The Lorimer Line

by Anne Melville

  ‘So for this coming year you will still be studying?’ he checked.

  ‘Yes, but in a different way from before. Although we must still attend lectures, most of our time now is spent in hospitals, seeing as wide a variety of cases as we can. My midwifery practical experience is already complete. Since June I have delivered sixty-five babies. My new work, starting next Monday, will be at the Hospital for Sick Children in East London, as clerk to the house-physician. I look forward to this very much. For three years I have been dissecting dead bodies. To care for patients who may be helped to recovery should be a most rewarding task.’

  William found it difficult to conceal his distaste for the information she gave in such a casual manner. The cutting up of dead bodies could not in any circumstances be described as a suitable occupation for a woman. Yet he was a man who respected success in any field and he had made his own enquiries. He knew, for example, that the examinations which punctuated the studies of any medical student were stringent. To pass each of them at the first attempt, as Margaret had done so far, was an achievement not to be despised. In any case, he was not one to waste time regretting decisions which had been made and put into effect long ago. All that concerned him now was whether Margaret herself was happy in her work.

  There could be no doubt about the answer. Her smile, at once confident and excited, might have softened the heart of a warmer man. In William’s case it served only to confirm his opinion that since his sister appeared to have fashioned a life so congenial to herself, she should be allowed to continue in it without interruption. While he pondered the matter, Ralph took up the questioning.

  ‘Do you intend to specialize after you qualify?’ he asked.

  ‘Either in paediatrics or obstetrics,’ Margaret told him. ‘I haven’t yet decided which. Each has the advantage that at least amongst the patients there is little prejudice against women, and that would not be true if I went into general practice.’

  ‘Do Miss Morton’s interests lie in the same sphere as yours?’ asked Ralph, with a casual air.

  ‘No, Lydia has her own enthusiasms,’ said Margaret. ‘If her choice were free, I believe that she would go to India as a medical missionary. She has been influenced by some of our fellow-students who have returned from that part of the world especially in order to increase their usefulness by medical training. But Mr Morton is in poor health, and Mrs Morton becomes upset at the possibility of her daughter going so far away. So Lydia intends instead to specialize in public health. There is a great deal to be learned, and much that is already known has yet to be applied. Even in hospitals, the older doctors and nurses have been very slow to understand the need for sterilization or even cleanliness. I am appalled every day by what I see. We are all told to be tactful, for the sake of the other women who will follow us, but sometimes it is very hard to keep silent.’

  The conversation continued for a little longer before Sophie showed her boredom with the subject by interrupting. William listened, and watched, and considered. After the others had retired for the night he sat for half an hour in the library, with the letter which had been on his mind all evening lying on the desk in front of him.

  Margaret had not yet learned of Ralph’s decision to become a Baptist missionary, and knew nothing of the interview which had taken place between the two brothers earlier in the day. She would have thought it monstrously unfair if she had discovered that because William resented the waste of money on his brother’s Oxford education he was taking on himself the right to decide whether his sister’s training should or should not go for nothing in the same way - or that, because he was sensitive to a fall in social status through Ralph, he could hardly bear the thought of his sister allying herself to a fugitive from the law who could be described as ‘perhaps a respectable tradesman’.

  William himself knew that it was unjust on his part to decide Margaret’s future without allowing her to express her own opinion, but he did not intend to let her argue the matter with him. Like his father, he believed himself entitled to keep all family decisions in his own hands, even when they concerned others more than himself.

  He stared down at the desk, his fingers tapping. Although he was now considering whether or not to destroy the letter, the thought of opening and reading it never occurred to him. Such an action would be dishonourable, whereas the course he was debating with himself might be all for the best.

  Perhaps one reason why he was not tempted to read the contents was his certainty that he could guess them accurately. With a warrant still out for his arrest, David Gregson would not have taken the risk of revealing where he was merely in order to continue a disagreement. A letter to Margaret could have only one purpose - to end the quarrel with which they must have parted. William could not know the details, but his sister’s distress at the time suggested that she had dismissed her lover in a way she later regretted.

  It seemed safe to make the assumption that she was now being invited to travel to San Francisco, to marry a man who after so long would be almost a stranger. William knew well enough that young women found it difficult to reject any invitation of this kind, and felt it his responsibility to decide on Margaret’s behalf what was best for her. Four years earlier, such a marriage might have brought her happiness. But today?

  In speaking of his vocation Ralph had claimed that Margaret would understand it because her own sense of vocation was strong. Even if he had not sensed that already, the evening’s conversation would have been enough to convince William of its truth. He would be doing his sister no kindness by unsettling her now. She had been happy in her training and she looked forward with satisfaction to a life which - whatever William himself might think - she believed would be of value both to herself and to society. At no time during the past four years had she shown any sign of regret for her broken engagement. Her present mood was, in a single word, serene.

  How different it would be if she were suddenly to learn that a relationship which she had thought buried might still be revived. In the first place she would have all the emotional anxiety of deciding what her feelings were for a man she had not seen for so long. She herself had changed greatly during the past four years, and so certainly had David Gregson, but she would be expected to make a choice before seeing him again. In the second place, if she decided to go, she would feel guilt at the knowledge that she was wasting her training by abandoning it before the acquisition of the necessary practical experience. If, on the other hand, she resolved to stay, she would undoubtedly wonder from time to time whether she had made the right choice. The uncertainty could blight a life which otherwise would be contented.

  There was one other point to be considered. If Margaret were to meet David Gregson again, the last months of Lorimer’s Bank before its failure would necessarily be discussed between them. What she did not know, and need not know, was that their father’s death had left a good many questions unanswered although the creditors had pressed as hard as they could. The plain fact was that John Junius’s fortune had diminished in the year before his death, but no one had been able to discover where the missing funds had gone.

  The mystery of Georgiana’s rubies had never been adequately explained. During the course of the bankruptcy proceedings it was discovered that John Junius had quietly disposed of all the most valuable pieces of his collection of jade, replacing them with a few cheap carvings so that the gaps should not be conspicuous. He had claimed – or so Margaret reported at the time – that the most priceless carvings were stored for safe keeping in the vaults of Lorimer’s, but they had never been found and there was no record of their deposit. William had assumed at first that John Junius had sold them to raise the price of the rubies, but the later discovery that the jewellery itself was only paste had introduced a new puzzle.

  It was a puzzle which nobody had solved, and one to which William gave a good deal of thought. To him it seemed clear that his father had made an attempt to rescue a large sum of money from the crash he foresaw, and that he
had done so in order that the family should not be ruined. The real disaster was that he died without revealing to his elder son where the reserve was concealed. William felt sure that one day he would be able to work out the answer to this problem and discover a hidden fortune; but until that day came it was not in his interest that anyone else should remember the discrepancy which had been the subject of so much agitation at the time but which had now ceased to be newsworthy. David Gregson and Margaret, together talking over the events which had parted them, might inadvertently revive a controversy which was best forgotten.

  So many thousand miles away, what harm could they do? William forced himself to recognize that this last objection to the renewing of old ties was not in Margaret’s true interest. The other arguments were a different matter. For some time longer he stared at the unopened letter in front of him. Then he made up his mind.

  Margaret had made her own choice. She had been happy in her decision, and to be offered the same choice for a second time could only bring uncertainty. Whatever she decided to do, she would be unhappy about what she had to reject. To force her into such a situation would be unkind. The past, thought William to himself, is best left undisturbed.

  His conscience did not disturb him at all. He had thought the matter through and was confident that the conclusion he reached as head of the family was in his sister’s best interest. And no one would ever know. He lit a spill from the lamp on his desk and applied it to the letter from San Francisco, holding a corner until the flame burned his finger and thumb. Then he dropped the charred sheet into the fireplace and stirred it with a poker into ash.

  Part II

  Margaret and Charles

  1

  Forced to spend their working hours at close quarters with death, medical students in every age and country devote their leisure to the most robust manifestations of life. The young ladies who enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women were no exception to this rule. True, they did not hurl themselves about the rugger field or propel unstable boats up and down the river or deprive policemen of their helmets in the course of inebriated evenings. But there was a light-hearted gaiety about them which Margaret at first found extraordinary, and then almost at once took for granted. There had been a time, in the bad year of 1878, when she had thought that she would never be happy again. Now, four years later, it seemed to her as she went exhausted to bed each night that she had never been happy before.

  The group had its own private language. When an alphabetical list of new students was pinned up on the first day of the preliminary course, they noticed at once that each of the first fifteen letters of the alphabet was represented, and by one surname only. They christened themselves the Alpha Beta class, and addressed each other by their initial letters instead of names. They embroidered the letters on the white linen smocks which they wore in the hospital wards, so that patients and instructors alike found it simple to pick up the habit. Even Margaret and Lydia, who had been friends for so long, adapted their speech to the private language during the term, becoming Miss L and Miss M.

  So Miss Lorimer and Miss Morton became holiday people only. It was like dying and being born again, Margaret sometimes thought: she had become a new woman. She could hardly believe that the girl who had lived in Bristol, doing her conscientious best to find some useful occupation for at least an hour or two of the day, was the same person as herself.

  Right from the beginning the work had been hard. There were moments during the preliminary course when Margaret was convinced that she would not be accepted for full training - or, if she were, would never be able to endure its more advanced stages. Later she discovered that those first few months were deliberately made taxing as a test of intelligence and staying power. When Ralph wrote anxious letters to her from Oxford during this period, hoping that she was managing to avoid the temptations and wickednesses of London life, she was able to assure him that she had not yet had time to find out what or where they were.

  There had been plenty of time, though, to discover the poverty and dirt in which so many Londoners lived. Her midwifery had taken her, often in the middle of the night, into dark and foul-smelling courts round which dilapidated tenements insecurely clustered. She became familiar with drunkenness and foul language and — because so many babies chose to arrive at two or three o’clock in the morning - soon ceased to be frightened by the hurried footsteps of a thief surprised at his work or the glimpse of a body rolled up in newspaper, a dosser who might or might not wake up when morning came.

  Even in the most sordid surroundings, she never felt in any danger. The messenger who came to call her, whether husband or child or neighbour of the woman in labour, always escorted her into the slums and out again, calling on the empty streets to let the doctor through, so that there should be no misunderstanding about her errand. Even as a girl she had never been nervous, and now she simply took it for granted that she should go where she was most useful.

  It was as a result of this attitude and experience that she saw nothing extraordinary about the Sick Children’s Hospital when she started to work there on the Monday following Beatrice’s fifth birthday. The building had originally been a warehouse, and the change of use had not been accompanied by any conversion of its structure. A hundred iron bedsteads and twenty wooden cradles had been installed, but otherwise the accommodation provided for the children was little better than that enjoyed by the sacks of cloves or ginger whose aroma still lingered. The walls were of wood, pierced by openings from which the old hoist platforms still projected. Arriving in September, Margaret accepted that the ventilation thus provided must have been pleasantly cool in the summer, but wondered with misgiving whether the mists and fogs of autumn and the chill winds of winter would prove healthy for the young patients.

  If coldness was still only in prospect, dampness was already in possession. The warehouse was supported half on land and half on piers sunk into the bed of the river. So near the autumn equinox, the tide was at its highest, lapping the floor of the overhanging section and splashing against its side almost into the windows. As a result, all the wood was damp and much of it was rotten.

  The ground floor, with no windows to illuminate it, was not used by the children. A pair of oil lamps hung there to welcome new arrivals. Their other greeting came from Jamie, the porter, whose body was powerful but whose mind was dim. Too large ever to stand straight under the low wooden ceiling, he sent the oil lamps rocking with blows from his head even when he stooped. But he was kind and harmless, and lifted the sick children up the steep ladders which emerged through trapdoors on to the main floor; carrying them as though they were snowflakes, weightless and fragile

  Margaret’s days in the hospital were busy ones. In the mornings she accompanied the house physician, Dr Ferguson, on his ward round, visiting every bed in the two long lines. It came as a relief on her first day to discover that his views on female doctors were tolerant. He believed that they should confine themselves to the care of children, but since the care of children was what he had agreed to teach her, there was no cause for disagreement between them. It seemed to Margaret, in fact, that he was especially meticulous in his supervision, as though by training her well he hoped to persuade her to choose this specialization. He made her conduct her own examinations and give her opinion before making his own pronouncement on the disease and its treatment. The hospital had no surgical unit. Even the charitable optimists who had looked at a derelict warehouse and seen a vision of care and healing had recognized that the facilities were not good enough for surgery.

  After Margaret had made up her notes for the morning, it was time to help with the out-patients. Officially her task was to keep the records, but from the start she was expected to offer practical help. The area was one of the poorest in London, and its children appeared either to be particularly adventurous or particularly unlucky. They crashed through rotten floorboards, they were hit by cargoes swinging from cranes, they were hauled half-drowned out of dock
s, they were bitten in bed by rats. For Margaret’s first day or two the responsibility frightened her, but there was too much work for time to be spent in wondering whether she was doing it in the right way. She advised on convulsions, set broken limbs in splints, and identified spots and rashes before sending their owners off to the isolation hospital. Each night she arrived home exhausted and could do no more than exchange a few experiences with Lydia over supper before falling into bed.

  It was on the Wednesday of her sixth week that she arrived in the morning to find a strange difference in the atmosphere. It was not easy to discover what had caused it. Most of the babies in the wooden cradles seemed to be crying, and there was a smell of vomit in the air, but this was normal. The older children in the beds, irrepressible even in sickness, were engaged in throwing at each other whatever articles were in reach; and even some of those who lay flat, with only their white faces showing above the scarlet blankets, were able to shout a cheerful insult from time to time, although it might take them five minutes’ panting to regain their breath.

  All this was normal too, and so unfortunately was the fact that a few children lay with their eyes closed, too weak to contribute to the noise and bustle. One of these was in the bed beside the trapdoor through which Margaret had just appeared. She looked anxiously at his dead-white face and blue lips and put a hand to his wrist even before taking off her cloak. His neighbour, a cheerful boy with the mark of his father’s drunken anger stitched in a livid scar across his forehead, leaned forward informatively.

  ‘’E’s croaking, Miss.’