Octavia (14 page)

She lay on the floor for a very long time, drifting in and out of consciousness, sore and sick and defeated. The room darkened. After a while, the sounds of the prison impinged on
her senses, a door banged, feet clumped along the walkway, someone was shouting, and she was reminded of where she was. She got up with a great effort, moving slowly like an old woman and crept to her bed. All she wanted to do was to lie down and sleep.

But once she’d fallen onto her unyielding mattress, sleep was impossible. Thoughts buzzed in her brain as the hours passed achingly by. She wondered if they’d done her any lasting damage. There were traces of blood in her vomit. She could see them even in the half-light. But there was nothing to be gained by wondering about it. If they had injured her there was nothing she could do about it. It’s done, she thought, it’s over, and the thought encouraged her. I’ve stood up to them. I’ve lived through it. They haven’t won.

But she was wrong. It wasn’t over. They left her alone for three more days, offering food, which she refused, and water which she drank eagerly, while the pains in her stomach became a dull perpetual ache and the agony in her throat eased from knife sharpness to a painful prickling as if she’d been grazed.

Then, and with the awful suddenness she remembered from the last time, the trolley was rattling outside her door and the torture team were in the cell and binding her arms and legs. This time she had less energy to fight them, although she struggled as hard as she could, desperate to avoid that searing pain. This time they pushed the tube into her throat with such force that blood rose into her mouth and spilt out onto their abominable rubber sheet. This time they left her barely conscious and she took a long time to come round. I can’t bear it, she thought, as she crawled back onto her bed and tried to wrap herself in the blanket. If they’re going to do this
to me every four days for the rest of my six weeks, I shall have to give in. She tried to work out how long she’d been inside, but her brain wasn’t functioning and she couldn’t do it. More than a week, certainly, but less than a fortnight. I can’t bear it, she thought. Please God, don’t let me be tortured any more.

There was a key rattling in the door. Oh God! Now what are they going to do? But it wasn’t the trolley. It was the doctor with the neat hair and the manicured hands, followed by the warder with the hard face. He walked to the bed and took her chin in his hands. ‘Open your mouth,’ he said, and then a little more kindly. ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to feed you.’

She opened her mouth, fearfully and painfully. He produced a torch from his pocket and shone it down her throat. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Discharge.’ Then he and the warder turned away from her and left.

Her heart was juddering with alarm. What did he mean, ‘
discharge
’? Had her wounds turned septic? Was that what it was? And if they had shouldn’t he be doing something to treat them? She understood enough about wounds to know that if a septic wound was left untreated you could get blood poisoning and die. Oh dear God, what is going to happen to me now?

What happened was that the fierce warder arrived in her cell the next morning carrying her clothes. ‘Get dressed,’ he said. ‘You’re being discharged.’

It was agony for Octavia to speak but she croaked a question. ‘Do you mean I’m going home?’

‘Not that you deserve it,’ the warder said. ‘But yes. Doctor’s orders.’

Tears were rolling from Octavia’s eyes. Home, she thought. The very word was a comfort.

They released her that afternoon. There was even a warder to help her totter through the gate. And there was her father, her dear, dear father, standing on the cobbles looking out for her, rushing forward to take hold of her as she stumbled towards him.

‘Oh, my dear child,’ he said, his face creased with concern. ‘What have they done to you?’

She was in too bad a state to tell him. It was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other. She had to concentrate because it was so difficult. She was numb to everything except the searing pain in her throat and the utter relief of being out of that awful prison. As the cab rattled them home, she had so little energy left that the first jolt made her fall against his shoulder and, at that, he put his arm round her and kissed her hair and told her she was a good, brave girl. It shamed him to realise that he was the one who was weeping and that she was dry-eyed.

Amy had been watching anxiously from the parlour window and came out at once, even before the cab had come to a halt, to ease her poor wounded daughter into the house. She was horrified by what she saw and swept into furious action. Octavia was put straight to bed with a hot water bottle at her feet and the blinds drawn to encourage her to sleep; Mrs Wilkins was despatched to make a pot of tea, with plenty of sugar, and a good beef broth for later; then having attended to her poor patient’s immediate needs, she phoned the doctor.

He arrived within the hour and examined the now sleeping Octavia very gently, noting the bruises on her arms and legs, her obvious loss of weight and the telltale shadows under her
eyes. Then, apologising that he would have to distress her if he were to make a proper examination, he gentled her awake and put a spatula on her tongue so that he could see how badly her throat had been damaged. She retched and groaned but he examined her carefully notwithstanding.

‘She is suffering from a badly lacerated throat and complete nervous exhaustion,’ he said to Amy. ‘She will need very careful nursing. Very careful nursing indeed. I have to tell you, Mrs Smith, that in all my years in the profession I have never seen a case so bad. Coax her to eat but don’t worry her if she can’t take anything more than tea. With care, she will improve by degrees. Keep everything as mild as possible, jelly and junket, broth if it’s strained. Plenty of water of course. I will look in again tomorrow, but phone me should you be concerned about anything.’

It was a long and gradual convalescence. To start with Octavia spent most of her time asleep, relieved to be back in her own comfortable bed in her own familiar room. She ate what she could, although even eating a junket felt like swallowing needles, and from time to time she tried to speak. But her voice was so husky her mother couldn’t always understand what she was trying to say.

‘Rest, my darling,’ she said. ‘Save your poor voice. It will come back more quickly if you don’t use it.’

So the days passed into weeks and the weeks were endured for a month. Tommy sent her several letters but although they asked how she was, they were mostly about the
‘warring tribes’
and what utter fools they were and how
‘they ought to have their stupid heads knocked together’
and she set them aside. She would write to him when she had more energy.

One morning her mother arrived in her bedroom with a
vase full of freshly cut lilac. The heavy double-headed blossoms filled the room with the fragrance of spring. ‘From the garden, my darling,’ she said.

Octavia was talking by then, although her voice was still croaky. ‘Is it spring?’ she asked.

‘Come to the window and see,’ Amy said. ‘I’ll get your dressing gown.’

It was like a return to life, to sit in her chair by the window and look out at the garden, at the cherry tree foaming with white blossom and the grass so green and the borders dappled with wallflowers, all bright reds and yellows and purples and browns.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘It’s so good to be home.’

Returning strength reminded her that she had friends – and a lover – who ought to be told how she was. That afternoon she sat at her desk and wrote to them all, to Mrs Emsworth and Betty reporting on her return to health, to her friends at the shop describing the conditions in Holloway Gaol, because she knew that was what they would want to know, and to Tommy to tell him she’d been released from prison and was back at home. She decided not to say anything to him about the force-feeding. There would be time enough for that when they were together.
‘I am sorry I have not written to you before,’
she said,
‘but letters were restricted, as you probably know.’
Then she added a postscript.
‘PS. I can’t wait to see you again.’

His answer was rather odd. He was glad she was out of gaol and at home again but he couldn’t say when he would be eligible for any leave.
‘Since the Balkan league decided they’d stop killing each other and attack the Turks instead, the situation has been extremely complicated. Warring tribes and 
all that. Now there is talk of a possible conference to be held in London, some time in May, which the powers fondly imagine will solve all problems here. Personally, I take leave to doubt it. However, the upshot of all this warmongering and manoeuvring is that we are all kept hard at it preparing reports on the current situation and, until the conference has sat to everyone’s satisfaction, all leave is cancelled. I wish I could say otherwise but that is the situation.’

The businesslike tone of the letter upset her. She needed tenderness and loving messages or at the very least an assurance that they would meet as soon as it could be arranged. This brusque talk of warring tribes and conferences made her feel bleak. For several days she left his letter unanswered, while she came downstairs and took her first breakfast at the family table, went for her first short walk on the heath, sat up late one evening to play bezique with her father, and finally had tea with Emmeline and her little ones, who had walked across the heath to visit her and were overjoyed to be allowed into her bedroom to see how she was.

‘You must be very good and not trouble your aunty,’ Emmeline warned them as they climbed the stairs.

But Octavia held out her arms to them as they peered round the door and soon they were all sitting on her bed and feeding her crumbs of madeira cake and she was laughing and saying she felt like a baby bird.

From then on she felt stronger every day. She took to reading the papers to see if anything was being said about Tommy’s conference and, once she had started reading again, rapidly regained her appetite for news and information, to J-J’s delight.

‘On the road to recovery, my little one,’ he said.

She agreed that she was although in one respect she knew she would never recover. For what she had been facing during the weeks of her convalescence was the fact that she was a coward. She knew beyond any doubt at all that she couldn’t go back to prison and face being force-fed ever again. Somehow or other she would have to find a way of putting herself beyond the reach of any more lawbreaking and the only way she could think of was to take a job – something that would pay her a wage and expect her loyalty in return, or at least her presence at a workplace every day. If she did that, she simply wouldn’t be available for any more civil disobedience and couldn’t break the law even if she wanted to. Eventually, she mentioned it to her father.

‘What would you say if I told you I should like to go to work?’ she asked, keeping the question as light as she could make it.

‘There are plenty of positions you could occupy with your qualifications,’ he said. ‘What do you have in mind?’

She didn’t really have anything in mind. Just a job. But pressed she admitted that she might be able to teach.

‘There are plenty of positions available at the moment,’ he told her. ‘It’s the time of year for new staff. I will look out some of the advertisements for you. Were you thinking of university or school?’

She said ‘school’ because a university post might be more than she could manage in her present state. So school it was.

Four days later, when the papers were full of the London conference that was going to solve the conflict in the Balkans, she had her first letter asking her to appear for an interview. Eight days later she had been hired to teach in a London elementary school. It was all remarkably easy. It occurred to
her to wonder what Tommy would say when he heard about it, but as his letters had grown shorter and more distant as the weeks had passed, she didn’t write to tell him. Something was wrong but she didn’t have the energy to find out what it was. It could wait until they met again, she thought – and wondered, sadly, if they ever would. How much your life can change in a short time, she thought. And it was a short time. March to the beginning of June. Oh, Tommy, Tommy, she mourned, if only I could see you again. I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. If only you weren’t such a long way away.

Tommy Meriton was sitting at his desk in his ornate office in the British embassy in Bucharest, with his feet on a velvet stool, his backside on a velvet chair and a pen idle in his hand, trying to think of something to say to Octavia. All he’d written so far was,
‘Here I am, still among the warring tribes’
and then he’d had to stop because he’d run out of inspiration. What he really wanted to do was tell her what a bore it was to be stuck out here in the Balkans but that was out of the question. It wouldn’t be the done thing, as he was a member of the embassy, not diplomatic and all that, and in any case he was beginning to suspect that she wouldn’t be interested. She rarely answered what he told her, and if she did it was in an offhand sort of way. In fact there were times when he was beginning to think that their affair was over and he’d have to find someone else. Which would be easy enough. She ought to think of that sometimes. The world was full of women and most of them had beds. It wasn’t as if he didn’t put himself out to say the right thing when he was writing to her. All that rot she’d told him about some silly woman who’d thrown herself
in front of the king’s horse at the Derby and got herself killed. Emily Something-or-other. What did she imagine would happen? Stupid woman. Four pages she’d written about that and he’d made a really good fist of answering. Said how sorry he was and how sad. Perfect diplomacy. Couldn’t have bettered it. So it wouldn’t hurt her to pay attention to what
he
was telling her for a change. Was that so much to ask?

He sighed, feeling weary and sorry for himself. In three minutes, he thought, checking his watch, Frankie Marlborough is going to stroll in through that painted door, adjust his eyeglass and ask me if I’m ready, and then I’ll have to leave this and go off to some God-forsaken battleground somewhere and write some God-forsaken boring report about it. Supposed to keep an eye on what’s happening. And how the hell can we do that? How could anyone, when it’s just a collection of stupid warring tribes settling old scores and grabbing up as much land as they can get away with and taking revenge on one another under cover of driving out the Turks. All that rot about the London conference and how their precious armistice would bring a lasting peace and what happens? Lasts three weeks and then they all start up again and now we’ve got to have another stupid conference here. I’ve no patience with ’em. They’re all as bad as one another and someone should move in and bang their stupid heads together.

Frankie Marlborough’s predicted head appeared at the door, eyeglass and all. ‘All set?’ he asked. ‘Ready for the off?’

It was a long journey and although the first part was pleasant enough because they were travelling by train across the gentle plain south of the Danube, when they reached Sofia they were in much more hostile territory, surrounded by bleak mountains that loomed in upon them in a brooding darkness
and poorly dressed men who glowered at them with suspicion. A chauffeured car and an interpreter were waiting for them outside the station, but neither were encouraging. The car was an ancient black saloon which looked as though it would be jolly uncomfortable, the interpreter a bearded man with a wall eye, who spat a stream of chewed tobacco onto the pavement before he greeted them and then spoke at length but so incomprehensibly that neither of them could understand a word he said.

‘This is a damned fool idea,’ Frankie Marlborough complained as they rattled out of the town, ‘chasin’ about the country in the middle of the night. We shall be black and blue before we get there, you mark my words, and our interpreter’s a fool and it’ll all turn out to be a wild goose chase, same as it was last time. Three dead soldiers and a pile of guns. Game ain’t worth the candle. I don’t know why we bother.’

‘I wouldn’t mind so much if the geese were to fly over better terrain,’ Tommy said. ‘Don’t they have
any
roads in this country?’

‘Ain’t seen one yet,’ his friend signed, ‘and I’ve been here a sight longer than you have. We’ll stop for supper in a little while.’

Supper was unpalatable, darkness impenetrable, the roads they were travelling now little better than dirt tracks, and the car was murderously uncomfortable and extremely cold. It would have been better if they could have settled to sleep but sleep was as impossible as the terrain and after several grumbling hours even breathing was difficult. After a while, it smelt as if they were driving through a bonfire and when they looked out of the window, they could see clouds of smoke and a distant dance of sparks.

‘What is it?’ Tommy asked the interpreter.

He shrugged. ‘Is Turk. No good.’

‘We’d better take a look,’ Frankie decided. ‘It might give us something to report back.’

So they stopped the car, found their torches, checked their revolvers and set out to reconnoitre.

They were in a narrow country lane and once they were out of the car they could see that there were fires burning about half a mile away. Houses by the look of it. Or huts. No sound of gunfire but they could hear the crackle of the flames. ‘Approach with caution,’ Frankie ordered.

It was a village of sorts, or what was left of it, and even before they reached the burning houses it was obvious that there’d been butchery there. The earth path was heaped with slaughtered cows, lying stiff-legged in dark congealing pools of their own blood. One was still alive, although her belly had been ripped open. She mooed plaintively at them as they passed and struggled to stand. Now they could see the outline of a church immediately ahead of them and more dark shapes lying on the ground, smaller shapes, sheep maybe? But the light of their torches revealed that these were not livestock but children. Little girls lying spreadeagled where they’d been dropped, their rough clothes torn and bloodstained.

‘Christ Almighty!’ Tommy said. Little girls no older than Dora and Edith, raped and murdered. What sort of people would do a thing like this? As he turned his torch he saw that one of the poor little things had had her throat cut. She was drenched in blood. The smell of it was overpowering.

‘Christ Almighty!’ he said again. ‘Christ Almighty!’ Horror had stripped him of the power of speech. He was stuck with
that one disbelieving oath, repeating it over and over again. He’d heard about rapes and murders, naturally, there were always rumours and some of them pretty lurid, but until that moment it had just been words. Not this. Oh God, not this! Then the gall rose into his throat and he had to turn aside to be sick.

Frankie walked on, the beam of his torch wavering before him, a small white light among the lurid red and sulphur of the flames. The church seemed to be steaming. There was a grey-white vapour rising from the roof and the west door was badly burnt and, as they discovered when they tried to open it, locked from the outside. It took their combined strength to turn the key and neither of them spoke because they could smell the horror that was waiting for them inside.

The place was full of charred corpses, lying against the remains of the pews, piled on top of one another, old men, toothless and wrinkled, women with burnt hair, tattered children, barefooted and filthy with the grime of the fire. It was terribly obvious what had happened to them. They’d been herded into the church and burnt alive.

There are prayers you have to say for the dead, Tommy thought, but he couldn’t remember them. His mind was stiff with shock and pity. He stooped to the nearest dead child and closed his eyes, gently as though he was still alive and could be hurt by the touch. Then he began to weep, hot angry tears of outraged pity for the suffering of these tangled corpses. The men who had done this were not mere warring tribes – thinking that was glib and silly. This was something much, much worse. These men were murderers, rapists, torturers, appalling, evil, cruel, despicable. If there was any justice in the world, they should be hunted down and shot like the mad
dogs they were, an eye for an eye, a split skull for a split skull, a death for a death. They should be shut up in another church and burnt alive like their victims.

The interpreter was standing beside him, chewing another wad of tobacco. How can he chew tobacco at a time like this? Tommy thought. ‘Who did this?’ he asked.

The interpreter shrugged. ‘Turk. Yesterday they come through. Two, three days.’

‘This is terrible,’ Tommy said. It was inadequate and he knew it but he felt impelled to say something.

The man shrugged again. ‘Is war,’ he said calmly. ‘Is what happen. They kill. We kill better. We kill much better. We cut throat, we take women.’ Underlit by the torch, he looked as though he was gloating, his face brutal. ‘We are Bulgar! We kill good.’

‘He speaks as though such things are normal,’ Tommy said as he and Frankie walked back to the car.

‘They are,’ Frankie said. ‘These people are like animals. All as bad as one another. This won’t be the last atrocity you’ll see, you mark my words.’

‘But even so…’ Tommy said.

‘Best not to think about it too much,’ Frankie advised. ‘Best just to write our report and get back to civilisation as quickly as we can.’

They wrote the report on the return journey to Sofia, using their torches to light the pages. By the time they were back in the embassy again it was mid morning, they’d filtered the incident into diplomatic language and they were drained of all energy.

Tommy’s letter to Octavia was still lying on the desk where he’d left it. The sight of her name made him ache to be in her
arms, with a tearing, agonising yearning to be loved and comforted and as far away from this nightmare region as he could get. It was a powerful sensation and not one he’d ever felt before. Was it only yesterday that he’d sat at that desk writing
‘warring tribes?’
Dear God! How could he have been so naïve? Only yesterday and yet everything had changed. Standing there in that baroque office, he knew so exactly what he wanted and what he needed. It wasn’t a series of easy conquests. Had he really thought that? How could he have been so trivial? That was petty and selfish. What he needed now was honesty and the chance to say what he truly felt, and the only person who could cope with that was his lovely, outspoken, determined Tikki-Tavy. He screwed the offending paper into a ball and threw it away. Then he wrote a simple message.

‘Sweetheart, I shall be in Paris as soon as it can be arranged. Please, please meet me there. I will write again with details as soon as I can. I cannot wait to see you again. I miss you more than I can say. Your ever-loving Tommy.’

‘I must go to Paris, Mama,’ Octavia said, folding his letter and putting it neatly back into its envelope. Her mother raised her eyebrows so she felt she had to explain. ‘My friends have invited me to stay for a while.’

‘Oh dear!’ her mother worried. ‘Are you strong enough, my darling? It’s a long journey. I wouldn’t want you getting ill again.’

‘It’s a Channel crossing, Mama,’ Octavia said. ‘I might get a little seasick but no more than that.’ The urgency of his letter was too obvious not to be answered. That and the
revealing pressure of that redoubled plea. He needed her and that was enough. After all these months of wanting to see him and wondering whether they would ever meet again, after all those puzzling, distant letters, he’d written to
beg
her to come to Paris. She would go no matter what her mother said.

‘But even so…’ Amy said. ‘You were so ill when you got back from that funeral. I wouldn’t want you to suffer another setback.’

‘It wasn’t a setback, Mama,’ Octavia said rather crossly. There were times when her mother’s concern, loving though it undoubtedly was, could be decidedly trying. ‘I was tired, that was all. It was a very moving occasion. We were all tired.’ She was remembering her fatigue as she spoke, the ache behind her knees as the great cortege wound through the streets, the staring crowds lining the pavements, many of them moved to tears, the dizzying scent of the flowers they’d carried, the white lilies and purple irises, the impact of so many women all wearing the suffragette colours, and marching with such strength. She’d felt so proud marching behind the hearse in the place of honour with all the other hunger strikers, wearing her silver arrow for the first time. Her pride had carried her along, that and the strength she’d felt at being in such a powerful crowd, following such a courageous martyr. ‘In any case,’ she said to her mother, ‘even if I was tired, it was the right thing to do. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

‘I don’t think you need to worry, my love,’ J-J said to his wife, interceding before his two darlings could quarrel. ‘As far as I can ascertain, the waiters on the cross-Channel ferries are not yet force-feeding their passengers. Given a fair wind and a strong tide, I think she will be safe.’

‘It is all very well for you to make light of it, J-J,’ Amy
rebuked him, ‘but health is a serious matter.’

‘And Octavia takes it seriously,’ her father said. ‘Do you not, Tavy? When do you intend to go?’

‘In a few weeks I expect,’ Octavia said. ‘They will write and tell me.’

But the situation in the Balkans was so difficult that it was August 10
^th
and after the Bucharest conference before Tommy could wangle the leave he wanted so much.

How beautiful Paris is, Octavia thought, all those chestnut trees heavy with high summer and the city so at ease. Of course, it was the month of the
fermiture annuelle
, so it was deserted by its inhabitants and their usual bustle and left to the amble of visitors. The Gare du Nord was full of them when she arrived, most of them British, and as heavily laden as the chestnut trees, talking excitedly in their now foreign language. Outside in the sunshine along the Rue de Dunkerque, the touts and taxi cabs waited in line for their custom and the café tables were set out on the opposite pavement under their bright scarlet awnings primed to tempt them.

Their clarion colour was the first thing Octavia saw as she walked out of the station, sniffing the familiar air. The second was her darling Tommy, striding across the road, elegant in a cream summer suit, dodging the traffic and watching the road. Then he saw her and stretched out his arms towards her. It was such a yearning, loving gesture she ran to answer it, calling his name. It would have been hard to say which of them was more in need of the other. They tumbled into an embrace, oblivious to the smiles and nods of the passers-by, and clung together kissing hungrily. ‘Oh, my darling, darling Tommy!’ ‘Sweet, sweetheart!’