Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  Octavia was thinking the same thing. She sat perfectly still in her high-backed chair on the platform and watched as her pupils filed in for the ninth assembly of the new school year and the last they would hold in that hall. I’m headmistress of Hammersmith Secondary School for the last time this morning, she thought. By this afternoon I shall be head of Roehampton Secondary School and we shall all be in our brand new building. She’d gone out of her way to look well, choosing her grey suit and her button boots, with her new glasses framing her blue-grey eyes, and her new blue hat jammed onto her frizz of ginger hair like a halo above her long face. The girls grew quiet at the sight of her as they always did, as if her stillness were infectious, and she waited until they were all settled before she stood to address them, as she always did. But despite her calm appearance her thoughts were in turmoil and for once it wasn’t the school she was thinking about, as her staff knew only too well.

  The events of the early morning tore at her memory, the anguished wait for the doctor’s visit, her mother’s terrifying struggle to breathe, her father’s controlled distress. She could still hear her own voice asking, ‘Should I stay at home, Pa? I will if you think it would be best. Miss Gordon would take over for me.’

  And her father’s sad answer. ‘No, Tavy my dear. You must be there. They will expect you to lead the way. In any case there is nothing you can do if you stay. Not with pneumonia. It’s as the doctor says. We just have to wait. All of us.’ And looking down at her mother, sweating and grey- faced, wheezing at every breath and only half conscious in her white bed, with two unnatural patches of colour on her cheeks and the rank smell of her illness rising from her like a miasma. Oh Mama! My poor dear mama!

  Before she left home her father had promised to phone her if there was any news. Thank God for the telephone. And he was right of course. There was nothing any of them could do, except wait for the crisis and pray that she would pass through it. Even so, Octavia was torn by her lack of care. If only it hadn’t been so rapid. How could they have known that a chill would turn to pneumonia so hideously quickly? Four weeks ago she’d been so well, out on the river, picnicking on the riverbank, laughing and talking, enjoying herself. She’d looked frail, of course. She’d been looking frail for years. It was something they all accepted. A sign that she was getting older, like Pa’s white hair and his grizzled beard. Something that made you feel fonder than ever of her. But not ill. No one could have said she looked ill. And then that stupid silly cold. Oh, why hadn’t they made her wrap up warmer? It was such a stupid, stupid thing to let her take cold. If only the crisis hadn’t come on this particular day. Oh, please, please let her pull through.

  The girls were assembled, all one hundred and seventy-four of them. There wasn’t a single absentee. They stood before her, in their school hats and blazers, with their bags and satchels at their feet, bright-eyed with expectation. They’re such good girls, Octavia thought, looking round at the juniors in their neat gymslips, the seniors in their fashionable skirts, their black stockings, the pretty variety of their white blouses, the hair they’d brushed and combed so carefully for this special occasion. She pulled her mind back to the occasion with an effort and managed to smile at them. And was glad when they smiled back.

  There was nothing that needed to be said. Books and equipment were all waiting for them in the new building, the special trams that had been laid on to take them there were due to arrive in three minutes, everything was well prepared. It was just the matter of the carnations. She looked across at Alice Genevra and signalled that was time for the basket to be retrieved. Then she addressed her school.

  ‘This is our red-letter day,’ she said and smiled at them all again. ‘I hope it will be one that you will remember with pleasure and look back on with pride, for we are starting the next stage of our school’s development and great things will surely follow. Now, as you leave this hall you will see Miss Genevra at the top of the stairs with a basket of carnations. There is one for each of you with a pin to fix it to your blazer.’ She paused to give them the chance to react, as they did in a murmur of surprise and delight, turning their heads and craning to see if they could catch sight of the flowers. ‘We shall leave and arrive in style,’ she told them, picking up her own basket. ‘Good luck to all of us. Lead on, Miss Fennimore.’

  It was the happiest procession. Even though they only had a few yards to walk before they reached the tram stop, they stepped out in style, two by two in a long cheerful crocodile, the September sun enriching the colour of their young bright hair and turning the carnations into red stars against the dark cloth of their blazers.

  Oh, such happy chatter on the journey! Such impatience! Oh, such excitement as the tram stop was finally, finally reached. And then, what a rapturous walk to their unseen promised land. At first they tried to be sedate and to behave like young ladies, but that wasn’t possible for more than two minutes. Soon the leaders were rushing, red stars bouncing, and the straggling tail of their long crocodile had to run to catch up. And there it was. Their lovely new school. It was absolutely enormous.

  They toured the building form by form, sniffing the lovely clean unused smell of the place, exploring and exclaiming from the western end, where there was a Music room with a grand piano and an Art room with easels and long north facing windows; to the eastern end, where they discovered the Cookery room with its gleaming saucepans and its brand new ovens and three Science rooms with their rows of workmanlike benches.

  Morag Gordon was still stunned by the size of the hall. ‘It’s like a theatre,’ she said to Octavia. ‘Look at the size of that stage. If we had some curtains fixed we could put on a play.’

  ‘That would be fun, wouldn’t it girls?’ Octavia said. ‘We could have a drama festival. Or an annual school play.’ Anxiety about her mother was still tying sharp knots in her belly but she’d found that the way to cope with it was to push her mind to respond to every suggestion she heard. Now she thought about the best time for a school play. At the end of the summer term, perhaps, and then they could have a party in the school garden afterwards. She already had plans for a garden in their grounds. There were so many possibilities in this place.

  When the bell rang for the dinner hour the tours were still going on and it took a considerable time for the girls to gather in the hall and find the places allotted to them at the dinner tables. Not that anybody was worried. The excitement of eating their very first school dinner in that very grand hall carried them all happily along. They knew it would take time to settle in and Miss Smith had told them there would be no lessons or studies until the last period of the afternoon, when they were to go back to their form rooms. That’s what it meant to have a red-letter day.

  None of them noticed that their indefatigable headmistress wasn’t in the hall with them. The staff, who were dining in the Cookery room, were aware of her absence but assumed that there was something that had needed her attention and that she’d gone to deal with it. In fact she was sitting in her study with her back to the window waiting for someone in Hampstead to answer the phone. The insistent brin-brin of the unanswered call was tying her stomach into knots of anxiety.

  A voice. At last. Mrs Wilkins, giving the number and sounding hesitant. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No change. Your father’s with her. Shall I call him?’

  ‘No,’ Octavia said. ‘Just give him my love. Tell him I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

  In fact it was well past six o’clock before she finally put her key in the lock and let herself in to the house. All the way home she’d been buoying herself up with hope, that the crisis would be past, that her mother would be improving, at the very least that she would be no worse. When she wakes up, she thought, I’ll tell her about my day and how well it’s gone. That will cheer her. But the minute she stepped into the hall she knew that things were too bad for the comfort of stories. The smell of the sick room was so strong it pervaded the house and there was a palpable sense of foreboding. Quietly, she put her bag by t
he hatstand, hung up her coat and hat and tiptoed upstairs.

  Her mother was lying propped up by pillows, her closed eyes sunk in their sockets, breathing noisily and painfully through her open mouth. She writhed and moaned in her struggle but was too deeply unconscious to be aware of anyone. The sight of her suffering was more than Octavia could bear without weeping.

  ‘Oh, Mama,’ she said and sank to her knees beside the bed, reaching for her mother’s limp hand and trying to hold it. But her touch was an irritation and her mother pushed her hand away.

  ‘She’s too far gone,’ J-J explained with terrible sadness. ‘She doesn’t know us.’

  ‘Can’t they do something for her?’ Octavia said, furious at her own impotence. ‘There ought to be something they could do. Has the doctor been?’

  ‘Twice,’ her father told her, ‘and no, there’s nothing he can do. Nothing anyone can do. We just have to wait.’ His face was seamed with distress and fatigue for he’d been sitting at the bedside nearly all day.

  ‘We’ll take it in turns to watch now I’m home,’ Octavia said, torn with pity for him. ‘Go down and have a bit of a rest. I’ll stay with her.’

  ‘She’s sixty-eight,’ J-J said. ‘We’ve been together for forty-seven years. I’ll not leave her now. She might wake and want me.’

  So they kept watch together, cramped and uncomfortable in the haunting half-light, with the curtains drawn against the night and one small table light to ease the worst of the shadows, not eating, for how could either of them eat in such a state? And not speaking much either, for what was there to say? The long terrible struggle went on – ten o’clock, midnight, one o’clock, two. Occasionally they catnapped and woke ashamed to have succumbed to sleep at such a time. And Amy sank deeper and deeper into unconsciousness.

  At around half past two Octavia woke with a start to a new sound. Her mother’s laboured breathing had changed to a dreadful rattle, low in her throat and very loud, and J-J was leaning towards her, holding her hand and weeping.

  ‘She’s going,’ he mourned. ‘Oh dear God! She’s going. My poor darling.’

  They sat on either side of her, holding her hands and kissing her fingers, even though they knew it wouldn’t do any of them any good. And the death rattle went on. It was an interminable anguish. But at last, at a little after three, Amy gave a short shuddering sigh and stopped breathing. It was over.

  Octavia was surprised by how calm she was. She took away the mound of stained pillows, found a clean one and laid her mother’s head on it as though she were asleep, she got a bowl of warm water and washed her face and hands, very gently as if she would be hurt by the slightest roughness, brushed her hair and closed her poor gaping mouth. She persuaded her father that he really ought to get to bed and try to sleep. Then and only then she went to her own room and undressed wearily. The triumph of the day was so distant it was almost unreal. I never told her about it, she thought, and she would have been so proud to hear it. She remembered all the other times when she’d come rushing home with some titbit of news to please her. How closely she’d listened. It was an anguish to remember, seeing those gentle grey eyes again, widening as they followed every word. She paid such attention to us, she thought. She set us at the centre of her world, listening to us, praising us, feeding us, worrying over us, but really it was she who was the centre of our world and now the centre is gone. After so many dreadful deaths she should have been used to loss, or at least better able to cope with it, but she wasn’t. This grief was worse than any of the others, even what she’d felt for Em’s poor little boys. Oh, my poor darling ma. What shall we do without you?

  There was little sleep for her that night, even though she was tired to her bones, and when the day dawned she got up and washed and dressed ready for the inescapable miseries of the day. It was an unbearably perfect morning, the air soft and full of rapturous birdsong, the sky a blue dome above the rich autumnal colours of Hampstead Heath, the sunshine gently warm. She drifted from room to room, through the terrible hush of her bereaved house, gazing down at the heath, out at the garden, along the empty pavements of South Hill Park. Everything she saw made her ache with misery at the unsuitability of such a day. It should be brewing a storm, she thought, or raining commiserating tears, or gathering into a fog, a thick damp demoralising fog to chill her bones and shroud her grief and make her runny nose acceptable. But not sunshine. Oh dear God! Not sunshine. Not today. Not when she enjoyed a sunny day so much. Poor Mama.

  There was a figure approaching along the street, a familiar straw hat catching the sun as it bobbed above the hedges. It turned in at the gate and became Emmeline, stout and determined in her old-fashioned button boots and her neat walking costume, with a wicker shopping basket over her arm, pink in the face and puffing after her long walk across the heath. Octavia drifted to the door to let her in.

  Emmeline put down her basket and threw her arms round her cousin’s poor bowed neck. ‘Oh Tavy, my dear, dear Tavy,’ she said. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

  How does she know? Octavia wondered. Did I phone her? Her mind was so embedded in misery she couldn’t remember. She could have done. In her present numbed state she could have done anything and she wouldn’t have remembered.

  ‘Mrs Wilkins phoned,’ Emmeline said, answering her unspoken question. ‘I came straight away. Eddie and Edith can go off to school on their own for once. They don’t need me to wave them goodbye. Now, are you all right? Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘I think I’m all right,’ Octavia said. ‘I’ve got to be, haven’t I? The undertakers are coming presently and Pa’s in no fit state…’

  ‘Of course not,’ Emmeline understood. ‘That’s why I’ve come.’ She pulled out her hatpin and took off her hat and gloves, setting them neatly on the hallstand, removed her jacket and hung it up. Then she took a white apron from her basket and put it on over her skirt, brisk and purposeful and loving. ‘Have you had any breakfast?’ she asked. And when Octavia shook her head. ‘Now, that won’t do. You can’t go without eating.’

  The sense of being cared for made Octavia aware of how desperately lonely she’d been feeling. ‘Oh, Em,’ she said, ‘I’m so glad you’re here. You’re the one person who really knows how I feel.’ Then she had to sit down on the hall chair because her control had broken and grief was welling over into terrible tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped. ‘I shouldn’t…’

  Emmeline put a loving arm round her shoulders. ‘You cry all you want, my darling,’ she said. ‘Time like this. What else would you do? You just sit down there and have a little cry and I’ll trot and put the kettle on. Nice cup of tea. That’s what we need. I shan’t be long.’

  What good will tea do? Octavia thought wildly, as she gulped and sobbed. Even if she made gallons it wouldn’t bring Mama back to life. But when the familiar teapot was carried up from the kitchen, with the tea things set out neatly on the tray cloth beside it, three cups and saucers, milk jug, sugar bowl and all, the day jolted into a sort of normalcy and she followed Emmeline into the breakfast room as obediently as a child and drank what was set before her. After a few minutes her father drooped into the room to join them and he drank obediently too. To Octavia’s grief-sharpened sensitivity, he looked smaller and peculiarly vulnerable, the flesh below his brown eyes puffy with weeping, his beard dull, his white hair not bushy and vital but lying flat and damp on his skull. My poor pa, she thought.

  ‘It is very good of you,’ he said to Emmeline in his quiet courteous way. ‘We do appreciate it, don’t we, Tavy?’

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ Emmeline said, ‘after all you’ve done for me over the years. The very least. You think how Tavy sat up with me when my poor boys were ill. Night after night and then off to school in the morning. And then when Mama was… And Pa. All that way to Wales and looking after me all the time. Oh no, it’s the least I can do and I’m very glad to do it. Now, would you fancy another cup?’

  But there wasn’t time to answer because someone was ri
nging the doorbell and presently Mrs Wilkins edged quietly into the room to whisper that the undertakers had arrived. So Octavia had to go out and attend to them and it wasn’t until half past nine that she got back to the breakfast room and by then, what with the misery of seeing her mother’s body again, and the strain of her long fast, she was feeling quite faint and had to hold on to the back of her chair to steady herself.

  ‘Porridge,’ Emmeline decided. ‘Don’t you think so, Mrs Wilkins? And then bacon and eggs. We can’t have you passing out on us.’

  ‘I ought to phone the school,’ Octavia said, remembering. ‘They’ll be wondering what’s become of me.’

  But Emmeline was in full command by then and said that she would phone and that Tavy and Uncle J-J were to sit down and have their breakfast and not to worry. And because they were stunned with grief and the day was thoroughly out of kilter, they did as they were told. But as she ate what she could, Octavia thought longingly of her new building and wished she could be there with things to do and the girls’ enjoyment to carry her along. She knew it was what she needed but she could hardly say so.

  The day passed in a blur of chores and tears. People phoned and called to tell her how sorry they were, Emmeline ran the household, and at a little after two o’clock Dora arrived to help out too, looking very stylish with her red hair cut in a fashionable bob and dressed in the latest fashion in one of the new cloche hats and high-heeled shoes and a blue skirt so short that Octavia could see her knees.

  ‘I’ll wear a long one to the funeral,’ she promised, noticing her aunt’s expression. ‘This is what I wear for the office. I know it’s the wrong colour but there wasn’t time to go home and change. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘I don’t mind at all,’ Octavia told her, understanding that she needed reassurance. ‘I think you look lovely.’

  ‘That’s not what her father says,’ Emmeline grimaced. ‘You’d never believe the ructions we’ve had over the length of their skirts. You’d think it was the end of the world the way he goes on about it. That and their hair.’