The Lorimer Legacy (44 page)

‘I thought perhaps it was nervousness which caused your nausea at that time,' commented Margaret. She had known of the plan to disrupt the Coronation service and had disapproved. It had seemed tactful not to ask too many questions when Alexa suddenly announced that she was not well enough to attend the service.

‘I'm never nervous about singing,' Alexa said. ‘And with Piers to support me I wasn't even frightened of being arrested. No, it was only the pregnancy which made me feel so ill. But this baby seems pleased to be part of my body. We're flourishing together in a quite different way.'

‘It could still be a girl.'

‘No girl could possibly kick as violently. Even Frisca, who's hardly been still for a second since she was born, wasn't able to make her presence felt before that with quite such gusto. No, I shall have a son. As tall and as kind as his father. With as much love of music as his mother. And, on his own account, with perhaps a touch of wildness. His kicking suggests that, at least. I think I shall call him Alaric. The barbarian, invading the civilized life of his parents. I wonder what he'll
really
be like. There was another thought I had, Margaret, when I sent the rubies away. Do you remember – oh, years and years ago – I asked you whether your father had left any legacy, and you said that the only true inheritance was one of character?'

‘I don't remember the occasion,' Margaret said. ‘But I'm prepared to believe that I expressed some opinion of the kind.'

‘You were talking about your father's children: William and Ralph and yourself. At the time, I didn't even know
that I ought to be counted in with them. Well, I was thinking the other day about the next generation, to which my son will belong: the grandchildren of John Junius Lorimer. They must all have inherited something from him. Some part of themselves, I mean – I'm not talking about objects. But what? It's not easy to pick' these things out, especially since the grandchildren are all so very different from each other.'

‘Perhaps his different attributes have been scattered between them,' suggested Margaret, willing to enjoy a moment of speculation. ‘Matthew and Arthur, for example. Arthur has certainly inherited his grandfather's talent for making money. But Matthew has his eye for beauty.'

‘I remember Matthew himself saying that to me once.' A silence hung in the air, as though there were something else that Alexa would have liked to say. Margaret equally had to restrain herself. She saw Matthew from time to time in London and, although she could make no sense of his curiously angular paintings, they still shared the affection for each other which had been established in Matthew's babyhood. She never talked about the meetings to Alexa, however, and did not propose to do so now unless she was asked.

‘Yes, they seem to have divided their grandfather's character neatly between them.' Alexa, accepting Margaret's verdict, then moved decisively away from that illustration of the subject. ‘But of all the other grandchildren, it might have been expected that at least one would be the John Junius Lorimer of his generation. I don't see which one, though. There are plenty of contrasts among the cousins, but none of them has quite the right weight to be the head of a family.' She laughed to herself. ‘Who could think that Beatrice and Frisca have anything in common, even as small a thing as a grandfather – Beatrice so prim and sharp and cold, and little Frisca bouncing
about, determined to make the whole world smile by her antics.'

‘There's not much of John Junius Lorimer in either of them,' agreed Margaret. ‘And even less in Ralph's children. Kate wants to set the world to rights, although she doesn't yet see how to do it. I sometimes think that she only has eyes for the miseries of society. She's still too young, I suppose, to realize that even the poor are able to be happy for part of the time. I have a great admiration for Kate. She'll have a good deal to offer the world when she's finished her training. But I'm afraid that the price she's paying for it is the sacrifice of her youth.'

‘While Brinsley is a golden boy who sees all the delights of life spread in front of him for the picking.'

Margaret agreed with the description. Where Kate's earnestness aroused admiration, Brinsley Lorimer brought gaiety everywhere he went, infecting everyone with his light-heartedness. It was difficult to imagine him settling down as a hard-working member of society. For a good many years it had been tempting to postpone any suggestion that he ought to begin taking the future seriously, so great was his delight in the pleasures of boyhood. Margaret herself had often excused his escapades on the grounds of his youth. But he was not a child any more – the year that was just beginning would see his twentieth birthday. Ralph, who had devoted his own university years to hard work, seemed to take a vicarious pleasure in learning that his son would captain the Oxford cricket team this summer. At least Brinsley was serious about something; but to play cricket was hardly a career.

‘I've never seen Grant, of course,' said Alexa.

Margaret's knowledge of him, too, was nearly all secondhand. Because she had been present at his birth, she had seen for herself his crippled condition and knew it to be incurable. Both Lydia's letters and Kate's angry
comments on them had made it clear that even so young he was tyrannizing his parents. There seemed no useful comment to be made on this particular grandson of John Junius Lorimer.

Sometimes Margaret wondered whether there might not be yet one more Lorimer, unacknowledged. There had been a moment of unhappiness in the life of her brother Ralph – before he married Lydia – when he had confided some of his secrets to his sister and had seemed on the point of revealing others. But that was only speculation. If Lorimer blood was flowing in the veins of some dark-skinned boy or girl in Jamaica, she was not likely now ever to be told of it.

That left only Robert, and Robert – except in the bright redness of his hair – bore no greater resemblance than any of his cousins to the man whom Margaret remembered from her youth as so rich and autocratic, so solid and old. She stared for a moment at the portrait propped against the wall. Then she walked across the room to the mullioned window.

The terraces and lawns of Blaize, and the fields of the home park beyond, were covered with a crisp sheet of snow. It had fallen on Christmas Eve and remained until today undisturbed by anything but the arrow-headed tracks of birds. But now the side of the shallow hill beyond the ha-ha was patterned with other tracks. Robert, rosy-cheeked with cold and effort, was dragging Frisca's sledge up the slope and sending it down again with a gliding push. Frisca's cries of delight at each speeding journey broke through the frozen air of New Year's Day while Robert, at the top of the hill, rested for a moment, sharing her pleasure, before running down with his scarf flying from his neck to pull his little cousin up again. His bright hair, tousled and shining, gleamed against the white background of the snow.

John Junius Lorimer had had red hair in his youth. He too must have been a lively boy once, waving his hat, perhaps, to cheer the news of the victory at Waterloo. But it was impossible for Margaret to take the leap of imagination which would enable her to envisage her father as young, and exactly the same limitation of vision made her unable to see Robert as old. It was enough, she told herself, that he was healthy and clever and loving; eighteen years old, with his life as an adult just about to begin.

‘What are you thinking?' Alexa asked from the day-bed behind her.

‘I was looking at Robert and thinking how good it must be to be eighteen years old,' she said.

It was a lie. She was thinking that there must have been a moment in 1800 when Alexander Lorimer and his wife had looked down at their red-headed baby, John Junius, hoping that he would have a happy and successful life. Alexander could reasonably have nursed these hopes until the day of his death, for he lived long enough to see his son, born into a time of wars and revolutions, survive into an age of prosperous stability. And yet, in the end . . .

Margaret closed her mind to what had happened in the end, but a forgotten sentence from a schoolroom translation flashed unbidden into her memory. ‘Who but a god goes woundless all the way?' On the day of Robert's birth she had been frightened lest she should prove unable to protect him on her own. She had done her best, and her best had been good enough to provide security during his childhood, but there was no kind of security which could be guaranteed for ever against accident and disaster.

The unwelcome thought made her shiver with an apprehension which had no reasonable foundation. To cheer
herself again she looked back at the happy scene outside. Frisca had jumped off the sledge now and was throwing snowballs at her cousin. Without warning Margaret remembered another snowy afternoon when she herself was only a year or two older than Robert was today. She had looked out of a drawing room window in Bristol then at a snowscene just as beautiful as the one which stretched in front of her eyes now. She still remembered the unbroken smoothness of the lawns, the dramatic highlights of a line of elms in the background, the cold blue cleanness of the silent air. She had stood beside the man she loved and the future stretched itself in front of her eyes like a carpet of happiness.

None of the happiness she envisaged at that moment had ever come her way. Instead, it had melted like the snow itself, one casualty amongst many others in her father's ruin. To look into the future and hope was to ask for trouble. But that thought, which so inopportunely and unreasonably chilled her heart, was not one which ought to be expressed to a woman expecting a child. The future must be all-important to Alexa now; her own future, and the child's. And the new baby would have the best possible start in life: loving parents, a secure and comfortable place in society, the right first of all to enjoy and later to own a peaceful corner of the beautiful English countryside.

‘How fortunate your son will be,' Margaret said. ‘Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, with all the advantages that you and Piers can give him – he'll have no need of any legacy from the Lorimers.' She looked down at Alexa and touched her shining strawberry-blonde hair with an affectionate finger. ‘Although I do suspect,' she said, ‘that he may inherit his grandfather's red hair.'

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © Margaret Potter 1979

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ISBN: 9781448203925
eISBN: 9781448203338

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