Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake’.
The tea rooms also, however, once open, become the scene of Jane Adeane — a highly skilled nurse — rejecting a proposal from Dr Valentine Ross, her colleague at her father’s surgery. Jane has achieved a near-mythic status as a nurse in Bath and ‘was described as “The Angel”, or sometimes as “The Tall Angel” or “The White Angel’ or, more frequently, as ‘The Angel of the Baths”’. Jane flees to London after Dr Ross’s proposal to stay with her unconventional aunt — an unmarried painter called Emmeline Adeane and is soon seduced by a married Italian beauty, Julietta Sims.
