‘I’ve hung Dana’s dress up on a hanger and I’ve run an old sheet up into a bag to carry them both back to Lovely Lane. Don’t you drop them now. And I’ve turned the hem up on Beth’s skirt. That’s in the bag too.’
Maisie had become chief dressmaker in preparation for the dance. The only one of the girls who hadn’t needed her help was Victoria, and she had come up trumps in her own way.
‘Would this dress and cloak be any use, Mrs Tanner?’ she had asked. The cloak was full length and made of the most exquisite black velvet. The dress was covered in seed pearls.
Maisie gasped. ‘Victoria, I can’t cut up good quality clothes like that. Are you out of your mind, love?’
‘Oh, yes you can,’ said Victoria. ‘Look, Mrs Tanner, I have kept all Mummy’s dresses and I have as many as you could shake a stick at at Aunt Minnie’s. This dress with the seed pearls was my great-grandmother’s. I’m never going to wear it. Look, it is so old-fashioned.’ Maisie could barely speak. She ran the dress though her fingers. ‘Pammy tells me you’re a magician with a needle, so please, turn them into something nice for Pammy and Dana.’
Maisie had worked her magic. Not only had she been able to make two beautiful dresses, but Dana also had a cape to match and Pammy a bolero. Dana preferred the velvet and the original cloak had so many folds there was enough for both dress and cape, with some left over for the bolero. The seed pearl dress was converted for Pammy.
Victoria was to wear a dress of stunning emerald green silk and Maisie had taken up, by over nine inches, a full-length black crepe skirt which Beth wanted to wear with a black silk blouse Victoria was lending her. The excitement was growing as the dance approached.
‘Mam, could you do something with this?’ Pammy took out a dress she had carefully rolled in her basket.
‘Who does that belong to?’ asked Maisie, looking confused. ‘It’s from Goldsmiths. They charge an arm and a leg, they do.’ She was checking out the seams. ‘Look at that beautiful stitching, Pammy.’
‘Mam, I want you to undo it.’
‘What? I can’t do that. Are you out of your mind, our Pammy?’
‘Mam, please, just do as I say. Don’t unpick the seams completely; leave it so that each seam is held by a half thread with no close at the ends.’
‘Pammy, what are you up to?’
‘I’ll tell you, Mam, but not until after. But I promise, the girls will love you if you do this for me.’
And, so, with a heavy heart, Maisie unpicked the most beautiful stitching she had ever seen.
Chapter thirty-four
Victoria still had told no one any details about Roland. Dana had decided to take matters into her own hands, and had called a meeting in the greasy spoon with Beth and Pammy to reveal and discuss.
‘Well I never,’ said Pammy. ‘When is she going to tell us? We need to buy her a present and get her a card. Something for her bottom drawer.’
‘What in God’s name do we buy for an engagement present for the daughter of a lord?’ asked Dana. ‘Anyway, I think we should do something for them at the dance. Teddy told me.’
‘Ooh, get you. Teddy told you, did he now,’ they all chorused playfully.
Dana blushed. ‘Yes, he did. Shut up, will you all. He also told me they have to wait until a respectable time has passed after the funeral before it is announced officially in The Times or whatever people like them do.’
‘Poor Victoria,’ said Pammy. ‘She must be heartbroken still, but you wouldn’t know it. If it was me and me da had died, I would have cried my leg off by now. It’s her breeding, you know, or so me mam says. She hides it well.’
‘There isn’t anything we can do,’ said Beth. ‘We have to wait until the day when Victoria wants to tell us about her and Roland being engaged.’
*
That evening, Pammy called her own meeting in the greasy spoon. This time everyone was invited.
Beth, Victoria and Dana arrived first and had already had their tea, when Pammy sat down next to them. ‘Don’t you just hate these national issue green cups and saucers?’ She leant forward to sip the tea out of her overflowing cup.
‘Is that why you have called a meeting?’ asked Beth, her voice incredulous.
‘No, of course not. Listen, I’ve just been to the pharmacy to have a word. I’ve a plan to get Celia back. Who’s with me?’
‘God, I haven’t even heard it yet, but all of us, eh, sisters?’ said Beth.
The girls grinned, and Pammy leant in to whisper.
*
Pammy dropped the clothes off into each girl’s wardrobe. She was the only nurse who had the Saturday off. Every other nurse at Lovely Lane was working that day. Lizzie and the older girls were sitting state finals the following week. They were in the library all day, revising. Pammy called in to Celia’s room first. She was in and out in a flash. Under no circumstances must she be caught, and she had to return the master key to the kitchen before Mrs Duffy realized it had gone. Celia needed to be taught a lesson and Pammy reckoned she had just made sure it would happen.
They walked up to the hospital in a row. Four girls with arms linked. They were singing Al Martino’s ‘Here in My Heart’ at the tops of their voices. It was the first night they had all taken out together and spirits were high.
‘I hope the punch is as good as Teddy reckons it’s going to be,’ said Dana.
‘It had better be,’ said Pammy. ‘He’s the one in charge of making it. You know Sister Haycock is coming too? Isn’t that lovely?’
The girls would not hear a word said against Sister Haycock. As far as they were concerned, she was nothing short of a heroine, what with the work she had put into saving Pammy, standing up for the rights of student nurses, and her quest to modernize nursing and life at St Angelus, which was still stuck in a pre-war 1930s rut.
Victoria was quieter than all the others on the way to the dance and Pammy decided to quiz her. ‘You all right, Vic?’ she asked.
Victoria decided that as they were all looking at her, waiting for a reply, now was as good a time as ever. The street lights illuminated the pavement and bathed the lane in a warm orange glow which lit their faces as they walked.
‘Oh, it’s no good, I’m going to have to tell you, although it can’t be public knowledge yet. I need your help later, and I felt dreadful you girls not knowing, and anyway you will meet him tonight and I can’t go on keeping something so important a secret any longer.’
‘Victoria, just spit it out will you?’
‘Oh all right then, I’m engaged to be married.’
The girls let out a shout of joy as they jumped around Victoria and hugged her, pretending they didn’t know.
Mrs Duffy heard them as she put out the rubbish. She tutted as she replaced the bin lid. ‘I don’t know, one night out and they go mad,’ she muttered.
‘Married?’ squealed Pammy. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Are you giving up nursing?’ asked Beth.
‘Go on, tell them,’ said Dana. Dana had decided to meet Teddy at the social club. As much as she wanted to see him, she also wanted the excitement of getting ready and walking up with her friends.
Victoria began to laugh so much she had trouble catching her breath. She finished quickly, ‘Look, tonight I’m not coming back to Lovely Lane. Roland has booked us into the Grand.’
Three astonished faces looked back at her. Just at that moment a car pulled up alongside and the window wound down.
‘Victoria,’ said the driver. ‘May I offer you ladies a lift?’
‘Roland!’ Victoria had thought he would be waiting in the social club car park.
As the nurses piled into the car, Pammy whispered to Victoria, ‘Why do you need our help, Vic?’
‘Because I need you to distract Mrs Duffy, so that she thinks I’ve gone up to bed, and then tomorrow I’m off, so I want you to tell her I left early.’
Pammy nodded, in deadly earnest. ‘Right, I’m your woman.’
*
&
nbsp; Sister Haycock arrived at the dance late. She hadn’t really wanted to go, but the nurses had insisted and anyway, Oliver Gaskell had asked her whether she would be attending. His question had been casual, almost throwaway, and she was so long out of the dating game that she had no idea how she should interpret his interest. She felt rather silly, standing in a hall full of her junior doctors and nurses. She was relieved to see some of the younger consultants milling around the punch bowl with one of the sisters from Maternity, and made her way towards them.
*
He didn’t even see them coming. He had waited night after night for her to leave the nurses’ home. Most nights he had waited until almost ten p.m. and yet she had never set a foot outside.
Don’t come home until she has agreed to be your wife, his father had said.
His wife? He would see her dead before he married her. The stuck-up bitch was too full of herself for him to ever want her in his bed. Country women in Ireland did as they were told, and when they didn’t they took the fist. That was the way of it. She would make life far too much trouble. Her own mother had ruined her for any good man. His father must have been mad thinking he would want to marry her. Not now. Now, he would just make her pay for humiliating him.
The hand landed on his shoulder with a thud. There were two of them.
‘Oh, a peeping Tom. My favourite,’ said one of the policemen. ‘Judge Pincher, he loves a peeping Tom. Caught one after his daughter once.’
The other policeman laughed. ‘Aye, right, let’s be having you down the station, young man, and it’s a cell for you. You’ll find it very comfortable. Up before Pincher you will be in the morning and then your bed may not be as comfy as the cell.’
Patrick tried to run, but they downed him on the path before he had taken a second step. Handcuffs on. Cold metal digging into his flesh. Soil in his face. From the corner of his eye he saw his flaming cigarette stub on the damp cold grass, slowly fade and die.
*
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dessie, carrying a tray of drinks to the stage for the band, who were playing, ‘She Wears Red Feathers’. The dancers on the floor seemed to move as one as the floor vibrated to the sound of tapping feet. And then the tempo altered dramatically as the lead singer of the band picked up the microphone and began to sing his version of ‘Here in My Heart’. His voice was deep, melodious and sad, and as the strains of the haunting song caught at her heart, Emily thought he must surely be a professional. She stopped in her tracks, captured by the music.
She was so entranced that she found it difficult to tear her eyes away. How lovely, she thought. What a beautiful song. I need to work less and do things like this more often. She saw Dessie almost drop his tray of drinks as he raised his hand to wave to her. She waved back and took a step forward. She meant to move towards Dessie. To help him to steady the tray. But, instead, she stopped dead. It was the distraction, Dessie waving, that had taken her eye away from the lead singer on to the dance floor and straight on to Pammy, in the arms of Oliver Gaskell. Pammy’s head was buried in his chest and the light reflected from the shimmering seed pearls covering her dress.
Did Emily feel her own heart tighten? Did she feel a lump form in her throat when she saw his lips brush against her flowing dark hair, as he whispered something in her ear? No, she did not. What she felt was relief, as Dessie strode across the dance floor towards her, holding out a glass of punch, and rescued her from her lonely place on the edge of the dance floor.
‘Come here, will you, and let me hang your coat up for you. You know, I thought they had switched the lights on when you walked in. A ray of sunshine, you are.’
His fingers brushed against her own as she took the drink and she felt something she had never felt before. She wanted to reach out and wind her fingers around Dessie’s. She felt frumpy in her skirt and twinset, but Dessie didn’t seem to care what she was wearing. With those few words, he had made her feel as though it was she who was wearing a shimmering dress, covered in pearls. She could have kissed him with gratitude, or at least she thought it was gratitude.
When the band finished, the lead singer announced, ‘Time for refreshments, doctors and nurses. We shall return in fifteen minutes.’
As the lights clicked on, they all heard a sound, a little like a mewing cat.
It was Celia Forsyth and she was twisting herself into a dozen different shapes while furiously tearing at her skin, yelling, ‘Scratch my back, scratch my back, oh God, my back,’ to the girls from the knitting circle who were looking at her in horror.
People gasped as the seams at the back of her dress fell apart, opening from top to bottom, just as a sleeve began to detach itself from a shoulder. It was all over in seconds as a very agitated and humiliated Celia ran from the hall, screaming.
‘Were you responsible for that by any chance?’ asked Teddy as he led Dana across to the buffet in the corner of the hall.
‘I was not. What do you think I am, vengeful? Oh, all right then. I didn’t do it, but I know who did and honestly, as God is true, I really wish it had been me. Guess why Pammy was asking the pharmacist for ground rosehip!’
‘Ouch! Rosehip.’ Teddy flinched.
‘More,’ shouted a group of doctors to the band, as they picked up their instruments.
‘“Here in My Heart”, again, please, it was wonderful,’ shouted a doctor, hoping to entice a pretty nurse to slip into his arms.
The nurse was Beth, who almost jumped out of her skin when he tapped her on the shoulder. She had been giggling at the sight of Celia as she careered through the exit.
He was six foot four to her five foot two. But she couldn’t have cared less. It was her very first dance, and as he took her by the hand and led her on to the dance floor she thought that she might like to join Pammy on the social committee after all and maybe take charge and organize another one of these dances very soon.
We hope you enjoyed this book!
Nadine Dorries’ next book, The Children of Lovely Lane, is coming in winter 2016
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About Nadine Dorries
NADINE DORRIES grew up in a working-class family in Liverpool. She trained as a nurse herself, then followed with a successful career in the health industry in which she established and then sold her own business. She has been the MP for Mid-Bedfordshire since 2005 and has three daughters.
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About The Lovely Lane Series
It is 1953 and five very different girls are arriving at the nurses’ home in Lovely Lane, Liverpool, to start their training at St Angelus Hospital.
Dana has escaped from her family farm on the west coast of Ireland. Victoria is running away from a debt-ridden aristocratic background. Beth is an army brat and throws in her lot with bitchy Celia Forsyth. And Pammy has come from quite the wrong side of the tracks in Liverpool.
Now they find themselves in a very different world. From formidable Matron, to terrifying Sister Antrobus. From kind housekeeper, Mrs Duffy, to Dessie, who rules the porter’s lads – not to mention the doctors, who range from crusty to glamorous. Everyone has their place at St Angelus and woe betide anyone who strays from it.
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About The Four Streets Trilogy
In the tight-knit Irish Catholic community of the Four Streets, two girls are growing up.
One is motherless – and hated by the cold woman who is determined to take her dead mother’s place. The other is hiding a dreadful secret which she dare not let slip to anyone, lest it rips the heart out of the community.
What can the people of the Four Streets do when a betrayal at the very hea
rt of their world comes to light?
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First published in the UK in 2016 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Nadine Dorries, 2016
The Angels of Lovely Lane Page 40