2
Odette
ODETTE HAS LOOKED THROUGH the mourning clothes and picked out a plain day dress in bombazine with deep crêpe hems – but it feels wrong to have something shop-bought, so fragile and temporary.
Odette’s family has never been large, but she feels its smallness now; so few of them will show their grief outwardly for long. Oh God, who will come to the funeral? Will they be alone in the church? It is too awful to think about.
Cecilia has come to help button and pin her into her new outfit, into her new life: a daughter in mourning.
‘I should keep busy. That will help, won’t it?
’ says Odette. ‘Do you think it will take long for a photographer to reply?’ They have dashed off notes to every photography studio they could find in the directory across Hampstead and Highgate and Kilburn.
‘Did we write to enough? Or was it too many? Oh God, what if five all turn up together and it is a photographic circus?’
‘Then they can all take pictures of each other, and it will set a new fashion,’ says Cecilia.
It is not funny, but Odette rewards her with a tight smile.
Her hands shake too badly to fix the hook and eye at the throat of her dress, so she turns for Cecilia to do it.
The brush of Cecilia’s fingers against the soft hair at the nape of her neck is familiar – disconcertingly so.
How can it be that this still feels the same?
That her body will still respond to Cecilia’s touch?
That she is some ordinary, base animal made of muscle and skin and appetite?
‘Do I really have to do this?’ she asks.
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
But Odette does not mean the photograph. She means all of it. To grieve. To mourn. To remember. To grow into someone new who lives in a world with no mother, a world her mother will never know.
‘Girls!’ Mrs Binx’s voice rises up the stairs. ‘The photographer is here.’
Want does not come into this part. There is compulsion. Obligation.
This is something she knows she must do.
‘I’ll be right there,’ says Cecilia, squeezing her hand. ‘If you need something else to think about, think about me. The little flat in Bloomsbury.’
Odette smiles weakly. Their fantasy of a future seems so laughable now. ‘The little flat in Bloomsbury. I don’t suppose we’ll ever have the money for it, after all.’
Cecilia falters. ‘Do you not know what your mother wrote in her will?’
‘No. We didn’t . . . At the end, it wasn’t really the sort of thing we could speak about.’
At the end, her mother could hardly speak at all.
Cecilia turns to her, surveys her new appearance. ‘There. All done.’
‘I suppose one simply has to go on,’ says Odette, half a question.
‘Yes,’ agrees Cecilia. ‘Though you could always turn to drink. Rend your garments and roam the Heath, gnashing your teeth at small children. I believe, traditionally, there has always been the option of going mad.’
Odette laughs, despite herself. This is what she loves in Cecilia: the unexpected cleverness to her, the sharp, canny imagination. Without thinking, she pulls Cecilia close and kisses her, languid and familiar.
A noise sends them scrambling apart; Odette smooths her skirt and resists wiping her mouth with her hand, as though Claudine will see the press of Cecilia’s lips marked on hers.
Claudine holds herself stiffly in the doorway, hand on the knob.
There is always something of the schoolmistress about her, as though she is ever at the head of an unruly class of children plotting revolt.
‘It is bad manners to keep tradesmen waiting. They are your tradesmen, after all.’
‘Yes, Aunt Claudine.’
The photographer has set up in the dining room. Claudine has changed into mourning wear as well, and the servants wear crêpe armbands.
The footmen stand around Lydia’s body, considering how to manoeuvre her into the chair that has been placed in the centre of the room.
Finally, they take hold of her under the knees and armpits, and fold her awkwardly into place.
She is already growing stiff, but they must fix her head upright as best they can.
How will they position themselves around her? Odette has considered placing another chair beside her mother, so they can be as close in death as they were in life. Then perhaps maybe her father behind them?
And Claudine?
Before the photographer has finished his preparations, Odette hears the front door open, and she steps out into the hall to witness the arrival of a tall man in his mid-twenties.
His cheeks are pink from the exertion of climbing the hill to the house, and his honey-blond hair escapes its pomade when he removes his top hat.
‘Leo!’ Cecilia dashes to her brother to draw him in.
‘Cessy.’ He kisses her cheek, unwinds the scarf from around his neck. He has found a crêpe armband somewhere on his way, and now he unpins it from his topcoat to refix upon his smart frockcoat. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be here sooner.’
Leonard comes forwards, embraces his mother, then clasps Claudine’s hand. ‘I am so terribly sorry. I cannot quite believe she is gone.’
Claudine removes herself from his grip smoothly. ‘She is with God now. Her suffering is over.’
They have clustered in the hall, half blocking the view into the dining room, but Leo is taller than them all, and he looks over their heads at Lydia propped in the chair. His mouth goes slack and trembles.
He kisses Odette’s cheek next. ‘She was the best of all of us,’ he says faintly, though Odette knows none of them can think that true.
‘Thank you. I know you loved her,’ she says, as though she must lay out the people on her side, the people she can call upon to remember that her mother mattered.
And surely she did matter to Leo? Surely he grieves, too?
He holds her gaze and, for a moment, they are children again, growing up together in Herne House, the three of them sitting for her mother’s paintings, hiding in the hay meadows, catching tadpoles and climbing trees.
Cecilia takes her arm, and Leo’s expression shifts, closing down. He does not understand the true nature of the relationship between Cecilia and Odette, but he feels it all the same, a change that marked the end of them as a trio.
‘Mrs Binx, tea for Mr Moore. In the drawing room,’ instructs Claudine. She turns to Odette. ‘Well, get your father.’
Aunt Penelope ushers Cecilia and Leonard into the drawing room, and Odette goes to her father’s study.
It is a small room, tucked away at the back of the house, where the windows open onto the wild rose bushes in the garden, and is filled high with books and scattered issues of psychological journals.
When the house was newly bought, most of the rooms were papered with William Morris designs; here, broad acanthus leaves twine across the walls in pale blue and ivory.
Her father’s red dispatch box sits atop the desk beside a ceramic model of a human head, marked with the sections and meanings of a phrenologist.
George Fairfax-Waugh sits behind the desk, face as grey and pallid as the hair scattered through his beard and at his temples, and he startles when Odette speaks.
‘Father? We wish to take a photograph. With Mother.’
‘A photograph?’ There is a moment of horror, a flash of eye-whites and a mouth drawn into the beginnings of a grimace.
‘Please,’ says Odette quickly. ‘The photographer is here, and it will only take a moment.’
His features settle into a more assured expression, the momentary glimpse of vulnerability gone.
It hurts Odette more than she would have expected.
She did not realise how badly she has wanted her father to join her in her grief, but he keeps himself apart from it, just as he has kept himself apart from the rest of them, shut into his private space since Lydia died.
Maybe there is no one who understands her now.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘A good idea. It is important for the human mind to progress through the stages of grieving in order to meaningfully separate the memory of a living person from the mortal remnants.’
He waits, wisdom proffered.
Odette does not know how to respond. Does her father think this is comfort?
‘We are in the dining room,’ she says instead.
The photographer and his assistant are waiting, the camera on its tripod and a space cleared around Lydia.
Odette’s father stays at a cautious distance from the body.
He will not look at her. Instead, he inspects the rug, the silver on the sideboard, the tassels on the curtain ties, everything but his wife.
‘George, don’t linger.’ Claudine ushers the photographer to begin his work.
The man dances round, positioning George behind the chair, his hand on Lydia’s shoulder, and Odette alongside her mother. Then he hesitates, looking at Claudine in her mourning blacks. ‘The whole family?’ he asks.
There is a terrible moment when no one can meet the other’s eye, looking instead to the photographer in the hope he will solve this unsightly problem for them.
Eventually George says, ‘One like this. Then the rest.’
Claudine flinches almost imperceptibly and steps back.
Odette shifts closer to George. He is her father. This is her family. There is a fragile, final, fleeting moment when the three of them will all be together again. She must savour this.
One like this.
Apparently, only one.
The photographer readies the plate, and Odette braces herself. She must touch her mother. This is important; she feels it deeply in her bones. They must have a record of how much they meant to each other.
She holds her breath and places her hand on the cold fabric of her mother’s shoulder. It is all she can do to suppress a shudder.
‘Mr Fairfax-Waugh, you could place your other hand on your daughter’s shoulder?’ suggests the photographer.
The solid weight of her father’s hand is enough that Odette can rally.
There is a bustle of activity at the camera, then a great flash, and now they must hold as still as they can.
It is uncanny, like this. Looking at her mother’s shining hair and the set of her shoulder, it is as though she is alive again.
Odette is struck for a moment by the hideous sensation that if she were to lean around and look at her mother’s face, she would be alive.
Her quick, bright eyes and sensitive mouth would quirk, and Odette would feel her own heart flutter in response, because her mother would be here, she would not have left her, and it is so terrible and so wonderful she cannot bear it.
If she looks, it will be true or not; she will know – if she never looks, it can always be true that, in this moment, that her mother was here. Her mother didn’t leave her.
Oh God, she is going to cry.
‘Very good!’ says the photographer.
George steps back, snatching his hands away from the dead woman and the living.
‘And now the whole group.’
The photographer brings in Aunt Penelope and Cecilia and Leo, along with Claudine, to group around Lydia’s body.
Odette cannot move. She is staring at a fixed point on the wallpaper, her hand on her mother’s shoulder. She must not cry. Not here – not yet.
The rest of the photographs are done quickly, then Mrs Binx announces tea.
Aunt Penelope again ushers Cecilia away, taking Leo with her.
Amidst the reorganisation, Claudine tries to touch George’s arm with a tenderness Odette has never seen from her before, but he slithers away and, with a mutter about a vote in Parliament, flees the house.
Claudine, cheeks pink with humiliation, snaps orders at the staff about printing funeral invitations and summoning undertakers.
The footmen come to move Lydia back to the dining table, and at last Odette must relinquish her mother. She shuts her eyes and steps away, holding the vision in her mind.
If she never looks, her mother is still alive.