And there, too, is Claudine.
It is this that gives Cecilia pause.
Claudine is dressed for bed in a silk robe draped over a nightgown, her hair let down from its pins. Why she is in Uncle George’s room in such a state evades Cecilia for longer than it should, and it is not until Uncle George steps into view and lets Claudine touch his face that the truth is blunt and inescapable. There is no need for the confirmation of the kiss that follows, but it comes all the same.
Her stomach knots.
‘Cecilia.’ It is her mother’s voice. Plain and flat, in a way that scares her. Her mother is in the doorway to her room, watching Cecilia watch Uncle George and Claudine. ‘Come downstairs.’
‘But—’
‘Downstairs – now.’
Cecilia obeys.
4
Odette
AT THE DESK INher mother’s studio, Odette sits with her pen pinched between her fingers, nib hovering just above the page. A solitary candle burns low.
She has come up to the studio in some obvious gesture of closeness to Lydia, though it has been months since her mother painted here. The top floor of the London house was built for an artist, with large north-facing windows that arch up into the roof so that a steady light pours into the open space throughout the day. George bought the house because of the window – for Lydia – or so goes the story that Odette has always been told.
It is cold up here, but she loves it: the paints, the canvases, the rags and palettes, the pots of paintbrushes and knives, the tang of turpentine. She remembers playing here as a child, pressing her face against the fragile glass and looking down the long drop to the paving stones below.
There is a sheet of paper before her and a stack to one side, ready for her words. To the left are the open pages of the memorials from her mother’s stash, taken from a box below her desk. They are a strange genre, a clash of different voices, all unfamiliar, marking down grief, shock, fear, carefully constructed bons mots about God and the Spirit and a Good Death, tirades against bad doctors and careless relatives. Odette has not read many memorials. She never could fathom whatthere might be in the death stories of so many, the grinding inevitability of decay and rot, of the end of human life.
She understands it a little better, now. It is like the photograph. This time is sacred: the final moments in which her mother still lives vividly in her mind. She must capture it all, while she still can.
Odette writes. About her mother’s illness, about the days, weeks, spent with her as she died, the horror and the beauty, the work of witnessing, what it has cost her, what she has lost. It is laborious work. The words fight her; each must be dug from the ground like ore, smelted into something with meaning and laid in slow foundations. As she writes she cries, silently, seemingly without end. Is this what it is to mourn? Is this why each of those strangers from the past was compelled to write down their memories of the last moments they had together, as though committing them to paper would anchor the dead to the world of the living, so the writer would not be left so alone?
The clock on the mantel strikes a tiny chime only once – it is deep into the night, and her candle has burnt to the stub. She stretches, arms pulled high above her head, back aching. The shop-bought weeds do not fit her well; they pinch beneath her armpits, and the skirt is too loose around the waist.
Tap-tap-tap.
Odette stops.
Tap-tap-tap.
That sound. Where does it come from?
It is just a noise. She should not be so suddenly fearful.
But oh, it tugs at something in her mind, some familiar, awful recognition rooted deep down.
Tap-tap-tap.
She must know.
Odette rises quickly, quietly, puts on her slippers and lights a fresh candle.
Below, the house is silent, save for the interruption of that solitary tapping. Her father and Claudine are both in their respective rooms; her mother’s bedroom door stands open, the room stripped and prepared for cleaning.
Odette checks it all the same, but it is a shell now, devoid of the warmth and softness and breath that makes a place alive.
Her mother is not here. Her mother is downstairs.
It is a comfort – and a horror.
