Cecilia laughs and draws her back inside. ‘I have an idea I want to tell you.’ She stretches her arms above her head and toes off her shoes. Odette thinks Cecilia should have been a dancer, like her mother; she is so elegant it is distracting.
‘A play?’
A cat-like smile spreads across Cecilia’s face. ‘Oh yes. A very good one this time.’
Theirplaysare a private game – something like a performance, a play-act, a co-creation of a world that lives between them, as if in one shared mind.
‘Later,’ says Odette, before Cecilia can speak. ‘Mother said she wanted us for her new piece.’ Odette sweeps into the morning room, untying the ribbons of her hat. ‘Mother?’
Her mother is sitting in an upright chair facing the window onto the garden, where, at a slant, it is possible to see the jabbing of the poles.
And then she moves, and it is not Odette’s mother at all.
Odette stops dead. For a moment, she thinks she has lost her senses. This woman looks like Lydia – the same mouth, the same set to her eyes and shape of her jaw – but it is as if one has been drawn in charcoal and the other in watercolour. This woman is her mother stretched out, blunter- featured, angular where her mother is soft, broad-framed where her mother is round and delicate, all pale lawn skirts and neat lace at her throat, unblemished by sweat or heat or any sort of human affect.
It is an astonishingly uncanny experience, like she imagines seeing a ghost must be – an echo of someone so familiar, distorted and wrong.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Odette, reflexively polite. ‘I didn’t know we were expecting company today.’
Cecilia stops behind her, like a shadow.
The woman lifts a perfume-scented handkerchief to her nose as a shield against the smell that reaches through the open door. Odette finds herself defensive of her home.It is only the country, she wants to say. The city has its own foul odour.
‘You must be Odette.’
‘How do you do?’ says Odette, with a confused smile, not allowing herself to falter at her Christian name being used so bluntly.
‘I am Claudine Hutton. Your aunt.’
Odette’s father arrives, with a maid carrying tea.
‘Getting to know each other?’ he says warmly, as though none of this is a disorientating surprise. ‘Sit down, sit down.’ He seems to notice Cecilia for the first time. ‘Of course you’re welcome to join us.’
A flush crosses her cheeks. ‘Thank you, but I had better see if my mother needs me.’
Cecilia slips away and Odette joins her father and Claudine. There is a silence while tea is poured.
Odette tries not to look at Claudine. It is too uncanny.
She searches her mind for anything she knows about her mother’s sister but comes up with little. Older than Lydia. Teaching at a school in Dresden. It is not that her parents have spoken badly of Claudine; it is that they have never spoken of her at all.
‘Claudine will be staying for a while,’ says George.
Odette looks at her aunt and speaks before she can think. ‘But I thought you and Mother were estranged?’
Claudine’s face becomes tight. ‘Is that what Lydia says?’
‘We thought it was about time things were patched up. Time heals all wounds,’ offers George, as though this is a profound comment.
Claudine does not look as though she agrees with the sentiment, and Odette feels a confusing sense of kinship in their reaction to her father’s words.
What does he want from her? It is the question she must always answer with her father. To close up the gaps, to smooth things over – that, she knows – but this is too baffling. What is he thinking, bringing home her mother’s estranged sister? She feels her own stupidity keenly. Surely she should be able to understand her own father. It is her failing that she always flounders just out of her depth; no one has ever said it to her in these terms, but she has come to understand it so. Her father expects more of her. She must be quick, she must be sharp, she must be one of the grown-ups. Odette and her father are the sane, rational ones lined up against her mother’s irrationality. That is her job, that is what she can do for him.
But this – she cannot fit it together in her mind. She must keep up, but where has he gone?
‘Where is Mother?’ asks Odette. ‘Does she—’know Claudine is here?It seems somehow too awkward to say it so plainly.
George’s expression is fixed. ‘She’s resting.’
