‘Then that is settled – we will go at once.’
Cecilia guides them out into the street. For a moment, it is as though a ghost of their past has arisen, some scene that Lydia has conjured to paint: Odette and Cecilia, young and in love, dashing around the city as though it is all theirs. It can be still, Cecilia reminds herself. She will make sure Odette gets the money she is owed, and then they will both be free of their families.
Cecilia goes slowly, putting them first on the wrong omnibus, then on the right one but mistaking the stop. She lingers to fix her hat, pausing to look in the window of a Lyons’ Corner House, commenting on the fashions, complaining that a street is too crowded so they must take another route – if she takes long enough, perhaps Claudine will give up?
They come at last to the gallery on Jermyn Street; it is one of the smaller galleries, but lively with the new showing. In the press at the entrance, their arms slip apart, and Cecilia finds herself walking alone, hoping Odette will follow. The rooms are hung high and teem with works, every new and interesting thing all pressed together; there are particular crowds around a new painting of Waterloo, and some piece on loan from a collection in Paris.
In a main room, filled with drifting crowds and poorly lit by the damp winter sun, they come across a painting that stops them both in their tracks.
It is a large, rectangular canvas hung at eye height, framed in gold, rich and dense with colour and light, as all Lydia’s paintings are. There is Lancelot, kneeling on the stone quay of Camelot, face beautiful with grief, and Elaine of Astolat, the Lady of Shalott, dead in the water, Lydia depicting her boat half sunk and strewn about with flowers. Only the oval of her face rises above the river, and one hand, still clutching the letter forLancelot.
Odette and Cecilia, recast by Lydia’s brush: Lancelot a handsome, boyish youth with Odette’s long, straight nose and high cheekbones, and Elaine a faded, washed-out mirror of Cecilia, a corpse of a living woman.
Unthinkingly, Cecilia grasps Odette’s arm. She has not seen this work since its painting. It is unfinished – there are patches of bare canvas around the edges, where Camelot fades into indefinite blurs of colour or pencil sketch – but it is brilliant. Beautiful and maddening, some sense of things not quite as they should be. Perhaps it is in the blank, sightless eyes, or the unworldly, weightless way Lancelot and Elaine seem to hang within their surroundings. Cecilia has grown up with her world reflected back through Lydia’s eye, and she has always taken it for truth, for wisdom, but now, with the link severed and Lydia in her grave, it strikes her as odd, a little disturbing. Was her work always like this, but Cecilia sees it only now? Or was the twist of Lydia’s illness already altering her sight?
Odette has covered her mouth with one hand, frozen in place. ‘Did you know this was here?’ she asks, voice coarse with emotion.
‘No. I swear it.’ Cecilia hopes the shock of it is clear in her voice. ‘Come away,’ she says.
But Odette is not listening. She whips round, pulling away from Cecilia’s arm, searching the gallery with wild eyes.
‘What is it?’ asks Cecilia. ‘What’s wrong?’
Odette searches a moment more, so tense that the lines on her neck stand out – and then, like her strings have been cut, she goes slack, closes her eyes. ‘Nothing.’
There. Another lie. They both know it. It hurts Cecilia like thorns on a rose bush; she tries to grasp Odette, the bloom of what she must still believe moves between them, and yet each time it draws blood.
Cecilia steers Odette with a hand in the crook of her elbow. ‘Come.’
It is not so many steps to the place in the gallery where a screen shields one part of the room from another. There is a shuffle of footsteps behind it, the rustle of fabric.
A bench is set before it.
‘Rest a moment.’
They sit in silence, Odette pale and unfocused, Cecilia working up the courage to speak.
‘You were not yourself at the dinner,’ she says.
‘Oh? Who was I then?’ Odette speaks lightly, but there is an edge to it – an edge to everything about her.
‘You hardly seemed in the room at all. And your letters—’
Odette stiffens. ‘What about them?’
‘I – I hardly know what to say. It is as though my Odette has disappeared somewhere and a stranger has come home.’
Odette gives her a look shot through with hurt and confusion. ‘You would have me smile and pretend, as my father would?’
‘No – of course not. I am trying to tell you I am worried about you.’
‘Worry more about my aunt who has become my stepmother. Worry about your mother, who has forgotten her dearest friend so fast. Worry about my father who brings incest into his marriage bed. Worry about my poor dead mother who had to die for everyone to finally be happy. Were they simply waiting for it all this time? Has no one ever truly wanted her here?’
Cecilia has lost her footing. There is some dark, open void within Odette she has never seen before, and it frightens Cecilia to find her so changed. She had hoped to engineer a failure of Claudine’s scheme, but Odette seems all too raw to contain herself.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘How do you know? Maybe I mean all of it, and it is only thatI don’t see why I shouldn’t say it now.’
