Do not ask me why I have come to this matter – it is not important – but I would know your answer.
Yours always,
Odette
*
11thOctober 1898
Darling Odette,
A letter from you, at last! I will tell you that when the porter gave me this missive and I saw your hand, I took it straight to my room and did a dance between the bed and desk, in what little space I have. It is a tonic to hear your voice in my head as I read your words, to think that I hold this piece of paper that once, not so long ago, was in your hands.
I wish I could visit, but they are so strict about what we do and where we go. I cannot believe there are still weeks and weeks until I see you again. I have enclosed a list of my lectures and tutorials and notes about what we discuss in each, so that you may consult it at any time and know where I am and what it is I am doing. Will you send the same by return? My studies are engaging, but I have not found a girl of any fellow-feeling here. They are pleasant but all quite serious and many study the sciences, and I feel quite stupid when they speak at dinner.
I think you would like it here. Oxford is a lively place; there is always someone about at any time of day, and the Ashmolean is so close it makes me think of our own little flat in Bloomsbury that is waiting for us one day. I would be happier, I think, if you were here. It is a little lonely.
I have prevaricated because I wish to linger in the goodness of having news from you for a little while, but I must say also that your letter has made me so unhappy. You must not thinklike this, Odette. Your mother was ill; there was nothing any of us could have done about it, and it is certainly not remotely reasonable to think that you could have done any more to help her than a doctor. She loved you and she needed you, and she would want you to be happy, to live your life fully and not lose yourself to grief. Of this I feel quite certain.
I must, then, come on to your question as to the matter of ghosts. I will not call it strange, for I do take it with the gravity you give it – but I suppose I do not know what to say. It is not something I have given much thought to, but perhaps it is simply that I cannot see any way in which they are real. They seem like such an old-fashioned notion to me, something from a world before the Reformation, the idea of souls in limbo for whom we must still fight. But I think I understand why you have asked me this. Lydia has been gone such a short time; she is still so alive in so many ways. I have read stories of widows seeing their husbands or hearing their voices from another room. I cannot imagine what it is to lose a mother, but I know what it is to lose a father, and they stay alive in your heart for so long.
But it does not mean they are a ghost.
I do not think you haunted, Odette. Only grieving.
Darling, please will you send a list of your engagements so I can see if there is any way I can manage a visit?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together.
Your Cecilia
*
20thOctober 1898
Dearest Cecilia,
Cambridge is a cursed place; I feel it deep in my bones. When I rise in the morning, there is a damp mist everywhere,turning us all into demons from some level of Signore Dante’s Inferno. The men are everywhere in their black flapping robes, clicking and fluttering, and I feel as though I have come amongst a colony of bats, in some hell-fire cave of damnation.
I am not sleeping.
Sleep seems so impossible.
I feel as though my mind is not my own, as though I cannot bring reason to bear on my own thoughts. I think that I am well and capable, and then I find myself at the back of a lecture with tears streaming down my face in the most humiliating manner, with nothing at all to have set me off, and I have to excuse myself before I become a topic of conversation.
I am troubled. I wish I could tell you all that is in my mind, but I fear you would think I have lost my senses, and I fear that I may have.
[The following is crossed out with deep incisions of the pen nib.]
I think I see things. Her. Oh God, she has not left.
You are wrong about my mother. I do not think she would release me so unbegrudgingly.
Do not visit. I do not want you to see me in the state I am in now. I think I have become quite selfish and utterly unable to tolerate the company of others. I stay up late into the night reading, for I do not wish to be myself. I hate joy in any form I see. I hate laughter or singing or any softness that I cannot have. People are more than strangers; they are some other species. Unmarked. Naive. They think death will not touch them. They walk as we all walk, on a narrow ledge above a great drop, but they do not see it – they do not know it is something to be feared. But I see now. I know.
There is horror in this world, and I do not understand how I can continue to live in it.
