Lorimers at War (10 page)

In the last month of 1915, Matthew was back in England. The Battle of Loos seemed to have existed in a different world from that of his quiet Chelsea studio, but as he worked his sketches up into a large painting of the battlefield at night all its sounds came back to haunt him: the boom of cannons, the spitting of machine guns, the erratic stabs of rifle fire, the deafening explosions of shells and grenades and, above all, the screams of the wounded. He slept badly, continually waking in a nightmare conviction that he had been blinded and would never paint again. In an effort to tire himself out, he stayed at the easel until the small hours of every morning. So when his doorbell rang late on a December evening, his strained eyes failed to focus immediately on the young woman who stood outside.

She was a working girl whose shabby clothes were too thin to prevent her from shivering in the winter air. After allowing him a few seconds to study her, she gave a resigned laugh.

‘You don't recognize me.'

Her voice, with its Midland accent, stirred Matthew's memory and he stared harder at the strong-boned face.

‘Of course I do.' Matthew had abandoned the snobbish class judgements of his parents on the day he left Brinsley House. Even if he had not had a particular reason for kindness in this case, he would never have begrudged politeness to someone whom his mother would have regarded only as a possible applicant for a post as kitchen maid. ‘It took me a moment to move my mind from the picture I'm working on, that's all. Come upstairs.'

She looked curiously at the huge painting as she followed him into the studio and allowed him to take her coat.

‘Is that what it's like, then?'

‘No. I can't find any way to paint the noise. This is a safe and silent version of Hell. The reality is rather different.'

‘Bit of a change from when you were painting me.'

‘It's all connected, though. These explosions of light are caused by the shells which you help to make. Well, perhaps these are shells filled by some German Peggy, but yours will be having the same effect on the other side of the line.'

She was intelligent enough to be amused at the way in which he let her know that he had remembered her name.

‘What happened to the picture you did of me?' she asked.

‘The munitions factory one went to be turned into a poster. One of a series to persuade women to take up essential war work. The other one's here somewhere. Sit down, and I'll find it.'

Earlier in the year he had been asked to make a portfolio on the Home Front and chose to concentrate on the contribution which women were making to the war. Everywhere he went he found women doing men's jobs, from farm labourers and gamekeepers in the country, to bus conductors and policewomen in the towns. Particularly in the factories, as the men moved out the women moved in. Peggy had been making fuses in a munitions factory when he first sketched her three months ago. She worked long hours in conditions which he privately regarded as criminally dangerous, and was faced at the end of the day with a long walk to the poor lodgings which were all she could afford. She was not by birth a town girl, and yet not exactly a country girl either. Her father was a coal miner and her home in Leicestershire was a mining village. There had been no openings for girls there, she had told him and, although she could have found employment on a farm nearer to home, she
had some talent for sewing and was reluctant to expose her hands to such rough work in all weathers.

Matthew had found the firm boldness of her features intriguing, marking her out from the other girls in the fuse-room. He offered her money to spend a few hours sitting for him in his studio, but her exhaustion when she came was such that she fell asleep while he was painting her. The canvas which he now pulled out of the rack depicted her in just that state – a young woman completely worn out by her work.

She stared at it critically for a few moments; then sighed.

‘I should've stayed asleep a bit longer,' she said. ‘I've fallen.'

The phrase was unfamiliar to Matthew and she realized that he was puzzled. ‘A baby,' she explained. ‘I'll be having a baby, come June.'

Inwardly Matthew groaned, but he did not allow any dismay to show on his face. ‘Is it mine?' he asked. There was no denying that he had taken advantage of her in every sense, at a moment when she was only half awake; and there had been other meetings in the month which followed, before he left for France. But she had not been a virgin.

‘Oh yes,' she said: ‘The first time, it were with a lad from our village. More nor a year ago. I were going to marry him. He never came back from Ypres. That were the reason I took this munition work. To get my own back, so to speak. There were no one after him, till you.'

‘I'll give you some money,' said Matthew. ‘You can go home to your parents, I suppose.'

‘Not in this state, I can't. I could go home as a wife. Or even as a widow, if it came to that. But I'll not show my face there with a bastard. Me Dad would kill me. And me Mam's dead.'

‘I can't marry you, if that's what you're after,' said Matthew. He chose the words carefully. They meant only
that if he could not marry Alexa he was not prepared to marry anyone at all, but with luck they would suggest that he was married already. If necessary he would tell the full lie, but he still hoped that the matter could be settled without a quarrel.

‘But you live alone here.'

‘That doesn't mean that I'm free.'

‘It means I could move in,' she said. ‘You'd find it cheaper to support me and the child here than in lodgings. You could do with a bit of housekeeping, by the look of it. And a baby ought to have a father.'

‘You're asking too much,' said Matthew; and some of the spirit which had first attracted his attention flashed angrily into her eyes.

‘
You
asked enough, didn't you? You expect me to walk out of here with a pound or two in my pocket and to feed your child on it for fourteen years or so, until he's big enough to earn?'

‘Of course not. I'll send you something every week. It won't be a lot, though. I'm not much better off than you are.'

Peggy laughed her disbelief. ‘It won't do,' she said. ‘If you can't marry then I must do without the marriage, but there's no reason why you shouldn't pretend. If I live here with you me Dad'll think all's right and proper. And if it turns out later that you've got a wife tucked away somewhere he'll be sorry for me, perhaps, instead of spitting at me on the doorstep.' The anger faded from her face and was replaced by a look of mischievous invitation. ‘The baby won't be here for getting on six months,' she pointed out. ‘We could have a bit of fun before that. And if I keep on working for a while longer, with no lodgings to pay, I can save enough for clothes to start him off. It wouldn't be so bad, you know.'

She stood on tip-toe to kiss him. Even while he returned her embrace, Matthew considered the proposal. He had been lucky so far, he supposed – because she was certainly
not the only one of his models over the years who had been persuaded to stay for the night when a sitting was over. It had been a mistake, in retrospect, to expect that Peggy would behave like a professional, accepting any accident as the luck of the game; but since he had made the mistake he must pay for it. And although he had no very strong family feeling, Matthew recognized his responsibility to the unborn child. It could not be right that his son should be brought up in the kind of poverty to which Peggy would soon descend if she were left unsupported.

There was not even any reason why he should not allow her the marriage certificate which would make her respectable in the eyes of her family. That was not a decision to be taken on impulse now, but it was something to be considered. Peggy was a decent enough girl, clean and hard-working. He might even find himself emerging at last from the squalor in which he had lived for the past twenty years. Certainly, as she reminded him, he could take pleasure in her company. The collapse of his hopes of marriage to Alexa had left him emotionally shattered and his experience of war in the past year – even as a spectator – made him profoundly pessimistic. His ambition to be a great artist one day had already faded and now he no longer expected to obtain any great satisfaction from life. There were no plans which would be endangered merely because he found himself encumbered with Peggy.

And perhaps, he thought as he kissed her again with more enthusiasm, responding to her invitation, perhaps a permanent relationship of this kind, and the family life which the birth of a child would bring, might have one positive effect. Alexa's marriage to Lord Glanville had not succeeded in stifling his obsession with her. But a new way of life and a woman of his own – surely now at last, if he really made the effort, he could force himself to forget Alexa.

The guests who enjoyed the hospitality of Blaize at the end of 1915 wore uniforms of hospital blue instead of the clothes appropriate to weekend house party guests. And they stayed longer. But the mistress of the house continued to regard herself as a hostess. The change from country house to hospital, originally planned to meet a temporary emergency, had by now taken on a permanent air. The old tithe barn which Alexa had earlier converted to a riverside theatre had been filled with hospital beds, and was used as a single long ward for soldiers who had survived operations in France or London but were still seriously ill. A scattering of ugly huts around it housed nurses and orderlies and could provide an isolation ward in case of infectious disease. As the men became convalescent, they moved up to the house. The orangery was a ward for wheelchair cases. The ballroom was divided into cubicles for men who were learning to walk on crutches. And the east wing was occupied by doctors and a dozen patients, mainly blind, who were unable to manage the stairs.

With thoughts similar to Arthur's in Brinsley House, Alexa had been making plans to entertain her many guests for Christmas. In the office which had once been a smoking room she expounded them now to Margaret.

‘Each of the men will find two stockings on their beds on Christmas morning,' she said. ‘Khaki ones, of course. All the women in the village have been knitting frantically to get enough finished. And Piers has been collecting little things to put inside. Tin trumpets, false noses, bags of sweets.'

‘You're treating them like children,' said Margaret, laughing.

‘They must feel like children, lying there helpless. If they didn't, how would they ever be able to tolerate all the business of bedpans and being washed by nurses? But there'll be adult things as well. Plenty of cigarettes, of course; and we've been offered two hundred copies of St Matthew's Gospel in a pocket size. Anyway, we shall see to it that the stockings are filled. And I shall provide a Christmas meal. Everything will come from our own resources, the home farm with the help of one or two of the tenants, so you won't need to go through all this ridiculous War Office requisition business. I've already been promised turkeys, sausages, bacon, beer, potatoes and sprouts; and the plum puddings were made here a month ago. Piers will look out some port wine to drink the King's health.'

‘Are you leaving me anything to do at all?' asked Margaret.

‘We need some crackers,' said Alexa, consulting her list. ‘The children in the village school are making paper chains and streamers and painting nativity pictures to be hung up. We must make the wards look really cheerful. There's plenty of holly and mistletoe in the grounds.'

‘Just stop for a moment,' Margaret pleaded. ‘Who's going to put up all these decorations?'

‘The VADs could do that in their spare moments, surely,' Alexa suggested.

‘You'll need to check that with Matron. They aren't allowed to have many spare moments, poor girls. Whatever you ask them to do will be extra to their nursing duties.'

‘They'll want to do it, all the same,' Alexa said confidently. ‘We'll have carol-singing in the ballroom on Christmas Day, and I'll form a little choir to sing in the Theatre Ward.'

‘The VADs again?'

‘Well, we ought to have a few women's voices. I should think there'll be plenty of volunteers. And on Boxing
Day you've already agreed that we can put on an entertainment.'

Alexa had made it her contribution to the war effort not only to sing to the troops herself, but to assemble a concert party which would provide a programme of varied entertainment. Naturally she had reserved the Christmas booking for her home ground.

‘Ah now, I have a point to raise on the subject of the entertainment,' said Margaret. She searched her overcrowded desk for a letter and read it out with a solemn expression on her face. ‘“Dear Commandant Aunt, Mamma is going to give a concert at Christmas and there will be a lot of singing and playing the piano and making jokes but no dancing. I wish to offer my services as a dancer and I shall be very good. Yours faithfully with love and kisses, Frisca.” I take it she's already approached you on the subject?'

‘Yes,' said Alexa. ‘I've never included dancing in the programme because so many of these men will never be able to dance again. And because often they can't
see
the concert very well, if they aren't able to sit up, but they can hear it. In any case, Frisca's too young for this sort of thing.'

‘How old were you when you first sang in public?' asked Margaret.

‘My mother was dying. I needed the money.' But Alexa had not needed the reminder that she was only nine years old when she made her first public appearance – in a music hall, not an opera house, but to just as much applause as she was to attract later on. She was willing to be persuaded if Margaret felt strongly enough to press the point.

‘Some of these men have babies they've never seen,' Margaret said. ‘A good many of them must have wondered whether their children would grow up without knowing what their fathers looked like. They've spent more than a year, most of them, living with death and
with other men in a world which hardly seems to include children at all. I think the sight of Frisca might well make some of them cry. But if she's prepared to face this rather special kind of audience, it can do nothing but good to remind them that they can hope to return to the sort of normal domestic life in which little girls smile and show off.'