Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  And our gain, Octavia thought, as his children sat up to the table and had napkins tucked under their chins to protect their clothes. ‘Wouldn’t do for them to go home covered in chocolate,’ Emmeline said. ‘Would it, my poppets?’

  They made a very good meal, to Amy’s delight, the adults happy to be in such entirely cheerful company, the children happy to be spoilt and petted. Dora and Edith, who were very grown up now they were nine and eleven, tried pickled onions for the first time and said they were ‘scrumptious’. Johnnie, who was a plumply ebullient four-year-old, ate so much plum pudding it gave him hiccups, their Uncle Podge put away a really good meal for once and hardly coughed at all. Even Eddie and Dickie, who came to the table pale and anxious in case they were going to be scolded, gradually discovered that in this house they were permitted to pick at their food and could eat what they pleased and actually began to enjoy it.

  When the cloth was cleared, they sat round the fire and ate roasted chestnuts and played Pit.

  ‘It’s like old times,’ Emmeline said. ‘Do you remember how we used to play Pit when we were little?’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Podge said, shifting Johnnie into a more comfortable position on his knee. ‘You never let me play anything. It was always you and Tavy and Squirrel. You said I wasn’t old enough. It didn’t matter how old I was – six, ten, sixteen – I was never old enough.’

  Emmeline chortled with delight at the memory and denied such an accusation at once – because it was true. ‘The tales you do tell, Podge. It’s all fairy stories, children. What shall we play next?’

  It was charades, by universal acclaim, and Podge was the star of the show to make amends for the terrible way he’d been treated when he was little.

  ‘It’s been a lovely Christmas, Aunt Amy,’ Emmeline said, when the clock had struck midnight and they were finally leaving. ‘What a difference peace makes.’

  ‘Let’s hope it will be the first of many many more,’ Amy said, kissing her. And she held out her arms to the children. ‘Come and kiss your old aunty and then you really must get home to bed.’

  And so on to the last excitement of the day, which was being driven home by their Aunty Tavy – all five of them squashed together on the back seat of her car, with barely room to breathe. Oh, it was lovely!

  ‘Although,’ Emmeline said, looking over her shoulder at them and pretending to be stern, ‘what your father would say if he could see you I dread to think.’

  After the euphoria of the party and the unaccustomed luxury of good food, the New Year brought them back to reality with a palpable shock. It was cold and dark and the streets were full of ex-servicemen, standing in queues for what little work was on offer and looking much older than their years, their faces lined and war-weary. No one had given any thought as to how they should be treated once they were out of the army and few jobs had been kept open for them, although because so many had been gassed or wounded they couldn’t have coped with the sort of hard labour they’d endured before the war, even if it had been available. The impact of so many suddenly unemployed men could hardly be ignored, but the weeks went by and the politicians had little idea what could be done about it.

  It was the Glasgow trade unions that came up with a possible answer. What they suggested was a statutory forty-hour week for all manual workers, without loss of pay, to create extra jobs for returning soldiers. It was a simple and obvious expedient but the employers were opposed to it. Why pay two men to do a job when you can get it done at half the price by one? In the end the dispute came to a general strike and, according to the newspaper reports, things got nasty. Twenty thousand demonstrators massed in George Square, bottles were thrown, the police charged and forty men were injured.

  ‘Disgraceful,’ Octavia said angrily. ‘It was a good idea. They could at least have given it a try.’ In the last two months she’d been carrying a niggling, useless anger with her wherever she went, at herself for having treated Tommy so badly, at Tommy for not understanding, at society for its stupid rules and regulations, at all the follies and idiocies of their war-torn times. Nothing was right with the world. She was living in an unexpected and cramping limbo, needing change and a new impetus to carry her forward but unable to reach out for it, missing Tommy so much that the lack of his presence was a physical pain, feeling guilty because the pain was self-inflicted. ‘There are times when I despair of people, I really do.’

  She despaired again later in the month when the disinfectant teams began to appear on the trams and buses. The Spanish flu had broken out again even more virulently and the authorities were hiring ex-servicemen to spray disinfectant in various public places, in a vain attempt to contain it.

  ‘It’s like King Canute,’ she said to her father at breakfast time. ‘What earthly good do they think a little disinfectant will be? It won’t stop people coughing all over one another and that’s how flu is spread.’ This time there was fear in her anger for so many people were falling ill and the death rate was alarming. ‘They’re talking about closing the schools if it gets any worse.’

  ‘And colleges,’ her father told her.

  ‘That would be no bad thing,’ she said. At least it would keep him at home and out of harm’s way. He was too old and too dear to her to be risking this awful disease because he still had to go to work. ‘The sooner you retire the better.’

  ‘At the end of the academic year,’ her father promised. ‘You have my word.’

  ‘You know my feelings on the matter,’ Amy said. She was afraid of this awful flu too. ‘It can’t come too soon.’

  What came a mere three days later was a terrified telephone call from Emmeline. Octavia had just got in from school and was standing by the hallstand unpinning her hat when the phone rang so she took the call.

  ‘Oh, Tavy!’ Emmeline’s voice said. ‘I’m so glad you’re home. You couldn’t come over could you?’

  She sounded so distraught that Octavia was alerted at once. ‘Something’s the matter,’ she said.

  ‘It’s Eddie,’ Emmeline explained, and now she sounded tearful. ‘He’s really ill and Ernest won’t have the doctor. He says he’s not to be a milksop. And he’s not. I know he’s not. He’s really ill. He keeps on cough, cough, coughing all the time and that’s not like my Eddie. I’m at my wits’ end. I’ve phoned Ma three times and I can’t get her. I think they must be out. You couldn’t come and see him, could you?’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ Octavia said. ‘I’ll be with you in five minutes.’

  And she was.

  Eddie was lying on the chaise longue in the drawing room, limp with fever and looking very ill indeed. His skin was clammy to the touch, there were two red fever patches on his poor pale cheeks and although he managed to open his eyes when Octavia felt his pulse, he was too ill to focus them.

  ‘Get the doctor,’ Octavia said.

  ‘What about Ernest?’ Emmeline worried.

  ‘I’ll deal with Ernest,’ her cousin said grimly. ‘You phone the doctor.’

  Emmeline was dithering with worry. ‘Oh dear, Tavy,’ she said. ‘You don’t think it’s the flu, do you?’

  ‘Get the doctor.’

  He came with remarkable speed and his diagnosis was instant. Yes, it was the flu, he was sorry to say. The child should be put to bed and given plenty of water to drink and a blanket bath to bring down the temperature, and kept away from his brothers and sisters. That was imperative. He would require careful nursing. Would Emmeline be able to manage or did she need assistance? He couldn’t promise her much help because the district nurses were run off their feet but he would do his best.

  Emmeline was calmer now that she knew the worst. ‘I shall manage,’ she said. ‘My cousin will help me, won’t you, Tavy? And my mother. We will look after him, poor little man.’

  She and Octavia sat up with their patient all night, as he tossed and sweated and coughed. They gave him a blanket bath in the hope of making him cooler but it didn’t seem to do much good. In fact, he cou
ghed more after it than he’d done before. At one in the morning Ernest came clumping home from wherever he’d been all evening, stamped up the stairs and disappeared into the master bedroom, banging the door behind him. At a little after two, Eddie began to sleep more peacefully and Emmeline told Tavy to go to the spare room and catch a few minutes’ sleep herself. ‘I’ll call you if I need you.’ But at four she was at Tavy’s bedside saying the child was worse and could she come.

  Octavia got up at once, buttoned her blouse, put on her boots and her cardigan and was in the corridor in minutes. But as she headed for Eddie’s sick room, the door to the nursery opened and Dolly came out in her dressing gown looking worried.

  ‘Oh, Miss Octavia,’ she whispered. ‘What a blessing you’re here. Could you come and see Dickie for me? He’s just been sick and I don’t like the look of him at all, only I don’t want to worry poor Mrs Freeman if it’s nothing.’

  The horror that Octavia had been dreading ever since she heard about Eddie was happening. The sickness was spreading. They had another patient. Within an hour she had taken charge of the household, carrying Dickie back into his own bedroom and settling him as well as she could in his own bed, phoning the doctor, sponging both her patients down, insisting that Emmeline should eat breakfast with her other three children and then take a nap – ‘Or you’ll be no good for anything and that won’t do’ – and finally, when the doctor had visited them and confirmed their fears, phoning Aunt Maud and breaking the news to her.

  ‘I’ll be straight over,’ Maud said. ‘Oh, my poor Emmeline! What a dreadful, dreadful thing!’

  Only Ernest took the news with calm. He came down to breakfast at his usual time, dressed and ready for work and was annoyed when Octavia told him that Emmeline wouldn’t be joining him because two of his sons were ill.

  ‘They will pull through,’ he said.

  ‘Your sons,’ she corrected him furiously, ‘have an illness that is killing people in their thousands. They are very seriously ill.’

  ‘I will trouble you not to talk nonsense, Octavia,’ he said coldly. ‘My sons don’t die.’

  ‘I have never talked nonsense in my life,’ she told him, her anger growing. ‘I am renowned for telling people the truth. If you choose not to believe it, that is your prerogative and your folly.’ And she took her cup of tea and went back to the better company of the sick room. ‘I’m off to school now,’ she said to Emmeline. ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you, now Aunt Maud is here? I’ll be back at teatime.’

  Emmeline had been crying but she dried her eyes to kiss her cousin. ‘Take care of yourself,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you falling ill too.’

  The one who should fall ill is Ernest, Octavia thought as she walked out to her car. It would do him good to suffer a bit, nasty pompous creature.

  But the devil took care of his own and Ernest stayed pompously fit as his sons struggled with the fever that was inching their lives away. And nobody could do anything about it.

  Dickie was the first to slip away, dropping out of his short life as gently as a leaf dropping from the tree, and two hours later while his mother was still too stricken with grief to move away from his bedside, Eddie stirred back to consciousness, tried to look at her, coughed, gave a deep sigh and followed him.

  Emmeline was felled by grief, defeated, lost. ‘They were my babies,’ she wept, crumpled on the floor between their two beds. ‘Such dear good boys, such dear, dear good boys, and so young. Oh Tavy, what did they ever do to deserve this? It isn’t fair. It really isn’t. They were such good boys, always trying to please their father and do the right thing. And it was so hard for them and they went on trying and trying. Such dear good boys. It’s not fair. And after that lovely Christmas too and your mother saying may it be the first of many. It’s not fair.’

  ‘No,’ Octavia said. ‘It’s not. There’s no justice in the world at all.’

  ‘Haven’t we suffered enough,’ Emmeline wept, ‘with that awful war and Squirrel killed and Podge in such a state and all those millions and millions killed and wounded? I used to say I believed in God but I don’t now. If there really were a god he wouldn’t allow such things. Oh, my poor dear boys! They were my life, Tavy. What shall I do without them?’

  It was a bleak and anguished time. And the funeral with its two pathetic white coffins lying side by side in the grave was more terrible than any of the family could bear. Octavia stood beside her cousin and held her poor trembling arm all through the service and wished with all her heart that there was something she could do or say to comfort her and knew there was nothing. And Dora and Edith and little Johnnie clung to their grandmother’s skirts and cried with grief and confusion. For how could this be happening? How could their brothers be gone? Ernest stood apart at the foot of the grave and revealed no feelings at all. Glancing at him, Octavia couldn’t help wondering whether he was cloaking his emotions with that stern expression or simply being heartless. If it had been Tommy, she thought, and he’d lost a child, he would be weeping. And despite herself she yearned to see him again.

  What she saw six weeks later, when they were beginning to ease away from the first and most terrible anguish, was an announcement in The Times. ‘Mr and Mrs HE Drewry…were pleased to announce the engagement of their elder daughter, Elizabeth to Major Thomas Meriton…’

  It was unexpectedly and exquisitely painful. Oh, Tommy, she thought, staring at the paper, we only parted in November and you’re engaged to someone else. How could you? But then she thought about it and decided to be sensible and was ashamed of herself. If he’d found someone else she could hardly complain. He’d made it quite clear that was what he wanted. ‘A warm bed and a warm wife.’ And I chose my career. Well, it’s no good sitting here feeling sorry for myself. That’s a fool’s game. I must get on with my life. There are things to be done.

  ‘I think,’ she said to her parents, ‘it is time I booked my passage to New York.’ And after that she would start house-hunting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The SS Olympic eased her storm-dishevelled grandeur towards the port of New York, obedient to the bark of the tugboat, engines throbbing. Most of her first class passengers were standing at the rail watching as the great city rose into view, pointing and exclaiming. It had been an unusually difficult crossing, for they’d hit a force nine gale in the mid-Atlantic and most of them had been extremely seasick, but now they were within sight of land and their six-day water torment was nearly over. And what land it was, this brave new world, this teeming incredible continent of new inventions and new men and new ideas. It made Octavia catch her breath simply to look at it. Such magnificent buildings, she thought, scanning the skyline, and so tall, and so many of them. They’re like a great cliff face. She couldn’t wait to be walking among them, seeing the city at first hand, but for the moment she stood quite still, elegant in her russet coat and her Cossack hat, contained and steady, because her unexpected happiness was so great she was afraid it would spill and be lost if she made the least movement.

  She felt exactly as she’d done on her first release from prison, set free to enjoy her life again. I’m here, she thought, at last. She could see the Statue of Liberty so clearly she could pick out the spikes on her crown, and the closer they got to shore the more shipping they encountered – ferries and tugs and cargo ships, all following their allotted paths across the choppy water, each leaving a froth of foam in her wake and a frisson of excitement in the Olympic’s watching passengers.

  ‘How’s that for a skyline, honey?’ the woman beside her asked.

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ Octavia said, with perfect truth.

  ‘You staying long?’

  After six days afloat Octavia had grown accustomed to the outspokenness of her American fellow travellers. At first it had worried her to be asked personal questions by total strangers but after a day or two she’d realised that what appeared to be rudeness was simply natural curiosity and that it was invariably friendly. Now she answered h
appily. ‘Just for the Easter holiday, I’m afraid. I wish it could be longer.’

  The interest continued, brightly. ‘Where are you staying? Have you made a reservation?’

  ‘With a friend,’ Octavia said. ‘She’s coming to meet me.’ And wondered how on earth they would find one another among the crowd of passengers who would be disembarking.

  She needn’t have worried, for there was a small slender woman in a blue suit standing at the foot of the gangplank with a placard held in front of her proclaiming ‘Miss Octavia Smith’ in letters a foot high. It made Octavia feel like a celebrity. She was blushing as she stepped forward to greet her new friend.

  ‘Connie Weismann,’ the lady said, introducing herself. ‘I’m so glad you could make it. Did you have a good crossing?’

  The quayside was full of noise and movement, hemmed in by massive cranes and jostled by swarms of porters in heavy jerseys like sailors yelling, ‘Carry yer bag, lady?’ and striding forcefully up the gangplank as the passengers tottered gingerly down still feeling the swell of the sea. Horse-drawn carts stood stolidly in the traffic or inched through the confusion, wheels creaking; honking cars and taxicabs fidgeted and throbbed, emitting a strong sharp smell of petrol; and a chorus of voices called and shouted in a bewildering variety of accents, raucous as gulls. It was an excitement simply to be standing in the middle of it. But it made hearing difficult.

  ‘I’ve gotten us a cab,’ Miss Weismann shouted at her. ‘If you’ll just follow me.’

  The luggage was loaded and the cab rattled away, faces passing the window jerkily and out of focus like pictures from the cinema. They were edged into a street crowded with vehicles and picked up exhilarating speed. Now images jostled upon Octavia with kaleidoscopic irregularity; here a group of young men, hats at a jaunty angle, dodged across the road between the cars, missing their approaching bumpers by inches, grinning and shouting; there a man sat in a huge chair casually smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper while a bootblack crouched before him buffing his shoes to a gleam; here a pair of delivery boys wobbled their bicycles between the traffic; there an elegant lady walked a white poodle with a blue ribbon tied in a bow between its ears.