Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘Mama,’ she said, striding into the room. ‘It was the most amazing—’

  But she didn’t get any further for Aunt Maud was interrupting her. Actually interrupting her. Whatever next? You never interrupted people. It was one of the ground rules of politeness. Pa said so. But it was being done, ground rules or no.

  ‘My dears,’ Aunt Maud said, beaming at them all. ‘Such wonderful news. Emmeline is engaged to be married.’

  ‘And I’ve just…’ Octavia struggled on. ‘We’ve just…’ But she was wasting her breath for Emmeline was on her feet and tripping towards her. Her news would have to be deferred. ‘How lovely,’ she said to her cousin. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘This afternoon,’ Emmeline said happily. ‘He asked Papa before dinner. I wanted you to be the first to know. We’re going up to the West End on Saturday to choose the ring. He says it’s to be a ruby and diamond and I’m to choose the one I want. Oh, I’m so happy, Tavy, you wouldn’t believe.’ And she flung her arms round Octavia’s neck and hugged her tight.

  ‘Oh, I would,’ Octavia said, kissing her cousin’s hot cheek. ‘Dear Em, it’s what you’ve always wanted. I’m so glad.’ For a second it was on the tip of her tongue to ask which of Em’s many suitors she’d chosen, but she checked herself in time. Just as long as it wasn’t the bank manager one, Ernest Whoever-he-was. She stood back to look at her cousin’s rapturous face. ‘And guess what,’ she said. ‘You’ll never believe this. I’ve got what I wanted tonight too.’

  Emmeline blinked with surprise. ‘Have you?’

  Now her news could be told. ‘I’ve joined the WSPU,’ she said proudly. ‘I’m going to be a suffragette.’ And she smiled into her cousin’s face, expecting pleasure and approval. But Emmeline was pulling away, her expression changing.

  ‘Oh, Tavy!’ she said. ‘You can’t have.’

  ‘I have though,’ Octavia said, misunderstanding the changed expression and still beaming. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? You and me both. On the same day.’

  ‘But you can’t have,’ Emmeline insisted. ‘I mean, they’re dreadful people. They’re leading the country to rack and ruin.’

  Her disapproval was like a slap in the face and so unexpected it stopped Octavia’s breath. ‘Oh, Em!’ she said. ‘How can you say such a silly thing? They’re not dreadful, they’re wonderful. I’ve just spent the evening with them, and I’ve never heard such sensible women in my life. You should have been there.’

  Emmeline’s face was beginning to flush with distress but she stood her ground. ‘They’re dreadful,’ she said doggedly. ‘Ernest says so. They’re telling people to break the law.’

  It would be Ernest, Octavia thought. I knew he was a fool. ‘If a law’s wrong it deserves to be broken,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows that. And this law’s as wrong as it can be. Why should a man have the vote and a woman be denied it, just because she’s a woman? You tell me that.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Emmeline told her. ‘But the law’s the law and if it’s the law you have to keep it.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ Octavia said, passionately. ‘That’s the whole point. If it’s a bad law, you have to change it.’

  Aunt Maud was on her feet, smoothing her hair, hanging her handbag over her arm. ‘Time we were off, Emmeline,’ she said, too brightly, and looked at her sister, her expression part appeal, part annoyance. ‘We only came over for a minute just to tell you.’

  ‘Of course,’ Amy soothed, touching her arm in a placatory way. ‘You can tell us everything else on Sunday when you come to tea. There’s so much I want to hear, Emmeline my dear. And by then you will have your ring, won’t you?’

  Emmeline agreed that she would and tried to smile although her face was crinkling towards tears and she couldn’t look at Octavia. It was horrid of her to quarrel, she thought, and especially tonight. She took her mother’s proffered arm and made as good an exit as she could, her head held high and her spine stiff with distress and anger. Amy escorted them to the front door, gentling all the way, and J-J followed, tugging at his beard with embarrassment. It was a very difficult departure and left on her own in the overheated room Octavia felt guilty for it, as though she were an infant caught out in some childish transgression. But really she could hardly have stood silent and allowed her foolish cousin to say such abominable things. Not that it was Emmeline, of course. It was that pompous fiancé of hers. But whoever it was she had to speak up. She couldn’t allow such prejudice to go uncorrected. That would have been cowardice and this wasn’t a time for cowardice. It was a time for women to speak up. She could hear the voice of her heroine, ‘You have joined a great crusade, Miss Smith.’ What would she have thought if I’d stayed silent at my very first test? No, she thought. I did the right thing. The only thing. It might have upset Emmeline for the moment but she’ll thank me for it when she understands.

  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 hav
e 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  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.