Octavia Symonds’ first love was the XK engine. She owned several garages or ‘sanctuaries’ as she sentimentally called them, scattered throughout the city, where her beloved racing cars enjoyed the tender care of tousled young men in overalls, their chests adorned with her family crest, a golden wheel of fortune.
The emblazoned Latin motto read celeritas omnia vincit. Speed conquers all.
Those historians possessed of an elephantine memory might recollect a more austere Symonds’ family crest; one involving a dank forest overseen by a solitary crow, but such was the severe scrutiny of Octavia’s frosty blue eyes that nobody dared challenge her about the change.
The Symonds’ estate contained little of human interest; hollow chesterfield chairs, busts of dead pets and odourless kitchens, dutifully cleaned by the Merridew family.
Relatives visited rarely, for Octavia was seldom at home and if she was, there hung about her the scent of petroleum that made smoking inadvisable. Pressing Family Interviews were restricted thus, to the passenger seat of an accelerating car.
Octavia’s father preferred the Continent to Surrey. He signed his postcards the Scarlet Pimpernel which might have caused heartbreak, had Octavia not been presented with a Le Mans D Type Jaguar for her twenty first birthday, gift wrapped in Pimlico.
Octavia flirted with politics, for she owned a garage near parliament, but alas, her Charities’ portfolio yielded nothing that required mechanical intervention so she resigned, thrilled to return to the open road with an unfettered mind.
Romantic love escaped her, until the Goodwood festival , where after a third glass of Cristal, her eyes encountered the owner of a Le Mans Maserati, George Emerson Junior. When it transpired that George was Georgiana every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, Cupid did the rest.
‘How could I resist such engineering?’ Octavia messaged the Merridews from her honeymoon in Monte Carlo.
‘How indeed,’ they replied.
The rest as they say, is smoke.
Well, this made me laugh out loud – for some reason made me think of P G Wodehouse’s Fiery Wooing of Mordred. Comic bliss!