Lorimers at War

by Anne Melville

  Whichever nightmare it was that attacked her, the effect was the same. She awoke each morning at four or five o’clock, drenched in sweat and unwilling to return to the terrors of sleep. She had been tired enough before, but now she was exhausted. Piers, concerned for her health and knowing that she had passed her sixtieth birthday, more than once suggested that she should retire. But the German offensive in the spring of 1918, sweeping again over the Somme battlefield on which Brinsley had died, seemed about to press the British Army back into the water. Once more the demand for hospital beds rose as casualties flooded back from a battleground which was no longer a place of retrenchment but of retreat. Like everyone else in England, Margaret read with a feeling near to despair Field Marshal Haig’s grim admonition: ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end.’ Defeat was very close. This was no time to consider retirement. If her nightmare had any basis in reality, it meant that she was in danger of drowning in a bottomless sea of work.

  Yet the impression left on her waking mind by the recurrent dream was so strong that when Arthur arrived from Bristol one day in May to break the news that Ralph was dead, it hardly seemed to come as a shock. Her emotions had been numbed by too much bad news. That a man who had spent his whole working life in an unhealthy tropical climate should die at the age of fifty-eight could not be thought of as surprising. Margaret was sad, because she had loved her younger brother dearly, but she was too tired to weep.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s some kind of deep pool in the Hope Valley estate, apparently,’ Arthur said. ‘A waterfall feeds it from above and a stream trickles out from the edge to pass through the village.’

  ‘I’ve been there,’ said Margaret. ‘Ralph called it the Baptist Hole. He used it for baptismal services.’ She remembered, though, how she had once crept towards the pool by night and had seen a very different kind of ceremony in progress, an orgy of music and movement which seemed to have come straight from the jungle, surviving the years of slavery without change. For a moment she wondered wildly whether her brother had fallen victim to some pagan rite, but it appeared that the truth was less dramatic.

  ‘There’s no doubt, I’m afraid, that he was drinking more and more heavily in this past year. My information comes from Duke Mattison. Brinsley’s death must have been a terrible shock, of course, and on top of that Uncle Ralph had convinced himself that Kate must also be dead, since there’s been no news of her from Russia.’

  ‘You mean, he fell into the Baptist Hole when he was drunk, and drowned there?’

  ‘It seems so.’ Arthur hesitated. ‘There are some business aspects of his death to discuss. But no doubt you’d prefer to wait until you’ve recovered from the main shock before I inflict any others on you.’

  Margaret shook her head wearily. ‘Tell me it all at once,’ she said.

  What Arthur had to say came as less of a surprise than he apparently expected. Margaret had never known for a fact that Ralph had had an illegitimate son in Jamaica shortly before his marriage to Lydia, but from his unhappiness at the time and the hints which he had dropped she ought to have guessed – and indeed she had wondered, but had not liked to ask. She remembered how Duke’s intelligent face had impressed her on the only occasion when she had met him – and remembered, too, how Kate had praised his head for figures and willingness to work hard.

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘It must have been some comfort to Ralph to have the company of one of his sons in those last days. But has he been fair to Grant, Arthur? Duke may deserve to inherit the plantation on the grounds of the work he’s put into it, or even because he’s the most capable person to manage it. But Grant is a legitimate son and more in need of support.’

  ‘Grant is well enough provided for,’ Arthur assured her. ‘Uncle Ralph never intended to allow him a share of the plantation – the original intention was that Brinsley should inherit it all. Do you remember that in the first months of the war I invested in a shipbuilding company? Uncle Ralph had funds to spare at that time, the profits of his trading, and asked to be associated with me in the investment, on Grant’s behalf. The German submarines have been making his fortune for him – every ship sunk in the Atlantic has needed immediate replacement.’

  Margaret found it distasteful that anyone should have made money out of a war which had wrecked so many lives. But Grant himself had no responsibility for what had happened.

  ‘This means that Grant will never go back to Jamaica,’ said Arthur. He was warning her, presumably, that she now had no escape from her unofficial adoption, but that was something which Margaret had accepted long ago.

  ‘Perhaps when he’s older he could share in the management of this company in which you’ve invested,’ she suggested. ‘I remember you intended to make an offer of that kind to Brinsley.’

  Arthur shook his head. ‘Can’t stand the boy. I’m sorry, Aunt Margaret. I don’t know what it is about him. Uncle Ralph couldn’t bear to have him around, and nor can I. I’ll see that his money is well managed until he needs it, and then it can be used to buy him whatever kind of business or estate appeals to him. But not mine.’

  ‘You saw him at his worst,’ said Margaret. ‘He arrived in England neglected and unhealthy – and made unhappy, naturally, by his mother’s death and his father’s rejection of him. But come and meet him now. He’s a different boy.’

  She took her nephew out into the spring sunshine. The early months of the year had been wetter than usual, but May had brought dry weather at last and all the soldiers who were well enough to leave their beds were taking advantage of the spacious grounds. They greeted Margaret as she passed them, and she did not like to move on without a friendly word, so it was a little while before she was able to discover Grant’s whereabouts.

  He was pushing Barbara’s baby carriage up the slope from the river. Her nursemaid walked beside them, but did not need to help. Grant’s arms – which he had used for many years as a means of pulling himself about – were exceptionally strong. The operation on his hip had been as successful as could have been hoped: he still walked stiffly, but the surgical boot which added a necessary two inches to his stunted leg was placed as firmly on the ground with each step as the normal boot of the other foot. Not only was he walking with ease and confidence, but he had become much thinner. In the last few months, like any thirteen-year-old boy, he had begun to shoot up in height almost visibly; he had shed the flabby fat which gave him such an unattractive appearance when he first arrived in England.

  In addition to the improvement in his physique, the boy’s temperament had changed in a way which must surely impress Arthur. Grant was talking to Barbara as he pushed her, pulling funny faces and jigging the baby carriage up and down in an attempt to make her smile. Whether or not the five-month-old baby was responding, Margaret could not see; but certainly Grant was laughing at his own jokes.

  Barbara’s arrival at Blaize at the turn of the year had gone almost unnoticed by the adults who lived there. Margaret had written in advance to Alexa to discover whether there would be any objection to the presence of another baby in the house, and had received the answer she expected. But Alexa and Piers had been as stunned as Margaret herself by Jennifer’s death and the uncertainty about Robert’s fate. Their embraces had been reserved for Margaret as she came wearily into the house after her stay in Norfolk; it was the wet nurse who was left to carry Barbara up to the nursery quarters.

  So many young lives had been snatched away from Margaret’s love and care that she had felt a need to pause before she could commit her emotions yet again. She knew that the baby would be well cared for by little Pirry’s nurse. Once a day she paid a routine visit to the nursery and stared for a moment into the cradle. But she had not felt able to lift the baby and cuddle her. For the first time in her life, it seemed, she had lost the ability to show love.

  Alexa had never pretended to be interested in any children e
xcept her own, and Piers spent most of each week in London. So Barbara was left to the servants – and to the other children of the family. Four-year-old Pirry saw her only as a rival who had caused his expulsion from the nursery to the more disciplined world of the schoolroom, ruled by a governess: while Frisca was too active to be interested in a baby who could not move from her cot. Barbara’s first friend in the Lorimer family had been Grant.

  ‘He was very fond of Robert, you know,’ Margaret told Arthur as the nursery group moved away up the slope. ‘Robert had the knack of teasing him into cheerfulness. So of course the news upset him badly. He doesn’t believe that Robert is a prisoner, any more than Jennifer did. When Barbara first came here, he’d sit by her cot for hours, just staring. I suppose he doesn’t understand about babies. He must have been trying to see the connection between Robert and Robert’s daughter.’ It occurred to Margaret even as she spoke that it was time for Grant to be given a little information on such subjects. It was unlikely that Ralph had ever had a fatherly chat with his unloved son. She made a mental note to ask Piers if he would take on that duty, and then continued with her explanation. ‘So Grant was one of the familiar faces in the baby’s life. When she gave her first smile it was to him, just because he was there. It was his finger she gripped when she began to play. He has a talent, I think, for all-or-nothing devotion. That may be why it took us all so long to make a good relationship with him when he first arrived. He’d been wholly devoted to his mother all his life and he wasn’t going to let anyone take her place.’

  ‘And you think he’s devoted to Barbara?’ Arthur’s voice revealed his incredulity.

  ‘I’m sure of it. Oh, he’s very fond of me as well. But he’s grabbing at Barbara just as he grabbed at Robert. Well, it will be good for both of them. When he first asked me whether he could push her out in the afternoons, I said he’d have to prove to me that he was safe with her, absolutely steady on his feet. Until then he’d been reluctant to admit that his operation had been a success. He still limped around in a very exaggerated way, and wouldn’t wear his boot. But when I insisted that the baby carriage must be pushed smoothly, he taught himself to walk normally almost overnight.’

  ‘Almost normally.’

  ‘Well, when you consider his state when he arrived here!’ It seemed to Margaret – who regarded the improvement in Grant as a small miracle – that Arthur was being over-critical. ‘And it’s not just walking. He’s become fanatical about getting himself fit. He goes to the exercise classes that we run for the men. And he’s asked Piers to let him ride. He’s still on a leading rein at the moment, but if he can really learn to grip with his knees he’ll bring back into use all the muscles which must almost have wasted away while he was a child.’

  For a moment she was cheerful. Then she remembered that she had now to break the news to Grant that his father was dead. Probably he would not care greatly, but Margaret cared on her own account. Arthur seemed to understand her sudden silence. He refused her invitation to stay the night and left her to her memories.

  The wooded slope between Blaize and the river was too steep for most of the convalescent soldiers to tackle. Margaret made her way there, hoping to be undisturbed. May was the month in which the azaleas were at their best. One of the patients, shell-shocked and silent, had devoted himself all winter to the task of clearing the winding stream and the azalea walk from the mud and weeds which had threatened to choke them after the last of Lord Glanville’s gardeners had been conscripted. Margaret sat down beside the water which was once again flowing cleanly along its path of flat grey stones and tried to think about Ralph.

  The ipicture was too confused. There seemed no way of reconciling the golden young man, confident and handsome in the white braided blazer of a schoolboy Captain of Cricket, with Ralph as she had last seen him, thin and stooping in a shabby black suit, his eyes wrinkled against the sun. And since that time his burdens had grown even heavier. He should have died sooner, Margaret thought to herself; before Lydia’s death – and certainly before Brinsley’s.

  Yet when Brinsley had died, it had seemed too soon. Had they been wrong, Margaret asked herself suddenly, to feel so much sadness and regret for a life cut short? Brinsley, like his father, had been a golden boy – but Brinsley would never be tired and old and disillusioned, wondering whether his life’s work had been worth while. He had always thought of himself as lucky. When Margaret considered her brother’s life, and when she looked at some of her patients – alive, but facing years of pain and dependence – it was difficult not to wonder whether perhaps Brinsley’s luck had held after all. Death was a disaster only for those who were left behind.

  She could persuade herself, no doubt, not to mourn too much for Ralph, who in his last months had been lonely and without hope. But it was impossible to carry the thought to its logical conclusion and hope that Robert was no longer suffering: that he was dead, not sharing the pain she felt on his behalf. She had begun by feeling sad about her brother’s death; but by the time she arose to walk back to the house her thoughts had returned, as they always returned, to her missing son.

  Someone was calling her name. She heard it faintly while she was still in the woods, and then more loudly as she stepped out into the open. It was possible to recognize Lord Glanville’s voice, although she could not see him; and the sound startled her. Piers was not a man who shouted. Nor did he ever use her Christian name in public. In private they had been close friends for many years, but in the world of the hospital she was always Dr Scott. Margaret began to hurry, fearful that some accident had occurred to Alexa or one of the children.

  She saw him hurrying up the paved path from the theatre ward; he must have been to look for her there. In his hand was a card which he waved in the air as soon as he caught sight of her. That was another departure from the norm. Even in these days when formality had almost disappeared, letters were carried by servants. Margaret froze into stillness. She refused to allow her mind to think or guess; and as though in sympathy, her body ceased for a moment to breathe.

  He came towards her and it seemed that he was no more able to speak than she was. Without allowing her a chance to look at the message he held, he took her into his arms, almost crushing her in the tightness of his embrace.

  How could she share his emotion when she still did not know whether the tears in his eyes were of sorrow or joy? She struggled to pull his arm away, to take the card from his hand. Then it was her turn to feel the tears flooding into her eyes. The postcard – printed and formal, except for a blank space in which a name had been written in ink – was little more informative than the telegram which had arrived five months earlier. But it provided the only piece of information that mattered.

  Captain Robert Charles Scott was not dead, but a prisoner of war.

  2

  Almost every month some new messenger arrived from Moscow; to announce a new decree, to investigate the working of an old one, to explain some aspect of Bolshevik policy, to make it clear that the blame for the poor harvest of 1918, and the consequent food shortage, must be squarely placed on the shoulders of the peasants, who had generously been given land and had responded with indolence and selfishness instead of free-handed gratitude. The orator on this occasion had been sent by the Commissar for War.

  That was all Kate knew as she hurried to the September meeting, a little late because of an emergency in the operating theatre and so tired that she wanted only to sleep. But she knew that her absence would be noted by the soviet of the military hospital to which she had been attached since disbanding her own medical unit a year earlier. In any case, there had been rumours that Commissar Trotsky himself was in the area. He was known to be touring the country in his armoured train, recruiting for the Red Army. Since the assassination of Uritsky and the shots which wounded Lenin, all Trotsky’s appearances were made without advance warning. But stories of the Red Terror had reached even this remote part of Russia and Kate was curious to see the man who was presumed to
be responsible for the shooting of so many prisoners and hostages.

  As soon as she opened the door, however, she knew that the speaker was not Comrade Trotsky. Even if the empty sleeve of his greatcoat had not given her the clue, she could not have failed to recognize the voice which had taught her to speak Russian. Sergei’s pale yellow-grey complexion was even less healthy than before and his fanatically glittering eyes had sunk even more deeply into their black sockets, but his intensity of manner and shabbiness of appearance had not changed at all.

  He recognized her with equal speed. His eyes, drawn by the movement of her late entry, fixed her for a moment with their hypnotic gleam. But he did not allow himself to be distracted from his theme; and that was directed to the men, not to her. He was describing the atrocities perpetrated by the White Army, the intention of its generals to restore land to the old nobility if they won, the need for all who were faithful to the spirit of the revolution to join the Red Army and fight both the enemy within the country and the invaders from outside.

  When the meeting was at an end, Sergei asked a quiet question of the chairman of the soviet, who looked around and pointed out Kate. There was another brief discussion, and then an announcement that Comrade Gorbatov wished to speak to the Comrade Doctor. Kate deduced from this that Sergei had not admitted that he even knew who the doctor was, much less that they were old friends. In the current atmosphere of suspicion and betrayal, she found this disquieting; and she could see the same uneasiness in Vladimir’s eyes as he watched her follow the speaker out.

  At their parting, Sergei had kissed her. For two years Kate had remembered him with affection, but now she did not know how to approach him. She had seen too many personal relationships snap under the strain of divided political loyalties. She waited: and so, for a moment, did he. Then he laughed.