‘I will talk to her.’
‘Perhaps I can ease the way for you a little,’ says Claudine. ‘Should you happen to speak to Odette as intimate friends, and should I happen to be in a position to hear what was said, then there can be no charge of a betrayal of confidence on your part.’
Cecilia’s stomach turns in revulsion. ‘I think I understand the idea.’
‘Then all is settled.’ Claudine rises from the settee. ‘I am so grateful to you and your mother for making me so welcome. Mine is not an easy position, and I find myself in need of a friend.’
For a moment, the truth of the words bleeds through, and Cecilia does not like the new wave of guilt that comes with them. It cannot be easy for Claudine. She is no monster, only a woman.
She presses Cecilia’s hands between her own. ‘Your mother tells me you are a sensitive girl, and I can see it in your face. This must be quite distressing for you. I am sure it can all be straightened out neatly enough.’
Sensitive. She meansweak.
Cecilia smiles, lets her hands be squeezed as though a pact has been made between them.
Claudine is not wrong.
She does not bend with the wind. She fears it breaks her.
2
Odette
THELONDON HOUSE ISa sinking ship.
Odette crosses the threshold and feels the floorboards lurch beneath her feet. This is wrong. This is not home anymore.
She lingered as long as she could, stretching out the minutes between the Heath and the house until night fell and she had no choice but to return. To face whatever is waiting for her.
The hallway is the same, of course, and the front door, and the same maid takes her coat and hat, and there is the same smell of lemon and vinegar from where someone has been scrubbing the tiles – but it is all overlaid with another set of images, like two photographs exposed on the same plate. Here is where her mother’s coffin rested; here is where the funeral party formed.
To her left is the door to the drawing room, closed tight, and Odette watches it for a moment – straining, she realises, for the tapping.
There is nothing.
Of course, there is nothing. It is just a house, and she is mad.
She has spent two months in Cambridge hiding from a ghost, twitching at shadows and sleeping in bursts. She has not seen the apparition again since the night of the funeral, and at times, she has convinced herself she has lost her mind. Nothing is following her. Her mother is dead and cold beneath the soil.
But here, in the house in which Lydia lived, touched the banisters, left hairs on the armchair, spilt wine on the rug – the house in which she died, in which they washed her cooling body and lifted her coffin.
Ghost or no, her mother is still here.
Her father comes down the stairs, a look of pleasant surprise on his face, as though this is normal – a daughter walking in as though she has only been into town, not gone for two months without a word since the death of her mother.
She notes the wedding ring on his left hand, and she wonders whether he took one off and procured another, or simply sent the old one for cleaning and then used it again at the church in Germany.
‘Odette, we have missed you.’
Have they? Really? She misses the father who would not cast her mother off so easily, but perhaps this is who he always was, and what she misses is a construction of her own imagination.
She allows her cheek to be kissed. A few months away, and she sees it now for the affectation that it is. They are not bohemian and continental; they are awkward and English, and her mother was the only one of them with any true talent.
‘You have time to change before dinner,’ he adds, when Odette does not speak. ‘Your things arrived from the station and have been taken to your room.’
Yes. The dinner. The celebration of her father and her aunt’s wedding.
‘Must I attend?’
