The Lorimer Line

by Anne Melville

  Her voice was far from happy, and Margaret knew that Lydia was thinking of her dead lieutenant. They were both silent for a while but Margaret’s emotions could not be repressed.

  ‘He is very handsome, would you not agree?’

  ‘Dr Scott?’ It cost Lydia an effort of willpower to adjust her thoughts. ‘Not handsome in the sense that your brother is handsome. But good-looking, yes. I think your own choice of adjective earlier was the right one. He looks dependable, in a sturdy way.’

  ‘How odd that there should be two Doctor Scotts in my life!’ Margaret exclaimed. Whether it was ladylike or not, she thought of her new acquaintance as Charles. Even so soon after learning his surname, she had almost forgotten it again until Lydia’s reminder. ‘One Doctor Scott brought me into the world.’ She wondered whether this second one might prove to have an equal importance in her life. It was too soon to put such an idea into words, but Lydia seemed to guess what she was feeling.

  ‘You have not yet had time to know this one well,’ she warned. ‘A good appearance is not everything.’

  ‘I respect his profession,’ Margaret pointed out. ‘And I have had the opportunity to observe his courage.’ She had not intended to make comparisons, even in her own mind, but found them irresistible. ‘A first impression may not be completely accurate, but it is surely a good guide. I remember my very first meeting with David. I was sure at once that he was clever, and ambitious, and that he was a man who would be successful in life. In spite of what happened, I still believe I was right. Those were virtues which I had been brought up to admire, and I loved him for them. Now events have taught me that other qualities may be more important.’

  Lydia raised her eyebrows and Margaret did not evade the unspoken question.

  ‘Kindness and loyalty,’ she said. ‘One needs, above all, a husband on whom one can depend.’

  Was she revealing too much? And was she being tactless as well? For a second time Lydia’s expression became grave, almost sad, and it occurred to Margaret that the cause of the sadness might be Ralph’s departure. Had Lydia, she wondered, entertained any hopes in that direction? If so, it was clear enough that she had been disappointed. It was time to abandon the dangerous subject and go to bed.

  By her own words Margaret had ruled out any possibility of seeing Charles before the weekend; but when Saturday arrived it became hard to conceal her excitement. She dressed that morning with particular care, choosing a plain dress so that Lydia would not notice that there was anything special about it, but one which emphasized her slimness. Although cold, the day was bright and sunny, and in the afternoon Lydia suggested that they should go to Hampstead and take a walk over the Heath. Margaret, however, was not prepared to leave the house. She excused herself on the grounds of an urgent need to complete her notes on the patients at the Sick Children’s Hospital.

  The excuse was not entirely an invention. As a result of the fire, the hospital had ceased to exist. During the week there had been plenty for Margaret to do, visiting the children in the various hospitals to which they had been transferred, noting how they had been affected by the disturbance, and passing on to the doctors now in charge of them some information about their past history. Meanwhile, the Dean had arranged for another supervisor to take charge of her studies in child health, and from Monday until Christmas Margaret would work at Great Ormond Street. So it was true that her notes required attention -but it was not the whole truth.

  As soon as Lydia had left for her walk Margaret spread papers and reference books all over the table in the sitting room which the two of them shared. The effect was impressively studious, and from time to time Margaret did in fact do some work. But every time footsteps approached along the pavement she lifted her head to listen. A hundred small hopes were succeeded by a hundred small disappointments; and when at last some footsteps did approach the front door, they were only Lydia’s.

  He would come on Sunday then - and on Sunday it rained so hard that there was no question of either of them wishing to leave the warm fire in the sitting room. They wrote letters and toasted muffins, chatted a little and read a little. No one came to disturb their relaxation.

  Margaret hid her feelings behind unspoken rationalizations. Perhaps Charles lived in the suburbs, or even in the country. If he had to travel to St Bartholomew’s whenever he was on duty he might be reluctant to repeat the journey into London on one of his few free days. It would have been more prudent to consider that, when she so officiously tried to determine when he would come. On the other hand, he might be on duty this weekend and not free until the next. There were all sorts of possible reasons to explain why he had not called. Margaret did her best to believe all of them at once, until next Sunday should arrive.

  Next Sunday arrived, and again Charles did not call: nor on any of the Sundays which followed. Margaret was too honest to pretend to herself that she was not hurt. Like Lydia, she had seen admiration in his eyes as they talked together at the theatre, and he had said that he would come: it was not something which she had merely imagined out of hope. So far from being dependable, he had let down the first expectation she had ever held of him. He had asked if he might call, had received permission, but had failed either to come or to explain his change of mind. It was not quite a broken promise, but fell little short of one.

  As Christmas approached, a more complicated feeling unsettled her. In the new year she would be starting a six-month period as a surgical dresser at St Bartholomew’s. In the first flush of her liking for Charles she had applied specially to be assigned to that hospital. Lydia would be there as well, encouraged by Margaret to make a similar application so that they could work together. Margaret’s original hope, before their encounter in the theatre, had been that she could greet Charles in the hospital with real pleasure and feigned surprise, and that he would reciprocate the pleasure. But now he was more likely to be embarrassed - even angered — if he thought himself pursued by a young woman when for some reason he did not choose to renew a chance acquaintance.

  When the first day of her new duty came, Margaret dressed neatly and severely and told herself that in no circumstances must she become upset. But she could not resist a moment of day dreaming. She would see Charles and he would smile and apologize. He had been ill, he had been away, he had forgotten her address. There must, after all, be an explanation.

  4

  When obligations conflict, a reputation for reliability in one sphere can be preserved only by causing disappointment in another. If Charles Scott had known that Margaret’s impression of him was of a dependable man he would have been pleased, for this was a character he wished to deserve. But on this dependability others had first claim. It was because he would not betray those who already relied on him that he was forced to break what he too recognized to have been a near-promise. Nothing prevented him from making the call which had been arranged except his own decision to stay at home: but it was a decision that he had no power to change.

  At their first encounter, on the morning of the fire, it had seemed to him that he had seen the young student somewhere before. Her red hair and freckled face were distinctive, but he could not put a name or occasion to the memory, and he was in too much of a hurry to pursue a matter of little importance. A great many students came to St Bartholomew’s Hospital for a few weeks or months in the course of their training. It was true that not many of them were women, and Charles would certainly have remembered if he had had this one under his direct supervision; but it was likely enough that at some time they had passed in a ward or corridor.

  Their second meeting was a different matter. After the discovery of the fire, Charles’s first concern had been to drag Jamie out of danger. When that was accomplished, he was appalled to discover that the collapse of the burning ladder left him unable to follow Miss L up into the children’s ward. The firemen came as quickly as could be expected in the fog, he supposed, but every moment of waiting was an agony to him. When at last he was able to scramble up t
o the hoist platform and found her not only safe but working calmly and speedily inside the ward to bring each child in turn within reach of rescue, his relief and admiration were as heartfelt as his previous anxiety. But it was afterwards, in the cab, that a new and more protective emotion was born. Margaret, who had been ashamed of her grimy skin and smoky clothes, and even more ashamed of her tears of nervous and physical exhaustion, would have been astonished to learn that this was the moment when Charles fell in love with her.

  He was amazed himself by the suddenness of his reaction to her collapse, but this did not prevent him from instinctively making good use of the situation by slipping a supporting arm round her waist. Her slimness and the trusting way in which she allowed her tired body to relax against his side excited him. He made sure of her address before parting, he sent flowers on the next day, and he planned to visit her on the Saturday, assuming that she would need all the intervening time to recover from the shock of her experiences. Considering that their acquaintance was such a short one, it appeared to be developing at a gratifying speed.

  The unexpected meeting at the theatre changed his intentions in the passage of a single sentence. When he caught sight of her from a distance at the end of the first act, there was a moment of jealousy: the blond gentleman - who, he hoped, might be attached to the plain young woman sitting beside him - turned to Miss L, whose smile indicated that their relationship was an affectionate one. But she herself was able to relieve his anxiety when they met later in the promenade, introducing the handsome companion as her brother. Then his happiness was cruelly shattered as she told him her full name.

  Margaret Lorimer!

  In his distress he walked all the way home from the theatre. At every step he tried to persuade himself that Lorimer, although not as common a name as Scott, was yet by no means unusual. There must be thousands of Lorimers in England. Yes, but how many of them would be called Margaret, and how many of the Margaret Lorimers would have red hair, and how many red-haired Margaret Lorimers would have a brother called Ralph?

  There was no need to torture himself in a private inquisition. As soon as he heard the name, he had remembered where he had seen Margaret Lorimer before. It was in Bristol, a good many years ago. Charles had spent little of his life there after the age of twelve. He had gone to boarding school then and came to London when he began his medical training at the age of eighteen. But holidays had been spent at home and although his father did not mix socially with his richer patients, Charles had once attended a concert at which the Lorimer family was pointed out to him.

  Margaret would have been no more than fifteen years old at that time, but he had noticed even then the mature, determined expression which impressed him again now. It would be possible, he told himself, to write for confirmation to one of his boyhood friends who still lived in Bristol. It would be known there whether John Junius Lorimer’s daughter had left the city to take a medical training. Yet the letter would not be worth the time devoted to writing it. The answer must be as certain as doomsday. He had fallen in love with the only woman in the world whom he could not possibly marry.

  Charles himself was rational enough on the subject. When her father’s bank collapsed, Margaret Lorimer had been only twenty-one. She could not conceivably bear any responsibility for what had happened. No one, as far as he knew, had even accused her of extravagance. There had certainly been gossip about the young man she proposed to marry, but the fact that the engagement had come to nothing was in her favour. If Charles had lived alone, responsible only for himself, he would have added to his earlier feelings an even deeper admiration for a young woman who had wasted no time in weeping over the riches she had lost. All credit to her for setting to work to make herself a useful member of society!

  Charles, however, did not live alone. He shared his cramped suburban home with his parents. There had been no choice in the matter, for the Receiver who administered the affairs of Lorimer’s Bank after its collapse had left his father and mother destitute. Their house, their furniture, and all their savings had been sucked into the almost bottomless pit of debt for which the bank’s shareholders found themselves responsible. Charles had accepted his responsibilities as a dutiful son, assuring his parents that they could rely on him for support. So Margaret had been perfectly correct in her estimate of him as dependable, but it was this which must inevitably prevent him from ever meeting her again.

  His mother wanted him to marry. Her abrupt change of fortune had shocked her into a state of querulous frailty. She was bewildered by the need to leave her comfortable home in Clifton and live in the narrow terrace house in Islington which was all that Charles could afford. To see her only son married, to hold the first grandchild in her arms, was her fondest hope. It would be a sign that her life was returning to normal again.

  Her husband, though, would never return to normal. In years he was not an old man. There had been a time, immediately after the disaster, when Charles had reluctantly considered the possibility of leaving London and setting himself up as a general practitioner in the country. There, his father might share the practice and heal himself by a return to work.

  The idea had never been more than a dream. Dr Scott senior was not likely to recover from the shock of his ruin, as his demented behaviour at Brinsley House had foreshadowed. Even to himself Charles did not use the word ‘mad’ but he had to accept that on this one subject his father’s mind was unhinged. Not only that, but it was all too easy for almost everything that happened to be connected with the one subject, however carefully Charles fought to control every conversation. It would be out of the question to mention Margaret Lorimer, even as a stranger glimpsed at a casual meeting. To expect that she could ever be received as a daughter-in-law was to reach for the moon.

  As he strode through the chilly streets of London on the way home from the theatre that evening, Charles tried desperately to find a way round the impasse. Suppose he never brought Margaret home, never mentioned her name. They could meet in her lodgings, in hospitals, in public places. Even as he imagined it, he knew that all this was impossible. His parents might live for another twenty years. They would never change their attitude. How could he possibly expect a young woman to accept such a situation with no prospect of its ending?

  Only as he arrived at his own front door did he admit to himself in so many words what had happened. ‘I have fallen in love with Margaret Lorimer,’ he said aloud, and sighed. Well, that was his mistake and his misfortune. No one had asked him to do it, and he must stifle his feelings as best he might. But there had been precious little time for Margaret Lorimer to fall in love with him. She had liked him; he felt pretty sure of that - and she would have been as flattered as any other woman when his flowers arrived. She might even be looking forward to his call; and if he kept his word she would have good reason for wondering whether he was interested in her. It would be too late after that to apologize and withdraw. He must come to a standstill now, before her emotions were involved. It was the only kindness which he had in his power to offer. ‘Margaret Lorimer must not be allowed to fall in love with me,’ he said; and tried to make the second statement as certain as the first.

  If Charles had been a philanderer, he would not have bothered himself about the feelings of someone whom he could drop from his life as soon as she became troublesome. It was because he was both kind and honourable that he forced himself to spend the weekend on which he had intended to call doing an extra duty on behalf of one of the other surgeons. Both then and afterwards he was unhappy, but he supposed that the hurt in his heart would heal as time passed. Nothing, he told himself, could alter his determination never to see Margaret Lorimer again.

  For this reason the meeting which took place on the first Monday of the new year was unwelcome and disturbing -all the worse because he had no warning of it. The supervision of students was a normal part of his duties as a surgeon in a teaching hospital: and because so many of the older surgeons in his own and other hospitals were
still not reconciled to the introduction of women to their profession, Charles found himself allotted a larger proportion of the students from the London School of Medicine for Women than would have come his way had they been divided evenly between the teaching hospitals. So there was nothing to dismay him in his first glimpse of the two young women who awaited his arrival that morning, neatly dressed in clean white smocks and plain skirts and with their hair strained severely back into buns. It was a different matter when he came near enough to recognize them.

  For a moment he was unable to speak. Then he gave a quick nod of recognition.

  ‘Miss Lorimer. Miss Morton.’

  His voice emerged coldly; it was because he could not think what else to say. His behaviour in turning away without a further word was brusque to the point of rudeness, he knew; it was because his thoughts were confused.

  Margaret Lorimer was owed an apology: there could be no doubt of that. But if he made one - at least with enough sincerity to render it acceptable - he would be in danger of restoring the very situation which he had determined to avoid. It was impossible for him to make a friend of Margaret Lorimer. Therefore, it would be a kindness, surely, for this to be made clear from the first moments. If he had to work with her for the next six or eight weeks, that was something which would have to be endured; but he must start by making it clear that the relationship could only be one of teacher and pupil.

  Another thought intruded. He had met Margaret Lorimer for the first time in her adult life by accident. Their second encounter, at the theatre, had been a coincidence, but one coincidence was not unusual in a relationship. A second coincidence, however, was less easy to accept. This third meeting, it was true, arose naturally out of their shared profession of medicine. Nevertheless, Margaret must have been aware that in coming to Bart’s she was likely to see him again. She knew he worked there, and knew he was a surgeon. It seemed likely that she had actually asked to do her surgical work with him. In that case, she was pursuing him. If any embarrassment was to be felt at this unfortunate meeting, she - who had contrived it - should be the one to feel it.