Free Octavia by Beryl Kingston Page A

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 longerhe 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