Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘She is suffering from a badly lacerated throat and complete nervous exhaustion,’ he said to Amy. ‘She will need very careful nursing. Very careful nursing indeed. I have to tell you, Mrs Smith, that in all my years in the profession I have never seen a case so bad. Coax her to eat but don’t worry her if she can’t take anything more than tea. With care, she will improve by degrees. Keep everything as mild as possible, jelly and junket, broth if it’s strained. Plenty of water of course. I will look in again tomorrow, but phone me should you be concerned about anything.’

  It was a long and gradual convalescence. To start with Octavia spent most of her time asleep, relieved to be back in her own comfortable bed in her own familiar room. She ate what she could, although even eating a junket felt like swallowing needles, and from time to time she tried to speak. But her voice was so husky her mother couldn’t always understand what she was trying to say.

  ‘Rest, my darling,’ she said. ‘Save your poor voice. It will come back more quickly if you don’t use it.’

  So the days passed into weeks and the weeks were endured for a month. Tommy sent her several letters but although they asked how she was, they were mostly about the ‘warring tribes’ and what utter fools they were and how ‘they ought to have their stupid heads knocked together’ and she set them aside. She would write to him when she had more energy.

  One morning her mother arrived in her bedroom with a vase full of freshly cut lilac. The heavy double-headed blossoms filled the room with the fragrance of spring. ‘From the garden, my darling,’ she said.

  Octavia was talking by then, although her voice was still croaky. ‘Is it spring?’ she asked.

  ‘Come to the window and see,’ Amy said. ‘I’ll get your dressing gown.’

  It was like a return to life, to sit in her chair by the window and look out at the garden, at the cherry tree foaming with white blossom and the grass so green and the borders dappled with wallflowers, all bright reds and yellows and purples and browns.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘It’s so good to be home.’

  Returning strength reminded her that she had friends – and a lover – who ought to be told how she was. That afternoon she sat at her desk and wrote to them all, to Mrs Emsworth and Betty reporting on her return to health, to her friends at the shop describing the conditions in Holloway Gaol, because she knew that was what they would want to know, and to Tommy to tell him she’d been released from prison and was back at home. She decided not to say anything to him about the force-feeding. There would be time enough for that when they were together. ‘I am sorry I have not written to you before,’ she said, ‘but letters were restricted, as you probably know.’ Then she added a postscript. ‘PS. I can’t wait to see you again.’

  His answer was rather odd. He was glad she was out of gaol and at home again but he couldn’t say when he would be eligible for any leave. ‘Since the Balkan league decided they’d stop killing each other and attack the Turks instead, the situation has been extremely complicated. Warring tribes and all that. Now there is talk of a possible conference to be held in London, some time in May, which the powers fondly imagine will solve all problems here. Personally, I take leave to doubt it. However, the upshot of all this warmongering and manoeuvring is that we are all kept hard at it preparing reports on the current situation and, until the conference has sat to everyone’s satisfaction, all leave is cancelled. I wish I could say otherwise but that is the situation.’

  The businesslike tone of the letter upset her. She needed tenderness and loving messages or at the very least an assurance that they would meet as soon as it could be arranged. This brusque talk of warring tribes and conferences made her feel bleak. For several days she left his letter unanswered, while she came downstairs and took her first breakfast at the family table, went for her first short walk on the heath, sat up late one evening to play bezique with her father, and finally had tea with Emmeline and her little ones, who had walked across the heath to visit her and were overjoyed to be allowed into her bedroom to see how she was.

  ‘You must be very good and not trouble your aunty,’ Emmeline warned them as they climbed the stairs.

  But Octavia held out her arms to them as they peered round the door and soon they were all sitting on her bed and feeding her crumbs of madeira cake and she was laughing and saying she felt like a baby bird.

  From then on she felt stronger every day. She took to reading the papers to see if anything was being said about Tommy’s conference and, once she had started reading again, rapidly regained her appetite for news and information, to J-J’s delight.

  ‘On the road to recovery, my little one,’ he said.

  She agreed that she was although in one respect she knew she would never recover. For what she had been facing during the weeks of her convalescence was the fact that she was a coward. She knew beyond any doubt at all that she couldn’t go back to prison and face being force-fed ever again. Somehow or other she would have to find a way of putting herself beyond the reach of any more lawbreaking and the only way she could think of was to take a job – something that would pay her a wage and expect her loyalty in return, or at least her presence at a workplace every day. If she did that, she simply wouldn’t be available for any more civil disobedience and couldn’t break the law even if she wanted to. Eventually, she mentioned it to her father.

  ‘What would you say if I told you I should like to go to work?’ she asked, keeping the question as light as she could make it.

  ‘There are plenty of positions you could occupy with your qualifications,’ he said. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  She didn’t really have anything in mind. Just a job. But pressed she admitted that she might be able to teach.

  ‘There are plenty of positions available at the moment,’ he told her. ‘It’s the time of year for new staff. I will look out some of the advertisements for you. Were you thinking of university or school?’

  She said ‘school’ because a university post might be more than she could manage in her present state. So school it was.

  Four days later, when the papers were full of the London conference that was going to solve the conflict in the Balkans, she had her first letter asking her to appear for an interview. Eight days later she had been hired to teach in a London elementary school. It was all remarkably easy. It occurred to her to wonder what Tommy would say when he heard about it, but as his letters had grown shorter and more distant as the weeks had passed, she didn’t write to tell him. Something was wrong but she didn’t have the energy to find out what it was. It could wait until they met again, she thought – and wondered, sadly, if they ever would. How much your life can change in a short time, she thought. And it was a short time. March to the beginning of June. Oh, Tommy, Tommy, she mourned, if only I could see you again. I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. If only you weren’t such a long way away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Tommy Meriton was sitting at his desk in his ornate office in the British embassy in Bucharest, with his feet on a velvet stool, his backside on a velvet chair and a pen idle in his hand, trying to think of something to say to Octavia. All he’d written so far was, ‘Here I am, still among the warring tribes’ and then he’d had to stop because he’d run out of inspiration. What he really wanted to do was tell her what a bore it was to be stuck out here in the Balkans but that was out of the question. It wouldn’t be the done thing, as he was a member of the embassy, not diplomatic and all that, and in any case he was beginning to suspect that she wouldn’t be interested. She rarely answered what he told her, and if she did it was in an offhand sort of way. In fact there were times when he was beginning to think that their affair was over and he’d have to find someone else. Which would be easy enough. She ought to think of that sometimes. The world was full of women and most of them had beds. It wasn’t as if he didn’t put himself out to say the right thing when he was writing to her. All that rot she’d told him about some silly woman who’d thrown
herself in front of the king’s horse at the Derby and got herself killed. Emily Something-or-other. What did she imagine would happen? Stupid woman. Four pages she’d written about that and he’d made a really good fist of answering. Said how sorry he was and how sad. Perfect diplomacy. Couldn’t have bettered it. So it wouldn’t hurt her to pay attention to what he was telling her for a change. Was that so much to ask?

  He sighed, feeling weary and sorry for himself. In three minutes, he thought, checking his watch, Frankie Marlborough is going to stroll in through that painted door, adjust his eyeglass and ask me if I’m ready, and then I’ll have to leave this and go off to some God-forsaken battleground somewhere and write some God-forsaken boring report about it. Supposed to keep an eye on what’s happening. And how the hell can we do that? How could anyone, when it’s just a collection of stupid warring tribes settling old scores and grabbing up as much land as they can get away with and taking revenge on one another under cover of driving out the Turks. All that rot about the London conference and how their precious armistice would bring a lasting peace and what happens? Lasts three weeks and then they all start up again and now we’ve got to have another stupid conference here. I’ve no patience with ’em. They’re all as bad as one another and someone should move in and bang their stupid heads together.

  Frankie Marlborough’s predicted head appeared at the door, eyeglass and all. ‘All set?’ he asked. ‘Ready for the off?’

  It was a long journey and although the first part was pleasant enough because they were travelling by train across the gentle plain south of the Danube, when they reached Sofia they were in much more hostile territory, surrounded by bleak mountains that loomed in upon them in a brooding darkness and poorly dressed men who glowered at them with suspicion. A chauffeured car and an interpreter were waiting for them outside the station, but neither were encouraging. The car was an ancient black saloon which looked as though it would be jolly uncomfortable, the interpreter a bearded man with a wall eye, who spat a stream of chewed tobacco onto the pavement before he greeted them and then spoke at length but so incomprehensibly that neither of them could understand a word he said.

  ‘This is a damned fool idea,’ Frankie Marlborough complained as they rattled out of the town, ‘chasin’ about the country in the middle of the night. We shall be black and blue before we get there, you mark my words, and our interpreter’s a fool and it’ll all turn out to be a wild goose chase, same as it was last time. Three dead soldiers and a pile of guns. Game ain’t worth the candle. I don’t know why we bother.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind so much if the geese were to fly over better terrain,’ Tommy said. ‘Don’t they have any roads in this country?’

  ‘Ain’t seen one yet,’ his friend signed, ‘and I’ve been here a sight longer than you have. We’ll stop for supper in a little while.’

  Supper was unpalatable, darkness impenetrable, the roads they were travelling now little better than dirt tracks, and the car was murderously uncomfortable and extremely cold. It would have been better if they could have settled to sleep but sleep was as impossible as the terrain and after several grumbling hours even breathing was difficult. After a while, it smelt as if they were driving through a bonfire and when they looked out of the window, they could see clouds of smoke and a distant dance of sparks.

  ‘What is it?’ Tommy asked the interpreter.

  He shrugged. ‘Is Turk. No good.’

  ‘We’d better take a look,’ Frankie decided. ‘It might give us something to report back.’

  So they stopped the car, found their torches, checked their revolvers and set out to reconnoitre.

  They were in a narrow country lane and once they were out of the car they could see that there were fires burning about half a mile away. Houses by the look of it. Or huts. No sound of gunfire but they could hear the crackle of the flames. ‘Approach with caution,’ Frankie ordered.

  It was a village of sorts, or what was left of it, and even before they reached the burning houses it was obvious that there’d been butchery there. The earth path was heaped with slaughtered cows, lying stiff-legged in dark congealing pools of their own blood. One was still alive, although her belly had been ripped open. She mooed plaintively at them as they passed and struggled to stand. Now they could see the outline of a church immediately ahead of them and more dark shapes lying on the ground, smaller shapes, sheep maybe? But the light of their torches revealed that these were not livestock but children. Little girls lying spreadeagled where they’d been dropped, their rough clothes torn and bloodstained.

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ Tommy said. Little girls no older than Dora and Edith, raped and murdered. What sort of people would do a thing like this? As he turned his torch he saw that one of the poor little things had had her throat cut. She was drenched in blood. The smell of it was overpowering.

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ he said again. ‘Christ Almighty!’ Horror had stripped him of the power of speech. He was stuck with that one disbelieving oath, repeating it over and over again. He’d heard about rapes and murders, naturally, there were always rumours and some of them pretty lurid, but until that moment it had just been words. Not this. Oh God, not this! Then the gall rose into his throat and he had to turn aside to be sick.

  Frankie walked on, the beam of his torch wavering before him, a small white light among the lurid red and sulphur of the flames. The church seemed to be steaming. There was a grey-white vapour rising from the roof and the west door was badly burnt and, as they discovered when they tried to open it, locked from the outside. It took their combined strength to turn the key and neither of them spoke because they could smell the horror that was waiting for them inside.

  The place was full of charred corpses, lying against the remains of the pews, piled on top of one another, old men, toothless and wrinkled, women with burnt hair, tattered children, barefooted and filthy with the grime of the fire. It was terribly obvious what had happened to them. They’d been herded into the church and burnt alive.

  There are prayers you have to say for the dead, Tommy thought, but he couldn’t remember them. His mind was stiff with shock and pity. He stooped to the nearest dead child and closed his eyes, gently as though he was still alive and could be hurt by the touch. Then he began to weep, hot angry tears of outraged pity for the suffering of these tangled corpses. The men who had done this were not mere warring tribes – thinking that was glib and silly. This was something much, much worse. These men were murderers, rapists, torturers, appalling, evil, cruel, despicable. If there was any justice in the world, they should be hunted down and shot like the mad dogs they were, an eye for an eye, a split skull for a split skull, a death for a death. They should be shut up in another church and burnt alive like their victims.

  The interpreter was standing beside him, chewing another wad of tobacco. How can he chew tobacco at a time like this? Tommy thought. ‘Who did this?’ he asked.

  The interpreter shrugged. ‘Turk. Yesterday they come through. Two, three days.’

  ‘This is terrible,’ Tommy said. It was inadequate and he knew it but he felt impelled to say something.

  The man shrugged again. ‘Is war,’ he said calmly. ‘Is what happen. They kill. We kill better. We kill much better. We cut throat, we take women.’ Underlit by the torch, he looked as though he was gloating, his face brutal. ‘We are Bulgar! We kill good.’

  ‘He speaks as though such things are normal,’ Tommy said as he and Frankie walked back to the car.

  ‘They are,’ Frankie said. ‘These people are like animals. All as bad as one another. This won’t be the last atrocity you’ll see, you mark my words.’

  ‘But even so…’ Tommy said.

  ‘Best not to think about it too much,’ Frankie advised. ‘Best just to write our report and get back to civilisation as quickly as we can.’

  They wrote the report on the return journey to Sofia, using their torches to light the pages. By the time they were back in the embassy again it was mid morning,
they’d filtered the incident into diplomatic language and they were drained of all energy.

  Tommy’s letter to Octavia was still lying on the desk where he’d left it. The sight of her name made him ache to be in her arms, with a tearing, agonising yearning to be loved and comforted and as far away from this nightmare region as he could get. It was a powerful sensation and not one he’d ever felt before. Was it only yesterday that he’d sat at that desk writing ‘warring tribes?’ Dear God! How could he have been so naïve? Only yesterday and yet everything had changed. Standing there in that baroque office, he knew so exactly what he wanted and what he needed. It wasn’t a series of easy conquests. Had he really thought that? How could he have been so trivial? That was petty and selfish. What he needed now was honesty and the chance to say what he truly felt, and the only person who could cope with that was his lovely, outspoken, determined Tikki-Tavy. He screwed the offending paper into a ball and threw it away. Then he wrote a simple message.

  ‘Sweetheart, I shall be in Paris as soon as it can be arranged. Please, please meet me there. I will write again with details as soon as I can. I cannot wait to see you again. I miss you more than I can say. Your ever-loving Tommy.’

  ‘I must go to Paris, Mama,’ Octavia said, folding his letter and putting it neatly back into its envelope. Her mother raised her eyebrows so she felt she had to explain. ‘My friends have invited me to stay for a while.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ her mother worried. ‘Are you strong enough, my darling? It’s a long journey. I wouldn’t want you getting ill again.’

  ‘It’s a Channel crossing, Mama,’ Octavia said. ‘I might get a little seasick but no more than that.’ The urgency of his letter was too obvious not to be answered. That and the revealing pressure of that redoubled plea. He needed her and that was enough. After all these months of wanting to see him and wondering whether they would ever meet again, after all those puzzling, distant letters, he’d written to beg her to come to Paris. She would go no matter what her mother said.