1
Odette
THEY LAY HER OUT, feet bound and jaw tied closed.
Odette’s mother has died in the London house, and there is much discussion as to where to put her.
Mrs Binx, the housekeeper, is a keen advocate of tradition and presses for the bed. Odette’s father, George, agrees. He has long since vacated the marital room, and it is now less a bedroom than a domestic hospital ward. It is no worse to have a dead body there than a sick one.
The nurse says it must be a table, preferably in the kitchens, for it will be easier to move around the body, to wash it, to wrap it in its winding sheet.
‘Her,’ says Mrs Binx, overcome unexpectedly. ‘Herbody.’
Aunt Claudine clasps her hands over the front of her dress and says it must be the dining room, for there will be visitors. They may put down a sheet of plain linen, to protect the cherry wood, and a board, so that it will be no trouble to moveher sister.
Odette is not called upon to give an opinion.
The windows are thrown open and maids cover the mirrors with black muslin, which Odette recognises as an old petticoat of hers cut up into squares. They have been preparing. At the front door, another maid wraps a black cloth around the knocker to muffle it. Outside, the leaves have begun their autumn turn onthe waving boughs of the ancient heathland forest, and they cast a shimmer of crimson and gold light like stained glass across the floors.
It is busy – people everywhere – and, somehow, there are more servants than she has ever noticed before at every turn of the staircase; in the drawing room, the doctor still lingers, talking to her father, and hurrying through the front door is Aunt Penelope, her mother’s oldest friend. The house is too tall, too big, her mother’s exuberant decoration overflowing in each room in a mess of rugs and mirrors, lamps draped with scarves, sketches framed on the walls, the reaching leaves of aspidistra and parlour palms, lacquered screens and lattice work. It is intolerable.
Odette slips up to her room so quietly that she goes without notice. Her trunks are packed and waiting at the foot of her bed, ready to be taken up to Cambridge. That will have to wait now. She must write a letter to Newnham explaining her delay. Black-bordered paper must be bought.
She will have to write the words: her mother is dead.
Odette presses her hands to her stomach, against the hard bones of her corset, walks around in a circle, takes a pillow from her bed and holds it to her face, smothering herself. She imagines being numb, like the earth stretching across the hillside, like the steady trunks of the beeches and oaks, and the still, silent water of the ponds.
When her hands stop shaking, she puts down the pillow and goes to her dresser. Its usual chaos has been tamed: her pomade and scent and creams all packed, her letters tidied, ink bottles stowed and jewellery stored carefully in the lacquered box her mother gave her for her eighteenth birthday. From a coin purse, she retrieves two silver half-crowns, so small and ordinary, like beach pebbles or sea glass. They are so completely inadequate. They are all she has.
Grief, like a wave taller than her head, taller than the house, rises up, building, waiting to break.
Her mother is dead. Her corpse is downstairs.
Coins in hand, Odette slips past the servants and past Aunt Claudine, who is patting Aunt Penelope on the shoulder as she presses her face into a handkerchief and trembles, past the shut door of her father’s study, past the nurse being paid by Mrs Binx – past it all, to the dining room.
She has left her mother’s body for only a minute or two, and yet she is already trepidatious to step across the threshold. It is fortunate that it is a cold, preserving day; the fires have been extinguished and all the windows left wide open for the fresh autumn breeze to air out the stink of illness and death. And to let the spirit out – so her mother once told her, when she was still small enough that she had to stand on her toes to see out of the nursery window. There had been a death in the house opposite – white sheets tacked over the windows, the people coming in and out with black bands around their sleeves and their arms full of flowers.
Her mother lifted her under the armpits so that she could see the coffin as it left for the churchyard.
‘The dead must not see their own reflection, or they will become confused and will not find their way to Heaven,’ her mother said. ‘You must let the spirit out, and close the eyes of the dead, or they will spy out who they will take with them into the afterlife. Hold the eyelids down with pennies.’
From the doorway, Odette can see bare feet tied with a length of muslin and the flare of the curtain as the wind blows through.
Blowing her mother’s spirit away.
At once, it is too awful a thought, and she dashes across the room to slam the sashes down. Her mother must stay. She is not ready for her to go.
Slowly, stiffly, Odette turns.
There her mother is.
Lydia Fairfax-Waugh has died just shy of forty and is as beautiful in death as in life. Her chestnut hair is full and shining and lies around her like a cloak; she is small and slender, like an angel, hands neat and precise, with flecks of paint still caught beneath her nails and her fine-boned fingers curled as though ready to clasp a brush.
The servants who carried her in crossed her arms over her chest before the stiffness set in, so that she will fix in place. Odette has read there will be a smell, but none has come yet; there is only the tang of carbolic soap and the soft lavender water she scattered on her mother’s pillow each night to ease her sleep.
Her mother’s eyes are closed. Thank God.
She will place the coins atop the lids, but not yet. Not yet.
