Octavia (15 page)

‘How husky you are,’ he said, surprised by the timbre of her voice. ‘Have you taken a cold?’

She had grown so used to the change that she hardly noticed it. It was improving gradually and didn’t really concern her. ‘No,’ she assured him. She would have to tell him what had happened to her, but eventually, not at that moment. ‘I am quite well,’ she said, smiling into his eyes. ‘It is nothing. Kiss me again, my darling.’

So he ignored her husky voice and raised an imperial hand to call a taxi. They kissed all the way to the hotel, where they registered with such impatience that the receptionist could barely conceal a snigger and the concierge looked askance at them. And at last they were in their room and alone together and could satisfy the aching sharpness of their desire, this new, driving, painful desire to be loved and comforted. After such a rapturous greeting they knew it would be a blissful coming together. But it wasn’t. It was a disappointment to both of them. He was too rough and too quick and was demoralised to have felt so little, she was left unsatisfied and puzzled. Worse, instead of lying lazily beside her and lighting his usual cheroot, he got up again and went to stand by the window where he looked down at the boulevard, stroking his moustache and frowning.

She sat up among the tumbled bedclothes. ‘What is it, Tommy?’ she asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘This is such a beautiful city,’ he said, looking at a fashionable couple who were strolling along the pavement below him: he, suave and handsome in well-cut grey and a jaunty hat; she, tall and slender and dressed in style in a
wide-brimmed
hat, an elegant rose-pink suit with a long straight skirt and a belted jacket and the prettiest pointed shoes. It was
a lifetime away from the mud and squalor of the Balkans. ‘People look so – oh, I don’t know – intelligent, I suppose, sophisticated, cultured, like people you can understand, people you can trust.’

‘And that makes you sigh?’

‘Yes,’ he admitted and tried to make a joke of it. ‘Potty, isn’t it?’

She left the bed, put on her glasses and joined him at the window, aware that there was more to the sigh than he’d told her. The sun streamed in through the casements to light the opulence of the room, the high bed, thick carpet, heavy furniture. It was such a solid unchanging room, a place to depend on, in a city they could trust. But her instincts roared that the world was changing for both of them. ‘What
is
the matter, my darling?’ she said.

He told her about the massacre, detail by appalling detail, speaking quietly and not looking at her, but gazing down at the boulevard, one hand resting on the heavy tassel of the velvet curtains. It wasn’t how he’d intended to tell her but once he’d begun he had to go on until the whole horrible business had been described. She was so appalled by the horror of the things he was saying she listened without moving. ‘Oh, Tommy!’ she said when he’d finished. ‘That’s dreadful.’

‘War is the most terrible thing,’ he said, turning to look at her at last. ‘It brings out the hatred in people, which God forbid you should ever know anything about.’

‘I know it already,’ she said. And because it was exactly the right moment, she told him what had happened to her in Holloway gaol, at first speaking quietly and sensibly but soon growing tearful at the memories she was stirring.

He put his arms round her as she wept and they clung together for comfort. ‘Don’t cry, my darling,’ he soothed. ‘You’re all right now. You’re with me. I’ll look after you. Oh, my dear darling, don’t cry.’ He was roused to the most protective tenderness. How dare they treat her so? Torturing her and making her ill and husky. Oh, how he loved that huskiness now. I shall marry her, he thought, kissing her tousled hair, I shall marry her and look after her. She can’t go on facing horrors like that all on her own. He hadn’t thought about marriage until that moment but it seemed the natural and obvious thing. He led her back to the bed and gentled her to sit down. He must start looking after her at once. ‘Dear Tikki-Tavy,’ he said. ‘You’ve suffered enough for this cause of yours. Don’t you think so? You must stop. You really must.’

They were being so honest with one another she told him the truth about that too, wiping her eyes and her glasses. ‘I’ve stopped already,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken a job. I shan’t have the time for demonstrations and hunger strikes. Or not so much time anyway.’

He approved. ‘Well, good for you.’

‘No,’ she said, sadly. ‘It’s not good. It’s cowardly. I wouldn’t tell anyone but you, but I’m afraid it’s the truth. I can’t face being force-fed again. I’m going to work so as to get out of the way.’ She was torn by her cowardice, deeply, deeply ashamed of it. ‘Things are going wrong, Tommy. It’s only two months since Emily Davison died. Only two months. We had that wonderful funeral procession for her and there was such sympathy for us. I thought we’d made our point at last, that people understood what we were saying. But I was wrong. They’re treating us like criminals again, Mrs Pankhurst is ill,
Sylvia’s in Holloway, we’ve had three suffrage bills put through Parliament in the last three years and they’ve defeated every single one. We haven’t made any progress at all. I feel we’re going backwards.’

He kissed her. ‘And what is this work you’ve taken?’

‘I’m going to teach in a national school,’ she said. ‘I start in September.’

A job’s no bad thing, he thought. It doesn’t matter why she’s taken it, it’ll keep her occupied and out of prison until I can leave Bucharest. ‘I only have six more months to serve,’ he told her, ‘and then I shall come back to England and marry you. How would that be? At Christmas, if you like, or in the summer. You’ve only to say the word. And then when I’ve got my next appointment you can come and live with me, wherever it is. It might be Paris. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? What do you think?’

She was so surprised that for a moment she couldn’t think what to say. If he’d proposed to her after that first amazing summer at Eastbourne, she would have accepted him without a second thought, but so much had changed now that she wasn’t sure. She’d adapted herself to this disjointed life of theirs, accepted that he couldn’t marry until his work and his father allowed it, grown accustomed to the deceptions that had been necessary to hide their meetings, even down to wearing a wedding ring. Most important of all, she was committed to teaching now. It would be unfair to take on a position at the school and leave it after a term. She steeled herself to tell him they must delay.

‘I would rather wait for a couple of years,’ she said. ‘Until the summer after next perhaps. We don’t have to rush things, do we?’

‘Dash it all, Tavy,’ he said, feeling rather put out, ‘I thought you’d like to get married. Most girls do.’

‘It’s not that I don’t want to marry you,’ she explained. ‘I do. Very much. I always have. It’s just… If I marry, I shall have to leave my job – they don’t allow teachers in national schools to be married – and I’d like to do it for a little while at least. To prove that I can. We can go on as we are, can’t we?’ It was a genuine question because he was looking so disturbed she needed to be reassured.

‘But you do love me?’ he said and that was a real question too.

‘More than ever.’

‘And you’ll marry me in two years’ time?’

‘Of course.’

‘Always providing there isn’t a war, I suppose.’

That sounded alarming. ‘There isn’t going to be, is there? I thought it had gone quiet.
The Times
said the London conference had arranged an armistice.’

‘I’m not talking about the Balkans,’ he said. ‘The armistice didn’t work. They’re fighting again already. It’s all they ever do. No, it’s not the Balkans.’

She was suddenly alarmed. What was he trying to tell her? That everything was worse than she thought? ‘What then?’

‘There could be a war between England and Germany,’ he said. ‘Our ambassador says he can see it coming. You must have heard rumours.’

She had, of course. Her father’s dinner guests had talked about the possibility of it, and there’d been an article in
The Times
about how many horses would be needed if a war broke out – she’d been appalled at the huge numbers they’d estimated for – and when the old king died, all the newspapers
said his diplomacy would be sorely missed and hinted that a war with Germany was imminent. But she’d assumed it was rumour and no more. People were always talking about wars of one kind or another.

She got up and walked back to the window, needing a pause to get her thoughts in order. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I have heard things. But it’s only talk, isn’t it? It can be avoided, surely?’

‘There’s no knowing,’ he told her sadly. ‘The Balkans is full of bloodthirsty maniacs and they’re all scared stiff of one another so they’ve made alliances with every major power in Europe – Great Britain, Germany, Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, everyone. It’s a powder keg down there. It only needs a spark to set it all off. Anything could happen.’

Below the window the chestnuts shifted in the afternoon breeze and the taxis darted about like water beetles on the shining blue of the boulevard. ‘Then we must hope it doesn’t,’ she said.

She looked so sad and bleak he was stirred to pity for her all over again, and pity triggered desire. ‘Come back to bed, Tikki-Tavy,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t good last time, was it? I mean…’

It was so nearly an apology and so very unlike him to offer one she was quite touched by it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t but we’ve got a month to make up for it.’

‘Starting now?’ he hoped.

She walked back to the bed and stooped to kiss him. ‘Starting now,’ she said.

‘Oh, Tikki-Tavy,’ he said. ‘I do love you.’

On that damp September morning when Miss Octavia Smith faced her very first class for the very first time, she knew at once that it was going to be a challenge. After three weeks in Paris with Tommy, which had been luxurious in every way, the sight of her pupils was a shock. It was a very big class, much bigger than she’d expected. Forty-two nine-year-olds, so the headmaster said. They stood ranged before her, two by two beside their narrow desks, nineteen boys and
twenty-three
girls, most of them filthy dirty and all of them standing bolt upright as if they’d been nailed to the floor.

The sight of them was daunting enough but the smell was worse. It was the first time in her life that Octavia had been nose to nose with the enclosed stink of poverty and she found it nauseating. The headmaster didn’t seem to notice it. He introduced her, told the class to stand up straight or it’d be the worse for them, strode out of the room and left her to it, but she felt too sick to speak. She stood before her new charges, swallowing hard and analysing the smell as a way of forcing herself to cope with it. It was, she decided, a combination of
ammonia, stale sweat, coal dust and rancid frying fat, with traces of unwashed bodies, smelly feet, filthy hair, and
rain-damp
clothes, most of which were reach-me-downs impregnated with the work-stink of their previous owners. It was so strong it stung her eyes.

After a few seconds, she pulled herself together and told them to sit down, which they did noisily, their rough boots clomping on the floorboards.

‘Now,’ she said, making another effort and remembering to smile at them, ‘I want you to take out your slates and your slate pencils and write down today’s date. I’ve written it on the blackboard for you. There it is. ‘Monday, September the first, 1913.’

They obeyed her, some quietly, some grudgingly, and for a few minutes there was no sound in the room except for the scratch of their pencils. It’s such an ugly room, Octavia thought, looking round at it. It reminded her of Holloway gaol with those green walls and those awful green tiles, and the windows were repressive in the same way, tall enough to let in plenty of light, but too high for children to see out of. She remembered Wordsworth’s lines,
‘shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy/ but he beholds the light and whence it flows,’
and was full of sympathy for her smelly pupils. Then she noticed that one of her growing boys was gazing round the room. It was the one with the squint and the shaven head.

‘Have you finished?’ she said to him kindly.

He closed one eye and looked up at her. ‘Yes, miss.’

‘Then bring your slate to me.’

He clomped to her rostrum and held up his slate for her inspection. He had drawn a line of loops.

‘What’s this?’ she said to him.

‘Please, miss, it’s me pothooks, miss.’

A girl in the front row enlightened her. ‘That’s what he does, miss.’

‘All the time?’ Octavia asked.

‘Yes, miss. He don’t know nothink else.’

I must see about that, Octavia thought as she sent him back to his seat. Then she walked round the room to check what her other pupils had been doing. It wasn’t encouraging. About a third of them had copied the date more or less accurately, the rest had made a stab at it and obviously hadn’t understood what they’d been writing. ‘Can you read that to me?’ she asked one tousled haired girl.

The child twisted her apron in both hands. ‘Yes, miss.’

‘Go on then.’

But it was beyond her. She just sat and stared at it and after a long pause she explained, ‘Please, miss, I got summink in me eye, miss.’

She can’t read and she can’t write, Octavia thought. What a lot of work there is for me to do. I shall start with reading. If they can’t read, they can’t do anything. I must sort out which of them
can
read and which can’t and then I shall start from the beginning and teach the backward ones their letters. Meantime there was a headmaster to obey – more or less – a timetable to follow and some rather peculiar lessons to be taught.

She looked down at the timetable, which she’d pinned on her desk to remind her of the things she was supposed to do, and wondered how on earth she would manage to do them. Half the subjects listed there were incomprehensible. What was ‘drill’ for example? The headmaster had written an
explanation of sorts alongside the word –
‘this is for the relaxation of mental strain’
– but that didn’t tell her what it meant. And what was free arm work? Or mechanical poetry? She had a vision of a tin robot barking out verse when she wound it up, probably with a drill in its free arm. And that made her want to giggle. ‘Arithmetic now,’ she said, to steady herself. That would be simple to teach if nothing else and it would give them a break from all that dreadful slate scratching. According to the headmaster, their arithmetic books were in the cupboard, or should be. ‘Come up and get your book when I call out your name.’ It was a long process but they didn’t seem to mind and it gave her the chance to learn a few names. ‘Now let us start with adding up. I will put ten sums on the board for you.’

As she’d expected, half of them could add up, more or less accurately, and half couldn’t, even though they were counting their fingers and chewing their lips for all they were worth. She walked among them observing their efforts and feeling sorry for them. It didn’t take her long to see what was wrong.

‘Stop work,’ she said to them, and waited until they were all looking up at her. ‘Arithmetic can be difficult sometimes, can’t it?’ Much nodding. ‘Very well. What I am going to do is to teach you a trick to make it easier.’ She drew six boxes on the board. I must take this slowly, she thought, and give them time to digest it. So she began to fill in the boxes, very slowly and one figure at a time. ‘One box for one figure,’ she said. ‘Do you see? As if we’re putting them in little cages. They’ll have to behave themselves if we put them in cages, won’t they? There’ll be no slipping away from us now. One box for one figure. Remember that. It’s the golden rule for adding up. One box for one figure, tens on that side, units on this. There’s
our sum and there are the empty boxes waiting for our answer. Now open your books and look at the page. Can you see the boxes?’ Some heads were shaking. ‘No? Look again. They’re there. It’s not lines in an arithmetic book, is it? What is it?’

Several hands were raised at that and an answer attempted. ‘Squares, miss.’

‘Well done,’ she said. ‘Quite right. It’s squares. Lots and lots of little squares. Lots and lots of little boxes. All drawn up and ready for you to use. Can you see them now? Well done. Fill in this first sum and then we will solve it together.’

It was a quiet success. They hadn’t all understood but many were working almost happily and there was far less lip chewing. Billy Pothook looked completely baffled but she was beginning to suspect that this was his perpetual expression.

If this is teaching, she thought, watching their small hands at work, I believe I can do it. Even if I don’t know what drill is. The word leapt at her spitefully. It was the next thing on the timetable

There was a disturbance at the door and a young man came in. He introduced himself as Mr Venables and said he’d come to show her the ropes. ‘Hand in your books,’ he said to the class. ‘Who’s the monitor?’

‘Please, sir, ain’t got one, sir.’

‘We’ll choose someone after drill,’ he said. ‘Whoever’s best. All stand.’

They obeyed, standing two by two beside their desks the way they’d done at the beginning of the morning, but they were looking sullen again. Whatever this drill is going to be, Octavia thought, they don’t enjoy it.

‘Arms in the air!’ Mr Venables shouted. ‘On the
command – Up! Down! One, two. One, two. Put some more beef into it.’ They raised and lowered their arms as well as they could and Octavia wondered if they’d ever eaten beef in their lives and decided it was unlikely.

‘Sideways bends,’ Mr Venables said. ‘On the command, to the right. One, two, three. Left, two three.’

The robot bent left and right in Octavia’s imagination and she remembered the nursery rhyme, ‘Click, click, monkey on a stick,’ and wondered why they couldn’t go out into the playground if they needed exercise and simply play. Whenever suffragette marches had taken her through the East End, she’d seen riotous games going on in the street – hopscotch, tag, swinging on the lamppost. If they needed to use up some energy for – what was it the headmaster had written? –
‘the relaxation of mental strain’,
what happier way to do it? Not that she could start arguing with the headmaster on her first day in his school.

It was a long day. Longer than she expected, for after the children had been released at four o’clock there were the next day’s lessons to prepare, alone in her deserted classroom. She found the window pole and opened the high windows as far as they would go to let in some fresh air. And was annoyed to discover that she was letting in the smell of the local brewery.

‘Poverty is all pervasive,’ she told her father at dinner that night. Even after a long soak in a warm bath and a thorough wash with scented soap, she could still smell the awful stink of her class. It must have got into her hair. ‘When you think how they live and what shabby clothes they wear and how little they have to eat, it’s a wonder they can concentrate on anything at all and yet some of them try so hard.’

‘I believe you have found your cause, my dear,’ her mother said. She was very relieved to think that her daughter had joined a profession at last. Of course, she would have preferred her to teach in a nice comfortable grammar school, but any kind of teaching was preferable to that awful suffragette movement, which was altogether too dangerous.

‘Tavy will find causes all her life,’ J-J said happily. ‘It is dyed in the wool, is it not, Octavia? You must tell our Fabian friends about all this on Thursday. They will be deeply interested.’

As they were. But not until they’d talked about Bernard Shaw’s latest play which was being premiered in Berlin prior to a London production in April. It was called
Pygmalion
and was about a professor of phonetics who trained a flower girl to speak like a duchess and then passed her off as a member of society.

‘And this from a man who would ban all schools,’ Mrs Bland teased, ‘and holds that education is evil incarnate.’

‘So it is,’ Mr Shaw agreed, beaming at her, ‘for there isn’t an iota of freedom within it either for teacher or taught. Education today is a matter of prescription and control, and that never did any good to anybody, which is what my hero discovers by the end of the play, when he has created his duchess and doesn’t know what to do with her. I might add that she doesn’t know what to do with herself either. It is all vastly entertaining.’

‘But does it argue the need for educational reform?’ Mr Bland wanted to know.

‘It argues a good many things,’ Mr Shaw said, ‘and I daresay my audiences will discover even more argument in it than I intended, as they usually do.’

Octavia felt she could venture a question. ‘Do you really
advocate the closure of all schools, Mr Shaw?’

‘Since most schools are instruments of social control,’ the great man told her, ‘in my opinion they are too harmful to be allowed to stay open. However few politicians would agree with me, I fear, other than the enlightened company around this table.’

The compliment was enjoyed with smiles and nods from all eight guests and their hosts. ‘But if schools were closed, Mr Shaw,’ Amy said, ‘what would you put in their place?’

‘Why nothing at all,’ Mr Shaw told her. ‘I would allow our children to run free.’

‘Would you not be afraid that they might run wild?’

‘That would be my most devout hope,’ Shaw said wickedly. ‘Every child has the right to run wild, the right to its own bent, the right to find its own way and go its own way.’

‘But some sort of control surely…’

‘Let me ask you a question, my dear Mrs Smith,’ Shaw said. ‘Why should one human being impose his view of life upon another? There is no justification for it beyond greed, profit and imperialism, all of which are intolerable vices. Nobody knows the way a child should go, except the child itself. All the ways discovered so far have lead to the horrors of our existing civilisation, which no thinking man would wish to perpetuate. Very well then. If we are to change these horrors we must first make changes in the manner in which we educate our children. In my opinion we should give them autonomy and release them from the tyranny of the national schools.’

‘Octavia could tell you what is going on in a London national school,’ Professor Smith told his guests. ‘She started work in one this very term.’

‘How very interesting,’ Mrs Bland said, turning to Octavia. ‘Is it as bad as Mr Shaw makes out?’

‘Every bit,’ Octavia said with feeling. ‘We control them every minute of the day, poor little things.’ And she told them about drill and mechanical poetry. ‘They spend hours copying off the blackboard and hours chanting – prayers, tables, even poetry – and most of them haven’t got the faintest idea what it all means.’

‘Then change it!’ Mr Shaw boomed.

‘I intend to,’ Octavia said

‘We will give you all the help we can,’ Mr Bland promised. ‘Will we not, Edith? Have you seen our latest pamphlet on education? No? Then I will send you a copy.’

‘I will do better than that,’ Mr Shaw said, all wickedness and bristling beard. ‘I will give you my advice. If you seriously intend to change the system – and I must warn you that you will suffer for it if you do, for the establishment is deeply suspicious of any change that might curtail its own wealth and power – but if that is what you seriously intend, you must leave the national school, no matter how noble your work there may be, and transfer to a grammar school. That is where reform is most needed, because that is where you will find the next generation of teachers.’

It was sensible advice and very tempting. It would be wonderful to change a generation of teachers. ‘I will think about it,’ Octavia promised. ‘But not yet. I must see the year through.’ And after that I shall be married.