The Nightingale Girls

CHAPTER Fifty-Five



VERONICA HANLEY MARCHED up the worn stone steps to St Oswald’s Church Vicarage and rapped smartly on the door with far more confidence than she was feeling. For all she had travelled the world with her father’s regiment, she was never really at ease outside the familiar surroundings of the Nightingale Hospital. She felt uncomfortable out of uniform, too, in her squashed hat and old coat that smelt of mothballs.

For tuppence she would have turned around and got straight back on the bus to Bethnal Green. But she’d come all this way and now she had to see it through. Show some backbone, as her father used to say.

She hoped Mrs Tremayne would forgive the intrusion. She hoped even more she would forgive what Veronica had to say.

The housekeeper showed her into the drawing room, a beautiful sunny room with French windows that opened out on to the garden. Veronica stood for a moment, admiring the beautifully manicured lawn, trimmed by immaculate borders, not a flower out of place. It was exactly the kind of garden she herself would have designed, appealing to her sense of order.

‘Miss Hanley?’ Constance Tremayne greeted her from the doorway. She looked rather put out to see her. ‘This is most unexpected,’ she said in a cool voice. ‘You’re lucky to have caught me, I’m due at a charity committee meeting in an hour.’

‘I won’t keep you, Mrs Tremayne. I’m sure you’re very busy.’ Veronica’s throat suddenly felt very dry. She would have appreciated a cup of tea, but Mrs Tremayne didn’t look as if she was about to offer her one. ‘I’ve come about Helen. You’re not really thinking of sending her to Scotland, are you?’

‘Not thinking about it, Miss Hanley. I’m going to do it. As soon as it can be arranged, in fact.’ Mrs Tremayne advanced into the room. She looked neat as ever in her sage green twinset and tweed skirt, her hair immaculately knotted at the nape of her neck. She was such a tiny, delicate creature, Veronica felt like a clodhopper next to her.

Constance Tremayne bestowed a smile on her. ‘Actually, Miss Hanley, I’ve been meaning to thank you. If you hadn’t alerted me to what was going on, I might never have found out what my daughter was up to. And then, heaven knows what would have happened.’ Her shoulders shuddered delicately. ‘Thanks to you, I have managed to step in and stop Helen from making a grave mistake, one which could have blighted her whole future.’

‘That’s just it,’ Veronica said. ‘I think you are the one making the mistake. You shouldn’t take Helen away from the Nightingale.’ She noticed Constance Tremayne’s darkening expression, but blundered on, ‘She’s an excellent student, and an asset to the hospital. And what’s more I believe she is happy and settled there. It would be so unfair to uproot her and move her all the way to Scotland. And who knows what effect it will have on her studies.’

‘Miss Hanley, please.’ Constance held up one hand to silence her. ‘I have no wish to offend you, but as I explained to Matron, neither you nor she has any idea what it’s like to bring up a daughter. Helen is young and naïve. She doesn’t know her own mind. She must be protected from her own base desires . . .’

Veronica Hanley stared at her in frustration. She wished she understood delicacy and tact, because she needed them for what she had to say next. For a moment she almost wished she had Matron’s facility with words. She might not approve of Kathleen Fox’s methods, or indeed anything much about her, but she had to admit Matron had a way of talking that seemed to get through to people. Unlike Veronica, who just seemed to blunder about, trampling over everything like the big, clumsy thing she was.

A bull in a china shop, her mother had always called her. That was exactly what she felt like now.

‘Well, Miss Hanley,’ Constance was already dismissing her. ‘Thank you for coming all this way, but I do have another appointment . . .’

‘Wait.’ Veronica rummaged in her ancient handbag. It had been her mother’s and had lain unused at the back of her wardrobe for such a long time the leather was cracked and dry. ‘I have a photograph I would like to show you. I think it’s in here somewhere . . .’

Constance tutted. ‘Can’t it wait, Miss Hanley? Only I am in rather a hurry.’

‘Please, it won’t take a moment . . . ah, here it is.’ She pulled the photograph out of her bag. The sepia image had yellowed with age. ‘I think you might find it interesting.’

Constance Tremayne took the photograph with a heavy sigh. ‘Really, Miss Hanley, I don’t have time to . . .’ She stopped dead as her gaze fixed on the figures in the photograph.

Veronica had seen the colour drain from people’s faces when they were given bad news about a loved one. And here it was, happening to Constance Tremayne. Her skin turned the colour of putty.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said faintly. ‘How did you get this?’

‘Before I began my training at the Nightingale, I was a cadet nurse at a hospital on the south coast. St Anthony’s in Whitstable. That’s a photograph of all the staff, taken one Christmas.’ She pointed over Mrs Tremayne’s shoulder at the chubby girl standing head and shoulders above her neighours in the middle of a row. ‘That’s me. I was a big galumphing thing even then.’ She moved her finger up to the back row of the photograph. ‘Those are the sisters, and those,’ she traced some more of the faces, ‘are the staff nurses. I can still remember their names, all these years later. Porter, Casey . . . and there’s Nurse Brown. She was on the TB ward. Very efficient. I must confess, I always wanted to be like her.’

‘Fascinating, I’m sure.’ Constance recovered her composure as she handed the photograph back.

‘But something happened to Staff Nurse Brown. Something rather shocking, I’m afraid.’ Miss Hanley gazed at the photograph for a moment longer. ‘I’ve never had anything to do with gossip. Even as a cadet, I kept myself to myself and never joined in when the other girls gleefully spread rumours about each other. I think it’s rather ghoulish to derive enjoyment from other people’s misfortune, don’t you? But even with my head in a book, I still heard stories. And the one about Staff Nurse Brown was just too difficult to ignore. Everywhere I went in the hospital, people seemed to be talking about it.’

She put the photograph back in her bag and snapped the clasp shut. It echoed around the silence of the room like shotgun fire.

‘You see, this unfortunate young woman fell in love with a doctor. A much older man, and married, too. Anyone with any sense could see straight away that he was just toying with her – apparently this man was notorious in the hospital as a seducer of innocent young nurses. But the poor, besotted girl truly believed that he loved her as she loved him, and that one day he would leave his wife and they would be together.

‘Eventually, of course, their affair was discovered, and there was a huge scandal,’ Veronica continued. ‘Suddenly this poor young woman’s folly was exposed in front of everyone. But she still didn’t care, because she genuinely believed that her lover would rescue her. But he didn’t. He avoided the scandal, kept his wife and his position at the hospital, and this girl was left to face the music alone. A dreadful business.’

Colour swept Constance’s taut cheekbones, but she said nothing.

‘Of course, she was sent away in disgrace,’ Veronica said. ‘She’d lost everything, including her good name. She had no choice but to leave the town where she’d grown up and move somewhere else. Start all over again, if you like.’ She shook her head. ‘I sometimes wonder what happened to her. I like to think she was able to start again, become the respectable, upstanding person she was always supposed to be, and find someone who was worthy of her love. I also like to think that her experience might have given her some kind of compassion and understanding. Especially where her own children are concerned.’

‘It might just as easily have made her want to protect those she loved from suffering the same fate.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Veronica agreed. ‘But hopefully she would also be wise enough to see that crushing the spirit out of them could only make them more determined to rebel against her. It might even drive them to make the same mistakes she did.’

She gazed at Constance who was now staring fixedly out of the window, as still as a statue. Only the convulsive movement of her throat showed she hadn’t been turned to stone.

‘I think Staff Nurse Brown would bring up her children to know right from wrong,’ Veronica continued. ‘I also think she would trust them to make the right decisions when the time came.’

There was a long, heavy silence. Veronica held her breath as Constance Tremayne turned to face her. Her face was a carefully blank mask.

‘It’s a very nice story,’ she said pleasantly. ‘But if you’ve quite finished, I do have my committee meeting?’

‘Of course. I won’t take up any more of your time.’

Miss Hanley heard the front door close behind her but didn’t look back until she reached the end of the drive. She’d half expected Mrs Tremayne to be standing at the window, watching her go, but she was nowhere in sight.

She cursed herself for coming. She didn’t know if she’d made it better or worse for Helen Tremayne by trying to talk to her mother. And there was so much more she wished she’d said, too. She wanted to assure Mrs Tremayne that she would never tell her story again, not to another living soul. She wanted to tell her how much she respected and admired her, how she looked up to her.

Just as she’d once looked up to poor Constance Brown.