The Lorimer Line

by Anne Melville

  Too overcome by the emotion of the day to speak, Margaret held out her hand towards him. David pressed it between his own and raised it to his lips. Then he stepped away from her, as though anxious by standing alone to give the impression that he had had nothing of importance to say. Margaret was left to speculate on the nature of the trouble which he foresaw. She was already wearing her black veil, so that her own expression could not be discerned, but she could see well enough through it. Both David and her father – and William too, who came now to join them – had already ceased to grieve for Georgiana. Their melancholy expressions were caused by anxieties of a different sort. The realization that her mother could be so quickly forgotten increased Margaret’s own grief, and she found it difficult not to weep as she took her seat in one of the mourning coaches.

  The mutes stepped forward into their places and the undertaker’s men in their tall black hats fell in behind. The other private carriages followed in a procession which represented much of the wealth of one of the wealthiest cities in England. Slowly the long line wound its way up the hill and over the Clifton Downs. There were a great many people in the streets. Margaret knew that the funeral cortège of a rich family could always be expected to attract sightseers from amongst those who had no better way to spend their time, and maids and tradesmen’s boys were naturally glad of an excuse to dawdle. But today there was a different atmosphere, as though word of the event had spread through the city, attracting onlookers who had made a special journey to be present.

  What seemed stranger was the reluctance of the crowd to pay its respects. Only at the last possible moment were hats doffed and heads bowed. Even then Margaret felt conscious that the occupants of the carriages were being closely observed, and that there was hostility in the stare. No one shouted out, and if there were mutterings they could not be heard inside the closed coach. Nevertheless, the uneasiness which had been born in Margaret on the previous evening and which had fed on the conversation between David and her father increased with every moment that passed. She was glad when the yellow stone walls of Christ Church came into sight.

  As she stepped out of the coach, Margaret gazed up at the huge building, which still looked as new as when it had been built some thirty years earlier. It was designed to the scale of a miniature cathedral, even to the grotesque heads carved above the door. Its tall spire soared towards the sky from almost the highest position in the city. Like the college and the suspension bridge, this was another of Clifton’s buildings which owed much to the generosity of her family.

  She remembered that again after she had made her slow progress down the centre aisle of the wide church to the family pew. As the lugubrious notes of the organ faded away, to be replaced by the equally mournful incantations of the rector, she considered the massive solidity of the structure in which she was sitting. It was built to last for ever. Just so secure had seemed her family life, broken now by Georgiana’s death. And her father’s financial empire, less vulnerable than either to the accidents of wind and weather or the certainty of mortality, had appeared the soundest institution of all. Could it be that this also was cracking? Surely it was not possible. If Lorimer’s were to fall, then nothing in society could be regarded as safe.

  Reluctantly she tugged her thoughts away from such worldly problems and gave all her attention to the service and to the memory of her mother. The funeral sermon was long and harrowing. Afterwards, in the churchyard, she looked round at the sombre group which had gathered round the vault, all dressed in deep mourning. Her feeling of unease returned, chilling her in spite of the warmth of an Indian summer and the heaviness of her dress. She could not reasonably have expected that life at Brinsley House would go on for ever unchanged. She herself had planned to leave it very soon. But that had been a change chosen with joy, not enforced in sorrow. Within a few days Ralph would begin his first term at Oxford. She might have to wait longer now for her wedding day, but when it came her father would be alone in the enormous house: alone and growing old. Under the cover of her veil she wept for him, yet part of her disquiet was for herself. Were her plans safe, or might this new situation impose some obstacle?

  It seemed to her as she looked at David, serious in expression as the last words were spoken over the coffin, that she could not bear to live without him. If anything should come between them … But she shook the idea away. John Junius might be lonely, but he would never admit to being dependent. If he should ask her to remain at Brinsley House in order to take her mother’s place in its management, he would put the demand as a favour to herself, by inviting her to make it her married home. As long as she and David were sure of each other, no outside force could separate them.

  They returned towards the carriages. A messenger boy was waiting in the street, looking worried as though he had not known whether he would be more sharply criticized for delaying the delivery of the telegram he carried or for intruding on an occasion of family grief. Margaret was conscious of her father wishing to hasten his step but, like the boy, obeying the restraint of decorum. At last he was near enough to take the telegram. He turned away from the company while he opened and read it.

  Margaret watched his face as he turned back. The other mourners, knowing John Junius less well than his daughter, might not have been able to recognize from the way in which his lips tightened that he was faced with some kind of emergency, but from the earliest days of her childhood Margaret had needed to know the signs which meant that her father had been thwarted beyond endurance in his affairs. She saw him catch David’s eye and hand him the telegram. The younger man in turn read the brief message. He was less well practised than the chairman in the art of concealing his emotions. He studied the words more than once. When he looked up again, his face was pale with despair.

  12

  When the sun of prosperity vanishes behind clouds, every community which has flourished in its warmth must expect to suffer from the storm which follows. It was unrealistic of David, when at last the chairman passed him the telegram, to regard the situation it described as a personal attack by the hand of fate. He ought not to have been surprised that the conditions of trade which had affected Bristol would have had the same effect on other mercantile cities. But in fact the news which he read was so unexpected, so overwhelming in the magnitude of the disaster, that the words swam before his eyes. He, as much as John Junius, needed time to compose himself.

  What the telegram told them was that the City of Glasgow Bank had closed its doors, unable to meet obligations amounting to six million pounds. That was all, but it was enough for David - and he could tell that the implications were not lost on his chairman either. The community of Glasgow, the commercial heart of Scotland, would be ruined - had been ruined already, although its citizens might need a little longer to understand their fate. To Lorimer’s the social effects were only of secondary importance. What mattered was that the fall of an institution so huge and so widely respected would shake public confidence all over the kingdom as soon as the news was known. Not even the most substantial financial institutions, the most cautious in their lendings, would be immune from its effects. No bank in Bristol, when it heard the news, would dare to deplete its reserves by a single sovereign at such a time, whatever difficulty the fall of a neighbour might cause in the city. The meeting arranged for the afternoon was doomed to failure before it began.

  ‘Then we have lost the day,’ he said, speaking quietly so that no one but John Junius could hear. The chairman did not show his feelings. His eyes were hooded in concentration.

  ‘The information will not reach the general public until the arrival of the London newspapers tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They will come on the railway train which arrives just after nine o’clock. If the train should be delayed - or better still, if the consignment of newspapers should be misplaced at the London end …’

  For a moment David wondered whether the old man’s mind had been softened by the shock. It was one thing to look for a way to fight on while ther
e was still ground beneath their feet, but it was no longer possible to return to the wild free-booting ways of the early Lorimers, advocating theft or an act of piracy when the only reward could be a few more hours of respite before the inevitable crash.

  ‘The Bristol Evening News will have its own sources of information in London,’ he pointed out. ‘It will be on the streets within a few hours. And even if we could survive Friday, we would still have to face Saturday. If you will excuse me now, I will see if there is anything to be done.’

  He paused only to kiss Margaret’s hand again, looking into her eyes with a sympathy he had no time to explain.

  ‘You will observe strict mourning tomorrow, of course,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘You will stay inside the house, pay no calls. Above all, you will not go down into the city.’

  He could see that she was startled to find him giving orders in such a matter, but left before she had time to understand their significance. As he strode down the hill, not caring about the curious glances which followed him, he knew that there was no way in which Lorimer’s could be saved. All he could do was to plan like a general for whatever form of surrender would cause the least harm to innocent victims.

  And who, amongst the innocent, were the most deserving? It was a question which he was forced to put to himself when he opened the door of his office at six o’clock the next morning, long before any other members of the staff were expected to arrive. The ordinary depositors who had brought their money to the bank for safe keeping had a right to expect its return when they asked for it. The shareholders, the men who actually owned the bank, had a right to expect that the money they had invested had been secured, and even increased. And then there were the creditors - local firms representing almost every trade in Bristol, firms which had supplied raw materials or finished goods or services towards such enterprises as William Lorimer’s new steamships, Edward Crankshaw’s great complex of docks, John Grange’s modern factory and a dozen other such businesses. Under the loan agreements which had been negotiated some years earlier they had been paid with bills drawn on the bank and had the right to assume that these would be honoured when they fell due. The staff, too, in all the bank’s thirty branches, had worked conscientiously for the salaries which they would expect to receive that evening.

  They could not all be paid at once. As David had explained earlier to Margaret, no bank could operate on the assumption that such a step would ever be necessary. It would be possible for David, if he chose, to meet the claims of the first few depositors who came to demand their money back; but by paying these in full he would be diminishing the reserve which would eventually have to be divided amongst the others. It was for this reason that he had come early to the bank. By the view from his window he might judge whether the prompt payment of the first few requests - payments made without any suggestion that the outward flow of gold would at some point be halted -would be sufficient to send the less nervous depositors home again, happy to leave their savings in what appeared to be safe hands.

  It was a hope which did not survive the first hour of his vigil. The bank normally opened its doors to customers at nine o’clock, the staff arriving an hour earlier. Already at seven the first anxious depositors were congregating in front of the building while other men, approaching from a distance, quickened their pace as they saw the numbers assembled before them.

  There were even one or two women. David groaned to himself as he recognized Miss Langdon, who only three weeks earlier had deposited in her account the money inherited from her brother in India, with which she planned to buy a small house for herself. By the end of the day Miss Langdon would be weeping for the collapse of all her dreams, and she would be only one of many. By eight o’clock, as he estimated the wealth of those who were already waiting - with still an hour to go - he knew that Lorimer’s could not open its doors again.

  The realization was a bitter one. David had not been a citizen of Bristol for long, but it was long enough for him to have absorbed the city’s pride in honest dealing. From the window of his office he looked across Corn Street to the Exchange, in which shiploads of commodities changed hands on the nod. Next to the Exchange was the merchants’ cloister of All Saints’ Church. The brass Nails which stood in it - waist-high pillars with round table tops - were used for the transaction of immediate business with an integrity which had made ‘paying on the nail’ part of common speech throughout the country.

  In addition to this shame at defaulting, David could not help but feel another regret. He had been given responsibility young, and he had done his best; but no one in the future would remember that or make allowances for the force of circumstances. Circumstances were all that he considered to blame. In his mental listing of the innocent, it had not occurred to him to wonder whether anyone might be guilty.

  The first of the bank’s staff was approaching. David went down to the side entrance to make sure that the doorman was on duty and would admit no unauthorized person. He was just turning away when a visitor arrived: a sergeant of police.

  ‘If I could have a word, Mr Gregson.’

  ‘In my office, Sergeant.’

  David knew the man well enough. All the Corn Street banks depended on him for protection if ever there was a need to move gold from one branch to another. Usually he was bluff and jolly, but today he was not smiling.

  ‘I’ve been sent down, sir, to enquire whether you’d be doing normal business today.’

  ‘Is that any affair of yours?’

  ‘Come now, Mr Gregson. You’ve seen the crowd in the street already. If you were to open your door this minute, they’d be scratching each other’s eyes out for the right to be first in. And if you don’t open at nine, you may be glad of some help in getting yourself out of the building unharmed. I’m not here to give opinions, sir. If it’s business as usual, I’ll try to get these people into some sort of line. If it’s not, I’ll need to bring in more men to disperse the crowd. We have to take action if we think there’s likely to be a breach of the peace.’

  ‘I am awaiting instructions from Mr Lorimer,’ said David. ‘But it could do no harm, I suppose, to have a few more of your men in the neighbourhood.’

  It was a sufficient answer. The sergeant’s expression was clouded as he accepted it.

  ‘You’ll be on the bank premises all day, sir?’ he checked.

  ‘During normal hours, certainly.’

  ‘And you’ve no plans for leaving Bristol in the near future?’

  ‘What the devil are you getting at?’ David burst out. The past few days, and particularly the last hour, had provided strain enough. To be questioned in such a way by a sergeant of police was an insupportable impertinence.

  ‘No offence, I hope, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘But we’ve been through affairs like this before. On a small scale, of course. People don’t take kindly to losing their money. They’ll be at headquarters to see what can be done about it. They’ll lay complaints of theft or embezzlement. Not because they believe it, you understand sir, but because they know we can’t interfere unless there’s a crime been committed. And maybe even they do believe it. Ordinary people don’t understand about money being theirs one minute and gone the next. Once there’s a complaint, someone has to look into it. It’s not a job for the likes of me, Mr Gregson, but you’ll need to have your books ready. I’m sure I sympathize with you, sir. We’ve all heard about the accident down at the yard. A misfortune not of your making. An unfortunate affair altogether, sir, an unfortunate affair. The hand of God.’

  He paused to sigh; then resumed more briskly.

  ‘You’ll be putting a notice up on the door, I take it, sir. If you could give me half an hour to get my men together, we’ll do what we can to save your windows.’

  The sounds of disturbance in the street below drew both men across the room to look out. John Junius Lorimer was coming to the bank as usual. His horses still wore their mourning ribbons, but nothing could camouflage the green and gold splendou
r of the carriage. The crowd outside recognized him at once as the man who would decide the fate of their deposits. Until they learned his decision there could be no demonstration of anything stronger than anxiety. They murmured and jostled amongst themselves, but John Junius would be safe, David reckoned, at this moment of arrival. The evening departure might prove rather a different matter.

  He hurried the sergeant out of the side door. Then he ordered the massive bolts of the studded wooden door at the front of the building to be drawn so that the chairman could enter with his usual dignity. Four members of the staff were at hand to make sure that no one was able to follow.

  Half an hour later the notice which the depositors had feared was posted outside that same door. David, standing in his office, heard the groan of many voices, the rush of feet, the cries of anger and the furious beating of fists upon the door. Then he was forced to move away, feeling sick -not with fear, but with grief and helpless sympathy. It was the bitterest moment of his life.

  The sergeant had given him two warnings, but so dark was his mood that at first he heeded only one of them. He looked to the protection of the windows and the safety of the staff and posted watchers to guard against any possibility of arson. Where the accounts were concerned, his own conscience was clear. There were so many other matters needing his attention that he did not immediately recall the doubts which he himself had felt and expressed when he took up his duties as manager.

  Only later, when the street was empty again, was he able to consider his own position more carefully. The angry crowd, which during the morning had increased to fill the whole area outside Lorimer’s, was by noon pressed back by half a dozen policemen, whirling their rattles as though they were weapons. At last, as evening approached, the depositors dispersed with curses and tears, enabling David to send for a hansom in which the chairman could be conveyed back to Brinsley House. John Junius did not argue. His recognition that the Lorimer livery would be stoned on sight was a mark of his acceptance of defeat.