Lorimers at War

by Anne Melville

  ‘Then he is the one who should go. This is my room and I’ll say what I please in it. Go to your own room, Grant.’ He waited a moment but his son did not move. ‘I said, get out. Did you hear me? Get out of here.’

  Naked and very tall, he must have appeared like a giant to the frightened boy as he left his bed and staggered across the room, dizzy with the effects of fever. At the last moment, the fair-haired boy twisted away from his father and half rolled, half slithered out of the room.

  ‘You see!’ exclaimed Ralph. ‘He can move well enough when he wants to. It’s our duty, yours and mine together, to teach him the best way to use what strength he has. But how can I expect him to succeed when you always go behind my back to spoil him?’

  Exhausted by the effort, he flung himself back into bed, hoping that Lydia would smooth the sheet and make him comfortable again. But instead she followed Grant out on to the verandah, her lips tight with anger.

  Ralph groaned to himself as he lay back on the pillow. Lydia had been the best wife that any man could hope for until the birth of that last, unwanted child; but these days there seemed to be as much quarrelling as love between them. He tossed restlessly from side to side until weakness combined with the humidity to exhaust him. For a little while he slept, and awoke to find Duke sitting beside the bed.

  The sight of his assistant never failed to cheer Ralph. Perhaps it was Duke’s own smile which worked the miracle. At least three of the young man’s ancestors had been white men, so that his skin was lighter than that of most of the islanders, but his flashing white teeth and ready grin were typical of Jamaica. Sometimes when Ralph was angry with Lydia, and sickened by the sight of Grant, he longed to proclaim that Brinsley was not the only son of whom he could feel proud, that Duke was a Lorimer as well. But that was a secret which had been kept for twenty-eight years and he recognized how hurtful it would be to reveal the truth now.

  ‘I brought the accounts,’ Duke said. ‘But if you too tired, next week good enough,’

  ‘No, I’ll look at them now.’ Ralph struggled to sit up, with Duke’s help. ‘Bring me something to drink.’

  The water from the covered pitcher was too warm to be refreshing. Ralph drank it thirstily but without enjoyment. Half apologetically, Duke took a small bottle from the pouch on his belt.

  ‘Put that away!’ Ralph ordered. ‘If you came more often to chapel, you’d know how strongly I feel about total abstinence.’

  ‘A little rum in the water helps fight the fever,’ said Duke. ‘Strong medicine, not drink.’

  He poured it as he spoke, and held it out. Ralph shook his head and then looked in irritation towards the open door as he heard from outside the familiar sound of Grant calling for his mother. He would have gone out to whip the whining child if he had been strong enough, for suddenly he felt that he could bear Grant’s petulance no longer. Perhaps that was why he abandoned the principles of a lifetime and in an angry gesture drained the gourd which Duke was holding to his lips.

  The rum was not watered at all. Ralph gasped as the spirit burned his throat. For a moment he dared not move or even speak; then his whole body flushed with warmth, balancing the heat of the fever so that for a little while he ceased to shiver and could relax in comfort.

  ‘Mother! Mother!’ Outside, Grant was still shouting, more loudly now and with a trace of desperation. ‘Mother!’

  It sounded as though Lydia for once was not near enough to come running to the boy’s call. Perhaps, thought Ralph hopefully, she had at last taken some notice of her husband’s opinion and had left Grant to look after himself. His anger faded into a feeling of well-being. It might be as well after all to leave the accounts until next week. He was just sliding back into a sleeping position when Grant called again. ‘Father! Father!’

  ‘Come here if you want me!’ Ralph shouted back. The response was automatic and yet even as he expressed his annoyance he was uneasy. It was surprising that Grant should call for someone he knew to be angry with him. And there were other sounds outside by now: a scrambling of bare feet, a murmuring of low voices. Ralph gestured at Duke to go and see what was happening.

  ‘And tell that child to stop shouting,’ he said. While he tried to keep a normal irritation in his voice, fear was growing in his heart. He stayed in bed as Duke went out, so that for a few moments longer he could pretend that nothing was wrong, but the effects of the rum had worn off already and his body was rigid with cold.

  When Duke returned he was carrying Grant. He stood in the doorway for a moment, almost as near to tears as the sobbing ten-year-old. Then he moved out of the way, and four of the villagers carried Lydia inside.

  3

  The building of Brinsley House at the end of the eighteenth century had been a gesture indicating a change of status. From that time onwards the Lorimers ceased to be merely one out of many shipping families of Bristol and were acknowledged as merchant princes. Magnificently dominating the Avon Gorge, the house was designed to be filled with large numbers of children, servants and guests. It was in Brinsley House that John Junius Lorimer had brought up his three legitimate children: William, Margaret and Ralph; and it was to this same house that Margaret had brought her half-sister Alexa, orphaned at the age of nine. From the ruins of the family fortune after the bank crash of 1878, William Lorimer had managed to salvage his father’s mansion, and had in turn brought up his own three children there. But William was dead; and his elder son, Matthew, had quarrelled with his parents in 1895 and, turning his back on any possible inheritance, had left Bristol for Paris, never since returning. As the end of 1915 approached, Arthur Lorimer lived alone in the mansion, attended only by a few servants who were too young or too old for war work. It was not a style of existence which suited the old house and, at the moment when one of the Lorimer Line’s banana boats was approaching the Portishead docks with letters from Ralph Lorimer on board, as well as produce from the Bristow plantation, Arthur had evolved a plan to bring the place briefly back to life.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about Christmas,’ he said to his sister Beatrice, who had travelled from London for a weekend free from the fear of Zeppelin raids. ‘You’ll spend it at Brinsley House, I hope. Mrs Shaw asked yesterday whether she should arrange for the usual decorations to be put in place. At first I thought it unnecessary to go to such trouble when only the two of us will be here. But then I had second thoughts. It seems a pity to abandon old customs. So I told her that I should want a tree to be decorated as usual, and holly and candles to be arranged in the galleries. And with that picture in my mind, I’ve decided to hold a children’s party. Or even more than one.’

  He was amused by the expression of horror on her face. Beatrice had no interest in children and no liking for them. ‘Whose children?’ she demanded.

  ‘First of all the children of my employees. But in addition to them, there are a good many boys and girls in Bristol whose fathers are at the front and whose mothers have trouble enough to provide even the most necessary food. They’re not likely to receive many of the presents which you and I could always expect in our childhood. We could give them here, I thought, an afternoon to remember, a little brightness in the gloom. It wouldn’t be too difficult to arrange. A few games to play, perhaps a conjuror to amuse them, a really good tea and a parcel to take home. I hope such a prospect wouldn’t frighten you away, Beatrice. I should need your advice. And your help too, on the day.’

  He knew that he could rely on it. Beatrice’s talent for organization had been increased rather than completely satisfied by her office work in London. She acted as a kind of remote quarter-master for all the women’s units sent abroad by the suffrage movement and took pride in obtaining and dispatching all the supplies for which she was asked, although their safe arrival was not always within her power to secure. As he had expected, she gave the quick nod which meant that she accepted his proposal in spite of its unexpectedness.

  ‘I’ll buy the gifts for you and wrap them, if you like,’ she offer
ed. ‘Tell me how much you want to spend on each, how many girls you expect and how many boys. And of what ages.’

  ‘Thank you very much. But Beatrice, don’t choose presents that are too sensible.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt the mothers would like to see a warm garment or a pair of shoes come out of each parcel. But I want to see the children smile with pleasure rather than gratitude. They should have toys. Something to play with. Something that their parents might consider a waste of money.’

  ‘You surprise me more and more, Arthur, but very well. I’ll buy skipping ropes and dolls and footballs and tin soldiers.’

  Arthur was not ashamed that she should think him sentimental. He had never tried to hide the pleasure he took in the sight of children. The smallness of their neat, slim bodies, the animal energy of their movements, their unrestrained pleasure in making a noise: all these things won his approval. Perhaps he envied them a freedom of movement which he had never been able to indulge – the precision of his mind as he marshalled the figures which kept his business prosperous was reflected in his tight, unhurried walk and quiet voice.

  ‘Would Aunt Margaret care to come to your party, do you think?’ asked Beatrice. ‘I remember how very much she enjoyed playing with us when we were small.’

  ‘I should think she’ll have enough to do as commandant of the hospital at Blaize,’ Arthur replied. ‘But I’ll invite her, of course. And Frisca would be the same age as many of the young guests. She might like to come as well.’

  While he was considering his idea for the party he had needed to remind himself that not all children were like Frisca. It was true that he liked little girls in general, but Frisca was almost an idealization of childhood made flesh. Blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful and irrepressibly energetic, she aroused in him a longing to own her so that he could buy pretty clothes for her and show her off and feel proud of her. But the children of his employees were more likely to be shy and badly dressed.

  Enough time had been spent on frivolities. Even on a Saturday evening Arthur was not sorry to be interrupted by a messenger from his dockside office. A ship was just in from Jamaica and a lengthy detour made necessary by the danger of submarine attack had put part of her cargo at risk of spoiling.

  ‘I’ll come at once,’ Arthur said. He glanced at the letters which the messenger had brought from the ship. Two of them were from his Uncle Ralph – one addressed to himself and one to be put in the post for Margaret. But they, like the rest, could wait until he returned.

  ‘We could ask Matthew,’ said Beatrice suddenly.

  Puzzled, Arthur paused in the doorway. He had already dismissed the subject of the party from his mind and did not take his sister’s meaning at once.

  ‘For Christmas,’ explained Beatrice. ‘His quarrel was never with us but only with our parents. Now that they are both dead, we could all be friends again.’

  It was not a suggestion to be adopted too impulsively. Arthur knew how attached Beatrice had always been to the elder of her two brothers, and how much it had upset her when he ran away from home to become an artist. But it was necessary for Arthur to consider his own position.

  There was no danger, he decided. Their father’s will – in which William recognized that it was his younger son who deserved to inherit the Lorimer business interests and who had the talent to manage them – had been watertight. And if Matthew had wished to challenge it, or even to appeal for generosity, he would have done so long ago. As Beatrice said, there was nothing to prevent them from resuming a friendly relationship.

  Except, it occurred to him, for one practical difficulty.

  ‘I agree with you in principle,’ he said. ‘It would be a good gesture. But how are we to get in touch with him? I’ve no idea whereabouts in the world he is at this moment.’

  4

  Young men were swept into the army by dreams of glory, by the shame of being presented with white feathers, or by the prospect of a regular weekly wage. None of these considerations affected Matthew Lorimer and if anyone had asked him why he had enlisted, he would have been hard put to find a sensible answer. There was no conscription as yet and his forty-second birthday even excluded him from the voluntary scheme under which men attested their willingness to serve when they were needed. He felt no hatred for the Germans, although it was true that his years in Paris had given him a love for France and a wish to see its soil free once again from the devastation of battle. Nor was he in any sense a combatant. He had joined the army only because that was a necessary first step towards secondment as an official war artist.

  Nobody had compelled or even invited him to spend his time sketching the shell-shocked landscape of craters and barbed wire, with wounded men propped against sandbags and stretcher bearers ducking low as they dashed from the dubious shelter of one hedge to another – in fact, his realistic pictures of soldiers hardly recognizable as human beings beneath their coverings of mud and blood were not always to War Office taste. He could have continued to prosper as a painter of portraits. There were still plenty of rich women in England. They looked a little more tired than in the previous year and their eyes could not always conceal the sadness of bereavement as their sons or brothers, husbands of fiancés, were lost to them in the Flanders trenches or on the Gallipoli beaches. But their commissions for portraits could have kept Matthew alive, if he had chosen to make his living in that way; and in addition a new market had opened as the war news grew grimmer and frightened mothers commissioned paintings of sons who might never return from France.

  Only restlessness could explain why Matthew should have turned his back on all that. He had been restless all his life, but at first there had been a purpose to his sudden movements. When he left England as a young man, it was not solely because he was bored with accounts and shipping statistics: more positively, he had set his heart on a painting career. And when, ten years later, he abandoned his life in Paris, it was not out of dissatisfaction but because of his projected marriage to Alexa. The discovery that Alexa was his aunt – a relationship for many years concealed by her adoption and by the closeness of their ages – had left him in a state of shock. Recognizing that he could never marry her, he was unable to prevent himself from continuing to love her. Jealous and unhappy, he had watched from the back of the admiring crowd as she emerged from her wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on the arm of Lord Glanville. Secretly he hoped that she had chosen to acquire a title and a fortune by marriage only as a compensation – because by an absurd accident of birth she was separated from the man she really loved. At some point, he knew, he would have to accept in his heart what his reason had already recognized as an inevitable and permanent separation; but until that point came he drifted without purpose, using the war as an excuse for physical insecurity in order that he need no longer come to terms with the deeper purposelessness of his life.

  In the last month of 1915, Matthew was back in England. The Battle of Loos seemed to have existed in a different world from that of his quiet Chelsea studio, but as he worked his sketches up into a large painting of the battlefield at night all its sounds came back to haunt him: the boom of cannons, the spitting of machine guns, the erratic stabs of rifle fire, the deafening explosions of shells and grenades and, above all, the screams of the wounded. He slept badly, continually waking in a nightmare conviction that he had been blinded and would never paint again. In an effort to tire himself out, he stayed at the easel until the small hours of every morning. So when his doorbell rang late on a December evening, his strained eyes failed to focus immediately on the young woman who stood outside.

  She was a working girl whose shabby clothes were too thin to prevent her from shivering in the winter air. After allowing him a few seconds to study her, she gave a resigned laugh.

  ‘You don’t recognize me.’

  Her voice, with its Midland accent, stirred Matthew’s memory and he stared harder at the strong-boned face.

  ‘Of course I do.�
� Matthew had abandoned the snobbish class judgements of his parents on the day he left Brinsley House. Even if he had not had a particular reason for kindness in this case, he would never have begrudged politeness to someone whom his mother would have regarded only as a possible applicant for a post as kitchen maid. ‘It took me a moment to move my mind from the picture I’m working on, that’s all. Come upstairs.’

  She looked curiously at the huge painting as she followed him into the studio and allowed him to take her coat.

  ‘Is that what it’s like, then?’

  ‘No. I can’t find any way to paint the noise. This is a safe and silent version of Hell. The reality is rather different.’

  ‘Bit of a change from when you were painting me.’

  ‘It’s all connected, though. These explosions of light are caused by the shells which you help to make. Well, perhaps these are shells filled by some German Peggy, but yours will be having the same effect on the other side of the line.’

  She was intelligent enough to be amused at the way in which he let her know that he had remembered her name.

  ‘What happened to the picture you did of me?’ she asked.

  ‘The munitions factory one went to be turned into a poster. One of a series to persuade women to take up essential war work. The other one’s here somewhere. Sit down, and I’ll find it.’

  Earlier in the year he had been asked to make a portfolio on the Home Front and chose to concentrate on the contribution which women were making to the war. Everywhere he went he found women doing men’s jobs, from farm labourers and gamekeepers in the country, to bus conductors and policewomen in the towns. Particularly in the factories, as the men moved out the women moved in. Peggy had been making fuses in a munitions factory when he first sketched her three months ago. She worked long hours in conditions which he privately regarded as criminally dangerous, and was faced at the end of the day with a long walk to the poor lodgings which were all she could afford. She was not by birth a town girl, and yet not exactly a country girl either. Her father was a coal miner and her home in Leicestershire was a mining village. There had been no openings for girls there, she had told him and, although she could have found employment on a farm nearer to home, she had some talent for sewing and was reluctant to expose her hands to such rough work in all weathers.