Chapter 4
Odette
HER MOTHER’S STUDIO IS HOT, despite the doors propped ajar and the windows wound open to their fullest. Though built as a conservatory, it does the job Lydia needs: every inch is bathed in natural light.
Canvases are propped against the walls in varying stages of completion, broken easels stacked to be repaired or become firewood – whichever strikes Lydia as fitting – and oil paints scattered in the drawers of an index card cabinet.
In the corners are piles of dresses, lengths of velvet and silk, swags of cloth flowers and leaves, vases, crowns, swords, jewels, arrows, coins, goblets, and a large standing mirror, like the prop room of some London theatre.
Odette’s mother is, as she suspected, on the chaise-longue tucked into a corner, alongside a short bookshelf and a card table.
Lydia is still in her nightdress, a shawl tucked around her shoulders, her chestnut hair lank from lack of washing.
Dotted on the table and shelves are apple cores dried to leather; a near-empty bottle of red wine is half hidden behind one table leg, and a fur of mould grows in the teacups littered about.
George always says that Lydia is too fragile to suffer the maids in her studio, though he likes to point out the mess, as though noticing is just as noble an act as doing anything to help.
‘Angel?’
Odette perches at her feet. ‘Mother. Are you well?’
Lydia closes her eyes in a grimace. ‘My headaches are like the Devil himself has fixed a belt around my temples and is squeezing me until I break. Nothing touches them.’ Lydia always has a headache, or a stomach ache, or her eyes are sensitive to the light, or she is too tired to come to dinner, or do whatever it is she has promised to do.
‘You always seem so bright and easy when you have a headache. I do not know how you do it.’ Odette plucks the fabric of her skirt.
It is not a competition, she thinks, but she knows there is no use saying anything like that to her mother.
It is a competition, and Lydia will always make sure she is losing.
‘I found your sister in the morning room,’ says Odette, for want of a better way of broaching the matter.
She waits to see if her mother will respond, but Lydia only sinks further into the chaise-longue, as though she cannot bear to carry the burden of her own body.
Odette tries again. ‘I didn’t think you were speaking to each other.’
‘I have always been willing to speak to her,’ says Lydia, then stops herself. ‘It isn’t important. She is here now, and I don’t want to get in the way of you having your own relationship with her.’
This is such a baffling statement Odette does not at first know how to reply. What relationship? Her loyalty is to her mother, not this stranger.
‘Will she be staying that long?’ she asks.
Lydia doesn’t look at her. ‘Ask your father.’
Odette wonders if Lydia thinks she is effectively concealing whatever this secret is.
There is so plainly something that neither of her parents wishes to acknowledge directly, but for all their careful obfuscation, the shape of the creature behind shows through.
It is maddening to see it plainly and yet be told there is nothing there at all.
Lydia opens her arms in a too-familiar gesture, and Odette submits to be drawn to her grasp.
This is how it is. This is the only way it can be, with her mother.
Lydia is lost at sea, and Odette is the life raft.
‘Never too old to be held by your mother,’ she says. ‘When you were little, it was the only way to calm you down.’
Odette makes a non-committal sound. The suggestion that she is not calm when she has done nothing but ask simple questions. There is some rising noise inside her, like the drone of cattle, too many voices lifting at once until it is unbearable, loud enough to fill her chest.
So Odette speaks. Not about her real life, or anything she feels or thinks, or her complicated, agonising love for Cecilia, or how she fears leaving for university on her own, or how tense she is with so many people always in the house, servants and guests coming and going, how she doesn’t know how to behave in front of them, cannot work out what they want from her, how she cowers and tenses like a hunted animal and only finds solace in a closed door.
She tells her, instead, of the information Newnham have sent to her, of the lectures she will attend on Latin and Greek, of the papers she is expected to write, of the accommodation prepared for her and the rules set down about how she must live.
She talks about what she might pack in her trunk, what books she will take, what she is reading now for pleasure.
A carefully penned portrait of a life.
It is a curious split she finds in herself: one part urgent in the need for some aspect of herself that her mother does not know, another in anguish to lose a moment of her attention. Her mother’s eye is always wandering towards her own pain, and it would be all too easy to lose her entirely.
The question is: which can she bear? The loss of self or the loss of her mother?
‘There is something I have been meaning to tell you,’ says Lydia.
Odette stiffens. ‘About Aunt Claudine?’
‘No. Put her from your mind. I would like to find a way to give you some money. If a woman is to be free, she must have her own means.’
Odette is almost too stunned to speak. It is a rush of frantic thought and feeling all at once. Is this real? Is it one of her mother’s fantasies? Will she remember this tomorrow? Can she be stupid enough to believe her?
After a moment’s deliberation, she asks, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I have come up with something of a plan. You know how long Eddie has been pressing me to do a show, and he says his friend, Mr King at the Jermyn Street Gallery, will gladly find space. There are so many pieces cluttering up the place here; I could sell them all for you.’
Odette’s heart pinches with a pain that silences her at first. It is a gift and a burden. ‘That is – that is too much. Are you sure you could part with them? And a show . . .’
Lydia smiles, holds out a hand. Odette takes it, feeling the cool, smooth skin of her mother’s fingers as she squeezes hers so faintly.
‘You’re such a lovely girl. You don’t know what it means to me that you have found something you are passionate about in going to Cambridge. You are so independent and sharp; I am so useless.’
If Lydia struggles, is lacking, suffers, it is only ever because Odette is golden, good, strong. It makes Odette wonder who her mother was before her. If it is Odette’s presence that casts her mother so deeply into shadow, then, without her, did she stand in the light?
It is as though they can exist only as two sides of one coin, and Lydia has decided that she must always be in the dark.
‘I can’t accept that much,’ says Odette.
‘It is my decision.’
There is nothing Odette can say to that. Thank you is too transactional. ‘If you are sure.’
‘You can always come to me. There will always be a room for you here, whatever happens. You are my girl.’
Lydia squeezes her tighter, and Odette feels suddenly repulsed. It is too confusing, these feelings of love and revulsion co-mingled within her.
How is it possible to love and to hate the same person so completely?