Jeffrey Archer - Only Time Will Tell

‘Quite right too,’ said the old lady. ‘You should always respect your parents’ wishes. I’ll see you later, Maisie.’

‘May I walk with you, Mrs Clifton?’ asked Emma as they stepped out of the church.

‘Yes, of course, my dear.’

‘Harry asked me to come and see you, because he knew you’d want to know that he’s been offered a place at Oxford.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful news,’ said Maisie, throwing her arms around Emma. She suddenly released her, and asked, ‘But why didn’t he come and tell me himself?’

Another scripted reply. ‘He’s stuck in detention,’ said Emma, hoping she didn’t sound over-rehearsed, ‘writing out passages from Shelley. I’m afraid my brother’s to blame. You see, after he heard the good news, he smuggled a bottle of champagne into school, and they were caught celebrating in his study last night.’

‘Is that so wicked?’ asked Maisie, grinning.

‘Dr Paget seemed to think so. Harry’s dreadfully sorry.’

Maisie laughed so uproariously that Emma had no doubt she’d no idea her son had visited the club last night. She would have liked to ask one more question that still puzzled her, but Harry couldn’t have been more emphatic: ‘If my mother doesn’t want me to know how my father died, so be it.’

‘I’m sorry you can’t stay to lunch,’ said Maisie, ‘because there was something I wanted to tell you. Perhaps another time.’

HARRY SPENT THE FOLLOWING week waiting for another bombshell to drop. When it did, he cheered out loud.

Giles received a telegram on the last day of term telling him he’d been offered a place at Brasenose College, Oxford, to read History.

‘By the skin of his teeth,’ was the expression Dr Paget used when he informed the headmaster.

Two months later, one scholar, one exhibitioner and one commoner arrived in the ancient university city, by different modes of transport, to begin their three-year undergraduate courses.

Harry signed up for the dramatic society and the officer training corps, Giles for the union and the cricket club, while Deakins settled himself down in the bowels of the Bodleian library, and, like a mole, was rarely seen above ground. But then, he had already decided that Oxford was where he was going to spend the rest of his life.

Harry couldn’t be so sure how he would be spending the rest of his life, while the Prime Minister continued to fly back and forth to Germany, finally returning to Heston airport with a smile on his face, waving a piece of paper and telling people what they wanted to hear. Harry wasn’t in any doubt that Britain was on the brink of war. When Emma asked him why he was so convinced, he replied, ‘Haven’t you noticed that Herr Hitler never bothers to visit us? We are always the importunate suitor, and in the end we will be spurned.’ Emma ignored his opinion, but then, like Mr Chamberlain, she didn’t want to believe he might be right.

Emma wrote to Harry twice a week, sometimes three times, despite the fact that she was working flat out preparing for her own entrance exams to Oxford.

When Harry returned to Bristol for the Christmas vacation, the two of them spent as much time together as possible, although Harry made sure he kept out of the way of Mr Barrington.

Emma turned down the chance to spend her holiday with the rest of the family in Tuscany, not hiding the fact from her father that she’d rather be with Harry.

As her entrance exam drew nearer, the number of hours Emma spent in the Antiquities room would have impressed even Deakins, but then Harry was coming to the conclusion that she was about to impress the examiners just as much as his reclusive friend had done the year before. Whenever he suggested this to Emma, she would remind him that there were twenty male students at Oxford for every female.

‘You could always go to Cambridge,’ Giles foolishly suggested.

‘Where they’re even more prehistoric,’ Emma responded. ‘They still don’t award degrees to women.’

Emma’s greatest fear was not that she wouldn’t be offered a place at Oxford, but that by the time she took it up, war would have been declared, and Harry would have signed up and departed for some foreign field that was not forever England. All her life she had been continually reminded of the Great War by the number of women who still wore black every day, in memory of their husbands, lovers, brothers and sons who had never returned from the Front, in what nobody was any longer calling the war to end all wars.

She had pleaded with Harry not to volunteer if war was declared, but at least to wait until he was called up. But after Hitler had marched into Czechoslovakia and annexed the Sudetenland, Harry never wavered in his belief that war with Germany was inevitable, and that the moment it was declared, he would be in uniform the following day.

When Harry invited Emma to join him for the Commem Ball at the end of his first year, she resolved not to discuss the possibility of war. She also made another decision.

Emma travelled up to Oxford on the morning of the ball and checked into the Randolph Hotel. She spent the rest of the day being shown around Somerville, the Ashmolean and the Bodleian by Harry, who was confident she would be joining him as an undergraduate in a few months’ time.

Emma returned to the hotel, giving herself plenty of time to prepare for the ball. Harry had arranged to pick her up at eight.

He strolled through the front door of the hotel a few minutes before the appointed hour. He was dressed in a fashionable midnight blue dinner jacket which his mother had given him for his nineteenth birthday. He called Emma’s room from the front desk to tell her he was downstairs and would wait for her in the foyer.

‘I’ll be straight down,’ she promised.

As the minutes passed, Harry began to pace around the foyer, wondering what Emma meant by ‘straight down’. But Giles had often told him that she’d learnt how to tell the time from her mother.

And then he saw her, standing at the top of the staircase. He didn’t move as she walked slowly down, her strapless turquoise silk dress emphasizing her graceful figure. Every other young man in the foyer looked as if he’d be happy to change places with Harry.

‘Wow,’ he said as she reached the bottom step. ‘Who needs Vivien Leigh? By the way, I love the shoes.’ Emma felt the first part of her plan was falling into place.

They walked out of the hotel and strolled arm in arm towards Radcliffe Square. As they entered the gates of Harry’s college, the sun began to dip behind the Bodleian. No one entering Brasenose that evening would have thought that Britain was only a few weeks away from a war in which over half the young men who danced the night away would never graduate.

But nothing could have been further from the thoughts of the gay young couples dancing to the music of Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. While several hundred undergraduates and their guests consumed crates of champagne and ate their way through a mountain of smoked salmon, Harry rarely let Emma out of his sight, fearful that some ungallant soul might attempt to steal her away.

Giles drank a little too much champagne, ate far too many oysters and didn’t dance with the same girl twice the entire evening.

At two o’clock in the morning, the Billy Cotton Dance Band struck up the last waltz. Harry and Emma clung to each other as they swayed to the rhythm of the orchestra.

When the conductor finally raised his baton for the National Anthem, Emma couldn’t help noticing that all the young men around her, whatever state of inebriation they were in, stood rigidly to attention as they sang ‘God Save the King’.