‘I am sure you can see for yourself now she is back in London.’
‘Enough of your cheek,’ chides Penelope. ‘It is a simple question.’
Cecilia stills her hands and focuses on a point on the wall behind Claudine’s head.
‘She is not .?.?. well,’ she says carefully. ‘I cannot imagine how she could be.’
Claudine is tapping her fingernail against the varnished surface of the end table, the only sign of her disquiet. ‘The girl wallows,’ she says to Penelope. ‘I told you at the time – we should not have humoured her about the photography and the funeral. She has formed an unhealthy obsession.’
Penelope nods, quick to agree. ‘It is natural to grieve a parent – none of us would deny it – but I must say that I for one think she takes this whole performance too far.’
‘I do not believe it to be a performance,’ counters Cecilia, but her mother ignores her.You do not know her, Cecilia wants to say, but the room is full of other people’s words, other people’s thoughts, and she struggles to regiment her own.
Claudine continues to speak to Penelope as though Cecilia were not there. ‘If she spoils dinner tonight with her sulking, I will insist George gives her a talking-to. He is her daughter; he must straighten her out.’
‘Quite right. She must learn to behave herself.’
Abruptly, Claudine looks at Cecilia, eyes sharp. ‘You two seem very close.’
Cecilia does not react. ‘We are old friends.’
‘She trusts you.’
‘Yes.’
‘She will tell you the truth, I imagine.’
Cecilia moistens her lips. ‘I am not quite sure I understand what you are suggesting. Tell me the truth about what?’
‘About whatever it is she is hiding.’
Ah. There it is. This is why Claudine has come.
‘I don’t believe she is hiding anything,’ says Cecilia automatically, but the lie sits dead on the floor between the threeof them. Odetteishiding something – from her, as well as from the others – and it rankles like a pebble in her shoe. ‘Or whatever it is, it cannot matter all that much,’ she says weakly.
‘That is for you to find out,’ says Claudine. She leans forwards, and her manner changes, like a theatre backcloth being raised and replaced by another. ‘You would be doing me the most terribly kind favour if you would speak to her a little, try to understand what lies beneath all this .?.?. extravagance.’
Penelope is staring at Cecilia with a too-familiar intensity, and Cecilia diminishes under the combined attention.
‘If Odette wants to keep secrets, she is not easily swayed. She is quite stubborn. Even if I tried to make her tell me, it would only make her withdraw further.’
‘Then try harder,’ says Claudine, mouth in a tight smile.
Cecilia stares at her feet, a rushing sound in her ears. This is all wrong. She shouldn’t be here, with them, drawn into her mother’s scheming. It is a horrible betrayal of Odette, and she despises herself for it.
But she is ruled by fear. Of Claudine, of her mother’s anger, driven by whatever secret it is Claudine holds over her. Fears the precarious future that balances before her.
She is a worm. She knows that much. She is pathetic and stupid and gutless.
The Gate House feels too small; Hampstead a prison yard, ringed round by watching guards. She is struck suddenly, intensely, by the notion that she and Odettecannotstay here any longer or she will end up in a grave herself.
A return to university is only a stay of execution. They need a wayout.
There is only one narrow chance of escape: the money Lydia promised from the sale of her paintings. Odette has dismissed it as a lost cause, another broken promise from Lydia, but Cecilia cannot let it go so easily. Could Lydia not have put something inher will? What has happened to all the paintings that have been taken?
She must keep the peace until she can give Odette a way out. She cannot lose her.
If she must play along for now, then so be it.
