‘Happy? I don’t think that’s what I’m made for.’
Cecilia tugs her elbow. ‘Come. Trust me.’
Odette relents and follows Cecilia into the open fields and towards the forest beyond.
This is the one thing Cecilia knows how to do: draw Odette out of herself, give her someone else to be, a private world of their own.
The sun is broad overhead, beating down in glory and gold. It is not a time for sad things – Cecilia will not have it so.
She sets off running through the meadow, past the bobbing heads of wildflowers and down, down, down, to the winding banks of the Stour. At a fairy ring amongst a stand of beech trees,Cecilia lays Odette down and heaps her with leaves, a slain King Arthur ready for Avalon. Cecilia gathers foxgloves and irises and sprays of meadowsweet to cover Odette where she lies, hands clasped at her breast over the hilt of a stick-as-sword. Kneeling at Odette’s side, Cecilia speaks Sir Bedivere’s words.
‘Whither shall I go? Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? For now I see the true old times are dead.’
Odette sits up, brushing the petals from her face. ‘No, don’t say that. Nothing is dead. It is only changing.’
Cecilia leans back in the grass, her expression dropping. She does not want to talk about this. They will leave for university so soon, and the thought of it makes her quail.
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,’ she offers.
‘Yes, more like that.’
They run again, right to the edge of the river, where the weight of the heat casts a shimmer across the water and dragonflies dart between the reeds. Odette stands on the bank, eyes caught on the glittering water.
‘Here – I have an idea. Let me go into the water. I can be Shelley, and you can find my body washed up and rotting.’
Cecilia frowns. ‘Let’s not. Won’t you sit down? I stashed some brandy around here somewhere.’
But Odette is wading into the water, up to her knees. ‘It is not so fast-flowing. Here, I will lie face down in the shallows.’
Before Odette can suit action to word, Cecilia catches her elbow again and drags her away. ‘AndI have strawberries. I don’t want to get wet – it’ll make my petticoats all itchy.’
They are silly protests, trifling things she fills the air with, smothering Odette’s fire. It is as though Odette wants to push and push, to find the edge where someone will call her bluff, will see that she is not all right. But it is not Cecilia’s attention she wants; this is not something she can give her. It is Lydia’s she wants, George’s, Claudine’s even – for them all to come to theirsenses and see what they are doing to her.
Cecilia knows they will not. Their only path is to get out. Odette will never get what she wants from them, and if she cannot see that, Cecilia will make the path for them both.
Because without Odette, what life will there be for her? Her mother. Home. Four walls, a tea set, never saying what she thinks. Her own inadequacy. Her own failure.
There is a sense of a great, yawning empty space around her, ahead of her, her whole life blank and cold and hopeless. It is a life sentence, to be herself.
She finds the brandy and strawberries and sets Odette down with both.
‘We’ll write to each other all the time,’ she says, as though dictating to the universe.
She pictures it now: a dowdy writing desk in a room at Somerville, pen in hand as she writes amidst the stacks of books and blotting paper and notes from lectures, looking out across emerald lawns, to tell stories of her adventures, and read Odette’s in turn.
‘And we’ll be together every vac.’
Odette chews a strawberry, considering. ‘Yes. I suppose so.’
Cecilia pulls a book from the basket and instructs Odette to lie down so she can read to her.
‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?’
Odette throws a strawberry at her. ‘You’ve done that one enough times. Something new.’
Cecilia throws the strawberry back, and it splatters on Odette’s shirtwaist, so she unbuttons it and casts it off, red-stained and crumpled into the grass. Cecilia lets her eyes linger on the soft curve of Odette’s breasts above her corset and the dip at the hollow of her throat.
She licks her lips and continues reading.
