Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  Her father gave her his most wicked grin. Really there were times when he was as bad as Bernard Shaw. ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘All will be revealed in time I daresay.’

  The interview was arranged as soon as Tommy got home and J-J found it fascinating, if prolonged. He was intrigued to see this handsome, confident young man so obviously ill at ease, and to wonder what words he would use when he finally got to the point. He was taking long enough to get there in all conscience. They’d talked about the weather – endlessly – and some of the shows that were running in the West End, including the one he and Octavia were going to see that evening, and even the possibility of a war with Germany, which he said was looking extremely likely. Surely he should broach the main topic soon.

  ‘I gather you had something rather particular you wanted to say to me,’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Tommy agreed. ‘Rather.’ But then words failed him and he sat silent, his hands on his knees.

  ‘Something about Octavia perhaps?’ the professor prompted.

  ‘Rather. Oh, I should think so. Yes indeed.’ But he still couldn’t say so and he was still looking at his knees.

  ‘In my limited experience,’ the professor prompted again, ‘I believe the correct form of words is something in the order of “I have the honour – or may I have the honour – of asking for your daughter’s hand in marriage”.’

  ‘By Jove, yes,’ Tommy said, looking up in relief. ‘I mean, rather. She’s such a corker, you know, sir, but she does need looking after, what with the suffragettes and everything. Not that she’s weakly or anything like that. I’m not suggesting that. Far from it, as you know, sir. Very far from it. What I mean to say is I’d like to look after her, sir, being she’s such a corker. I can provide for her and all that. Might have to live abroad now and then but she would live well, you have my word. Wouldn’t want for anything.’

  The thought of his darling living abroad stabbed at J-J’s heart. ‘So, when were you hoping to marry?’ he asked, carefully calm.

  ‘Not till the summer, sir. August I hope. I’m taking up a new appointment in September. In Paris. But it depends on Tavy. She wants to see the year out at this school of hers. Says she’ll get the sack if she marries. Sounds absolute tosh to me but I daresay she’s right. Anyway, she wants to wait until the summer. I’d marry her now if it were up to me. Like a shot. But there you are, sir, it’s her decision, and I’m bound to honour it.’

  There was a pause while both men wondered what should be said next. Then Tommy ventured. ‘Do we have your blessing, sir?’

  J-J smiled at his prospective son-in-law. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘If that is what you need. Although I would have thought good footwork might be an advantage too. Octavia is an affectionate young woman but her determination can be prodigious.’

  Tommy grinned. ‘I know, sir. That’s why I love her. May I go and tell her now?’

  J-J watched as the young man strode from the room. There was such strength in that walk and, now that he’d made his declaration, such happy confidence, as if his life were charmed. And so it is, he thought, if he’s going to marry my Tavy. He could hear her running down the stairs and Tommy’s voice murmuring to her. They are lovers, of course, he thought. He’d never seriously believed in Octavia’s ‘suffragette friend’ who had to be visited so often and at such length and was never invited back to meet her parents – although he’d never admitted as much to Amy, who needed to believe it for her own peace of mind. The young are not the same as we were at their age, he thought, and hoped for all their sakes that this marriage would be a good one. We know so little when we set out, he thought, and life is full of hazards.

  But then Tavy and her mother were in the room and both talking at once, and Tommy was standing behind them, beaming so widely it was a wonder he didn’t crack his jaw, so they all had to be gathered into a circle round the fire for the delightful business of drinking champagne and making plans.

  ‘Now for a start,’ Amy said happily, ‘we could have an engagement party on New Year’s Eve. How would that be?’

  It would be wonderful, as the engaged couple were happy to tell her.

  ‘Oh, I’m so happy for you, my darling,’ Amy said to her daughter, for the third time since she’d heard the news. ‘What a splendid way to start the New Year. You must lay on plenty of champagne, J-J. It isn’t every day of the week your daughter gets engaged.’ She was into her full planning stride now and thoroughly enjoying herself. ‘We must have a cake and a band for dancing and a buffet supper. It’s all going to be perfectly splendid. I can’t wait to tell Maud and Emmeline.’ Although of course Emmeline had known there was a romance ever since that holiday at Eastbourne.

  ‘And after that you must choose a date for the wedding,’ she went on, ‘and we can start organising that.’ She gave them both a rapturous smile. ‘Have you any ideas?’

  The engaged couple answered at once, but not with the same voice. Tommy said, ‘First Saturday in August,’ eagerly, Octavia offered that there was no rush.

  ‘She doesn’t meant that,’ Tommy said. He spoke as if he was joking but there was an edge to his voice. ‘Do you, Tavy?’

  ‘Well, actually I do,’ Octavia said. ‘I’d rather like a second year at the school. What if we say the August after next?’

  ‘But that means waiting nearly two years!’ Tommy said. ‘Oh, come on, Tavy, you don’t mean that.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop telling me what I mean and don’t mean,’ Octavia said and now it was her voice that sounded sharp.

  J-J intervened before they could quarrel. ‘You don’t have to make your mind up here and now,’ he said. ‘Take your time. There’s no rush. We’re happy to go along with whatever you decide.’

  ‘The first Saturday in August would suit us fine,’ Tommy said, but when Octavia glowered at him, added, ‘but we’ll do as you say, sir, talk it over and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘And now you have a theatre date, I believe you said,’ J-J smoothed. ‘We don’t want to lose you but it wouldn’t do to be late.’

  So they wrapped themselves up in coats and scarves and hats and gloves, kissed Amy goodnight, and stepped out into the cold air. They were obviously still arguing as they walked down the path towards his car.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter with Tavy?’ Amy said as she and J-J returned to the fire. ‘I’ve never known her so tetchy.’

  ‘Nerves?’ J-J offered.

  ‘She never has nerves.’

  ‘Determination then,’ her father said. ‘I think she wants to go on teaching for a bit longer.’

  Amy sighed. ‘That’s always been her trouble,’ she said. ‘Determination. She’s got a darn sight too much of it. The sooner she’s married and settled, the better, if you ask me. Now then, I must draw up an invitation list for the party and after that I must telephone Maud and Emmeline. Oh, what a day this has been!’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tommy and Octavia bickered all the way to the theatre. And all through the interval. And all through a rather good dinner, which they wasted. And all the way back to his flat, where being alone at last they exploded into a full-scale quarrel.

  ‘Dash it all, Tavy,’ he said, as he opened the door, ‘what’s the matter with you? I thought you wanted to marry me. I came hotfoot to London. You’ve no idea what a journey it was. Hotfoot. And I saw your father the very first thing. I couldn’t have done it better if I’d tried. I thought you’d be grateful.’

  ‘I am,’ Octavia said, throwing her hat and gloves in the nearest chair.

  ‘You’re not. How can you say that? You turned me down. In front of your own father. I said August and you turned me down.’

  ‘I didn’t turn you down,’ Octavia said, unbuttoning her coat. ‘Don’t exaggerate. I said a bit later. That’s all. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’

  ‘Oh, that’s lovely!’ he said, furiously. ‘You get a bona fide proposal and you call it a molehill. A molehill! That just shows you
don’t want to marry me.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ Octavia said, throwing her coat across the chair. ‘I keep telling you. I do. It’s just that I want to go on teaching too. I thought you’d understand that at least. It’s important to me.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he mocked, ‘I can see that, all right. It’s more important to you than I am.’

  ‘No it’s not. I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Yes it is. You think about it. If I was important to you you’d marry me. You wouldn’t put me off and say “later, later, later” all the time. You’d say “yes, Tommy, August would be ticketty-boo”.’

  ‘I don’t say ticketty-boo. It’s childish.’

  ‘Don’t split hairs,’ Tommy said. ‘You know what I mean.’ He was shivering and that annoyed him too. ‘What’s the matter with this damned place? It’s like ice in here. What’s happened to that damned fire? They were supposed to keep it in for us. Oh God! I wish I’d never come back.’

  Octavia went to look at the fire, glad of a chance to move away from the quarrel. ‘It’s still alight,’ she said. ‘I’ll fix it if you like. Have you got a newspaper?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said crossly. ‘I don’t light fires.’

  She looked behind the coal scuttle and found a copy of the Daily Herald. It wasn’t really big enough but it would have to do. At least it fitted over the grate. She held it there tightly to draw the embers back to life, while Tommy watched her and scowled. It took a few minutes before the coals began to roar and by then the centre of the paper was turning brown.

  ‘Drop it, Tavy!’ Tommy said, growing anxious at her daring. ‘You’ve done enough now. Drop it. I don’t want you burning yourself.’

  She held on a little longer. ‘Give it time to take,’ she said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’ And with that, the newspaper burst into flames.

  He’d snatched it from her hands, thrown it on the hearth and was stamping on it before she could catch her breath. And then she was in his arms and being kissed with such relief and passion that she was breathless all over again. ‘Come to bed,’ he begged. ‘I’ve missed you so much. Don’t let’s quarrel any more. Come to bed.’

  So it was a happy homecoming after all, if a trifle sooty. Afterwards as they lay warmly together in their familiar bed while their once recalcitrant fire burnt strongly as if to make up for its earlier shortcomings, they put their quarrel behind them, talked like the married couple they were to be and gradually found a compromise. He said he couldn’t understand for the life of him why she should want to go on teaching but could see that she did. She told him that she knew quite well that he wanted to marry her in August and in ordinary circumstances that’s when she would have married him but she did so hope he would wait a little while longer. And eventually they agreed that Easter 1915 would be a sensible time. It didn’t really satisfy either of them, of course, but they were both love calmed by then, and wise enough to know that mutual dissatisfaction is the nature of a compromise.

  ‘We’ll buy the ring tomorrow,’ Tommy said, as they got dressed ready for her return home. On this at least he could get his own way.

  * * *

  It was a rather grand diamond and he gave it to her at the start of their party on New Year’s Eve, to the assembled delight of their relations, who’d been rather surprised to hear that the wedding wasn’t until the Easter after next and had spent the first part of the party telling one another how odd it was to have such a long delay.

  ‘I mean,’ Mrs Meriton said to Amy, ‘it isn’t as if there’s anything to stop them, when all’s said and done. I can’t think why they’re being so long-winded about it.’

  But it was a splendid party, they were all agreed on that, and when Tommy and Octavia kissed one another at the stroke of midnight, right there in the middle of the room before them all, they were misty eyed at the romance of it. ‘Long life and happiness,’ they called as they drank their champagne and were confident that there was nothing that could possibly stand in the way of either.

  The next evening in the House of Commons David Lloyd George gave a speech in which he described the build up of armaments in Western Europe as ‘organised insanity’. Few newspapers reported it and, even if they had, the partygoers wouldn’t have paid any attention to it. They were too busy discussing the party over dinner or were lurking in their rooms nursing the remains of their champagne hangovers. The governments Lloyd George was castigating ignored him too and went on amassing guns and bullets, and training soldiers to use them.

  In March, while Octavia’s pupils were cheerfully colouring in pictures of wild flowers and Tommy was moping in the embassy in Belgrade, miserable for lack of her, the Russian government announced that their standing army was to be increased from 460,000 to 1,700,000; Admiral von Tirpitz declared that the German navy had ordered fourteen new warships and, not to be outdone, Mr Winston Churchill, the first lord of the admiralty, asked the British government for two and a half million pounds to speed up the production of battleships and aircraft. The race to war was gathering momentum.

  It began on a sunny day at the end of June in an obscure corner of the Balkans, just as Tommy had predicted it would, and two rapid pistol shots were enough to set it off. The first was aimed at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was heir to the throne of the great Austro-Hungarian empire, and was visiting Sarajevo as its southernmost outpost. It hit him in the neck and killed him ten minutes later. The second killed his wife instantly with a wound to the stomach.

  For several days there was confusion, as rumours circulated, were contradicted and reiterated. The assassin had made no attempt to get away, had been arrested immediately and said he’d carried out the killings to avenge ‘the oppression of the Serbian people’. It was rumoured that he was a member of a secret society of Serbian army officers called the Black Hand. In Berlin, the Kaiser made a point of reaffirming the strength of the German alliance with Austria; in St Petersburg, the French president arrived to visit the Czar; in Vienna, students took to the streets to demonstrate against the Serbs and to demand vengeance; there was confusion and anger throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire from Prague to Sarajevo.

  Three weeks later, Austria broke off diplomatic relations with Serbia and in rapid succession, the Serbian army was mobilised, and the British embassy in Belgrade was cut down to a skeleton staff. Two days later Tommy was back in his flat in London and that afternoon he was sitting outside Bridge Street School in a swanky new car waiting for Octavia to finish work and come out and join him. Her pupils were owl-eyed at the sight of him and deeply impressed when she climbed into the car and they drove off together.

  ‘I shall never hear the end of this,’ she laughed, looking back to wave at them. They were standing in the road to watch her go but were too overawed to wave back. ‘They thought my ring was wealth enough, now they’ll think I’m royalty.’

  ‘So you are. To me anyway.’

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely to see you,’ she said. ‘I thought I was going to have to wait until we broke up. Are you home for good?’

  ‘So they tell me. Till the war ends anyway.’

  ‘So there is going to be a war?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ he said, laconically. ‘Foregone conclusion as far as I can see. They’re mobilising all over Europe. Got my commission last week.’

  She was aghast. ‘What do you mean, got your commission? You’re not in the army.’

  ‘Am now, old thing,’ he said.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Time of war,’ he said. ‘It’s expected of a chap. It’s what you do.’

  ‘But you might get hurt.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, turning the car and the conversation equally deftly, ‘what say we go to the music hall tonight? I don’t fancy the theatre.’

  She didn’t fancy the music hall much either. It was too light hearted for her sober mood. But she didn’t argue. It was enough to sit beside him in the dusty stalls and sing the familiar songs. She could find out about the commission l
ater.

  She found out at the end of the week, when he told her with the studied flippancy that she was beginning to recognise as a mask for something serious, that he had ‘to pop off to Salisbury plain for a spot of training’. She was very upset for by then there was no doubt that war was imminent. Every day brought fresh news – now fully reported in every newspaper – of another ultimatum, another threat, more mobilisation. People were jittery with the uncertainty of it.

  On July 28th Austria declared war on Serbia and the next day the Czar responded by mobilising his enormous army. On July 30th Kaiser Wilhelm sent the Czar an ultimatum saying that Germany would mobilise too unless Russia stopped its own mobilisation at once. The threat was ignored and the mobilisation continued. Things were now moving almost too quickly to be reported, diplomatic messages being sent between the great powers one after the other. The Kaiser contacted Paris asking what the French government intended to do, and having received no reassurance from that quarter, promptly declared war on Russia; the Royal Navy was mobilised; the Italian government declared its neutrality; and London sent a message to the Kaiser pledging to ‘guarantee Belgian neutrality and protect the French coasts’. But it was already too late. On August 4th the German army invaded Belgium and by the end of the day Britain and Germany were at war.

  From that moment everything changed. It was as if a fever had passed, or an ugly boil been lanced. The long months of anxiety and uncertainty were over. The war had begun, the time for action and decision had come. Now it was all excitement and a joyous, uplifting, wonderful sense of relief and importance. Crowds came out onto the streets to shout and cheer.

  In Paris they thronged the Boulevard Haussmann from the Opera House to the Place de la Republique, throwing their hats into the summer air and shouting ‘A Berlin! A Berlin!’ as though they were ready to march on the enemy there and then. In London they gathered in Parliament Square to hear the declaration, their summer boaters bobbing like pale flowers above the green lawn of the central garden, or they marched down the Mall, waving paper flags, as though it was the Jubilee all over again, and stood before the gates of Buckingham Palace, flushed with patriotic fervour, singing ‘God Save the King!’ Oh, what splendid times to live in! Every day brought a new thrill.