By Juliet Armstrong, ©1966
That foggy London morning, when someone tried to snatch her handbag, was to have far-reaching consequences for Maura O’Shea, sending her winging across the seas to a new life in the sunny West Indies. It was indeed a far cry from the renowned St. Matthew’s Hospital in London to the little nursing home at Ste. Monique, but Nurse Maura was to find that the emotional problems facing her there were far, far greater than ever they were in London.
GRADE: B+
REVIEW:
Maura O’Shea is the Irish stereotype, red-haired and feisty;
“You could deal out a very smart box on the ear, if you thought a chap deserved
it,” she’s told. She is working in London when right there on the first page
her handbag is stolen and she is knocked to the ground. “A tall man, carrying a
suitcase, strode over to her and lifted her to her feet with his free arm,
firmly but gently, as though she were a precious piece of china.” Do we think
this gentleman makes an appearance on the last page of the book as well? We
sure do! His name is Paul Lasalle, and he is in town on business for his
plantation (yeesh) in the Caribbean. Because the robber is soon nabbed, he is
required to come back to town to testify at the trial in a few weeks, so the
pair go out regularly before he heads back home. But his brother, Claude, is
also in town—and he’s a more social fellow, frivolous with his emotions, soon
taking her out on a regular basis and calling her “darling,” which makes Paul’s
eyebrows rise concernedly when he returns, and he’s a bit too brusque for
Maura. “Was it that he suspected her of setting her cap at Claude, and regarded
her as on a lower social level than the Lasalles?”
But Claude has to return to the Caribbean soon, and Maura tells him she’s not going to see him any more—so he shows up and proposes marriage. It’s arranged that she will sail to the Caribbean in a few weeks, and at the first stop she gets a telegram telling her to get off there, though she’d planned to finish her trip at another island, and when she steps off, she’s met by Paul, who tells her that Claude has gone back to his ex-wife—whose existence surprises Maura. When Paul tells her he will pay for her to fly back to London on the next flight, instead of being grateful, she’s rude: “You’re in a great hurry to get me out of the island! I might have the plague!” she snaps, not at all grateful that he’s trying to help her out of a huge jam. Instead she takes a room in a boarding house and gets a job at a nursing home, but Paul warns her that the nursing home is on the verge of going bankrupt, because although it’s a profitable business, the owner, Mrs. Martin, took on a lot of debt to finance its startup and is having trouble paying her creditors as well as the business expenses. Again, is she thankful for the tip? No, she is not!
Yet he keeps popping around to see her or take her to dinner, and they inevitably squabble, mostly about his concerns about the men she is dating—his motivations transparent to everyone except Maura, who thinks, “How hard and distrustful he could be, how lacking in charity”—although one time when they are driving to dinner and she has fallen asleep in the car she dreams that he gently kissed her lips … and then suddenly, out of nowhere, Maura decides “to part with him finally and forever, would be utterly unbearable”! This is one of the worst sorts of plot twists, completely inconsistent—even if completely predictable—with the character we have followed in the last hundred pages. Yet she still argues with him at every turn, and then does her best friend Phyllis a bad turn when she dates her boyfriend and he thinks he’s fallen in love with her. Only a series of crises with both Paul and Phyllis—again, completely predictable—sort out everyone’s true feelings, although one of the crises, which lands Paul in the hospital, is so bizarre it’s hard for me to imagine Paul would ever look at Maura again.
In the meantime, Maura is being quite rude to a coworker who, it must be confessed, is not a nice person, though she should know even at 22 that she’s not helping the situation. Oddly, she is reluctant to visit Paul in the hospital but finally goes a week or two later, “cost her what it might in pride,” though it’s clear to me that she owes him a lot more than a visit—but he’s left the hospital days ago. She meets the nurse who had cared for him there, and now she’s stupidly in agonies that Paul has fallen for his nurse, wondering if she “was the reason for his silence”—and never mind that she hasn’t reached out to him at all, either, so maybe he’s wondering about her silence, but “she was too proud to ring up the Lasalles, as she would have loved to do.” Maura is her own worst enemy, and it’s a little difficult to understand what all the men see in her. And now she’s decided to leave the Caribbean in two weeks, another smart decision. Then her feud with her co-worker lands her in hot water at the immigration office, as she’s been working without a permit, and is told to leave the island the next day. What will happen next?
The obstacle with this book is that Maura is a stupid and not very likeable person. She deserves little of the good that happens to her and all
of the bad. But the writing is good, even if I found nothing for the Best
Quotes section above, and the other characters in the book are interesting. If
you can tolerate a very predictable plot (but then, aren’t all VNRN plots very
predictable?) and a foolish heroine, it’s not a bad read.