Lessons in Heartbreak (19 page)

October 1940

Lily Kennedy rested her stockinged feet against the base of the cream Aga in the huge kitchen in Rathnaree and sipped her tea from a flowered china teacup. It was early morning and the room was silent except for the ticking of the clock on the wall and the occasional crowing of the cockerel outside in the yard.

The ten-minute walk from the Forge to the big house had been cold, with Lily and Mam hurrying along in their heavy outdoor boots, the cool of dawn biting into their faces and a weak sun lengthening shadows in the dark woods along the avenue. Lily wasn’t afraid of the dark: a girl raised in the countryside had no fear of shadows, although there were plenty of stories about bogeymen and spirits that gave her pause on the nights she bicycled from her friends’ homes in Tamarin. But looming dark shapes beside the road were often as not a cow or an innocuous blackthorn bush.

Tommy had written in his letters about the city lights of London and how there was almost a glow above the houses in the sky from the street lights. They were all gone now, he said: nobody wanted a glow as a signal for Mr Hitler. Lily couldn’t imagine a city the size of London: Dungarvan was the biggest
town she’d ever seen in real life, although she’d seen London, Paris and New York through the magic of films in the Ormonde cinema.

And now she’d be seeing it herself, in a few days. She hugged the thought to herself, excited and a little bit anxious. Tommy, who’d helped her find out about the nurses’ training in the Royal Free, wouldn’t be there to meet her. His regiment, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, was being sent overseas, although he couldn’t say where to.

Dad had read Tommy’s last letter and then crumpled it up and thrown it in the direction of the fire.

‘Tommy’s gone, why are you setting off too, Lily?’ he’d demanded gruffly. ‘We’ve had enough wars of our own to keep us going. We don’t need to be sending our children off to fight anyone else’s battles.’

Lily hadn’t replied. She knew her father’s pain was over losing his beloved son to be a soldier rather than any diatribe against a war in which the Irish Free State was taking a neutral stance.

Mam understood it better. She knew that Lily was passionate for another life, one away from Rathnaree.

‘A person would never believe the cold of this house if they didn’t experience it,’ said her mother now, hurrying into the room, dressed in her housekeeper’s uniform. ‘The beds are all damp despite it all, and there’ll be hell to pay if her ladyship comes home before it’s all settled.’

Lily jumped to her feet and poured tea into another cup and saucer. Her mother didn’t bother with china cups usually, but Lily loved the delicate feel of the bone china.

‘Here’s your tea, Mam. Sit down.’

‘I’ve no time to sit,’ her mother said, but she took the cup and sipped it gratefully standing at the great scrubbed wooden table. ‘The red bedroom smells of damp, and even with the window open, I don’t know if the smell will be gone by
tomorrow. Why, in the name of the Lord, did I say it was all right for everyone to come in late today, what with all the work to be done,’ Mary fretted.

‘Sit with me,’ Lily begged, because she knew there was no point telling her mother to stop rushing for people who were not actually there and who wouldn’t appreciate her rushing anyway.

‘I’ll sit for a moment,’ her mother said, and looked wistful. Her daughter was leaving home the next day, but Mary would be busy readying the staff for the big party. The family had been in Dublin for a week and were coming home the following day with a party of friends.

Normally, the place would be buzzing even at this early hour, with Eileen Shaw, the cook, huffing and puffing about how the cold, wet weather made her cough worse. Sean, who’d been the Major’s batman in the last war and now worked as the family’s butler, would be lighting his pipe and casting irritated glances at Nora, the latest maid, who was all fingers and thumbs, organising Lady Irene’s breakfast tray. Sean was generally easy-going, but there had been quite a turnover of housemaids recently and Nora, who was young and awed by the grandeur of Rathnaree, fell short of the butler’s standards.

Last, there would be Vivi, Lily’s best friend, standing outside and having a quick cup of tea and a cigarette before she started work. Lily loved Vivi: they were like chalk and cheese, Mam said, but they were best friends, had been since school, although Vivi had left at thirteen to come and work for the Lochravens.

Mam had insisted that Lily stay on until she was seventeen, which was almost unheard of.

‘You’re daft to keep at the books,’ Vivi used to say to her. ‘Think of the fun we’ll have when you’ve a few bob in your pocket, Lily.’

Vivi was short, curvy, and had recently gone to Silvia’s Hairdressing Emporium to have a platinum rinse to her hair, doing her best to look like Jean Harlow, her heroine.

‘But I’ll have to work for bloody Lady Irene,’ Lily pointed out. That was the downside of having money. If it had to be earned in Rathnaree, she’d rather not earn it. Unfortunately, there weren’t many other options for her in Tamarin. There was no money in the Kennedy household for her to train as a nurse in one of the big hospitals, which was what she really wanted to do. So she’d ended up in Rathnaree after all, which had made Vivi happy.

Leaving her best friend behind was going to be one of the hard things about going to London, Lily thought sadly.

This morning was the last vestige of holiday for the staff. There weren’t many days when servants could lie in bed at their leisure. Tomorrow, it would be business as usual with frantic dusting, cleaning and polishing, and Eileen in a lather of sweat preparing the pheasant for the party, cooking her special wild mushroom soup and making delicate pastry for the crème mille-feuilles Lady Irene insisted upon.

The fact that the family were away was the only reason Lily had come with her mother to Rathnaree in the first place.

She hadn’t been there since the previous Christmas, when she’d left to work with old Dr Rafferty in his surgery in the village. When Dr Rafferty’s daughter got married, Lily had leapt at the chance to take over her job tidying up after the doctor, helping him out sometimes, in the hope that she might somehow find a way to train as a nurse if only she had some experience behind her.

Lady Irene had been furious, although she had hidden it behind the usual veneer of disinterest.

‘If you want to spend your life working with sick people, Lily, then I wish you luck with it,’ she’d said when Lily had formally handed in her notice.

Lady Irene’s last lady’s maid had been addressed by her surname: Ryan. But Lily, because she was the housekeeper’s daughter and had been in and out of Rathnaree since she could toddle, had been spared the harshness of being called Kennedy. It was a great sign, Lily’s mother said, pleased.

‘She’s very fond of you, love,’ Mam said with pride when Lily had been promoted, after just six months in the house, to the position of lady’s maid. ‘And why shouldn’t she be? You’re so neat and clever, and I never saw anyone fix her hair the way you can.’

Lily was quite aware that being able to dress the older woman’s thinning dark hair was not necessarily a guarantee of her civility. Fifty years of having their every whim responded to did not endow a person with grace.

They all knew that Lady Irene was high in the instep and had been brought up with a fleet of servants, far more than she had now. There had been French chefs and an Italian lady’s maid in her home in Kildare, not to mention two thousand acres of prime farmland, and an Italianate garden that lay spread in front of a vast Georgian mansion. All of which added up to the fact that she wasn’t used to being thwarted by a mere member of her staff.

‘I am surprised that you wish to leave,’ Lady Irene had added in her lethally soft voice, the pale patrician face showing an unaccustomed flush of red. Under the dusting of powder, the harsh smoker’s lines around her tight mouth were like angry furrows.

‘I thought you were happy here.’

‘I am, your ladyship,’ said Lily evenly. She’d learned to speak in calm measured tones when she’d been drafted in to replace Ryan. Her mistress was mercurial and her mood could change in an instant. Her daughter, Isabelle, was exactly the same. Luckily, Isabelle was rarely home. She’d been schooled abroad, had gone to finishing school in Switzerland,
and was now touring the Italian lakes with some cousins. 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.