Only Time Will Tell (The Clifton Chronicles, #1)(97)

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’.

Harry and Emma walked slowly back to the Randolph chatting about nothing of any consequence, just not wanting the evening to end.

‘Well, at least you’ll be back in a fortnight’s time to sit your entrance exam,’ said Harry as they climbed the steps to the hotel, ‘so it won’t be too long before I see you again.’

‘True,’ said Emma, ‘but there’ll be no time for any distractions until I’ve completed the last paper. Once that’s out of the way, we can spend the rest of the weekend together.’

Harry was about to kiss her goodnight, when she whispered, ‘Would you like to come up to my room? I’ve got a present for you. I wouldn’t want you to think I’d forgotten your birthday.’

Harry looked surprised, as did the hall porter when the young couple walked up the staircase together hand in hand. When they reached Emma’s room, she fumbled nervously with the key before finally pushing open the door.