Octavia (3 page)

So the outfits were ordered from the dressmaker in Flask Walk and very pretty they were. Amy’s was a suit in lime green silk with ruched frills in the prettiest lilac set diagonally across the skirt and a lilac blouse that was all neat tucks with a white collar that covered her neck right up to her chin and rose in two curved wings on either side of her face. And Octavia had her first proper grown-up costume, in rose pink, finished with grass green bows at shoulder and wrist, which she wore with white silk stockings and white silk gloves and the dearest little straw hat trimmed with pink roses. And then, just when everything was ready, the weather changed and they had a violent thunderstorm. Octavia stood by the drawing room window, watching as the rain whipped the fruit trees and violet clouds massed and brooded over the rooftops.

‘What will happen if it rains on the day?’ she asked Mrs Wilkins. ‘Everyone will get wet.’

‘It won’t rain,’ Mrs Wilkins reassured her. ‘Don’t you worry your pretty head. We shall have royal weather. It’s always royal weather for the queen. God bless her. Now come away from the window, there’s a pet. We don’t want you struck with lightning.’

But the morning of the Jubilee was muggy and not at all promising.

‘You two must take your parasols and I will carry an umbrella,’ J-J decided practically. ‘Then we shall be prepared for every eventuality.’

So with every eventuality catered for, they set off for the City, travelling by horse bus because Papa said that was the best way. But when they got to King’s Cross the driver couldn’t take them any further because so many roads had been closed for the procession, so they had to get off and find some other way to proceed. Professor Smith took his family by the new underground, which Octavia found very exciting. She’d never travelled under the ground before and what with the smell of sulphur and hot oil and dust, the pressure of the crowds and the terrifying clicking of the train as it rushed in and out of the tunnels, she was quite breathless by the time they emerged into the air again.

They were in a wide street with very tall buildings on either side, all of them flying the Union Jack and hung about with so many garlands of green leaves that the air prickled with the scent of them and Octavia felt as though she was walking through a forest. The pavements swarmed with people, all very excited and all walking in the same direction. And the sun was shining.

‘Hold my arms,’ J-J said to his womenfolk. ‘I don’t want you getting lost.’ And off they went along the pavement with all the other people: men in boaters and blazers, smoking cheroots; men in bowlers and brown suits and stiff white collars, smoking cigarettes; women carrying baskets and umbrellas and folding chairs, as if they were off to a picnic; women in summer dresses and bonnets high with flowers and feathers and bright wax fruits; and hordes and hordes of children clutching tiny flags, all of them crushed in close together and all talking at once. ‘D’you ever see such a crowd?’ ‘Soon be there!’ ‘She’s got the weather for it, bless her.’ ‘Watch what you’re doing with that flag, Mildred. You
go on like that, you’ll put the lady’s eye out.’ And after several jostling minutes, pushed up against other people’s bony arms and into the hot cloth on their backs, they emerged into a wide square in front of the biggest church that Octavia had ever seen and Papa said they’d arrived.

‘St Paul’s Cathedral,’ he told her. ‘One of the best examples of mathematical architecture in the world. Observe the grace of the columns, Octavia, and the balance of that architrave.’ But his daughter was gazing up at the great grey-blue dome shining in the sunshine above her and was lost in amazement at the scale and beauty of it.

‘You will see even better from our vantage point,’ her father said, leading her through the crowds again. ‘We go up these steps. Take care. They’re rather rickety. That’s the style. Second tier. Here we are. Now this is better.’

He was right. The view from their high grandstand was breathtaking, for now they could see the entire square in all its multicoloured detail, from the blur of the crowds on the pavements – all hats and faces and restless movement – to the stolid red backs of the guardsmen who lined the kerb, stiff as toy soldiers, their faces half hidden by great black bearskins. There was a statue on a plinth in the centre of the square, surrounded by iron railings, and the road that curved around it was empty, except for two cavalry officers on patient horseback. It looked very pretty because it had been sprinkled with pink sand. ‘To save the horses’ feet,’ Mama explained. But the most impressive sight was the great mass of people who were standing on the cathedral steps in such a blaze of scarlet and gold and white that they looked as though they had burst into flame. There were two huge choirs, one in long red robes and the other in white; dozens of clergy, draped and
dramatic, all gold and white and embroidered; generals and admirals in full fig, medals, swords and all, their shoulders hung about with gold braid and their hats plumed with ostrich feathers. Several politicians strutted and looked important while their wives preened beside them, and on the bottom-most step, a line of Yeomen Warders from the Tower, quaint in their odd red and gold jackets. It looked like a huge stage set, painted and peopled and ready for performance.

‘Take a close look,’ J-J advised his daughter. ‘These are the people who run the country.’

‘They’re very grand,’ Octavia said. ‘Are they the great and the good?’

‘Not what you and I understand by the term,’ her father told her. ‘Although to be fair I suppose some of them might qualify. We must allow for idealism.’

There was a flurry of activity in the sanded roadway. Two more cavalry officers had arrived and were trotting up to their companions. There was a short conversation and then all four took up positions on either side of the steps, the crowd began to buzz and from somewhere in the western distance they could hear cheers rolling and rising. The parade had begun.

Octavia was enraptured. So many horses, all stepping in line, snorting and tossing their heads, and all the same colour; so many riders in magnificent uniforms: first a troop of guardsmen riding chestnuts, then another in splendid helmets and breastplates that flashed in the sun riding horses as black as silk. ‘Horse Guards,’ Mama explained. But Octavia didn’t care what they were; the sight of them was enough. She leant over the edge of the stand, agog for the next troop, as they rounded the street into the square, one after the other: Dragoon Guards, Hussars, Scots Greys, Cape Mounted Rifles,
Trinidad Light Horse, Jamaica Artillery, Lancers of the Indian Empire, magnificent in striped turbans and formidable beards. Even their names were magical. And what colours they wore! Sky blue and gold, scarlet and gold, purple and gold, emerald green and gold. She had never seen anything so gorgeous. The sixteen carriages that brought up the rear of the procession were quite dull by comparison, although the ladies in them were beautifully gowned and held their elaborate parasols above their elaborately hatted heads as delicately as if they were holding flowers.

‘Are there any more soldiers?’ she asked her mother, leaning forward over the edge of the stand and straining to see. The crowd in Fleet Street were cheering like mad and there was a snowstorm of paper flags and white handkerchiefs, so something special must be coming.

It was a black coach with crimson wheels pulled by eight cream coloured horses, all caparisoned in crimson and gold, with postilions in crimson and gold walking importantly beside them, and sitting all on her own on the back seat, facing two rather grand ladies in lilac gowns, was a little fat lady in black, with a small black cap on her white hair, a white parasol above her head and a huge smile on her round face. The queen.

‘Sixty years,’ Amy said. ‘Think of that, Octavia.’

‘The richest woman in the world,’ J-J parried. ‘Think of that, Octavia.’

But Octavia was beyond thought, and cheering with the crowd. The noise they were making was so loud it was making her ears ring. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ she said.

The coach had come to a stop right in front of the steps and the archbishop was walking down towards it. ‘How will she
get into the cathedral past all those people?’ Octavia wondered.

But apparently she wasn’t even going to get out of the coach. The ceremony was going to be conducted there on the steps and they were going to see it all. The two choirs were already clearing their throats and settling themselves to be ready. What fun!

It was a very short ceremony, just the ‘Te Deum’, the ‘Old Hundredth’, a blessing, the ‘National Anthem’ and three cheers, but Octavia relished every minute of it. I’ve seen the queen, she thought, on her Diamond Jubilee. And cheered again as the lovely cream horses pulled the coach away, slowly and gently, round the statue and out of her sight.

‘What did you think of that?’ her mother asked.

‘I should like to see it all over again,’ Octavia said. ‘I feel quite sad now it’s over.’ And it
was
sad to see the way everything was breaking up after the event, the crowds shifting and beginning to walk away, the serried ranks of choirs and dignitaries turning and moving, breaking their wonderful patterns, the pink sand littered with discarded paper flags and smeared with trodden manure. ‘But it
was
wonderful, wasn’t it, Mama? When I grow up I’m going to be rich and famous and ride in a carriage too.’

They were negotiating the steps from the grandstand. ‘Well, if that’s the case, miss,’ her mother teased, ‘you will have to find yourself a rich husband.’

Octavia grimaced with distaste at such a suggestion. ‘Oh no, Mama,’ she said seriously. ‘That would be cheating. I mean to be famous in my own right because of something I’ve done.’

Amy smiled. ‘And what will that be, pray?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Octavia admitted. ‘Something good and helpful.’

‘You still intend to change the world then?’ her father said, handing her down the last rickety step and onto the pavement again.

‘Yes, Papa,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

But her father was looking at Mama and offering his hand to help her down the step and the topic seemed to be over.

‘We could take a little stroll and see the decorations, could we not, J-J?’ Amy said, looking about the square.

Octavia was all for it. ‘Could we, Papa? Oh, do let’s.’

‘If that is what you would like,’ he said and watched as she skipped towards the steps of St Paul’s, bright and happy in her summer pink. ‘There goes our world shaker,’ he said to Amy, half amused and half proud. ‘Just look at her, my dear. I wouldn’t put anything past her.’

Amy smiled. ‘She’s a good little girl,’ she agreed, and added, because it was too apt an opportunity to miss, ‘once she’s at school, we shall see great things of her.’

‘You are still determined upon it,’ he said, and his tone was almost reproachful, for they’d discussed the matter so often and at such length and he knew it was settled, but he wasn’t convinced.

‘Of course,’ Amy said, in her mild way. ‘You know I am, oh ye of little faith. You mustn’t worry so, my dear. Nothing but good will come of it, I promise you.’

‘I am sorry to have so little faith,’ he said wryly, ‘but schools can be cruel places. I would not wish her to suffer there. Or anywhere for that matter.’

‘If it is wrong for her, J-J,’ Amy reassured, ‘we will remove her and find a better place. That is agreed.’

But he was frowning and pulling his beard.

‘On the other hand, it could be just the right place at just the right time,’ Amy said. She was so sure of it, yet nothing she said convinced him. She looked up at the great dome of St Paul’s, strong and secure above her head, and knew in her bones that this precious daughter of theirs would move from success to acclaim, through school to university, to an eminent academic career, just like her father, and that school would be the making of her. Why was he so foolish as to doubt it?

Octavia had reached the top of the cathedral steps and turned to urge them to follow. ‘Come
on
,’ she called. ‘You can see for miles up here.’

‘If that is the case,’ J-J called back, smiling again, ‘we must join you, for what can be better than a clear view?’ But as he strode towards her, he put one hand behind his back and crossed his fingers.

Although her father worried about her all summer and grew more and more concerned as September approached, Octavia slipped into scholarship as easily as a swan into water. Learning was natural to her, for she was an inquisitive child and accustomed to having her questions answered; a classroom held no terrors, because her cousins had taught her how to wait her turn and stand her ground; but above all, she was happy in her skin so naturally she expected to find friends and helpers in this new adventure of hers, and naturally she wasn’t disappointed.

By the end of her first week she had made more than a dozen friends and by the end of the second had established one of them, a small, pale, rather nervous little girl with
owl-like
glasses, as ‘my best friend, Betty Transom’. By the end of her first term she had decided that Mrs Bryant, their headmistress, was the most wonderful woman she had ever met, not counting Mama, of course. ‘She says we are all capable of great things,’ she reported to her parents when she came home after the final assembly on the last day of term.
‘All of us, every single one. She says times are changing and by the time we are in our twenties there will be all manner of opportunities for us and we are to seize them with both hands. Isn’t that splendid?’ It was so exactly what she wanted to hear that her face was glowing with the delight of it. ‘I think being at school is the best thing ever.’

Her cousin Emmeline found the experience far more difficult and in that first term she spent many of her playtimes weeping on Octavia’s shoulder, complaining that the other girls were beastly and she wished she hadn’t come. ‘It’s all very well for you, Tavy,’ she wept. ‘You’re clever. You know the answers.’

‘Not all of them,’ Octavia admitted honestly. ‘Just say you don’t know, Em. They won’t kill you.’

But Emmeline took a lot of persuading. She’d been the big sister for so long it was hard to be an unimportant newcomer in a class full of larger and more determined girls who all knew their way around. ‘I shall never fit in,’ she mourned.

Cyril was delighted to see her at a disadvantage for once and said she was being silly. He’d found himself a new friend that term and was full of reflected importance, quoting him on every occasion. ‘Meriton Major says school stinks.’ ‘When he grows up, Meriton Major’s going to be a Member of Parliament.’ Now he offered his friend’s philosophy to quell his sister’s fears. ‘I told Meriton Major about you, and he says it’s sissy to be afraid of school.’

‘I’m sick of Meriton Major,’ Emmeline said. ‘He should try being at our school.’

‘It’ll get better, Em. Truly,’ Octavia soothed. ‘It’s just you’re not quite used to it yet. Some of it’s good, you’ve got to admit.’

But Emmeline couldn’t see good in any of it. ‘I think it’s all horrid,’ she said. ‘You can’t speak unless you’re spoken to and you mustn’t call out and you mustn’t run and you have to say “please” all the time and they keep making you sign the Appearing Book – I’ve signed it four times already and I was only talking to Sissie – I don’t see why you can’t talk to your
best friend
– and Pa says I’ve got to stay there until I’m sixteen. Sixteen! That’s five whole years, Tavy, and I never wanted to go there in the first place. Oh, I know I said I did but that was just to please people. What I really want is just to grow up and get married and have lots of babies.’

‘Fathers are awfully funny,’ Octavia observed. ‘Here’s yours really keen for you to be a scholar and I don’t think mine wanted me to go to school at all.’

That surprised her cousin. ‘How do you know that?’ she asked. ‘Did he say?’

‘No,’ Octavia admitted. ‘He never actually says. That’s how you know it’s important. He goes round and round things, sort of talking at the edges. He was fussing about it all summer and asking me if I was really sure and saying I didn’t have to go there if I didn’t want to. And I love it.’

And loved it more with every new day. Even when the weather grew cold and the sports field was sharp with hoar frost, she couldn’t wait to get out to play, and in the relative warmth of the classroom every lesson brought a new challenge. There were so many books to read and so much to find out. By the end of her second term she had established herself as one of the most intelligent girls in her class. By the time she was eleven and had been elevated to the main school she was being spoken of as ‘university material’ and her father had quite forgotten his anxieties and was happily admitting
that he and Amy had made a wise choice in this school.

‘She has a natural aptitude for French,’ he quoted from her latest school report. ‘Her grasp of mathematical principles is commendable. This is all very gratifying, Amy.’

‘She is a natural scholar,’ Amy agreed and smiled at him. ‘Like her father.’

‘She shall go to the pantomime,’ he decided, ‘as a reward for good work. And to the Egyptian Hall to see Mr Maskelyne and his magic.’

Octavia enjoyed the pantomime and was intrigued by the famous magician but she would have worked well without any recompense, for learning was now its own reward. The months passed happily, punctuated by feasts and festivals and successes. Now there was a new century coming and the newspapers said it would be the start of a brave new world and would bring much change and progress, which didn’t surprise Octavia at all for wasn’t that exactly what the redoubtable Mrs Bryant had predicted? They all sat up to welcome it in and Octavia and her two older cousins were allowed to drink watered wine to toast its arrival, which was a first for all of them and made them all giggly.

But once the Christmas holiday was over, life at home continued in its old comfortable way and, as far as Octavia could see, the new century was just like the old one only with a different name. There were wars going on in various parts of the world – but weren’t there always? – the Italian king was shot by anarchists, and in Great Britain a new political party was inaugurated. It called itself the Labour Party and was led by a man called Keir Hardie. Her father grew very animated at the news and said that Mr Hardie was first rate and that this was the start of a bloodless revolution and the masters would
have to look to their laurels, but Octavia wasn’t interested. She was more concerned with her Latin declensions.

Her life was changing but the change was so gradual and easy that she barely noticed it. She had grown taller – that was obvious because Mama had let down all her skirts and dresses and last year’s gym slip didn’t fit at all – but the face that looked back at her from her early morning mirror was unaltered, long and serious, the hair still sandy in colour and very frizzy, the eyes still blue under sandy eyebrows, nose long and straight, mouth wide and pale, teeth white and crooked, hands long-fingered and skinny. Out in the garden the cherry tree had doubled in size, but like her, it had grown gradually and in season and nobody remarked on it. Em and Squirrel had grown taller too, and, at fourteen, Em was beginning to round out into a pretty femininity, but they still wore the same childish faces and fought and argued in the same childish way. Only Podge revealed the passage of time. In the three years since she and Em had started school he’d grown from a plump baby in a pram to a roly-poly toddler, staggering about in his baby skirts, and eventually to a little boy in his first sailor suit with all his pretty curls cut off and his hair trimmed to a big boy’s cut, four and a half years old and full of himself. Emmeline cried to see the sudden change in him and said she’d lost her darling baby but Cyril said it was high time he stopped being a duffer and learnt to stand up for himself. ‘You want to be a big boy, don’t you, Podge? Not a soppy baby.’

And Podge, who was standing on Octavia’s knee so that he could admire his new image in the looking glass, said, yes, he did, and sounded defiantly confident even though the expression on his face was anxious and doubtful.

In the summer of the first year of the new century the North London Collegiate School reached the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation and the entire school went to a special service in St Paul’s Cathedral – no less – to celebrate. It was an impressive occasion and Octavia was duly impressed, thrilled to think that they were in the self-same cathedral that had welcomed the queen, overawed by the imposing clergy, stirred by the wonderful sound the choir made as their voices echoed up and up into the high spaces of the great dome, uplifted by the rousing speeches in praise of the great work already done by the school, encouraged to think that even greater things lay in the future and that she would be part of them.

In the autumn the Conservative party won the general election with four hundred and one seats to everybody else’s two hundred and sixty-eight, and Keir Hardie was elected as Labour MP for Merthyr Tydfil, to whoops of delight from Professor Smith. Then on the second of January in the second year of the new century, the papers were printed with black margins to announce the death of ‘good Queen Victoria’. ‘It is the end of an era,’
The Times
said, ‘and we shall never see her like again.’ Special prayers were offered up for her at school and in church, most social functions were cancelled as a mark of respect, and her death and its repercussions were the main topic of conversation wherever the Smith family went. This time Octavia wasn’t impressed at all. It had been exciting to watch the living queen in her carriage by the steps of St Paul’s but it seemed silly to make a fuss about her because she was dead. There was no need to go cancelling parties and staying at home all the time.

‘If it had been someone we knew,’ she said to her cousins
when they were all sitting round the drawing room fire on Sunday afternoon, ‘it would have been different. I can’t see the point of making a fuss over someone we don’t know. I don’t see why they’ve got to cancel Betty Transom’s party.’

‘Nor do I,’ Emmeline said. ‘It’s not her fault the queen’s gone and died. What do you think, Squirrel?’

‘Meriton Major’s got one of those new bicycles,’ Cyril said. ‘I’m going to ask Pa if I can have one too. It’s ripping fun.’

‘It’s always Meriton Major with you,’ Emmeline said scornfully. ‘I’m tired of hearing about him. Aren’t you, Tavy? It’s so boring, worse than the queen.’

‘That’s all you know,’ her brother said, tossing his dark hair and picking up the poker to give the coals a good whacking. ‘Actually he’s a dashed good egg. If it hadn’t been for them cancelling Betty’s party you’d have seen him there and then you’d have known.’

But as it was they were denied sight of his hero and on the day of the party they had to content themselves with playing Pit and roasting chestnuts by the fire.

The new century rolled on. A wireless message was sent right across the Atlantic Ocean, which was quite amazing; the coronation was postponed because the new king had appendicitis and had to have an operation, which was very serious; the bell tower in Venice collapsed into a heap of rubble – there were pictures in the paper to prove it – and Emmeline finished her unwanted years at school, failed her final examinations and was allowed to leave. She was pretty with relief. Within a week she had put her hair up and left her childhood behind her. She and her mother visited the dressmaker in Flask Walk, on Amy’s recommendation, studied
the catalogues and went for several shopping expeditions to the West End. Soon she was fully kitted out as an adult, with all the clothes necessary to her new status: walking costume, day dresses, gloves, hat, silk stockings, button boots and all. She was totally and glowingly transformed.

‘Pa’s going to take me to a play on Friday,’ she confided to Octavia, ‘and a concert on Saturday. I intend to meet lots and lots of people. That’s the best way if you mean to be married and I mean to be married just as soon as ever I can. Oh, you don’t know how lovely it is not to be at school! It’s going to be such fun. You can’t imagine all the things Ma’s got planned for me. It’s going to be a splendid summer.’

‘Aren’t you coming down to Eastbourne with us?’ Octavia said. The two families always took their summer holidays together, always for four weeks and always in Eastbourne.

But apparently not. She and Aunt Maud were going to stay in Highgate all summer, Cyril was going to France with Meriton Major’s family and only Podge would be playing on the Eastbourne sands that year. It was very disappointing.

‘I shall miss you,’ Octavia said. And did, for the holiday wasn’t anywhere near so much fun on her own. Despite having a brand new swimming costume – and a very pretty one in sky blue cotton with two thick white frills at knee and elbow and another all round her cap – and despite excellent weather and having Podge to look after and with plenty to do and see, she was often lonely. The donkeys stood in patient lines on the beach, or plodded their well-worn hundred yards of sand, the band played its usual medley of cheerful tunes in the bandstand, the Pierrot company entertained as brashly as ever on the pier, the Punch and Judy man set up his customary stall at the top of the beach, but these things only increased
her loneliness. What was the good of them, if there wasn’t anyone to discuss them with? True, she had long talks with her mother and father when they all went for their daily promenade, but adult conversation is not at all the same thing as a gossip with your oldest friend, and a postcard isn’t the same thing either, although she wrote one religiously every day. Emmeline did write back, but only now and then, and with diminishing interest, and by the time the four weeks were over, Octavia had begun to accept that her life had changed whether she would or no.

‘It’ll be nice to see Emmeline again,’ her mother said, as they packed their clothes in the trunk on that last busy day.

Octavia agreed that it would, although privately she wasn’t quite so sure and the expression on her face revealed her feelings to the perceptive eyes of her mother.

‘And Cyril too,’ Amy pressed on. ‘I wonder how he got on in France. Don’t stand on the towels, Podge, there’s a good boy. You’ll be glad to see your mama again, won’t you? And your brother and sister.’

‘Not much,’ Podge said. ‘There’s no fun in
them
. Squirrel’s off with Meriton Major all the time on his rotten bicycle and Em’s got new clothes. It’s all she ever talks about. She says I’m a pest. I’d rather stay here with Tavy and ride the donkeys.’