Chapter 3
Cecilia
THE AIR IS TOO COLD for Cecilia’s bedroom window to be open as far as it is but, though it causes her to shiver in her nightdress and silk dressing gown, she cannot bring herself to push the sash down fully.
From here, she can see all the way across the road and past the tree branches, to the neat square of light that is Odette’s window in the Fairfax-Waugh house.
On this clean, calm night, she can even make out the smudge that is the sketch above Odette’s bed: Cecilia and Odette at thirteen, in the pond at Herne House, posing as water nymphs for a larger piece Lydia planned but never completed.
Cecilia holds herself at the window now, a hand pressed to each side so it frames her. Is Odette there? She cannot quite see; there is no movement, but that does not mean Odette is not just beyond her sight.
This is how she first saw Odette, seven years ago, when Cecilia and Leonard and their mother first moved into the private square in Hampstead.
Penelope and Lydia’s friendship stretches back long enough that, on the mantelpiece downstairs, there are photographs of the two of them together, before either Odette or Cecilia were born.
But Cecilia only met the Fairfax-Waughs when Lydia summoned Penelope back to London from their tidy, unobtrusive house in Richmond and installed them in Gate House set just across the road from the Fairfax-Waugh villa.
In the four grey walls of her bedroom, in this new, alien place, twelve-year-old Cecilia set out her needle and thread and her embroidery and pulled the dustsheet from the mirror on her dressing table put there by the movers and—
There.
In the reflection.
Like Lancelot to the Lady of Shalott, Odette appeared in a scene of colour and beauty. Cecilia could not at first put together what she saw: a curious girl wrapped in a swathe of velvet, a silver crown on her waves and a sword slung across her shoulder. It was strange and brilliant and confusing.
Cecilia spun around and pressed herself to the window, hauling up the sash so that she could hang out across the sill and drink in this apparition.
Odette held a fixed pose, face raised in some sweet victory, her hair flowing around her shoulders. Only when Lydia stepped into view in a stained painting smock, brush brandished at Odette, did Cecilia understand what it all was.
Penelope brought them to Lydia’s house the next day, and there Odette was.
Real. Tall and observant, leaning languorously across the arm of the settee, her hair flowing in burnished waves about her shoulders, her sharp, hawkish eyes following Cecilia about.
It was like being stung, a shock rippling through her body at this sense of recognition, of some missing part to herself made flesh.
She grew hot at once, flustered with yearning.
Odette took her up to her room, through the glittering maze of mirrors and paintings, shawls draped across lamps and Turkish lanterns dangling from the ceiling, silk wall hangings glowing in the gaslight. She pressed a volume of Keats into her hands, asked to be read to.
It was a bolt of sunlight into a gaol cell. Cecilia had been raised small and quiet, confined to a life reflected, the insipid shadow of something real and true and burning, but here Odette was, and she felt drunk on it. She knew then that she would walk after Odette wherever she went.
Only now, it does not seem so easy to follow.
The light in the window across the way flickers – it is Odette’s form passing before the lamp.
She settles now at her writing slope, lithe form curved over her work.
Cecilia has watched her like this so many times, watched her dress and brush her hair and read sprawled across a chair and, sometimes, Odette watches her back.
Now, Odette looks up and meets her eye. She picks up a pen and stands it upright in the inkwell.
The signal for Cecilia to come over.
It still makes her heart stutter, even now. Odette wants her. Odette needs her.
She slips on her shoes, hooks her skirts into the belt of her dressing gown, and climbs from her window, onto the roof of the bay below, then down a trellis to the ground.
There is no one abroad at this time of night, and she passes unseen across the road and into the grounds of the Fairfax-Waugh house.
It is not so easy a climb this side, the house standing taller, but ivy winds wild up the brickwork, clematis and wisteria vying for space and proffering hand and foot holds.
Cecilia slips at last through the open window into Odette’s room.
Odette waits, hands twisted together, a little distance away, as though she has forgotten how they can be together.
Cecilia will remind her.
She takes Odette in her arms and kisses her firmly, her mouth, her jaw, pulls their bodies flush and sets Odette steady. Here, she tries to say, this has not changed. This will never change.
‘Do you think the photograph will turn out well?’ is the first thing Odette says when Cecilia draws back.
Photograph? It takes her a moment to place Odette’s thoughts. ‘Of course it will,’ she says.
‘There are so few of her, and what if one day I forget what she looks like?’
‘You won’t.’
‘I will. I can barely remember my grandparents.’
‘She’s your mother. You’ll remember.’
‘Do you remember your father?’
It is an abrupt and cruel question, and Cecilia smiles reflexively to hide the hurt.
No, she does not remember what her father looks like.
How can she when he died before she was born?
Odette knows this. She means nothing by it.
There are a handful of photographs that her mother jealously guards in an album, and Cecilia has committed each of them to memory; she has quizzed Leo on what little he can tell her and turned each image – gentle hands, fierce temper, bright eyes – into something like a whole man. But she does not remember him.
Odette picks at her cuticles. It is painful to watch.
Cecilia takes her hands. ‘It has only been a few hours. It is still such a shock—’
‘Oh, do not try to be kind to me – I cannot stand it.’ Odette snatches away her fingers, paces like a cat.
‘If I cry, I don’t know if I will ever stop.
I can feel it all there, waiting for me, something so big it’s like an ocean that will drown me if I ever stop kicking, so please, Cecilia, do not ask me to stop kicking. ’
She presses her hands to her temples, pulling at the fine curls that are escaping their pins.
Cecilia comes to her again, kisses her cheek, then her forehead. ‘I ask no such thing. Whatever it is you need from me, I will do it. Tell me.’
Odette’s mouth twists, her full, Cupid’s-bow lips and her fine dark brows drawn together. ‘Distract me.’
This is a request Cecilia knows well. It is a game, their game.
She brings her to a sofa and sits in the corner so that Odette can rest her head in her lap. Cecilia strokes her hair, her eyes drifting around the room, to Lydia’s sketches, the half-finished work Odette has been allowed to keep – La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, Lamia.
‘One day,’ she begins, ‘we will take a train. We will go all the way to the coast.’
‘To Brittany?’ asks Odette, noting which picture Cecilia is looking at. Tristan and Iseult.
‘To Brittany. Cornwall. Ireland. All of it.’
‘No. I don’t like that one. It all ends in death.’
She is not wrong. The stories that Lydia has painted them into court suffering and lovesickness, heartbreak and grief. Now, it seems a folly, inviting in something for which they were not ready.
‘Then what about our flat in Bloomsbury?’ Cecilia asks.
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 will look 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.
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.