Lorimers at War (18 page)

She smiled at him and was disconcerted by the scowl with which he responded, making no effort to stand or even to lift his arms to return her embrace. He was an unattractive child, pale-faced, podgy and shabbily dressed. His hair, long and straight and with the appearance of having been roughly chopped with scissors, was so fair as to appear almost white, and his blue eyes were hard. Margaret had spent a great part of her professional life looking after children and took her ability to establish an immediate rapport with them almost for granted. For a moment, faced with this cold sulkiness, she was taken aback. But perhaps the letter would offer some explanation of her youngest nephew's mood as well as of his presence.

‘I'll tell you what it says.' Arthur was too impatient to wait for the two women to puzzle out the words. ‘Uncle Ralph has sent us his youngest son. He's not capable of caring for the boy any longer, now that Aunt Lydia is dead, so he expects us to do it for him. Without bothering to ask in advance. Obviously it was a mistake on our part to behave so generously to the others – to Kate and Brinsley. He takes it for granted that we'll look after as many children as he cares to ship to England with the rest of his merchandise.'

‘You forget yourself,' Alexa rebuked him. She turned to the boy. ‘I'm your Aunt Alexa, Grant, and this is my house. I have a little girl almost the same age as you – just a year or so younger. Come with me and we'll find her. You can play with some of her toys while we prepare a meal for you.'

‘I don't play with toys,' said Grant.

‘All the same, I'd like you to meet Frisca.' Alexa opened the door, expecting Grant to follow her, but the boy did not move.

‘He has to be carried everywhere.' Arthur was still too outraged by the imposition to accept Alexa's hint that it should not be discussed in the boy's presence. ‘That's another problem. It may have been possible in Jamaica, but which of us can carry that sort of burden?'

‘Stand up, Grant,' said Margaret gently, while Alexa rang for a servant. Half helping, half pulling, she steadied the unwilling boy on his good leg. ‘Oh, we can soon find a way to deal with this. We've got a whole store room full of crutches. We'll cut one down to size and you'll soon be running around on your own.'

‘I don't want to,' said Grant, but Margaret took no notice.

‘This is a hospital as well as a house,' she said. ‘Anyone who isn't able to look after himself has to do what the doctors tell him; and I'm the doctor.' She was still smiling, but made no attempt to conceal the firmness in her voice. ‘Off you go now to meet Frisca.'

The footman who had answered the bell picked Grant up in answer to her gesture, and Alexa went with them to introduce the two children to each other. At last Margaret had the chance to read her brother's letter.

‘This is written in grief, not drunkenness,' she said. ‘At the very moment when he'd just learned of Brinsley's death in France. I suppose it was too much for him to bear, that the deformed child should survive when he had lost his golden boy.'

‘I'm not concerned with Uncle Ralph's reasons. Only with his actions. What he asks is impossible. Quite impossible.'

‘There's plenty of room in Brinsley House, Arthur.'

It seemed to Margaret that Ralph was not the only one behaving selfishly. Her nephew was one of the few people in England who was doing well out of the war. He had no personal attachments and so did not share the strain endured by all those whose loved ones were at risk on the battlefield. The family shipping line and the shipbuilding firm which he had bought more recently were both profiting from large government contracts, and even before the war started he had been a wealthy man. He could keep Grant in a corner of his mansion in Bristol, with a tutor and a nurse if necessary, and hardly even know that he was there. ‘And I thought you liked children,' she chided him.

‘Children like Frisca, perhaps. But not a boy like this. Spoiled. Sulky. Ugly. Raging every time he fails to get his own way. He's been at Brinsley House for three days already, because I couldn't get away sooner, and I can tell you that I've had enough. I'm not surprised that Uncle Ralph wants to be rid of him. I must repeat that I recognize no responsibility in the matter at all. If you can't take him, then I'll send him back to Jamaica on the next available ship.'

‘
I
take him?' Strained as she was with lack of sleep, overwork and anxiety about Robert, Margaret hardly
knew whether to laugh or cry. How could Arthur imagine for a moment that she could carry this load as well?

‘Or Alexa, of course. I realize that she doesn't have your feeling for children. But she has servants. And as she said herself, there can't be more than eighteen months difference in age between Grant and Frisca. They could share the same governess.'

Alexa's first words, when she returned to the library, were sufficient to throw doubt on that suggestion even before it was put to her.

‘I'm afraid there's going to be trouble there,' she said. it's difficult for someone as lively as Frisca to know what to do with a boy who can't or won't move. I suppose I shouldn't say this in front of a doctor, but one wonders sometimes whether it wouldn't be kinder if babies with such disabilities weren't allowed to survive the moment of their birth.'

The casual remark had an effect on Margaret which Alexa could not have anticipated, for it was Margaret who had cared for Lydia during her last pregnancy, Margaret herself who had delivered the baby in that steaming West Indian village. She still remembered the moment in which she too had wondered, staring down at the new-born child, whether if he had the choice he would prefer never to draw his first breath. It had been a moment of temptation made stronger by the knowledge that the pregnancy was an accidental one and that the baby was unwanted by either parent. She had resisted the temptation and in so doing had condemned the child to a life in which his father resented him and his mother was weakened by his demands. Unlike Arthur, it was not possible for Margaret to say that she had no responsibility at all.

In any case, the boy was a Lorimer, descended – like each of the three adults in the room – from John Junius Lorimer of Bristol. He was a member of the family, and what was a family for if not to deal with emergencies like
this? Inside a family, the question of whether someone had an attractive or unattractive personality was irrelevant. Whether or not Margaret could make herself like Grant, she had a duty to help him.

‘When does your next ship sail for Jamaica?' she asked Arthur abruptly.

‘Not for some time. The number of German submarines operating in the Atlantic makes the risk not worth taking too often, and that route is one of the government's lower priorities.'

‘Give me good warning as soon as you know a date, if you please. Alexa, may Grant stay here until then? We will speak of it only as a holiday, so that he won't feel too greatly rejected when we send him back. It's natural that Ralph should have been distraught by the news of Brinsley's death. We must give him time to recover. In the meantime, this is a hospital and poor Grant is in need of treatment. Arthur may be right in saying that he has been spoiled, but it's equally clear that he has been neglected. There are surgeons performing miracles every day in England now. We must see if there's anything to be done for the boy. If there isn't, we must teach him how to live with his own body. I'm too old to bring up another child. But at least for a limited time, I think we should all recognize our family responsibilities even if we take no pleasure in them. If Arthur will contribute towards the cost of any medical treatment and Alexa will allow Grant to live here with Frisca, I will do my best to find some course of treatment which will benefit both his body and his mind.'

The decisiveness with which she spoke made it difficult for the others to demur. Alexa no doubt realized that her frequent absences from Blaize and a continuing sufficiency of servants meant that an extra guest would cause her little personal inconvenience. And although Arthur's interest in making money was almost obsessional, he had never been mean about spending it in a cause which
touched his pride. Their realization that Margaret was accepting the responsibility for sending Grant home as well as for keeping him for the time being made it easier for them both to accept her decision. Arthur gave the quick nod with which, like Beatrice, he was accustomed to approve a new proposal. Alexa, as befitted a chatelaine and prima donna, murmured something which could be taken as a gracious acceptance.

‘That's settled, then,' said Margaret briskly. ‘As a temporary arrangement at least. But that still leaves us Ralph to worry about. Do you think Grant was telling the truth when he said that his father drank? Ralph has been a total abstainer all his life. As a boy he never drank spirits because of his enthusiasm for games, and as a Baptist minister he was determined to set a good example. I can hardly believe that he would abandon his principles.'

‘I'm afraid it may be so,' Arthur said. ‘We must make allowances for the fact that Grant and Ralph are clearly on bad terms, but there's evidence to support what the boy says. Most of the business letters which have reached me recently from Hope Valley have been written by Duke Mattison, Ralph's assistant – because, he explains, the pastor is ill. The nature of the illness is never defined, but it may well be –'

‘Then perhaps Kate should come home to look after her father,' Margaret said. ‘She's only a volunteer, after all. Even a conscripted doctor would have been entitled to leave after two years. I'll write and suggest that just at this moment Ralph may be more in need of his daughter's care than the patients in her hospital are of a doctor. And in the meantime we shall all do our best to help Grant, shall we not?'

Her smile met little enthusiasm. Grant had managed to alienate his relatives in England in record time. But neither Alexa nor Arthur made any further objection. The war had ushered in a new world, but some of the old
values survived. Even when scattered all over the globe, the Lorimers remained a united family.

Everything about England came as a bewilderment to Grant. To begin with, he had not expected it to be so cold. He was accustomed to rainy days, but in Jamaica it was warm even while the rain was falling and as soon as it stopped the sun came out, making the air steamy with heat. He had been given no new clothes since his mother died and now he found that in this chill December weather everything he was wearing was too thin as well as too small.

He was astounded, too, by the size of the houses. There was not a single building in Hope Valley which had more than one floor – most of the village homes contained only one room. Brinsley House, his cousin Arthur's house in Bristol, had seemed like a palace, and yet Brinsley House was quite small compared with Blaize. Did everyone in England, he wondered, live in such a grand style?

The immediate problem here was one of stairs. Although Grant was careful to conceal the fact as much as possible, he had become quite adept at moving around on level ground, but he had never before been faced with so many flights of stairs and his difficulty in coping with them was genuine – even if he could not make anyone believe this.

It came as no surprise to realize that he was not wanted: he was used to that. He had not been wanted in Jamaica, either, since his mother's death. But it had been an unpleasant shock to discover that he was not even expected, that the letter which his father had scrawled
had travelled on the same boat and had been delivered, so to speak, by the same post as himself.

It was Miss Mattison, the village schoolmistress, who had really been responsible for his journey. On the day when the telegram arrived from the War Office to announce that Captain Brinsley Lorimer had been killed in action, the whole community had watched in horror as their pastor raged across the length and breadth of the valley, and the Bristow Estate which adjoined it, and even climbed the rocky path to the Baptist Hole, roaring his grief aloud and feeding it with forbidden rum.

Grant had spoken the truth when he claimed that his father had been drunk. His father's flock had accepted their shepherd's lapse more tolerantly than the frightened boy, for they would have behaved in the same way themselves. Most of them had kept out of the way until the fury of his mourning had spent itself. But Duke, on whom he depended, had made it his business to follow the pastor unobtrusively and make sure that he did himself no harm. And Duke's mother, Miss Mattison, had equally unobtrusively arranged for Grant to be carried to the schoolhouse. She kept him out of the way there for several weeks, in case his father's frenzy should vent itself on his unloved youngest child, and it was she who suggested, when she thought the time was ripe, that the boy should go to England. She knew from what Duke had told her, and what rumour in the Valley confirmed, that Arthur Lorimer, master of Brinsley Great House in Bristol, was a very rich man.

But when Miss Mattison's plan had been put into effect and Grant found himself unloaded at Avonmouth with a consignment of bananas, Arthur had made no pretence of a welcome. Grant found that easy enough to understand. What was more bewildering now was the attitude of his two aunts. They had agreed, apparently, that he should stay at Blaize, and yet they seemed to have no interest in him. Aunt Alexa had simply disappeared into another
part of the huge house, while Aunt Margaret was always busy, always hurrying on her way to somewhere else, always tired, always worried.

‘She's anxious about Robert, don't you see?' Frisca told him when he commented on this. Of all the surprises which England had in store for him, Frisca was the most astounding. In Hope Valley everyone was black – except for his own family, of course, and the Mattisons, who were a light shade of brown. He had known that in England everyone would be white, but Frisca had a brightness about her which was different again. Her golden ringlets were shiny as the sun, her eyes were alight with liveliness, her clothes sparkled with cleanliness, and her whole body somehow had a bouncing brightness of energy. Grant had spent the whole of his life pretending to himself that as long as he had his mother he didn't care whether or not anyone else in the world cared a fig for him. But now his mother was dead. He pined for someone else to like him. Could he persuade Frisca to do so?