Lorimers at War

by Anne Melville

  ‘Yes, sir. But I don’t ever want to take what’s hers. If she comes back, it must all be for her. All the land.’

  ‘No.’ Ralph saw no need to mention his fear that if Kate did survive the Revolution she might prove to have been infected by its philosophy. From childhood she had been a passionate defender of the underdog and it was too easy to imagine her refusing an inheritance or accepting it only to give it away. ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘You are the heir. The land is not to be divided, and it’s for you. Kate’s a doctor. To have an income would be useful to her, but she doesn’t need land and she wouldn’t know how to run it. I want you to have it. You have always been obedient, and you must obey me in this. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Duke rose to his feet. As always, his head was held high and his back straight. He had inherited his bearing and fine features from his mother, Chelsea Mattison, whose beauty as a young woman had proved irresistible. From his father he had inherited a powerful physique and a shrewd head for business. His body was as strong and athletic as Brinsley’s had been – and he shared the same love of cricket – but his nature was more industrious and his character more serious. He was serious now as he looked at Ralph. ‘Maybe you don’t want I tell anyone outside about this,’ he said. ‘But just once I have to say it out loud. Thank you, Father.’

  The emotion of the moment, unexpected because he had thought to have it under control, caused Ralph to choke and cry out. He opened his arms to embrace his son, allowing his senses to register the feel of the strong muscles and the smooth skin. It was right for him to be ashamed of his responsibility for Duke’s birth, but he was proud to have such a son. He had lost his merry, hardworking wife, his golden boy, his lion-hearted daughter, but after all there was still someone to love. There had been occasions before this one when he had wept in Duke’s arms, but his tears then were caused by rum and depression. Now he cried for joy.

  Afterwards he made a copy of his message to Arthur, in case a U-boat should sink the ship which carried the original. The next day he travelled to Kingston and arranged for the separate dispatch of the two identical letters. Then, in his lawyer’s office, he signed the will which had already been drawn up in accordance with his instructions.

  The reminder that he still had family ties apart from Grant should have renewed his interest in life and restored him to cheerfulness. Instead, the assurance that he had settled his affairs on earth led his thoughts more towards the next world, as though he had not only chosen an heir but already handed over the inheritance. Knowing that it was in good hands, he no longer even pretended to interest himself in the management of the plantation. But he was still the pastor, and still every Sunday, shaved and sober, he preached to the congregation with some of the old fire and taught the Sunday School with some of the old patience. For the rest, he grew listless and slovenly.

  His congregation were tolerant people. Conscious of their own transgressions and mindful, too, of the prosperity he had brought them during the thirty-five years of his pastorate, they took little notice of his bouts of drunkenness. Under the influence of rum he now became silent, not rowdy. He was waiting, they realized, for God to call him Home. In a curious way their respect for his holiness grew with this realization. Patiently and lovingly they waited with him.

  9

  The music room at Blaize had been preserved from the hospital’s increasing demands for space. In it, Alexa spent an hour every morning practising her vocal exercises. If Piers, her husband – or anyone else – had asked her directly, she would have had to admit that she did not ever expect to return to the stage as a prima donna. The nights of triumph, the applause, the curtain calls, the bouquets – all these were gone for ever.

  Were she to be honest with herself, she would admit also that this was not entirely the fault of the war. Her international career had effectively come to an end when she consented to become Lady Glanville. The interruption was intended to be no more than temporary, but the tásk of producing an heir had proved less simple than she anticipated. It was part of the bargain she had made with Piers that he should have a son, and a good many months had been wasted on the baby daughter who died within a week and the renewed hopes which ended in miscarriage.

  After the eventual achievement of Pirry’s birth there had been just one season in which, with health and voice restored, she had sung the leading parts in her own opera house; but she was as well able as anyone else to recognize that this was only a hobby, a tiny tributary of the main stream of opera. The war had robbed her of even this, but it would scarcely have been possible in any event for Lady Glanville to have stepped back into the place which Alexa Reni had vacated.

  For one thing, she had already – earlier in 1917 – passed her fortieth birthday. As a young woman she had scornfully dismissed singers who spoiled the great reputations of their youth by continuing to perform after their voices passed their peak, vowing never to make the same mistake herself. If her career had not been interrupted, she now confessed to herself, that vow would have been broken. But she was realistic enough to recognize that if she were to attempt a full return to the stage she would be using her reputation only to ruin it.

  To her surprise, the discovery did not depress her. With a husband who adored her, she no longer felt the need to make conquests and collect tokens of admiration: her private life was contented to the point of placidity. As for her professional life, it was enough that she had once been at the very top of the tree. She had been ambitious as a young girl and her ambitions had been fulfilled. No one could deprive her of the memory of success and so she was able to let the experience of it slip away.

  Not that any of that made any difference to the perfection of her approach. The soldiers to whom she sang nowadays, whether in camps or hospitals, had little interest in opera, preferring to hear ‘Keep the home fires burning’ or the hit songs from Chu Chin Chow. Either alone or in the concert party she had organized she gave them what they wanted, but with a quality of voice which would have satisfied the most meticulous critic of a performance at the Royal Opera House.

  On a frosty day in November 1917, her first engagement was at a rehabilitation centre. Margaret had asked her to inspect the various training schemes in operation there, in case any of the ideas and techniques could be put to use in the convalescent wards at Blaize; and the commandant of the centre had expressed himself delighted to give her lunch and act as her personal guide before the afternoon recital began.

  ‘Our chief problem here is one of morale,’ he explained as they moved quietly from one room to another. ‘All our patients have been too severely wounded ever to return to the army. In a medical sense, they’ve come to the end of their convalescence by the time they’re sent here. They’re as fit as they ever will be again, but all of them are disabled for life. We try to train them for some new career, but naturally they arrive in a state of great depression, and they’re very reluctant to leave here and face the world again. We have to be rather brutal with the men who have finished their course – push them out, in point of fact. On the other hand, we sympathize with those who are just arriving and haven’t yet come to terms with their disabilities. The first classes they attend are what you might call therapy rather than formal training. In the old barn, for example –’ like the hospital at Blaize, the centre was a temporary conversion from a country house – ‘we’re running an art class for men who’ve lost the use of one or both legs but still have their hands and eyes undamaged. One of our patients – the only civilian here – turned out to be a professional artist. A very talented chap. He acts as instructor – that’s his therapy. The idea is that if one of them turns out to have any talent, he ould be more intensively trained either to teach art or to take up commercial drawing; but in any case it does them all good to feel that they’re capable of producing something. They’ll be packing up in the next few minutes ready for your concert, so they won’t mind being interrupted.’

  He pushed open the door. Outside, it was
a bitterly cold day. But inside the barn the air was made hot and stuffy by three paraffin stoves grouped round a makeshift platform on which a model was posing. A dozen men in hospital blue sat round the platform, their chairs and easels widely spaced so that the instructor could move between them in his wheelchair. The opening of the door allowed the cold air to stab into the barn. The model was too well-trained to move, but the instructor looked round in slight irritation. Alexa gasped in a sudden shock as she recognized the man who had been her first love. She felt her arm being seized by her companion. Before she had time to understand what was happening she was outside again, with the door slamming behind her.

  Dizzily, she leaned for a moment against the wall of the barn while the commandant exploded into an apology which she did not understand.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lady Glanville. My fault entirely – I should have warned them – you must forgive me – I do apologize.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Alexa asked faintly. It was clear to her that she was expected to reassure him, but since she saw nothing for which he could be blamed she found it difficult to choose the right words.

  ‘The model,’ he said. ‘Mr Lorimer wasn’t expecting a lady visitor, of course. I allow him a free hand in the choice of subjects. But of course if I had told him you were coming, he would have found something more suitable today.’

  ‘Was the model naked, then?’ Alexa had a vague impression of the profile of a young man, almost certainly blind; but she had been distracted before her eyes could take in the rest of his body.

  ‘You didn’t see? I was afraid – you looked so startled – and quite justifiably so.’

  ‘Not by the model,’ said Alexa. ‘No, I didn’t see. It was Mr Lorimer himself who startled me. He’s a relation of mine, as it happens. But we’d lost touch. I didn’t even know he’d been wounded. It was a shock. Is it serious?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ The commandant shook his head sadly. In relief that he had not after all caused offence to an influential visitor, he was willing to talk freely. ‘Very considerable injuries to the spine and abdomen. Wheelchair for the rest of his life, I’m afraid, and basic nursing care. No reason, of course, why he shouldn’t continue to paint. You might say he’s lucky, for an artist. Blindness would have been far worse in his case. But there was no injury to his eyesight at all. Nor to his manual dexterity. Count your blessings, I tell him. But he’s as downcast as any of the others. Nothing worth living for, never going to be a great artist now, all that sort of thing. It’s only to be expected. He’s a good teacher, though, and it’s getting through to him that he’s helping some of the others. With any luck, that will be a help to him in turn, given time.’

  ‘After the concert, perhaps I could talk to him privately.’ Alexa could barely bring the words to her lips. ‘Is there anywhere we could meet?’

  ‘Of course, Lady Glanville. I’ll see to it.’

  She felt a moment of panic at the ease with which the arrangement was made. On the day of their engagement she had promised Piers that she would never see Matthew again. But neither of them then could have envisaged the circumstances of this new encounter. A happily-married woman, mother of a four-year-old son; and a severely disabled man. What harm could a conversation between them do? And it would be unthinkable to turn her back on a member of the family. She had spoken the truth when she claimed a relationship with the instructor. Matthew, after all – in spite of being three years older than herself – was her nephew.

  It was not an easy meeting. The commandant put his own office at their disposal and Alexa waited until Matthew had arrived there before she joined him. She had sung all her songs that afternoon for him – and he, meeting her gaze steadily, had known it. So there was no longer any element of shock in the encounter, but the constraints imposed by their past relationship remained. It was impossible, naturally, for Alexa to kiss him; but equally impossible, for quite different reasons, to shake hands as though they were mere acquaintances.

  Twelve years had passed since they last saw each other. At the ball which Lord Glanville had given in 1905 for Alexa Reni, the star of the new season at the Royal Opera House, she and Matthew had danced together, their eyes bright with love and excitement. And then Alexa had been forced to tell him what she had only recently learned herself – that her father, the mysterious man who had had a liaison with her mother in the last years of his life, was Matthew’s grandfather, John Junius Lorimer.

  She had done her best to persuade Matthew then that the discovery was of little importance. It was true that they could no longer contract a valid marriage, as they had hoped, but what did that matter to an artist and a singer? Alexa had been sincere when she said that she cared nothing for convention. That had made all the greater the shock of hearing Matthew declare that she must be free to marry one day, to be respected and to lead a conventionally happy life in the class of society which her beauty and talent entitled her to enter. He had kissed her with a fervour which left no doubt of the passion he was renouncing. Then he had run from the ballroom, never to see her again. Until now.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Alexa felt her voice shaking. She leaned back against the door, trying to laugh at her own inadequacy.

  ‘Well, I do,’ said Matthew. ‘I have to say that you’re more beautiful than ever. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but you’ve grown even lovelier than when you were eighteen. Lucky Lord Glanville. I was glad when you chose him to marry. He seemed a kind man. Why don’t you sit down? You’ve been told, I suppose, what’s wrong with me.’

  He was talking too much for the same reason that Alexa was talking too little. Neither of them was quite certain what their relationship was or could be. She sat down and did her best to conduct an ordinary conversation.

  ‘Not in any detail,’ she said. ‘How did it happen, Matthew? You weren’t in the army, were you?’

  ‘At my age? Don’t be ridiculous! Well, I shouldn’t say that. I gather that even old men like me are being swept into the general carnage these days. No. The really ridiculous part of the whole business is that I could have stayed safely at home if I’d wanted to. I actually chose to go up in an aeroplane. I had to beg people to let me. I must have been mad.’

  ‘An aeroplane!’

  ‘That’s right. I was an official war artist, doing a series of battle paintings. I got it into my head that I’d like to see what the whole thing looked like from above. On the ground, it’s all a mess. Dead bodies, live bodies, none of it makes any sense. There must be a pattern somewhere, I thought, and it might be possible to see it from the air. They let me go up on an observation flight, to take photographs of the enemy lines. I knew how to work a camera.’

  ‘And was there a pattern?’

  ‘If it counts as a pattern to see rows of ants bustling around. All keeping to their own tracks, trying to achieve some invisible goal, occasionally diverting round some invisible obstacle.’ He hesitated and for the first time the note of bitterness left his voice. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, it was beautiful. There was snow on the ground – you remember how late spring was. Impossible to believe that armies were killing each other down there. Little dots of people. Little puffs of smoke. Peaceful. The aeroplane was noisy, but everything else seemed to be silent. Until at last one of the puffs of smoke pointed in our direction and we fell out of the sky.’

  ‘You were shot down? Oh, Matthew!’ It was impossible to restrain her affection for him any longer. She seized his hand and pressed it against her cheek. Gently, but definitely, he took it away.

  ‘Don’t, Alexa,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t want this meeting. I knew you were coming to sing, of course, but I hadn’t meant to be at the concert.’

  ‘But we could be friends again,’ Alexa said. ‘Twelve years of separation is long enough, surely. And when we’re members of the same family, it’s absurd. We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing that happened was our fault.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Matthew wryly
. ‘Nothing, alas!’

  ‘And how much I regretted that, when you left me,’ said Alexa. ‘That night in Paris, after Salome – I would have stayed with you, you know, if you’d asked me.’

  ‘And instead I asked you to marry me and we found ourselves trapped by all the Lorimer conventions of correct behaviour between a gentleman and his fiancée. But now you’re married to Lord Glanville, and another set of conventions comes into play!’

  ‘Piers couldn’t possibly object –’ began Alexa. But Matthew interrupted before she could move too far away from the truth.

  ‘In view of my condition?’ he suggested, still with the same forced smile on his lips. ‘It’s certainly true that he’d have nothing to fear from me. Well, to be honest, I’m not much bothered about what he thinks. I’m speaking out of selfishness. I couldn’t stand it. I’m having trouble enough in coming to terms with everything I’ve lost as a result of the crash. To be reminded of what I lost even before that would be too much of a burden. I’m sorry, Alexa.’

  Alexa was silent, recognizing her own selfishness in her reluctance to let him go. She did her best to accept his decision without letting him see what an effort it cost her.

  ‘But where will you go when you leave here?’ she asked.

  Again the wry smile twisted Matthew’s lips.

  ‘I have a house – a very small house – in Leicestershire,’ he said. ‘Whether any of the doors will be wide enough to admit a wheelchair, I don’t know. And inside the house I have a wife. Whether she’ll have any use for a cripple is another thing I don’t know. I even have a baby son, John. With any luck he’ll get on with me for a year or two, until he feels the need of a father who can kick a football around with him.’