Octavia (23 page)

Looking at them all as they sat around the fire, Octavia felt suddenly and entirely happy. The breakthrough may have begun, she thought, there didn’t seem much doubt about that now, but the war’s still going on, food is still short and there are far too many people catching that awful Spanish flu, but we five have turned our lives in a new direction. We five have the chance to build a better world. She looked from face to face: at Alice Genevra’s china doll prettiness with her fluffy fair hair and wide blue eyes – and fierce intelligence; at Morag Gordon’s motherly presence in her long wool cardigan and sensible shoes – how reassuring she will be to all our new girls; at Elizabeth Fennimore’s severity, her dark hair pinned so tightly into its bun, her pince-nez dangling on her white blouse, her suit so impeccably tailored – and caught the warm smile that gave her stern appearance the lie; at Sarah Fletcher’s loving ugly face with its long nose and small grey eyes and touching eagerness, and she knew that they were all cheerful eccentrics and that she had chosen well.

‘I give you a toast,’ she said, raising her teacup. ‘Here’s to our school. May we all be very happy teaching here.’

It was a grey November day on a grey Hampstead Heath but because it was peacetime at last, a few hardy couples were out for a stroll, returning to normal despite the weather, doing their best to ignore the mist that clouded the denuded branches of the trees, the chill of the sodden air and the total lack of colour in the sky. They were well cocooned against the cold, with furs and scarves mounded about their necks and gloves tightly buttoned. They walked briskly, while their dogs trotted at heel, damply and obediently, their ears drooping.

Only one couple was walking slowly, and even stopping from time to time to face one another. They were so deep in conversation that they were oblivious to the chill, the fading light and the curious stares of their fellow strollers. They made a striking pair: he, with his military bearing and his military moustache, dapper in a fashionable grey overcoat, neat kid gloves and a light grey trilby; she, striding tall and slim beside him, in her pretty leather boots, elegant in a russet brown cloth-coat with a fox-fur collar and cuffs and a Cossack hat to match. Neither was aware of the stir they were
causing among the other passers-by, for what they were saying to one another was paining them so deeply they needed all their energy and attention to cope with it.

‘Dash it all, Tavy,’ Tommy said, in exasperation. ‘We can’t go on drifting forever. You must see that. I mean to say, there’s no excuse for it now. The war’s over. Everyone’s expecting us to tie the knot. It don’t make sense to keep putting it off. I thought a wedding at Christmas would be just the thing.’

‘It would,’ Octavia said, her face fraught. ‘Other things being equal. I’d marry you tomorrow if I could be married and go on teaching. But it isn’t possible. They don’t allow it. You know that. Married women have to resign.’

‘Let’s cock a snook at ’em,’ he suggested, trying to dare her. ‘Marry and be damned. How about that? You’d like to get the vote, now wouldn’t you? And you won’t get that if you’re a spinster.’ He felt quite pleased with himself to have pulled that particular rabbit out of the hat. It had to be a clincher. Surely.

She took his arm and walked on, aching to find an answer that would help them through their impasse and quite unable to do it. ‘I’m afraid it would turn out to be marry and be fired,’ she said and tried to sound as though she was joking.

It was a vain attempt. They’d been over this stale sad ground so many times and his face was taking on the sullen look she recognised just a little too well. ‘You don’t love me,’ he said. ‘That’s the truth of it.’ Behind him the dome of St Paul’s rose from the distant fog like the boss of an ancient shield and the spires of the lesser churches around it were sharp as spears. ‘I’ve been four years in hell and now I want to start work at the foreign office and be normal again – get married, settle down, bit of comfort in my life,
place of my own, children, warm bed, warm wife, that sort of thing. I’ve earned that surely to God. Still, if you say it’s unreasonable…’

‘No, no,’ she said, reassuring him quickly. ‘It’s not unreasonable. I never said that. It’s perfectly natural.’

He stopped again and took both her hands, cupping them between his own, the way he’d so often done before. ‘Then marry me,’ he pleaded, ‘and have my babies. You’re not too old for it, and you want children, don’t you?’

‘I’ve got children,’ she told him. ‘Hundreds of them.’

‘Don’t be flippant,’ he said crossly. ‘I’m not talking about them. I mean real children.’

She ignored that, knowing that if she argued it would sidetrack them and cast him down. She’s been casting him down a great deal too much over the last few days and it hurt her as much as it was hurting him. ‘If we
were
to marry,’ she said, carefully, ‘if we went ahead with it, and then I got fired and didn’t have a job, I would make you a very poor wife.’

He was hopeful again, almost eager. ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘We must think about it now. It will be too late once we’re married. I would be a poor wife. I’m not made for domesticity.’

He was still urging her. ‘You’d come round to it. Women do you know.’

She knew they did, but whether they ought to or not was another matter. She thought of Emmeline, worn out by children, and still turning herself inside out to placate that awful Ernest. ‘I might not,’ she said. ‘We have to think about it. I might not be the sort of wife you want. I might make you very unhappy.’

‘You don’t know the sort of wife I want,’ he said.

But she did. She’d known it with sharpening clarity ever since that awful leave when he came home from Salonika. He wanted a hostess for the dinner parties he meant to give once he was at the foreign office, someone who dressed well and spoke well but was never out of order, a mother for his children, a woman always at home and always at his beck and call, someone subservient and obedient, like all those little dogs trotting along in the cold and hating it. What was it he’d just said? ‘Warm bed, warm wife.’ The very words disturbed her, spreading irritable ripples through the dark pool of her mind. That was not the sort of woman she was or ever could be. She had to be true to her nature and follow her calling. And she knew too well that if she did that, she would make him unhappy.

He was sighing. ‘I don’t understand you, Tavy,’ he complained. ‘All this fuss about a job. I can’t see the sense of it. I mean it’s not as if it’s anything special, now is it? Teaching. I mean anybody can teach.’

She’d held on to her self-control for so long that the effort was making her chest ache. ‘That’s what people think,’ she said, struggling to be patient. ‘But they’re wrong. It takes a special person to teach. It’s an art.’

He shrugged. ‘If you say so. I should have said they’re all much of a muchness. Boring and dull. At least the ones who taught me were. Positive ditchwater the lot of ’em. Couldn’t wait to see the back of ’em.’

‘It’s an art,’ she insisted. She felt she
must
make him understand but his incomprehension was as impenetrable as a wall. ‘If it’s done properly it isn’t boring. It doesn’t bore the teacher or the taught. It’s fascinating. And I
mean to do it better and better. Once I’ve been to New York…’

He groaned. ‘Oh God, Tavy! Not New York again. We’ve been through all this before. You don’t want to go to New York. Not now anyway. And certainly not to see some stupid school. Wait till the summer and I’ll take you. We can travel as man and wife, eh? I’ll give you a first rate time there. Leave all this school nonsense. There are plenty of other people to do that.’

I’m wasting my breath, Octavia thought. He hasn’t understood a word I’ve said. He doesn’t see what this is about at all. ‘There aren’t plenty of other people, Tommy,’ she said. ‘I’m the only one. I’m not replaceable. At least not yet. Others will follow me, I’m quite sure of that, but I’m the one who has to lead and I have to lead now. The war is over and the time is right. It’s what I have to do. I can’t turn my back on it. I would regret it for the rest of my life.’

He didn’t understand her reasons but he could see their implication. ‘So what you’re telling me,’ he said wearily, ‘is that you’ve made your mind up. You’re not going to marry me. That’s it, isn’t it? Not now and not ever.’

It was an utterly miserable moment but she answered him honestly. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is, Tommy. I’m so sorry.’

The cold was making her nose red and behind the severity of those round glasses her grey-blue eyes were swimming with tears. He was caught by such an overwhelming surge of love for her that it was all he could do not to pull her into his arms and kiss her. But it was too late for kisses and they both knew it. They had parted. Their affair was over. ‘I shan’t see you again,’ he said, gruffly. ‘Wouldn’t be wise.’

She nodded and agreed. ‘No.’ And paused, waiting for him
to say something else. But he didn’t. ‘What about my ring?’ she said. ‘Do you want me to give it back?’

‘No, no. You keep it.’

‘Thank you.’ Oh, how banal this is!

‘You will explain to your parents?’

‘Yes.’

For a second he dithered before her, although they both knew there was nothing more to be said, then he straightened his spine, turned and walked away, self-consciously but steadily. He didn’t look back. She watched as his figure dissolved in the mist, first his striding feet, then those long, long legs, then the sturdy bulk of his greatcoat and finally his dear, fair, stubborn, uncomprehending head. She felt as if he was being taken away from her piece by piece and the thought made her shiver. Already loss was scrabbling in her belly and filling her throat with tears. I shall never see him again, she thought, never lie in his arms or wake to find him beside me, never share a meal with him, never watch him shave, never hear him laugh, never smell him. But what else could I have done? I couldn’t leave my job. Not now. Oh, how cruel it is to force a woman to choose between marriage and career. Cruel and wasteful. Utterly, utterly wasteful. Anger rose in her and she let it rise because she knew it would sustain her. She could feel her strength returning to her already. Something will have to be done about it, she thought. We can’t go on wasting talent forever. I shall put my mind to it. Then she too turned and headed for home.

Now she would have to tell her mother and father that there would be no wedding and the sooner she got it over and done with the better.

It was more difficult than she imagined for her mother seemed determined to talk about trivial things and did it all through dinner, with a nervous intensity that Octavia found horribly disquieting. It wasn’t until they were sitting round the fire drinking their ersatz coffee that her father finally rescued her.

‘I think, my dear,’ he said gently to Amy, ‘that Tavy has something she wants to tell us.’

‘Well, I hope it’s the date of her wedding, that’s all,’ Amy said. ‘We can’t go on hanging about for ever, Tavy.’

‘There isn’t going to be a wedding, Mama,’ Octavia said. ‘The engagement’s over.’

Amy made a grimace. ‘I noticed you weren’t wearing your ring,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘And that’s final, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s a great pity if you ask me. You won’t get another offer anywhere near as good.’

Octavia felt so irritable that for a second she couldn’t find the words to answer. But her father stepped in again.

‘She has found her life’s work, my dear,’ he said to Amy. ‘I think it deplorable that she is forced to choose between work and marriage – if the world were a better place that would not have been necessary – but nevertheless she has made her choice and it is an honourable one. We must wish her well, must we not?’

‘I do,’ Amy said. ‘You know that, Tavy, don’t you? I do with all my heart. It’s just…’

‘Yes, Ma,’ Tavy said. ‘I know what it’s just and it’s very unjust.’

‘Shall you go to New York now the war’s over?’ J-J asked, apparently changing the subject.

‘When the weather’s better,’ Octavia told him. ‘Easter probably. I don’t fancy crossing the Atlantic in the middle of winter.’

‘I don’t fancy doing anything much in the middle of winter,’ her father said. ‘I am getting altogether too long in the tooth for extremes of temperature. I shall retire before the next one, I give you fair warning.’

And I shall start house-hunting, Octavia thought. It’s high time I had a place of my own.

But first they had to get through the winter that was looming down upon them and that season had some terrible things in store, although it began with a small triumph.

Just before Christmas when Octavia, her staff and her pupils were happily hanging the classrooms with paper chains and singing carols at every assembly, Lloyd George held the general election he’d called as soon as the war was over. The new women voters were much in evidence at the polling booths and there were several pictures of them in the papers, smiling shyly at the cameras as they cast the vote for the first time.

Octavia devoted an assembly to it and wore her precious silver arrow around the school all day, with great pride. ‘When you get the vote,’ she told her girls, ‘as you will sooner or later, either when you are thirty or when the government wakes up to its responsibilities and awards it to all women over the age of twenty-one. But when you do, be sure to use it. The franchise is too valuable not to be used. Never forget that.’

And they beamed at her cheerfully and turned the pages in their hymn books ready for the next carol.

It was a cheerful Christmas. Maud and Ralph brought their entire family to Amy’s Boxing Day tea, with the exception of their son-in-law who was busy with his papers, according to Emmeline.

‘It’s his loss,’ she said to Amy. ‘I
did
tell him he was invited. My stars but that’s a pretty dress!’

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.’