‘I agree, both stories are interesting,’ Jodie said, surprising her. ‘It’s like there were two separate worlds here, independent and yet linking up: the aristocrats, and the servants. Two different stories at the same time, how interesting is that! Oh, I’m so glad we got to come in here. Thank you, Izzie, for arranging it.’
‘You’re going to work on it, then – the history from both sides?’ Izzie asked.
Jodi nodded. ‘I love uncovering the past, don’t you?’ she said happily. ‘It teaches us about ourselves: that’s what they told us in college, anyway.’
Izzie stood in front of the big fireplace the way the people in Jodi’s sepia-tinted photograph had stood and tried to imagine herself back in their world. She’d read a novel about time travel once, where a woman from the twentieth century had been whisked back to the seventeenth. The idea had fascinated Izzie. What would she bring to the past if she was transported back to 1936 right now? Would her wisdom be of any use then? Or would she find that, instead of her bringing superior modern knowledge into the past, the past would turn out to be her teacher?
When she was older, Lily found that the seasons reminded her of different parts of her life. Spring was always Tamarin, when the bare trees were dotted with pouting acid-green buds of new life, and the fields changed from heavy umber to palest green dotted with velvety new lambs on shaky legs. Autumn was Rathnaree, when the staff toiled to get the great house ready for winter and when Sir Henry invited cronies to shoot or fish with him. Outside, the woods came alight with the russets and pale golds of autumn, while inside, apple logs burned in the grates and the kitchen steamed up with cooking for the parties of gentlemen.
But summer: summer would always be London during the war when the sun shone more brightly than ever before, and life was lived with far greater passion and ferocity than she’d imagined possible.
May 1944 was one of the hottest Mays on record, and on the rare occasions when they weren’t working, Lily, Diana and Maisie loved to sit on the tiny balcony on the third floor of the nurses’ home on Cubitt Street, faded and frayed cushions behind them, letting the heat sink into their tired bones.
They didn’t get too many opportunities to sit in the sun: time off was at a premium for third-year nursing students and Matron was an ardent believer in the mantra of the Devil making work for idle hands.
She would have been scandalised if she had seen them sitting on the balcony with their stockings off and their feet deliciously bare to the sun. But it had been a hard week, Lily thought, leaning back, and what Matron didn’t know, couldn’t harm her. In the delivery ward, Lily had been involved in the births of seventeen babies in that week alone.
She deserved a rest. That evening, she and the girls were going out to tea in Lyons Corner House, and afterwards to the Odeon to see Gaslight. She loved going to the cinema and immersing herself in the fantasy world onscreen. Joan Crawford was still her favourite film star, but she could see the lure of Ingrid Bergman. Maisie, who was prone to flights of imagination, said Lily had the same eyes as Ingrid.
‘Mysterious,’ Maisie insisted. ‘Like you’re thinking of a special man, somewhere.’
‘When she looks like that, she’s thinking of what’s for dinner,’ laughed Diana, who was much more prosaic and, like all of them, thought about food quite a lot.
Lily remembered the huge surplus of food at home, fresh eggs every day and her mother’s fragrant bread. She’d never realised how lucky she’d been. Now, the shortages had even spread to Ireland, where flour was in short supply. ‘We’re all eating black bread at the moment,’ her mother had written in her last letter. ‘Tastes like turf to my mind. Lady Irene’s got very thin on account of it.’
As the afternoon sun warmed her face, Lily wondered how she had ever lived anywhere other than here. It wasn’t just food that made her think back to Tamarin and Rathnaree: her mother working hard, never seeing anything but the bloody Lochraven family, never thinking of more. Lily herself had seen so much now – she’d helped in theatre when the hospital was short-staffed and had stayed standing despite the stench of discarded splints and dressings from men wounded overseas. She’d spent many nights in the basement during air-raids, comforting patients while trying to remain calm herself, telling them it would be fine, that the hospital had never taken a direct hit and wouldn’t now, when she knew no such thing.
She’d delivered two babies all by herself, and had felt a surge of pride when she’d heard that the Queen said she was glad Buckingham Palace had been bombed so now she could look the East End in the eye. Lily liked the Queen: she cared, keeping the little princesses in London despite the bombing. They were on rationing too, which was only right. Lily would have bet her last shilling that, if the Lochravens had been running the country, they’d still be eating plover’s eggs and lobster thermidor.
‘Is it bad not to want to go home?’ she asked Maisie.
‘Depends on what there is to go home to,’ Maisie said pragmatically. ‘There’s nothing for me to go home to, ‘cept Terry’s wife, and she won’t be welcoming me with open arms.’ Maisie’s mother had been killed during the Blitz as she’d opened the front door of her flat to rush for the Underground. Only her brother, Terry, was left of their small family, and he’d married a year ago when his girlfriend, a platinum blonde named Ruby, became pregnant. Ruby and Maisie didn’t see eye to eye.
‘Yes, sorry,’ said Lily, angry with herself for thinking out loud. ‘But when the war’s over, what then?’
‘You got listening privileges in the War Office, then?’ Maisie asked. ‘How’d you know it’s going to be over?’
‘It can’t go on for ever.’
‘Says who?’ Maisie found her cigarettes and lit one.
‘Tea’s ready, girls.’ Diana put three cups of tea down beside them, then swung her long legs down so the sun could warm them.
‘Thanks.’
‘Thanks, Diana.’ Lily sipped her tea, still wrinkling her nose at the first taste. She missed sugar, but had decided it was far better to save her coupons for actual tea.
Diana had given up coffee altogether. ‘I can’t bear the taste of Camp,’ she’d said, shuddering at even the notion of the coffee substitute. She’d told them once about drinking delicious pre-war coffee in Juan Les Pins in the South of France where she’d gone with her parents and sister, Sybil, and stayed in a fabulous villa with its own swimming pool and blue-and-white umbrellas to shelter one from the sun.
‘Lily’s going all maudlin on us, Di,’ said Maisie. ‘Wants to know what we’re going to do after.’
Diana’s perfect nose wrinkled. ‘Darling, heaven knows. Daddy will want me to get married, I suppose, so I’ll be off his hands, like Sybil. That’s what he thinks war is about – defending the country so your daughters can still get married in the family chapel.’
‘You never said you had a chapel.’ Maisie sat up. ‘I thought Sybil was getting married in an ordinary church.’
‘It’s only a small one,’ Diana said apologetically. ‘Lots of people have them. Not just us.’
‘Keep your knickers on, Princess,’ Maisie sighed. ‘I’ve never seen a house with a chapel before. Christ Almighty, I s’pose I’ll have to be on my best behaviour for this bloody wedding.’
You’re not the only one, Lily thought. She still felt unsure about attending Diana’s sister’s wedding. It was easy to forget that Diana came from another world, the world of privilege. She shared their room and they saw her asleep