Octavia (17 page)

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!’

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 later.

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 28
^th
Austria declared war on Serbia and the next day the Czar responded by mobilising his enormous army. On July 30
^th
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 4
^th
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.

Within days, young men were volunteering in their thousands all over Great Britain, glad of the chance to leave their dull lives and prove themselves heroes. Everybody said the war was going to be short and decisive, ‘over by Christmas’ according to Sir John French, so they had to be quick about it. By the time Tommy returned from his training, in the full uniform of a second lieutenant and looking extremely handsome, the British army had doubled in size, the British Expeditionary Force had landed in France and the war was under way.

He got back just in time for a celebration. Cyril and Podge had enlisted on the first day of the war and their proud parents had followed their training day by day, commiserating with them for the lack of tents and provisions and consoling their impatience as the weeks grumbled past. Now they were organising a family party to give them a proper send-off.

‘Such good brave boys,’ Maud said to her sister. ‘Heroes, the pair of them.’

Amy was sorting out a pile of bunting, which was in such a tangle it was harder work than she expected. She had to pause for a minute to catch her breath. It was something she often had to do those days. ‘You will miss them when they go,’ she said.

‘Oh, I shall,’ Maud agreed. ‘But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m so proud of them. Especially when they’re in uniform. They look so splendid! They wear it all the time you know, even when they’re on leave.’

‘So does Tommy,’ Amy said. ‘And you’re right, it does make them look handsome.’

‘Do you think we ought to invite his parents?’ Maud asked. ‘Tommy’s I mean. Now he’s home. After all, he is part of the family and he’ll come to the party, won’t he? It would be rather nice. A combined send-off.’

So the guest list was extended to include Tommy’s family and friends, and extra catering was ordered, and even though it all had to be done in a matter of days, it was a great success. By then Tommy’s brother James had enlisted too, so there were four soldiers to be petted and toasted and told they were heroes, even if young Jimmy wasn’t in uniform yet. In fact, they had so much champagne urged upon them that Podge, who wasn’t used to quite so much praise nor quite so much alcohol, became incoherent and giggly. When the time came to make a speech he could barely manage a sentence and every word in it was slurred, although he was applauded to the echo. And Jimmy was little better, saying, ‘Thank you. Most kind. King and country and all that,’ and then sinking back into his seat to happy cheers and laughter.

Having reached the maturity of twenty-six, Cyril and Tommy could take as much drink as they were offered and still retain their eloquence. Tommy thanked his guests for their good wishes and told them he considered himself the luckiest man alive to be part of the great British army
and
to have persuaded Octavia to be his wife, ‘which took some doing, I can tell you!’ Cyril surprised everybody by quoting poetry.