old kitchen table. Sometimes, Dad’s habit of focusing on the not-so-important details irritated Izzie. But now, she could see it for what it was: a survival tactic.

His mother-in-law had been with him for the darkest parts of his life and now she might be dying. Rather than face that cold, stark fact, Dad was training his sights on something else.

‘Does it matter who he is?’ Anneliese asked with a touch of irritation. ‘You heard the doctor: nobody knows what’s going on in Lily’s mind. Jamie might be someone important or he might be the postman.’

‘The postman’s called Calum,’ said Brendan stubbornly.

‘Not the postman, then,’ said Izzie quickly. It was unlike her aunt to be so irritable. She gave Anneliese a final hug to show that she was all right. Anneliese resettled her chair and pulled her mug towards her.

‘Is Beth coming?’ Izzie asked Anneliese to deflect the irritation, and felt guilty as soon as she’d done so because her aunt looked away as if she could hide the anxiety that had flared in her eyes.

‘No, she can’t come yet and I don’t want to worry her,’ Anneliese said.

‘Of course,’ Izzie replied, in the cheery voice that she used to clients on the phone who were telling her they didn’t want to use one of the models on her books.

Not worrying Beth was a mantra she’d grown up with. In the family tree, Izzie was the one who had it all sorted out, who knew where she was going with her life. Beth was younger, the fragile, sometimes dizzy one, the one who wouldn’t quite make it in the world. How wrong that had turned out to be. Beth was happily married to Marcus and Izzie had notched up another failed relationship. Not even a proper relationship, actually: a relationship with a married man. Who was the fragile, dumb one now?

Damn, she had to stop thinking like this. She was going round and round in circles and her brain was numb. She should be thinking about her grandmother and not about bloody Joe Hansen.

Suddenly Izzie felt so very tired. It was a sad, lonely homecoming with nothing but misery. She wanted it to be the way it had been before; before Gran was ill; before she’d realised Dad was getting old; before she’d known about something wrong between Anneliese and Edward. Before it had all gone wrong with Joe.

She got up from the table quickly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think the jet-lag is getting to me. I’m going to go to bed.’

‘Of course.’ Anneliese got up and gave her another hug.

Izzie sank into her aunt’s arms and bit back the desire to burst into tears.

‘I’ll phone you later,’ Anneliese whispered, for her ears only.

‘I’d like that,’ Izzie said.

Izzie woke up to light filtering in through floral curtains. She’d been having the most amazing dream and she wanted to tell Joe. They’d been on a holiday somewhere sunny, maybe Mexico, and she could feel the heat burnishing her skin. Then
there was a ride in a teeny plane and now they were back in their lovely home, a light-filled loft apartment. She felt utter contentment fill her and she rolled over in the bed to touch Joe. Just then, she came fully awake. There was no Joe in the bed beside her. She’d never slept with him, she realised suddenly. It had all been a dream. Their sleeping together was relegated to small naps after those times they’d made love: correction – after they’d had sex.

They would never live in an airy loft apartment in New York together; he’d probably hate it. She wasn’t sure what he liked in apartments or houses. She’d never seen anywhere he’d ever lived. Instead, she was alone in her childhood bed in Tamarin, with the pale wallpaper she’d picked herself when she was eighteen and the apple tree banging in the wind against the window. Joe would never see this, he would never know about her childhood, he’d never come here, he’d probably never get to meet Gran.

Izzie, you are a moron, she said out loud.

She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, threw back the covers and got up. No looking back: it was time to look forwards. It was after eleven. She’d slept for fifteen hours and she was hungry and thirsty.

Still in her T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, she went downstairs. There was no sign of Dad, but there was coffee in the pot and a note left on the counter beside the coffee.

‘Izzie, there’s food in the fridge. Hope the coffee’s drinkable when you get up. I’m on my mobile phone and I’m going to drop into the hospital later. Call me if you need a lift, otherwise, I’ll be back at one.’

Izzie drank her coffee, ate two rounds of Irish soda bread toasted and smothered with bitter marmalade, then showered and checked her messages on her BlackBerry. There was one from Carla, wishing her well, hoping that everything was OK, a couple more from people at work, another from
Andy, who lived two apartments below her, saying he’d called and did she want to go to the movies with him and some friends?

She’d have to ring him later and tell him she was in Ireland. There was one from Stefan, about the SupaGirl! competition. More work, she’d pass that on to Carla. Nothing from Joe. Not that he’d ever emailed her before – he was far too clever to want electronic evidence of their fling, she thought acidly. But he had her email address, he could have mailed if he’d been that desperate to get in touch with her.