Chapter 6
Cecilia
THE SECRET BEATS LIKE a second heart beneath Cecilia’s chest.
A day or two passes, the mellow light of autumn slowing time and drawing the nights closer. There is so much to do. Death is a messy business.
She sits with a stack of black-bordered note-cards and writes to the world of Lydia’s passing.
Someone must do it, and the task has fallen to her.
A clergyman, with a punched nose and widow’s peak, all in black like a crow, comes to discuss the order of service.
The undertaker arrives with a bag of samples.
She is struck by the mundanity of their tasks, the separate world they have been pushed into. The chores. The detail.
And everywhere, lies.
Each time she looks at Claudine and Uncle George, she cannot bear the pressure that builds within her. She must tell Odette. It is unconscionable that she is keeping this from her.
But then, as she stands at the French windows that open onto the meadow-garden, rich with late-blooming flowers and the vines that climb the stone boundary wall, and again, as she replaces a book of Coleridge onto the shelves that teem with fine leather and gilt and endless, endless dreams – it strikes Cecilia that she might die if she were ever forced to leave this place.
There are two deaths waiting for her: the loss of Odette, and the loss of her safety.
For so long, they have been one and the same, but now they have been split apart, and she does not know which road to follow.
If her mother is right, then without Claudine’s approval, without the continuation of the financial support that Lydia gave, no safe future is possible.
But without Odette, she can see no future at all.
Money and Odette. There must be a way to make these two things be one and the same.
Cecilia and her mother are sorting through a pile of condolence letters when Odette comes out the drawing room to fetch her. Her face is drawn and pinched, her sleep-bruised eyes sunk deep below her brows.
‘There you are,’ she says to Cecilia. ‘They’re starting.’
Penelope lays a hand on Cecilia’s knee beneath the table to fix her in place.
Odette extends her hand.
For now, at least, Odette has authority here.
Cecilia wriggles out of her mother’s grasp and lets Odette lead her through to where the undertaker has laid out examples of wood and handles and name plates.
Claudine stands by the fireplace, stiff-backed and watching.
Uncle George joins them, and the truth is so clear in the way Claudine’s eyes track him around the room, assessing, possessive.
His studied disregard is a little too overdone, even for him.
It is almost unfathomable to Cecilia that this is the same man she has known half her life, that the man she always believed to be benevolent and wise could seemingly so lightly do something so grotesque.
And yet now she knows, she can see it in his every gesture.
Odette seems oblivious to it all, but surely she cannot be.
She lives in this house; this is her father, her aunt.
She must be able to see what is now so obvious to Cecilia.
‘I want whatever is best. What do you think?’ Odette asks the undertaker.
He coughs delicately and indicates a shining plaque in bronze with an elaborate engraving of lilies around the border. ‘We find this design suits a more refined, sensitive taste.’
‘Then we must have that one. And four coaches, at least, with ostrich feathers for all.’
Claudine makes a noise that she smothers quickly.
‘Do you have a comment?’ snaps Odette.
‘An elaborate funeral is old-fashioned. Your mother would have wanted something small, for true friends only.’
Odette laughs, short and harsh. ‘She would not have wanted anything of the sort.’
The truth, Cecilia thinks, is that Lydia would not have been able to make any decision at all about what she wanted. None of this is about Lydia, but then no funeral is ever about the dead.
They all turn to George, King Solomon sat in judgement.
He shifts in his seat. ‘Ah. Well. Ritual has an important role to play.’
Cecilia always wonders how he manages to say so very little of meaning.
It always seemed a little eccentric before, charming in some sort of inaccessible, academic way, but now it feels flat, so clearly inadequate.
For the first time, Cecilia finds herself angry at him.
Odette deserves more. Lydia deserves more.
Claudine is clearly displeased, but she can say nothing more than, ‘Very well. But we must do it quickly. It is no good to linger over these things.’
Indeed, they do not linger at all. The funeral arrangements are decided in a rush of activity over the next day and a half; food is ordered for the wake, the coffin measured and bought, velvet lining and brass handles chosen, a service planned, and a plot paid for.
The coffin arrives the morning of the viewing, and they all gather around to watch as Lydia is lifted from the dining table and placed gently inside the silk and velvet lining like a ring into a jeweller’s box.
Odette clutches onto Cecilia so tightly it leaves finger marks.
She wonders how much Odette is sleeping – if she sleeps at all – for she jumps at the tapping of the maid knocking the stub of a candle from its holder.
There is a distinct smell starting to rise from the body. The staff breathe through their mouths as they come near Lydia, and even Leo coughs into his handkerchief before excusing himself.
‘Flowers,’ declares Cecilia. ‘Should there not be flowers?’
Odette rouses herself. ‘Yes. Flowers. There were always flowers.’
They leave the rest of the household to prepare for the visitors who have been invited to view the body, and go into the garden, with a large basket and a pair of secateurs.
The sky is broad and beautiful, with the glory of a late-September sky when the air is fresh and strong but still made rich from the last of the light.
The dahlia beds are a prism of colour, delicate asters and late-blooming clematis spilling down across the trellis.
They place the basket on the lawn and begin their work.
Cecilia kneels beside Odette, reaching out to each stem and snipping it cleanly. On the wooden fence before her, a deathwatch beetle crawls from its hole and along the grain. A bee alights upon a hedge stake.
‘I’m leaving for Oxford on Saturday,’ she says. She wants to bring the future into the present, bring Odette onto this road she has chosen. ‘When is your train to Cambridge now?’
Odette holds the stem of a pale mauve autumn crocus in her lap. ‘I am not sure.’
‘Have you the ticket already? I can go to the ticket office if you need.’
‘I mean, I’m not sure that I am going at all.’
Cecilia sits back. ‘Of course you are going. What are you talking about?’
‘I don’t rightly know, but how can I? I don’t sleep, I cannot read, I can barely dress myself without crying. How can I do something so momentous when I am like this?’
‘But, by your own logic, would it not be rash to throw away everything you planned, simply because you are “like this”? When it passes, won’t you want to still have a life to go back to?’
Odette cuts the stem before her with viciousness. ‘Passes? I am not sure this will ever pass.’
‘Then why not go anyway? Lydia would have wanted you to.’
Cecilia casts around for something she can say that will pin Odette, keep her within the bounds of the girl she has always known. They have had their plan neatly set out for so long: university, then, somehow, an escape to a life of their own. What would she do without it?
All is in disarray, and Cecilia does not know how to position herself amongst the debris.
‘You do not know what she would have wanted.’ Odette throws down the flower and rises, brushing the grass from her skirt. ‘She was drowning in life and would have taken me with her, if it would have kept us together longer.’
Cecilia scrambles up after her, nicking her hand on the secateurs so that she must pause and suck the small wound before she spills blood upon her clothes.
A white rabbit sits in the centre of the lawn, its side-eye trained on them, its nose twitching. In a flash, it is gone, into the vegetable beds, and Odette is walking stiffly inside, holding the basket of flowers close to her chest.
In the dining room, the coffin has been placed back onto the table with Lydia in it. The room is empty, and Cecilia closes the door behind them while Odette sets the basket down and idly takes up the round head of a hydrangea.
‘Please,’ says Cecilia, ‘don’t make any rash decisions about Cambridge. I don’t think it would do you good to stay here with – Claudine.’
This at least seems to reach Odette. She knuckles her eyes. There are dark-blue smudges on the fragile skin beneath. None of them have been sleeping, but Odette seems to have been half pulled into the underworld.
‘Perhaps not. Though I think she is trying, in her own way.’
Cecilia purses her lips. ‘Do you?’
‘Father says I must try harder to understand how difficult this has all been for her. She has been abroad for so long; she has come back to quite a group of strangers. It must be hard to feel part of the family, as an outsider.’
Now, here is the moment. She must say it.
Cecilia’s mouth is dry. Words abandon her.
‘We must find a way to rub along now, I suppose,’ says Odette.
Cecilia is a coward. A complete and utter coward.
She does not want to hurt Odette, she tells herself. She is protecting her. She will find out soon enough. Why take these last moments of ignorance from her?
So instead, she kisses her, less in passion than succour.
Cecilia will find the money for her and Odette to escape, and then whatever it is their parents do or do not do will not matter.
‘Here,’ says Cecilia, when they draw back. Fishing in a pocket, she pulls out two coins.
Odette smiles, small and tentative, but the first one Cecilia has seen in days.
Gently, Odette places the coins on her mother’s eyes, then together they dress the body and the coffin in the flowers and greenery, until it is teeming with colour and verdant with life. The scent of sap covers the rot that has spread throughout the room.
‘It is like something she would have painted,’ says Odette, and then, without warning, the tears come flooding out.
Cecilia holds her tightly, as though they can weather the storm together and will survive by the strength of their grip.
Their moment is broken only by the sound of the doorbell, and a sudden flurry of movement in the hallway.
Visiting time has come.
Odette turns at once to the wall, scrubbing her eyes, and Cecilia takes a few paces away just as Claudine comes in.
Behind her in the hallway, there is a mass of hats and scarves and coats being removed from heads and shoulders, the jabbering sound of conversation and even muted laughter, and George there in the middle of it, alive in the clasp of his circle.
Claudine surveys the flowers with distaste, which snaps to anger when she sees the coins on Lydia’s eyes. ‘What is this? Get rid of those at once before people see.’
Odette stands very still. ‘She is my mother. Why should I not do as I please?’
‘And she was my sister. Don’t act as though I have no feeling in this. Remove them. At once.’
For a moment, Cecilia thinks she may challenge Claudine – and oh God, has the time come already for Cecilia to declare whose side she is on? – but then Odette goes slowly to her mother’s face and plucks away the coins.
The Fairfax-Waughs’ circle – Liberal politicians, art critics, poets and professors – crowd into the dining room and make unbearable conversation, rehearsing the same stale dialogue over glasses of brandy and sherry.
George appears relieved to disappear into the safety of friendships that demand no real intimacy.
It all reminds Cecilia of her mother’s threats a few days before.
Odette is surrounded by people offering their condolences and wringing her hand and telling her in detail who her mother was, as though Odette does not know best of all.
They admire Lydia’s paintings and sketches, which cover the walls.
Odette’s face is in more than half, the model forever at hand for whatever Lydia was struck to try.
Cecilia’s face is there, too, but it is as though she is invisible.
They cannot see her beside Odette in a sketch of Lancelot coming to Guinevere – Odette as Guinevere and Cecilia the maid who tends to her – or in the painting that hangs above the sideboard, of Cecilia’s Cassandra, put to death by Odette’s Clytemnestra on the return of Agamemnon, modelled by Leo.
She is drawn again to that painting, thinking of the cold spring day when Lydia dressed them in sheets and muslin, put a tin sword in Leo’s hand and knocked Cecilia to the floor to bring her to a position of supplication and despair.
She is alive there, at least, in the moment captured in ink and oil. In the memory.
A gasp of horror snaps through the room, and Cecilia comes back to the present at once.
All stare at Lydia’s face.
Her eyes are open.
There are mutterings of shock. A woman slumps into a chair, and there is a general drawing back from the body.
Odette trembles, one hand holding onto the coffin, but a neighbour, a doctor, closes Lydia’s eyelids, explaining how the muscles of the face contract after death and it has been known for a corpse to wink.
But Cecilia is watching none of them.
Claudine is at the door, one hand searching behind her for the handle, the other clutched to her chest in fear. She is ashen – the shock, of course, but it is more than that. She looks as though it is Judgement Day and the dead have risen to give their final testimony.
Odette is so caught up in herself that she does not see it. Cecilia glances between Claudine and Lydia, at the rictus of some unnamed emotion that fixes Claudine’s expression.
Guilt at taking her dead sister’s husband, perhaps.
Cecilia cannot rightly place it.
All she knows is that she must act with caution.
She only wishes Odette would do the same.