Odette shudders at the image. Hood’s suicide,Owning her weakness, her evil behaviour. Lydia never wanted to paint Hood’s ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, no matter how much she was encouraged, calling the story of romantic suicide a cruelty forced on women by men. Odette first saw the Millais etching as a child, and the shrouded figure with her face so stricken with horror drove deep roots into her. The Watts painting,Found Drowned, seemed too peaceful when she came across it, too kind an end, as though those who had driven the woman to her death by malice or indifference could be acquitted of their guilt by imagining. Lydia hated it, so Odette did, too, listening earnestly as her mother explained that drowning was not so peaceful as people would tell you.
Only now does she wonder how Lydia might have known what drowning felt like.
Odette will not be brave enough to do it. She knows this. She can lean far over the stone balustrade and watch therushing, muddy Thames pass beneath her and understands she is trapped.
Her mother stands a little way off on the other side of the bridge, obscured by passing vehicles, but Odette knows she is there, in the flash of white shroud and the glimpse of her pinched and yellowing face.
She will not come any closer, not yet. Odette knows this, too.
It is as though a veil has been ripped down between them and Lydia’s mind is her mind. They never were two different people, only sound and echo.
It would be easier to be dead like her.
But instead, she is mad, and she has lost Cecilia.
She saw the look in Cecilia’s eye when she asked her what she had experienced at the séance.
Nothingwas her answer.
Lydia has come only to Odette, and so it is Odette’s duty to avenge her, to keep her alive in the memory of all those so keen to forget her.
Her mother walks behind her all the way back up to Hampstead. It is a long walk, and Odette lets her mind turn over the problem of Claudine.
Revenge. Murder. Remember me.
This is what her mother asks of her.
The air is brisk and fresh as she walks up and out of the smog that hangs low across the city. The colour is high in her cheeks by the time she steps back inside the house. It is quiet, and she pauses in the entrance hall, listening instinctively for footsteps, for a tapping.
Of course there is nothing. Her mother is gone, for now.
She is doing what her mother wants. She does not need reminding.
Odette strips her gloves and hat and fixes her hair in the hallway mirror, touching her fingers to the brooch at her throat,the one that contains a curl of her mother’s chestnut hair. She pricked her skin pinning it in place this morning, and if she looks closely she can see a rusty speck on the black fabric where the blood has dried.
As she goes up to her room, she hears noise from the top of the house. Hammering, sawing. She follows it to her mother’s studio, where workmen have erected ladders and worktables as they set about boarding up the great arching window.
Odette flushes hot with outrage. It is her mother’s rage that runs through her, twined with her own, finding her voice before she knows it. ‘What are you doing? Who told you to do this?’
She realises too late that Claudine stands to one side, supervising.
‘These are long overdue repairs,’ she says. ‘I would remind you to moderate the way you speak.’
Odette is too angry to heed the danger Claudine poses. ‘This is my mother’s room – how dare you come in and destroy it?’
‘You forget this is my house now. This room is draughty and lets in damp. The window is impractical and no longer needed.’
‘Why not burn the whole place down? Then you never need think about her again,’ snaps Odette. ‘Surely that would suit you best.’
Claudine is about to respond, but suddenly her expression softens, and she transforms into an angel of the hearth. Odette turns to see her father in the doorway, filling his pipe.
‘What’s this?’ George saunters into the room. ‘Both my favourite girls together.’
For a moment, Odette and Claudine are united in horror.
‘Really, George,’ tuts Claudine.
‘Have I interrupted something?’ He smiles in confusion, and Odette cannot believe it is not feigned. Surely he can sense the tension simmering? She looks at him anew, considering this man who would so blind himself to the truth for the sake of aneasy life.
