Odette curls her fingers into the fabric of Cecilia’s skirt. ‘Yes, I like that one.’
‘So do I. I have been thinking, we’ll have a little cat maybe, called Babette, and she will howl and howl every morning until we get up and feed her.’
‘Where will our flat be?’
‘Oh, in a narrow building full of poets and suffragists. It will be on the second floor but still quite spacious. The windows will look out onto a fine square, and if you stand just right and squint, you will see the British Museum or St George’s.’
‘There must be a little baker’s down the street to buy fresh bread every morning,’ says Odette, ‘and I will always bring you back a strawberry tart when they are in season.’
‘And in winter, it will be terribly cold, but we will stoke the fire high and I will knit you a scarf and the lights of the city willlook so beautiful in the frost.’
The smile that had been forming vanishes from Odette’s face. ‘We will find the money for it, won’t we? Could Aunt Penelope help us? It is not all lost, is it?’
Cecilia does not know how to answer. Instead, she taps her fingers against the hard shell of Odette’s bodice, the bones of her corset.
‘Perhaps I will get a job as a typist for a radical newspaper,’ says Cecilia uncertainly. ‘And you can be a clerk at the telegraph office and learn all sorts of secrets.’
But it is spoilt now. Odette’s expression is far away.
Cecilia bites her lip. ‘Are you still with me?’
‘I am sorry. I am not good company.’
‘I don’t need you to be.’
‘I do not know when I will be myself again. I think I died, and now I am in a new world and I recognise none of it.’
Cecilia presses a palm to Odette’s cheek and turns her face to look at her. ‘Then recognise me. I am still here.Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’
Odette covers Cecilia’s hand with her own. ‘What am I to do with myself?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Cecilia, and it is the truth. ‘But I do not think there is a wrong thing to do.’
Odette brings their foreheads together, and they stay for a while, united.
‘My mother kept all the memorials her family wrote,’ says Odette eventually. ‘All these stories of the deaths of people she had never met. She said they were a comfort. Do you think it would be a comfort?’
Cecilia understands that she is not being asked her opinion. Odette needs someone to make a shape of the world now it has come undone, to lay down the edges afresh and say, here, this is where you are.
‘I think it is beautiful to write it all down. To remember.’
Odette nods. ‘To remember.’
Cecilia kisses her cheek. ‘Will you sleep?’
‘No. I think I will write.’
‘You must sleep a little.’
‘Later.’
They embrace once more before Cecilia makes her journey in return, working her way down one house and up into the other.
By the time she makes it back to her room, the light has been extinguished in Odette’s.
But there is movement in another window now.
Two along: Uncle George’s room. It is not one she has had any cause to look at before, for she has had no special reason to think much of Odette’s enigmatic father. But there he is, plain before the open curtain, well-lit by gaslight.
