Nurse Jane in Teneriffe

By Jean S. MacLeod

When her sister died, Nurse Jane Lambert went out to the Canary Islands at her brother-in-law’s request to help care for his children. She had always loved Felipe, and could not help hoping that now perhaps he might come to care for her. But she arrived in Teneriffe to find a very different situation from what she had expected.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“All truth is brutal on occasion.” 

“Ideals aren’t much use without money to back them up.” 

“Creative genius has a moral code of its own.”

REVIEW:
Is it a nurse novel when the nurse in question has left her job and only spends two afternoons volunteering at the local clinic during the entire book? Here it might, I think, because Nurse Jane Lambert loves nursing and plans to return to it—and her general qualities of compassion, strength and independence are those of our accustomed nurse heroines. So, that settled, let’s turn our attention to Jane, who has flown to an island in Spain some months after her sister’s death to “seek out her sister’s children in an alien land,” where they live in luxury with their father, a titled plantation owner. Her secret agenda stems from the fact that she had been in love with her brother in law, Felipe, and had been dating him when her sister Grace had rudely stolen him away and married him. She still loves him, of course, because he was “kind, considerate, charming and a little remote.” When she arrives, however, she find he now possesses one of those qualities—guess which one?

Jane wants to believe that the crushing heartbreak of the failure of his marriage, or rather the more devastating insult of his wife’s affair and pregnancy, have made Felipe ruthless, “harsh and unrelenting overlord” he is now, but this is hard to swallow, and Jane’s complete lack of judgment about people doesn’t help. Everyone seems to know that she’s come hoping to marry Felipe—his Mrs. Danvers-esque sister Teresa, who cruelly manipulates the household for her own ends; the local doctor; even Felipe himself.

The children, Chris, age 4, and Rozanne, either 5 or 6, are as uninterested in Jane as everyone else is. Chris is already a spoiled, “haughty” “autocratic” monster, while his sister is openly neglected and abused, but whose constant sullen and rude attitude nonetheless makes her an unappealing character, as much as I’d wanted to pity the unwanted child. So Jane mostly just hangs around the house or accompanies the children on their trips to town. She does manage to get into trouble when she stops for an hour at Dr. Andrew Ballantyne’s clinic—there’s a big epidemic on, you see, and her one hour of work will make so much difference! It does to her, anyway: “A strange excitement ran through Jane as she slipped into the familiar uniform, a sense of renewal, of purpose. She had come home.” When Felipe finds out Jane has been “missing,” however—30 minutes late in collecting the kids from their swimming lessons—he’s furious! He snaps at Andrew, who has walked Jane back to the pool, that she is not entitled to make her own decisions and all but forbids her to work as a nurse for Andrew—in part because he believes Andrew was Grace’s lover. (Jane believes this, too, so it’s quite startling when she tells Felipe, “I just can’t imagine Andrew Ballantyne doing such a thing,” when she’s been convinced of it on numerous other occasions.)

Then on the patio that evening, as Jane’s “heart fluttered,” Felipe insists he will marry Jane. “It was the thing she had wanted more than anything in the world”—but it’s clear now that he does not love her. “He needed her to grace his house, to be a second mother to his children, but there was no love left in his heart.” Now suddenly Jane decides that though she had loved him, her fluttering heart must have just been indigestion. “I never really knew you. You were a—sort of symbol to me, a—a figure of romance." And poof! now she’s in love with Andrew! “her first swift, passionate attachment to Felipe was as nothing compared with what she felt now.” But “twice she had loved where Grace had come first,” she thinks, still believing the noble Andrew had been having an affair with her sister.

Up until now the book had been somewhat Gothic in its attitude—haunting would be too strong a word, but at least mildly complex and dark—but suddenly it loses its character and becomes a madcap frenzy of activity. There’s a dying baby to save, a stolen emerald, a secret and stupidly fruitless journey to town just to warn Andrew that he will be accused of the theft by the vindictive Felipe, when the town gossip mill has delivered the news better than she can ride a horse (it’s her third time), Rozanne runs away and is chased by Jane, a fall down a cliff, and then an extremely long conversation between Jane and Andrew as she is barely managing to cling to the precipitous cliff. All the “mysteries” are revealed to the unsurprised reader, and even Andrew’s ignominious career in the “backwater” clinic is suddenly given a glorious future. The last third of the book didn’t fit the rest of it, and that was a disappointment.

The plot is reminiscent of Peggy Gaddis’ very annoying Nurse at Spanish Cay, but Harlequin regular Catherine Airlie is a new author for me, and I found her writing pretty good, though this the only “nurse” novel she seems to have written. Jane is a bit wishy-washy as a character, showing strength and resolution one minute, then gullibly swallowing obvious falsehoods or climbing a wall and becoming too frightened to climb down. Other characters are well-drawn and at least interesting, and the descriptions of the island are really enjoyable. So Nurse Jane is a mixed bag, but not a total loss.