Chapter 7
Odette
THE COFFIN SITS IN the hall now, open and covered in a black velvet pall with a white velvet border.
Odette has chosen the old-fashioned shape that resembles a person, rather than the new oblong style that reduces a body into four straight lines.
They are burying her mother; there is no need to hide it.
The dining room has been turned over now to the funeral breakfast, the mourners gathered together in their black, passing out scarves and hatbands and eating from the great piles of funeral biscuits that Mrs Binx has produced.
There is a buzzing in Odette’s head as she comes to the open coffin.
Her mother’s eyes are closed.
Of course they are.
Her cheeks have sunken in now, and her skin has become pinched and grey. She is dead.
She is dead she is dead she is dead.
And the thought strikes Odette, brief and giddy.
Odette is free.
Her father appears on the stairs, followed by Claudine, both in black, George holding his top hat, around which a crêpe band has already been tied.
He is as hard to read as ever, but she notes that he appears dishevelled; his tie is set a little crooked and his waistcoat is misbuttoned.
Perhaps his grief does work its way through.
The undertaker comes from the dining room with two of his staff, ready to fix the lid in place, and Penelope, Cecilia and Leo follow.
Penelope passes around a pair of scissors, and they take turns to cut off a lock of hair. Odette’s fingers tremble so badly that her cut is jagged and a fine spray of hair falls across the shroud. She tucks the remaining strands in a handkerchief.
‘You must go to the jeweller who handled my own dear Harry’s hair with such care.’ Penelope indicates the brooch pinned to her breast, which has a plaited lock of hair beneath glass.
The undertaker’s men place the lid and set to nailing it down.
Odette is struck by a burst of hysterics rising within her, the urge to scream and beat her fists against these horrible men who have shut her mother into a box.
Cecilia holds her back, a rigid presence at her side.
It is done.
Penelope looks at her pityingly. ‘Come sit with Cecilia and me; we can watch the procession leave from the drawing room.’
‘I am going with them.’
Penelope looks between Odette and her father in surprise. ‘No one wants a crying woman disrupting the service. You are of course deeply affected by it all, which makes you act so, but if you cannot control yourself—’
‘“Act so”? What have I done that is so unreasonable?’ demands Odette, cheeks hot. Who is Penelope to talk to her of grief? Who are any of them?
Penelope laughs uncertainly. ‘I only meant—’
‘What, that I should stay here and cry? That I should carry on this pretence that we do not suffer as badly as if we, too, had died? No, I suppose none of you do suffer like that. It is no pretence.’
‘Oh, let her go,’ says Leo. ‘It’s Lydia. She wouldn’t have cared a jot for convention.’
‘That’s enough,’ says Claudine.
Odette sets her jaw. ‘I am going.’
They all look to George, who seems to shrink within his clothes. ‘Very well. We will all go.’ If this is all Odette gets, she will take it.
The front door is opened, and as the pallbearers arrange themselves to lift the coffin, the whole party take their places.
Leo squeezes Odette’s arm as he passes. ‘Buck up, old thing,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t make a show.’
Odette keeps Cecilia close, as though she is the only tether preventing her from drifting away.
‘I am not unreasonable, am I?’ whispers Odette.
Cecilia does not reply, looking instead at the floor, at the flowers, anywhere but Odette’s face. Odette means to ask something more, but the procession begins to move out, and she is silenced.
On either side of the front door stand two mutes, with their old-fashioned wrapped hats and sticks and streamers, like something her mother would have painted. They lead the group, followed by the featherman, then the hearse with the coffin placed carefully within.
Coaches are lined up, four horses a piece. George, Odette and Claudine take the first, and Odette snatches up Cecilia’s hand to drag her in as well, leaving Penelope and Leo to take the next. There are several empty coaches behind, sent by those who could not attend in person.
It is a short, uncomfortable ride to Highgate Cemetery, where they dismount and file into the chapel for the service. After psalms and lessons are read, they move to the grave-side, where fresh-turned earth lets out a loamy, damp smell of rotting leaves and rain.
Lydia’s coffin is committed into the earth, and the clergyman continues to speak, but Odette hears none of it.
That buzzing has come back into her ears, with a sense that she is far away from her unreal body.
Is she crying again? She cannot make sense of anything she is feeling.
Do her shoes pinch? Is she dying? They have taken her mother and put her in a box, and now they will put that box into the ground and she will be left there forever.
It is mad. It is all mad. How can they do this to her?
How can they be so done with a person, so certain her time with them is over?
She has been thrust through a door that she did not know was there and has found herself alone, cold and frightened and unsure how she will survive.
There is no poetry here. No art, no music. There is only this bleak, sharp reality, ugly and ill-formed and discordant, all laid bare by this one truth:
What is she to do without her mother?