Octavia's War (15 page)

It was bright moonlight out in Pall Mall and Tommy's Silver Cloud was the colour of its name. As he drove off along the empty street, the sky was stained an ominous misty red by the fires and he could hear an ambulance ringing somewhere nearby. It'll be good to be home, he thought. I wonder whether Elizabeth is back.

She wasn't, which was a disappointment. But never mind, she'd be back soon. He switched on the bedside light and lay down on their bed to wait for her. And the next thing he knew his alarm clock was yammering and it was half past seven. It took him a few seconds to gather his thoughts. Then he realised that her side of the bed hadn't been slept in and went off to look for her in the spare room. She wasn't there either. So where had she got to?

He put on his dressing gown and went downstairs to find his housekeeper, Mrs Dunnaway. She was in the kitchen, capped and aproned and waiting to cook his breakfast. ‘No, sir,' she said, ‘Mrs Meriton hasn't come down yet.'

‘I don't think Mrs Meriton has come home from her
party,' he said. ‘I should think they all went on to breakfast somewhere.'

Mrs Dunnaway smiled benignly as if it was perfectly all right and the smile irritated him. Elizabeth had no business staying out all night, especially when he was going to the States. It wasn't kind.

He ate what breakfast he could, showered, dressed, checked that he had his flight ticket and his passport, and there was still no sign of her. I'll phone Arabella, he decided. But that was a waste of time because Arabella wasn't at home either and neither was her husband. Now there were only a few minutes left before he had to leave for the airport. He sat down at her dressing table and wrote her a note. ‘Dearest Elizabeth, Who's a dirty stop-out? Ring me when you get back, my darling. Leaving now. 8.33 a.m.' Then he drove to Croydon, feeling aggrieved.

It was Octavia who took the phone-call. It was a man's voice, asking if he could speak to the headmistress. ‘Speaking,' she said. ‘How can I help you?'

‘Ah!' the voice said. ‘I'm trying to contact one of your parents. Percy Carswell. Air Raid Warden.'

‘We've no one of that name, I'm afraid.'

‘No, no,' the voice said apologetically. ‘That's me. I'm Percy Carswell. No, The person I'm trying to contact is someone by the name of Meriton. Major Meriton. His housekeeper said he was one of your parents. Daughter called Lizzie, I believe.'

Octavia's heart gave a painful lurch. ‘That's right,' she said. ‘Is something the matter?'

‘It's a matter of identification,' Mr Carswell said carefully. ‘We had an incident in the West End last night and we were rather hoping that Major Meriton could help us. Could your
pupil tell us where he is? His housekeeper said he'd gone to America, but she couldn't say where we could find him.'

‘Washington,' Octavia told him. ‘British Embassy. I've got the phone number if you'll hold the line for a moment.' And she searched through Maggie's careful files, her heart shuddering with alarm. If it was an incident in the West End it was either one of the boys or Elizabeth. ‘Here it is,' she said, picking up the receiver again. And she gave him the number.

‘Thank you,' he said. ‘It's very kind of you.'

‘Before you go,' she said, speaking quickly before he could hang up. ‘Would you mind telling me something more about your casualty. I assume it was a fatality.'

‘I'm afraid so,' he said, with weary sadness. ‘But we're not allowed to divulge any details except to next of kin.'

‘That's quite understood,' Octavia said, ‘but I need some information if I'm to be ready to help my pupil when the identification is made. Is this a young man, in air force uniform perhaps, or a woman?'

‘The latter,' Mr Carswell told her. ‘Which is why we want to contact her husband.'

Oh dear God! Octavia thought. My poor Tommy and my poor little Lizzie. She didn't know which of them she felt most sorry for.

‘Well, thank you again,' Mr Carswell said, and this time he did hang up.

For the rest of the day Octavia struggled to decide what she ought to do. As she cycled between her two school buildings, with her basket full of books and papers, her scarf flying behind her and her button boots slipping on the damp pedals, she turned the choices over. Should she tell her now, very gently of course, it would have to be done very, very gently,
or should she just throw out a hint of some kind to warn her? Or should she say nothing until she knew for certain who the person was? After all, it might not be Elizabeth. It could be someone else. In the end she decided to say nothing but to wait until she heard from Tommy.

When she got home from school that afternoon, Janet and Edie were full of news about the raid on the City.

‘One a' the woarst raids they've ever knoan, so they say.' Janet told her. ‘There's a photo here of St Paul's and you can hardly see if for smoake.'

‘It's a wonder it wasn't burnt to the ground,' Edie said. ‘They say there's nothing left of the City.'

Emmeline walked into the kitchen just as they were pushing the evening paper across the table for Octavia to see, and she knew at once, from the anguish on her cousin's face, that there was something seriously wrong. ‘What is it, Tavy?' she asked.

‘It's Tommy's Elizabeth,' Octavia said shortly. ‘It looks as though she was killed in the raid last night. I had a warden on the phone asking for Tommy's address in Washington.'

They were all shocked and Janet and Edie were silenced. ‘Oh my dear,' Emmeline said, her face full of concern. ‘Does Lizzie know?'

‘Not yet,' Octavia said, struggling to stay calm. ‘They've got to identify the body before they can…' And then the words got choked in her throat and she had to sit down at the kitchen table and breathe quietly to bring herself under control.

‘Of course,' Emmeline said. ‘That's the way it is.' And she changed the subject. ‘How did you get on with your nice Chairman? Is he going to be able to get the money for your extra beds?'

So they struggled through the bad moment and Edie hid the paper away. But it was bad, bad, bad and none of them could deny it or change it.

Tommy and his team were doing rather well on this latest trip. The reports that Alistair Cooke was broadcasting from London were beginning to change minds and, of course, Roosevelt had been comfortably re-elected and could back them rather more easily. Tommy was enjoying a cigar and feeling quite pleased with himself when he was called from the conference table to take ‘a call from London'.

‘Meriton here,' he said.

‘Major Meriton,' the voice said. ‘I'm sorry to trouble you, sir, but may I ask when you will be returning to London?'

‘Who is this?'

Mr Carswell identified himself and spoke rather vaguely about a casualty ‘whom you might be able to identify, sir. Your daughter's headmistress gave me your telephone number.'

Oh God, Tommy thought, he's told my poor Lizzie. He was suddenly uncontrollably angry. ‘You had no business talking to my daughter.'

‘No, no, sir,' Mr Carswell soothed. ‘Nothing has been said to your daughter. You have my word on that. It was you I wanted to contact, seeing as…' And his voice drifted off.

Tommy's feelings plummeted from anger to an unnatural coldness. ‘It's my wife, isn't it?'

‘We're afraid it might be.'

‘I'll be back as soon as I can get a flight,' Tommy said. ‘Whom do I contact? You'd better give me a name and address.'

The morgue was ice chill and peculiarly dark after the bright light of his flight and every sound echoed, footsteps reverberating along the corridor, the door opening with an unnecessary thud, papers rattling, somebody coughing like an explosion, and even though the voices that spoke to him were muted they resonated with what felt like menace.

And of course it was Elizabeth, lying under a small white sheet – what were they covering up? – her hair matted with great clots of blood and her beautiful face so gashed and stained it was almost impossible to recognise her. In fact he might not have done, had they not drawn that awful sheet back to reveal one long white perfect hand for his inspection. He stood looking down at it obediently and was cut to the heart to see that there wasn't a mark on it and that she was still wearing her engagement ring. He controlled himself with a superhuman effort. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘This is my wife.'

Lizzie and Mary and Poppy were in their dormitory discussing their academic futures. The three of them were sitting in the window seat in their dressing gowns, which strictly speaking they shouldn't have been doing, because it wasn't long before breakfast and they ought to have been down in the hall, dressed and ready. But as Mary said, ‘There's no lessons and if you can't take a few minutes off to plan your life in the holidays, when can you?'

‘The thing is,' Lizzie said, ‘Miss Gordon will keep telling me I should be making my mind up about what subjects I want to study at Higher Schools, and I haven't got the faintest idea. I mean, how are you supposed to know what your favourite subjects are when you haven't taken them? I like French but I might hate it if I fail it. And the same with Maths.'

Mary said it wasn't such a problem for her. ‘There's only two subjects I'm any good at,' she said, ‘and that's English and Art, so I suppose that's what I shall choose, providing I get Matric.'

‘What do you want to do when you leave school?' Poppy asked her.

‘I'd like to be a nurse,' Mary admitted, ‘but you have to have Biology for that and I don't suppose I'll pass that.'

‘Yes you will,' Lizzie told her firmly, ‘if you want to. You just have to put your mind to it.'

‘What about you, Lizzie?' Poppy said. ‘Do you know what you want to be?'

Lizzie gave it thought. ‘Something adventurous,' she said. ‘I don't want to teach or anything like that. Or work in an office. I'd be bored stiff in an office. I mean, imagine typing letters all day. And I don't want to be a nurse. I might like to be a doctor if it didn't involve too much blood. But not if there was a war on.'

‘What about getting married and having children?' Mary asked. ‘I've always thought it would be nice to work for a little while but I wouldn't want to do it forever. I think it's more important to get married.'

‘I'd like to have someone madly in love with me,' Lizzie said. ‘Like Rhett Butler.' They'd seen
Gone with the Wind
three times when it came to Woking. ‘I'm not sure I'd want to marry them, though.'

Mary was surprised and rather shocked. ‘Why ever not?' she asked. ‘I mean if someone loves you and you love them, you get married. I mean, that's only natural.'

‘In some jobs you have to leave work if you get married,' Lizzie explained, ‘and that's not natural. I think it's ridiculous. Imagine getting a really good job, something you really enjoy, something that's valuable and worthwhile, and then falling in love and getting married and being told you've got to resign.'

‘But they don't do that now, do they?' Mary asked. ‘I mean look at all those advertisements in the paper asking for women to do war work. They're always on about it and they never say anything about not being married, do they?'

That was true but Lizzie didn't have time to consider it because someone was knocking at the door to their room.
‘Come in!' she called. ‘Don't be shy.'

It was Miss Henry. ‘Aren't you coming down to breakfast you three?' she said. ‘It's bacon and tomatoes.'

That was temptation. Bacon was a rarity.

‘We're not dressed,' Lizzie pointed out.

‘Come as you are,' Maggie Henry said. ‘Cook won't mind. It's holiday time.' She'd been making a special fuss of Lizzie Meriton since Miss Smith told her about her mother. It was awful to look at her pretty face and to know that she was going to be told that her mother had been killed. Miss Smith
had
said it was just possible the person they'd found wasn't her mother but if they'd sent for Major Meriton to identify the body there didn't seem to be much doubt about it. ‘I'll tell them you're on your way.'

Tommy Meriton drove to Woking as slowly as he could. It was miserable and cold and the roads were icy but his mind wasn't on his driving, as it would have been in any other circumstances. He was trying to find the right form of words to break his dreadful news to Lizzie. He was still in shock, although he wasn't prepared to admit it, still unable to absorb what had happened, although he knew with the reasoning part of his mind that it had and that he'd accepted it.

Woking was virtually empty and the few people in Chertsey Street were swathed in scarves and had their hats pulled well down over their foreheads and were skulking along as though they were actors in some awful American thriller. He looked at them with loathing, thinking, why are you alive and walking about when my Elizabeth is dead? Then he felt ashamed of himself because he was being unreasonable and cruel and his thoughts went spinning off into an uncomfortable mixture of anger and regret and grief. I can't do this, he thought, as he
reached the entrance to Downview and turned in at the drive. How can any man tell his daughter that her mother is dead?

There was nobody out in the grounds and it took far too long for someone to answer when he rang the bell. He stood under the porch shivering and miserable and when the door was finally opened by a rather small girl, he walked in and followed her up the stairs to the matron's room without saying a word. Now that he was here the sooner he got this over with the better.

Maggie Henry was standing just outside her room talking to a group of little girls. ‘Come to see Lizzie,' he said gruffly. ‘Is she in?'

One of the girls was sent to find her and he was ushered into Miss Henry's room and the door was discreetly closed.

Maggie gestured towards her easy chair and he sat in it feeling horribly ill at ease. ‘Am I right in thinking you will need to be private when you talk to Lizzie?' she asked gently.

He admitted it, staring at her carpet. Her voice was so full of sympathy he was afraid it would unman him.

‘You can use this room,' Maggie said. ‘You'll be quite private here. I'll hang my ‘
Do not disturb
' sign on the door for you.'

Then there was nothing either of them could say and they waited in silence, as the noise of the school racketed beneath them and a lone bird chirruped in the branches of the tree outside the window and the clock on the mantelpiece ticked the seconds away.

A knock, a whispered voice, a rush of cold air, and Lizzie was in the room, looking at him anxiously. And Miss Henry was gone. He stood up, gathered his courage, held out his arms to her.

‘Oh Lizzie, my little love,' he said, ‘your mother's been killed.'

She put her arms round his neck and stood for a long time holding on to him, cheek against cheek, not speaking. Tears rolled out of his eyes and fell on her hair. He simply couldn't stop them.

She was murmuring to him, comforting him the way Elizabeth used to do, kissing his cheek, his tears salt on her lips. ‘Poor Pa! Poor, poor old Pa!'

‘I'm so sorry,' he said.

She drew away from him so that she could look up at him, her arms still round his neck and those grey eyes dry. ‘It's not your fault,' she said. ‘You didn't kill her.'

He was shaken by how calm she was. ‘It's just…' he said. But there were no words to tell her how he felt.

‘I know,' she soothed, wiping away his tears with her fingers. ‘I know, Pa. It's terrible. The worst.' (Wasn't that what Miss Henry always said?) ‘But you've still got me. I'll look after you.'

It wasn't until he was driving away that he realised that she'd been comforting him when it should have been the other way round.

Lizzie walked back up the stairs to her bedroom in the attic, sat in the window seat, took up her book and went on reading where she'd left off. It was Robert Browning's
Men and Women
and before her father had arrived she'd been reading
One Word More
, wondering whether she would ever find someone who would love her as much as Robert Browning had loved his Elizabeth. Talking about Rhett Butler that morning has set her thinking. Now it was as if her thoughts had congealed. She was surprised by how coolly she was accepting this death, almost as if it hadn't happened to her mother but to someone else, like poor little Iris's mother or Penny's, or Dorothy Brown's father who'd been torpedoed in the Atlantic. Not a
real death at all. Just something you heard about and then said how sorry you were. For a few minutes she wondered whether she ought to tell her friends and decided against it. What was the point? It wouldn't bring her mother back to life. It was all very simple. She'd been in a house that had been hit by a bomb and she'd been killed. It happened all the time.

Then she put her head in her hands and howled with grief, overwhelmed by it, aching with it, out of her depths in it.

Tommy had been driving round Woking for more than an hour, hardly aware of where he was going or what he was doing. It was as if he'd lost all volition, as if the car was going its own way, with no more substance than thistledown. He'd driven down the same road twice before he realised where he was. Then he understood that it was Ridgeway and that he'd come to a halt outside Octavia's house. He turned in at the drive and switched off the ignition. Then he just sat there, staring through the windscreen. He had no idea what he ought to do next.

Janet was setting the table for dinner when she became aware of him and she went off at once to report to Emmeline.

‘I think it's wor Major Meriton,' she said. ‘Onny he's not movin', like. He's just sittin' there.' And Emmeline, who wasn't in the least surprised, put on her hat and coat and went out to speak to him.

She had to tap on the window for quite a long time before he became aware of her and rolled it down.

‘Tommy, my dear,' she said. ‘Aren't you coming in?'

‘No, no,' he said. ‘Thanks all the same. Can't stop. Things to do. Reports to write. That sort of thing. Regards to Tavy.' And before she could persuade him, he put the car in gear and drove away.

Emmeline stood in the moonlit garden flanked by the dead twigs of winter, with the gravel hard under her slippers – why hadn't she thought to change her shoes? – and the night air chilling her lungs. She was fraught with pity for him. What a terrible time this is, she thought. There are so many deaths and so much misery. And she wondered how Tavy would cope with that poor child.

At that moment she was sitting in the window seat with Lizzie in her arms, holding her while she cried. ‘It's the worst,' Lizzie sobbed. ‘The very, very worst. Life will never be the same again.'

‘No,' Octavia agreed, ‘it won't. It will be different from now on. You have to face that. We all do when we lose someone we love. But I can promise you that there will be good things as well as bad.'

‘How can you possibly say that?' Lizzie said, raising her head. Her eyes were bloodshot with weeping and her face wild with grief. ‘How can you possibly, possibly say that?'

‘Because it's true,' Octavia told her. ‘I know you can't believe it now, but it
is
true.'