1
Odette
THEY LAY HER OUT, feet bound and jaw tied closed.
Odette’s mother has died in the London house, and there is much discussion as to where to put her.
Mrs Binx, the housekeeper, is a keen advocate of tradition and presses for the bed. Odette’s father, George, agrees. He has long since vacated the marital room, and it is now less a bedroom than a domestic hospital ward. It is no worse to have a dead body there than a sick one.
The nurse says it must be a table, preferably in the kitchens, for it will be easier to move around the body, to wash it, to wrap it in its winding sheet.
‘Her,’ says Mrs Binx, overcome unexpectedly. ‘Her body.’
Aunt Claudine clasps her hands over the front of her dress and says it must be the dining room, for there will be visitors. They may put down a sheet of plain linen, to protect the cherry wood, and a board, so that it will be no trouble to move her sister.
Odette is not called upon to give an opinion.
The windows are thrown open and maids cover the mirrors with black muslin, which Odette recognises as an old petticoat of hers cut up into squares.
They have been preparing. At the front door, another maid wraps a black cloth around the knocker to muffle it.
Outside, the leaves have begun their autumn turn on the waving boughs of the ancient heathland forest, and they cast a shimmer of crimson and gold light like stained glass across the floors.
It is busy – people everywhere – and, somehow, there are more servants than she has ever noticed before at every turn of the staircase; in the drawing room, the doctor still lingers, talking to her father, and hurrying through the front door is Aunt Penelope, her mother’s oldest friend.
The house is too tall, too big, her mother’s exuberant decoration overflowing in each room in a mess of rugs and mirrors, lamps draped with scarves, sketches framed on the walls, the reaching leaves of aspidistra and parlour palms, lacquered screens and lattice work. It is intolerable.
Odette slips up to her room so quietly that she goes without notice. Her trunks are packed and waiting at the foot of her bed, ready to be taken up to Cambridge. That will have to wait now. She must write a letter to Newnham explaining her delay. Black-bordered paper must be bought.
She will have to write the words: her mother is dead.
Odette presses her hands to her stomach, against the hard bones of her corset, walks around in a circle, takes a pillow from her bed and holds it to her face, smothering herself.
She imagines being numb, like the earth stretching across the hillside, like the steady trunks of the beeches and oaks, and the still, silent water of the ponds.
When her hands stop shaking, she puts down the pillow and goes to her dresser.
Its usual chaos has been tamed: her pomade and scent and creams all packed, her letters tidied, ink bottles stowed and jewellery stored carefully in the lacquered box her mother gave her for her eighteenth birthday.
From a coin purse, she retrieves two silver half-crowns, so small and ordinary, like beach pebbles or sea glass.
They are so completely inadequate. They are all she has.
Grief, like a wave taller than her head, taller than the house, rises up, building, waiting to break.
Her mother is dead. Her corpse is downstairs.
Coins in hand, Odette slips past the servants and past Aunt Claudine, who is patting Aunt Penelope on the shoulder as she presses her face into a handkerchief and trembles, past the shut door of her father’s study, past the nurse being paid by Mrs Binx – past it all, to the dining room.
She has left her mother’s body for only a minute or two, and yet she is already trepidatious to step across the threshold.
It is fortunate that it is a cold, preserving day; the fires have been extinguished and all the windows left wide open for the fresh autumn breeze to air out the stink of illness and death.
And to let the spirit out – so her mother once told her, when she was still small enough that she had to stand on her toes to see out of the nursery window.
There had been a death in the house opposite – white sheets tacked over the windows, the people coming in and out with black bands around their sleeves and their arms full of flowers.
Her mother lifted her under the armpits so that she could see the coffin as it left for the churchyard.
‘The dead must not see their own reflection, or they will become confused and will not find their way to Heaven,’ her mother said. ‘You must let the spirit out, and close the eyes of the dead, or they will spy out who they will take with them into the afterlife. Hold the eyelids down with pennies.’
From the doorway, Odette can see bare feet tied with a length of muslin and the flare of the curtain as the wind blows through.
Blowing her mother’s spirit away.
At once, it is too awful a thought, and she dashes across the room to slam the sashes down. Her mother must stay. She is not ready for her to go.
Slowly, stiffly, Odette turns.
There her mother is.
Lydia Fairfax-Waugh has died just shy of forty and is as beautiful in death as in life.
Her chestnut hair is full and shining and lies around her like a cloak; she is small and slender, like an angel, hands neat and precise, with flecks of paint still caught beneath her nails and her fine-boned fingers curled as though ready to clasp a brush.
The servants who carried her in crossed her arms over her chest before the stiffness set in, so that she will fix in place.
Odette has read there will be a smell, but none has come yet; there is only the tang of carbolic soap and the soft lavender water she scattered on her mother’s pillow each night to ease her sleep.
Her mother’s eyes are closed. Thank God.
She will place the coins atop the lids, but not yet. Not yet.
Instead, she reaches out one trembling hand to the pale skin of her mother’s neck and spreads her fingers across her throat in the echo of a too-familiar gesture.
There is no pulse, of course.
‘He has out soar’d the shadow of our night.’
Odette snatches her hand back and turns to find Cecilia in the doorway.
Cecilia has no obligation to wear mourning, but she has come in a sombre grey and mauve day dress, her jewellery plain jet, with a ring of her late father’s on her index finger, as a testament to the closeness of their two families for so many years.
She looks only prettier in the soft colours, the flax of her hair and milky pink of her cheeks made delicate.
‘Envy and calumny and hate and pain can touch him not.’
Shelley. Odette remembers Cecilia spreading the book of poetry open on her knees as they sat side by side on the roof of Herne House, the weight of a summer storm thick in the air.
Odette means to speak, to offer some answer to Cecilia’s own line, but she can find nothing. She is no poet. The truth of it all is beyond words.
Cecilia pushes the door closed and comes to take Odette in her arms, to press their foreheads together like they are still schoolgirls whispering their love in the quiet dark.
‘I am so, so sorry,’ says Cecilia, and it is enough.
Odette curls into her warm body, lets the tears come, and shakes and shakes with the force of it.
‘Please never leave me,’ she speaks into Cecilia’s shoulder.
‘Never.’
They draw apart and turn to face the table.
‘For the eyes,’ says Odette, showing the coins on her palm.
Cecilia grips Odette’s arm as she readies herself.
Before she can begin, the door opens again and the women of the house flood into the dining room.
Odette quickly slips the coins into her pocket and presses her back to the wall.
Maids carry in basins of warm water and cloths and a large pair of scissors to snip away the nightgown Odette’s mother died in, should they prove unable to remove it themselves.
‘You don’t have to be here for this,’ says Odette to Cecilia under her breath.
‘Do you want me to stay?’ It is not a simple thing to ask.
‘It will be . . . taxing for you.’
‘I’m not afraid.’
Odette chews the meat of her lip. There is no way of knowing what will be a comfort. The washing of the body, its preparation, involves no decision on her part. A ritual tells her: this is how it is; you are part of something bigger than you, and it has its rules. You are safe. Held.
It seems churlish to want a person as well. Demanding. Odette is too demanding; she knows this is her terrible flaw.
And yet, she wants.
She touches her fingers to Cecilia’s, begins to speak, but Aunt Penelope interrupts.
‘We can be of more use elsewhere. Come.’
Cecilia is ushered away by her mother, who has donned sombre black for her dead friend.
They are now five in the room: Mrs Binx, the nurse and one housemaid, who is sniffing pathetically – and Aunt Claudine.
She stands at the head of the table, eyes fixed on her sister. She is the taller, lither woman, with hair that runs to brown instead of chestnut, and her hard years of spinsterhood and teaching in Germany show in the lines around her mouth and eyes.
It is no easier to understand her now. She watches her dead sister’s face with an intensity that could drive a hole through the wood, grey eyes flashing and dark.
Odette does not go to her.
‘What can I do?’ she asks Mrs Binx instead.
‘Nothing, my love.’ Mrs Binx pats her hand. ‘Let the women do the work. We are here to see that it is tenderly done.’
First, the nightdress is carefully lifted up; the maid cradles Lydia’s head as the gown is removed, and she lies naked before them all as she has never done in life. Her illness has made her fragile. Each bone of her ribs is clear, and her hips jut through skin that is sunless pale.
Water, soap and cloths are brought, and her body is washed. Each arm, each leg, across her stomach and chest. She is rolled over so her back can be washed, too, and then each leg and foot is gently attended to.
The maid lifts her mother’s thigh, opening it out to the side, exposing her.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ asks Odette.
‘We must stop up the orifices, Miss Fairfax-Waugh,’ says the nurse, who is moving wads of cotton to between Lydia’s legs. ‘I would explain why, but I don’t think you’d like to hear it.’
‘Oh. I see.’
Claudine waves them on. ‘Do not be prim, Odette.’
‘I am sorry.’
Odette retreats to the wall again, catching her hands behind her to press them against the dado rail until they go numb.
They put cotton inside her mother’s vagina and anus and nostrils and ears and into her mouth. She never thought a human body had so many broken places.
Odette has seen dead bodies before: carcasses in the kitchen, dead sheep bloated and rotting in the fields around Herne House – even, a very long time ago, her grandmother laid out on her bed, ready for Odette to kiss her waxy cheek.
She has seen unmoving bundles in rags on the streets around Shadwell, when she and Cecilia take the train east to sit in the dark corners of beer-soaked music halls where no one will recognise them and they can press as close together as they like.
She has seen graveyards dug up to make space for more bodies, and a boat crammed with screaming people sink in the Thames.
Death is everywhere in this city. It is not so strange that it should be in her family, too.
When her mother’s hair has been washed and spread out to dry, they dress her in her grave clothes.
Claudine bought them from the finest funeral emporium on Oxford Street, and they are beautiful and pointless.
The buttons do not fasten; there is no overstitching across the decorative embroidery, so they can never be washed, and they are fixed only with ties at the side.
Then Mrs Binx brings the shroud.
Odette made this herself. Cecilia sat beside her, stitching the hem as Odette sewed the pattern of ferns and lilies and chrysanthemums, while they kept vigil through Lydia’s long dying.
‘No. Wait.’ Odette springs forwards. ‘We must photograph her first.’
Claudine stops. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. Why not? People do it.’
Odette feels the weight of Claudine’s gaze and every strained breath, every twitch of her mouth in exasperation – or perhaps distaste. That is what it is. However nicely she plays, Odette is not stupid.
‘If you must,’ says Claudine at last, and takes the shroud away.
The maid gathers up the rags and the scraps of cotton; the nurse takes the bowls of dirty water, and Mrs Binx brushes out Lydia’s hair again.
It is mundane. It is monstrous.
Odette is powerless to change a thing.