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seem to have one - or that
    if she did, it was certainly rather weak. Lying in Tom’s
    arms, after what was really a very happy if not earth
    shattering event, she told him so.
    ‘One man I went out with told me I was rather
    forbidding. You don’t think that’s right?’
    ‘Not in the least. Rather the reverse. I think you are
    lovely, extremely sexy and clearly not in the least frigid. But
    then, I am clearly in love with you, and probably
    prejudiced.’
    He had, even in his everyday speech, a very elegant turn
    of phrase.
     
    Tom was extremely clever; he had gone to Oxford from a
    good grammar school and got a First in history. This should
    have freed him, but didn’t, from the entirely illogical sense
    of inferiority he had from not having gone to public school;
    he was, he told Octavia, going to be proving himself for the
    rest of his life. She found this touching and baffling, not
    least because he had done so well, and said so. He had
    smiled and said that no one who had not been put down by
    an Old Etonian in the nicest possible way on their first
    night dining in College - ‘Which school? Ah. Don’t think I
    know that one’ - could understand how much it mattered.
    ‘I know it’s silly, but I am silly. I can’t bear being second
    best.’
    His background was modest; his father had been an
    insurance salesman, and his mother had devoted her entire
    life to him. ‘I came a very poor second. I don’t think they
    ever wanted children, certainly they never had any more.’
    They had died within a year of each other of heart
    disease: ‘Not a good prognosis for me, I’m afraid.’
    Octavia was then twenty-four years old. Her own
    background (adored only child of very rich man, Wycombe
    Abbey and Cambridge) initially worried Tom, and he was
    so nervous the first time she took him home to meet her father, he was physically shaking as he did up his jacket. No one would have known, of course. Watching him chatting
    easily in the dark, heavy Hampstead drawing room,
    carefully respectful, he seemed the embodiment of self
    confidence and charm. It wasn’t until she was able to
    reassure him, truthfully, that Felix Miller had pronounced
    him ‘interesting and impressive’ that he relaxed, said he felt
    himself able to continue their relationship.
    As they grew closer, as it became clear Tom was
    extremely important to her, his relationship with her father
    darkened. Octavia, who had seen this happen before, was
    terrified of the eventual outcome.
    She was not just an only child, her mother had died
    when she was two, giving birth to a brother, who had died
    also, after three agonising days. She and her father had been
    all the world to one another from that day; she adored him,
    saw him as the source of all wisdom. Early boyfriends he
    tolerated, or, rather, dismissed as unimportant. ‘He’s a child,
    darling,’ he would say. ‘Very sweet, and of course you must
    go to the party with him, you’ll have fun. But he’s not
    nearly clever enough for you.’ Or ‘I suppose he’s all right. I
    don’t exactly admire his manners. I think you deserve
    better.’
    She would say, immediately, that if he wasn’t happy
    about whoever it was, she wouldn’t go to the pictures or
    whatever, at which he would laugh and say, ‘My darling,
    it’s not important. You’re not going to marry him, are you?
    Just have fun. You’re young, you must have a good time.
    Go.’ She would, with at least half her mind fixed on her
    father’s judgment, and very often the first outing would be
    the last. She accepted her father’s judgment in all things.
    But Tom had taken Felix Miller on, in all his powerful,
    manipulative jealousy, and, if he didn’t exactly win him
    over, developed a modus operandi with him at least. There
    had been one period - after the honeymoon of her father’s
    relationship with Tom, before he had come finally to realise
    that he must accept him - when Octavia had despaired. The
    atmosphere whenever