Octavia (5 page)

There was a cross swish of skirts and her mother was back in the room. ‘That was no way to treat your cousin, Octavia,’
she said. ‘She was most upset.’ She spoke gently but her annoyance was plain from the set of her mouth.

‘Then she shouldn’t have said such stupid things,’ Octavia said, fighting back. ‘I couldn’t believe my ears. “
Leading the country to rack and ruin
.” The very idea. That was just prejudice, and if there’s one thing this campaign
must
do it’s to speak out against prejudice.’

‘At a political meeting, maybe,’ her mother told her, taking her seat by the fire, ‘but not in your own home and not to one of your guests. That is discourteous and unkind and I cannot allow it. You will write to Emmeline and your aunt this evening before you go to bed and apologise.’

‘No, Mama,’ Octavia said, flushing at the distress of disobeying her mother but determined to follow this through. ‘I know this will grieve you but I cannot possibly do such a thing. It would be tantamount to admitting I was in the wrong.’

‘You
are
in the wrong,’ her mother told her implacably. ‘You were discourteous to your guests and now you must apologise.’

J-J was standing beside the dresser pouring himself a whisky, trying to look unconcerned and failing. ‘Pa,’ Octavia said, turning to him for support, ‘you know what this means to me. Tell Mama it isn’t possible.’

His answer was a profound disappointment. ‘Your mother is the arbiter of proper behaviour in this house, my dear,’ he said, ‘and, as such, I stand by her decision. My advice to you would be to apologise with a good grace and put this whole rather silly business to rest. Any other course of behaviour would prolong the unpleasantness.’

‘Any other course of behaviour would be preferable to
cowardice,’ Octavia said hotly. ‘Can’t you see what you are asking me to do?’ The longer they talked about it the more deeply entrenched in her opinion she was becoming. ‘It isn’t possible. It would be treachery.’ And then tears began to swell in her throat and she had to leave the room before she lost control of her feelings. She managed to pause at the door to wish them goodnight but then she had to move away as quickly as she could.

Oh, how can they be so unkind? she thought, as she ran up the stairs to her bedroom. I’m not a child. Why can’t they trust me to do the right thing? And she flung herself face down on her counterpane and wept with abandon.

It was a long sleepless night. She relived the quarrel, endlessly and word for word, sure she’d been entirely in the right, but getting more and more upset to have quarrelled with her dear Em and wondering how on earth it could have happened. Her thoughts rolled over and over, as the hall clock turned the hours like pages and the darkness pressed in upon her like guilt, and when morning finally lightened the sky, she was no further to knowing what she ought to do. I’ll talk to Betty Transom, she thought, and see what she has to say.

Betty Transom was indignant. ‘For your own cousin to say such things!’ she said. ‘How could she be so insensitive? It beggars belief. Well, don’t take any notice of her, that’s my advice. She’s just being silly. Apologise if you must. You don’t have to mean it. I’ve apologised hundreds of times in my life, over and over for all sorts of silly things and I’ve rarely meant it.’

‘That wouldn’t work for me,’ Octavia told her, sadly. ‘If I say a thing, I have to mean it. It wouldn’t be honest otherwise.’

The bell was sounding for the end of break. ‘Well,’ Betty said, ‘it’s too great a cause for any of us to go back on it now. My lot weren’t happy about it either. My ma thinks I shall be sent to prison. But I’m not going to take any notice of any of them. Cheer up. I’m with you. And so is Mrs Pankhurst. It’ll all come out in the wash.’

Unfortunately it was a tea party that Octavia had to face, not a washday, and the tea party was even worse than she feared.

For a start her mother was distinctly chilly with her, which was more upsetting than she cared to admit, and to make matters worse, she was uncomfortably aware that her father was ill at ease. He was frowning and stroking his beard and watching the conversation as if he was guarding it. Emmeline wouldn’t so much as look in her direction, but that was understandable because she’d been placed at the end of the lengthened table, well out of the way, wedged between Podge, who was a big boy for a twelve-year-old and took up an inordinate amount of room, and Cyril, who talked about Oxford pretty well non-stop and stole the marzipan from her plate when she wasn’t looking. Emmeline and her fiancé were in the seats of honour at the centre of the table, she quietly contented, displaying her new ring, eating very little and gazing at her lover with admiration, he holding forth – about the dependability of modern banking and what a first rate career it was ‘for the up and coming young man’, about stocks and shares and how happy he would be to advise his host on such matters, even about education, which he claimed provided the backbone of the nation, ‘always provided it was administered with sufficient rigour and discipline.’ The longer
he talked, the more Octavia disliked him. She’d come to the table prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt because, to be fair to the man, she’d only met him on two or three occasions, and then only briefly, when he was arriving to take Emmeline out for the evening, and she really didn’t know very much about him except that she didn’t like him. But one meal was more than enough to give her his measure.

‘He’s pompous and boring and self-opinionated,’ she told Betty Transom the next morning. ‘I can’t think what she sees in him. He isn’t the least bit handsome. His face is too fat and he’s got tiny little eyes and messy looking teeth and he oils his hair so much it sticks to his skull like a nasty bit of black leather and he talks about money all the time.’

‘Ugh!’ Betty grimaced. ‘If that’s what husbands are like it’s just as well we’re not going to get married.’

‘Amen to that,’ Octavia said. And that made them both laugh and cheered her a little.

But the real cheer came the following morning when she brisked in to breakfast to find a letter waiting for her beside her plate. It was from the WSPU, signed by somebody called Dorothea Worth, welcoming her to the union and asking if she would care to assist them in their shop on Hampstead High Street.
‘There is always work to be done,’
she said.
‘We meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays and you would be most welcome, should these days be agreeable to you.’

They were more than agreeable. They were essential. She and Betty, having decided that they would start work at once, walked to the shop as soon as they’d had their tea that very afternoon.

It was an interesting place and not a bit like a shop, although there were the usual plate glass windows outside and the usual bottle green paint everywhere and pamphlets for sale on a counter just inside the door. But the real work was being done in the room behind the shop, where three young women were hard at it typing letters and addressing envelopes.

Dorothea turned out to be a plump middle-aged woman with hair almost as untidy as Aunt Maud’s and the same preoccupied habit of patting it and tucking it while she was speaking. ‘We’re sending out information about the Manchester demonstration,’ she told her new recruits. ‘We want it to be the biggest and best there’s ever been, so we can use all the help we can get. You’ll be joining us, of course.’

Oh, of course. It almost went without saying. Although as they walked rather wearily home after an evening of letter folding and stamp licking, they both confessed they were none too sure about what their parents would have to say about it.

‘Your pa won’t mind,’ Betty said cheerfully, but added with a little more doubt. ‘Will he?’

Octavia had to admit that she really didn’t know. It would depend on what her mother had to say, and with that horrible apology still not given and Emmeline unapproachable – and the deplorable Ernest everlastingly around to prejudice her – it was hard to predict what anyone would say. Luckily it was only her father who was at home to greet her that evening. Amy was still at her sister’s ‘discussing menus or some such’. And her father approved.

‘Capital,’ he said. ‘I can just see you carrying the banner, you and young Betty. Will Gwen be going too?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Octavia had to admit. ‘She’s on late shift this week so she wasn’t there and we’ve only just sent out the letters. I expect so, though.’

‘Well, you’re sensible girls,’ J-J said. ‘You won’t do anything foolish.’

And that, rather surprisingly, was her mother’s opinion too, although she added a proviso. ‘If anything untoward were to happen you must promise me you would get out of the way of it at once.’

It was a promise easily given. For after all what could possibly go wrong when there were going to be so many of them and they would all be together to support one another?

The morning of the demonstration was cold and overcast, threatening rain, and as she dressed for this first public test of her affiliation, Octavia was tremulous with nerves. Ever since she’d joined the WSPU and had that silly quarrel with Em – oh, how she regretted that quarrel! – she’d made a point of reading every newspaper article about the suffragettes that she could find and she’d been appalled at the level of prejudice she’d discovered, especially in the cartoons that all depicted campaigning women as ugly and deformed. So she’d given a lot of thought to what she would wear, knowing how important appearances could be.

She’d chosen her dove grey costume and the prettiest blouse she possessed and had topped them off with a brand new, far too expensive hat, dove grey to match the costume and loaded with artificial fruit and flowers. Even though it was probably immodest to say so, she was pleased with the image she presented, and glad that Betty and Gwen were equally prettily dressed. The three of them strolled into Euston like visiting
royalty, using their umbrellas as walking sticks and gathering admiring glances.

But the journey increased her nervousness with every mile. Her two friends gossiped and giggled and didn’t seem at all perturbed by what was ahead of them, but Octavia rehearsed every possibility in her mind and the possibilities grew more alarming the nearer they got to their destination. What if they were arrested? Would she know how to behave if they were? What if there were fisticuffs? Or if she were hit by a truncheon? How would she cope with that? And the wheels sang a mocking accompaniment as they rattled along the rails.
‘What if you were? What if you were?’
It was quite a relief to hear the brakes take hold and to know that they’d arrived.

Manchester was an extremely dirty place and a very noisy one. Octavia was horrified by how black and tall the buildings were, and how roughly people were pushing past each other on the pavements. She felt she was walking in a chasm in a foreign land. After a while she noticed that she and her friends were not the only well-dressed women in the street and realised that all of them were walking in the same direction, and then she knew that this was going to be a very big demonstration and began to feel glad that she was part of it. Then they turned a corner and there were the placards saying, ‘Votes for women’ in large bold letters and the familiar banner with its familiar legend, ‘Deeds not words’, swelling in the breeze and making a noise like the crack of a whip and she felt she was in familiar territory. Standing directly and loudly in front of the banner was a brass band, tuning up, and behind it there were rows and rows of women waiting in line, filling the square, turning their heads to smile at them as they approached.

They joined the tail of the procession and introduced
themselves to the women on either side of them, and then they waited, while the column got longer and longer. Police constables walked up and down beside it, looking important, and consulted with their sergeants, looking solemn, and patrolled again. And eventually the brass band gave a sort of garrumph and began to play a rousing march – something by Souza wasn’t it? – and they were off.

It felt most peculiar to be marching down the middle of the road instead of walking on the pavement. And alarmingly exposed. But after a hundred yards Octavia got used to it and began to swing along as though she’d been marching all her life. Until she noticed the crowds.

At first they all looked the same, staring and blank and oddly unreal, standing in little groups at the edge of the pavement, the men grimy in their working clothes, their faces shadowed by cloth caps, or superior in dark suits and white wing collars and bowler hats; the women clogged and shawled and carrying heavy baskets, or wearing smart coats and gloves and grand hats. But then she realised that, despite their class differences, they were all disapproving and many were shouting insults. ‘Go hoame to tha maister!’ ‘Shame on you!’ ‘Hussies!’ ‘You’re a disgrace to womanhood!’ Her spine stiffened with such anger at their stupidity that for a few seconds she couldn’t walk normally and that annoyed her too.

‘How can they be such fools?’ she said to Betty. ‘I can understand men shouting at us. They won’t have the upper hand once we get the vote and they won’t like that a bit. You can tell that already from this lot. “
Go hoame to tha maister
” indeed! Why should men be our masters? It’s downright archaic. But the women are another matter. I don’t understand them at all. When we get the vote, they’ll get it too.’

‘They’re just showing their ignorance,’ one of her new friends said. ‘Don’t take any notice of them. They’re not worth it.’

But Octavia couldn’t ignore them. They were too loud and too full of stabbing hatred. She was hot with annoyance all the way to St Peter’s Field. But once there her mood changed, for there was Mrs Pankhurst standing on the hustings waiting to speak, and the sight of her heroine lifted her spirits at once and made her feel proud of what she was doing. Let them shout, she thought. We have right on our side.

The speeches, when they began, were a terrible disappointment. After the clear cool voices she’d heard and admired in Caxton Hall, these women sounded muffled and indistinct, their words blurred by the megaphones they were using and blown away by the wind. She struggled to disentangle what they were saying for several frustrating minutes and in the end she gave up the effort and decided that if she were to hear anything at all she would have to get nearer to the platform.

‘Come on,’ she said to Gwen and Betty. ‘I’m going to the front.’ And she began to ease and squeeze her way through the crowd, with her two friends following behind. Several other women had the same idea so it wasn’t easy, but Octavia was even more determined than they were and after ten striving minutes she arrived at the foot of the platform. The speaker was a young woman in rather a plain coat but her face was fiery and so was her message.

‘The time is approaching,’ she was saying, ‘when we must decide upon militant action. We have tried marching and writing letters and petitioning the government and all the politicians do is to make soothing noises. They will never take
us seriously from our strength of numbers alone, no matter how many of us there might be. They will never take us seriously while we write them polite letters. They will throw them in the bin. No, I tell you, they will only take us seriously when we disrupt their lives, when we make life uncomfortable for them. If it means breaking the law to draw attention to our cause, we must break the law. The longer we go on being quiet and respectable, the longer we shall wait for justice. This is a fight and we must fight with every means at our disposal.’

At that, the women who were near enough to hear her broke into a cheer. Yes, Octavia thought, cheering with the rest, she is absolutely right. We must take action. Even if it means being arrested and going to prison. At that moment, embedded among all those cheering women, there was no doubt in her mind at all.

She was still burning with enthusiasm for her cause when she finally got back to Hampstead late that night.

Her parents had sat up for her and were eager to hear how she’d got on. Her father pressed her for every detail, beaming his pleasure at her boldness, but her mother grew steadily more and more alarmed. Wasn’t this just precisely what she’d feared? These campaigns were all the same. They began with marching and ended up breaking the law.

‘I hope you won’t do anything foolish,’ she warned. ‘I wouldn’t want you getting hurt.’

‘You mustn’t worry so, Mama,’ Octavia said. ‘I shall be perfectly sensible whatever I do.’ And she patted her mother’s lace-edged hand to comfort her.

Amy wasn’t comforted. ‘It will come to grief,’ she predicted, as she and her husband were preparing for bed. ‘She’s too
headstrong, J-J. She’ll go her own way no matter what we say. She won’t listen.’

‘She’s a sensible young woman,’ her father said, brushing his hair thoughtfully before the mirror. ‘Let’s trust her, shall we?’

‘We can’t even trust her to apologise for bad behaviour,’ Amy pointed out. ‘This silly quarrel’s been dragging on for weeks and weeks and she won’t write – I’ve asked and asked – and how it will all end I dread to think.’

But on this score at least she needn’t have worried. Two evenings later Maud came to pay her a visit, and Maud had arrived to be a peacemaker. She was even more dishevelled than usual, with her hair tumbled out of its pins and her cheeks flushed with apprehension, but she plunged into her mission as soon as she’d stepped foot inside the hall.

‘Amy, my dear,’ she said. ‘It’s about the bridesmaids. My Em is worrying herself silly. She thinks Tavy won’t want to do it. She’s been in tears over it and that won’t do. We can’t have her making herself sick. So in the end I said to her, “I’m sure she will, but there’s no point sitting around worrying and crying. I’ll go and find out for you.” So here I am.’

‘We’ll ask her,’ Amy said. ‘She’s in her bedroom writing an essay. Go through and I’ll get her.’ And she went off upstairs at once.

Octavia came down with her mother feeling rather apprehensive because the quarrel had been going on for such a long time. It really ought to have been settled ages ago but she still didn’t know how to do it without losing face. But when she heard that her cousin was worrying and weeping, all her old affection reasserted itself and the whole thing was simple.

‘Oh, Aunt Maud,’ she said. ‘Of course I’ll do it. I always said I would, now didn’t I? We promised one another. I wouldn’t miss Em’s wedding for the world.’ She was warm with relief. Em might have said silly things about the suffragettes but that was only because Ernest had talked her into it. She wasn’t like those poor silly women lining the pavement, shouting their stupid insults. There was no malice in her. Dear Em. Memories came cramming into her mind, disparate and jumbled, nudging and shifting, and all of them loving – the games they’d played in the house in Clerkenwell when they were little, the secrets they’d shared at school and on holiday in Eastbourne, the childish dreams they’d ‘interpreted’, the adolescent confidences they’d dared to reveal, she and this dear girl who’d so nearly been her sister.

Maud was smiling so much it looked as though her face was splitting in two. ‘Can you come round tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘And I’ll show you the patterns. Some of them are so pretty. Oh, my dear, she’ll be so pleased.’

‘And after all that nonsense, she said “yes” as meek as a lamb,’ Amy reported to J-J later that evening. ‘There are times when I just don’t understand her.’

‘She is a loving girl,’ her father said. ‘Love was sure to triumph in the end, even over a cause.’

Which in the following weeks it most certainly did. To everybody’s relief.

Emmeline’s wedding day opened like a rose, luscious with sunshine and summer foliage under a dappled sky. ‘Happy the bride the sun shines on,’ her guests approved, smiling as she gleamed past them up the aisle, dreaming and beautiful in her
white wedding gown. When they emerged into daylight again after the service, their mood changed, for a sudden breeze had sprung up and was soon scattering mischief and confusion in every direction, ruffling the lilac ostrich plumes in Aunt Maud’s hat, flinging Emmeline’s veil into the air, rippling the obedient silk of her wedding dress, tumbling the petals from the red roses in her bouquet. Within seconds her guests were laughing and holding on to their hats as the photographer fussed to arrange the family portraits to his satisfaction. ‘In a little more on the left-hand side,
if
you please. Yes, yes,
my
left. That’s the ticket. Now if you can just settle a little.’

Octavia stood beside the bride, feeling proud of her. Dear Emmeline, she thought, I
do
love you and I do so hope you’ll be happy. You deserve to be happy – whatever you might think of the suffragettes. The breeze flapped the skirt of her blue gown like a flag and she turned to smile at her cousin, although turning made her aware of how cruelly her new corset was pinching. She knew she looked very grand in her long gown, with its delicate underskirt and all that expensive braid edging her bodice and cinching her waist like an embroidered belt, but being held in so tightly was a nipping price to pay for it. Still, she consoled herself, you have to look your best at a wedding. It’s expected.

All the other guests had put on the style quite splendidly: the ladies in fashionable dresses, lilac and rose pink, soft yellow, powder blue and wearing absolutely wonderful hats trimmed with ostrich feathers dyed to match; the gentlemen very fine in their morning suits with their lovely dove grey toppers and their cream kid gloves and spats. There was one in particular who was especially handsome, tall and straight with thick fair hair and dark eyes and a lovely easy way of
walking and standing, like a leading man at the theatre. She’d noticed him as soon as they walked out of the church. In fact, now she came to think about it, being at a wedding was very much like being at the theatre, all dressed up and being looked at. From the corner of her eye she sensed that someone was trying to catch her attention, and turned her head to see who it was – and caught sight of the handsome young man again. He was standing on the edge of the group. I wonder who he is? she thought, and turned her head again in case someone noticed that she was staring.

‘Nice smile!’ the photographer called from beneath his black hood. The flashlight exploded with a flump of white light and when her eyes had adjusted to the sunlight again, the handsome young man had disappeared.

Then it was time for the bride and groom to climb into the two-horse carriage that was waiting for them and be driven away to their reception under a shower of rose petals and good wishes. Octavia went to look for her mother and father so that they could walk downhill to the hotel together with all the other guests. Everybody was talking at once as they progressed, laughing and chattering and saying what a pretty wedding it was and how well it had all gone. But there was no sign of the handsome young man, which was rather a disappointment.

At the hotel foyer, the guests had to wait because the groom’s formidable mother was arranging the line, although strictly speaking it was nothing to do with her and should have been done by Aunt Maud.

‘Come along, gels,’ she said to the four bridesmaids. ‘You are to stand behind the bride. Mr and Mrs Withington here, beside your daughter. That’s right.’

It was a very long line, what with bride and groom and both sets of parents to be greeted, and the guests took a very long time to file past. Octavia was soon tired of hearing the same endless good wishes – ‘Many congratulations, Ernest.’ ‘Such a delightful service.’ ‘We do wish you joy, Emmeline, my dear.’ She was beginning to feel cross at the way the bridegroom was smugly accepting everything that was being said as if it was his personal homage. He might be a distant relation of the great Coutts family, she thought, but there’s really no need for him to lord it quite so much. I wish they’d hurry up and have done with all this. But the line stretched on and on beyond the hall.

‘I don’t know about you,’ a voice said beside her, ‘but I think they should speed things up a bit. I’m absolutely ravenous.’ It was the handsome young man.

‘I’m afraid we’re in for a long wait,’ she told him.

‘So I see,’ he grimaced. ‘It’s a jolly poor show! I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’

‘I don’t think they’re serving horse today,’ she said. ‘It’s potted shrimps and ham on the bone and cold roast turkey.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve seen the menu.’

‘Well, at least it won’t go cold,’ he said, sighing. ‘My name’s Thomas, by the way.’

She held out a gloved hand for him to shake. ‘I’m Emmeline’s cousin, Octavia.’