Chapter 7
Odette
GREAT CLOUDS OF INSECTS rise off the stagnant moat, here and there flecked with the iridescent blue of dragonflies feasting.
The roses and hydrangeas in the garden tumble and riot across the flowerbeds, and in the fields, the sheep bleat against the relentless sun.
The whole household retreats inside, shutters closed.
‘Where’s my father?’ Odette asks Leo, when she finds him trotting downstairs in a fresh change of clothes after his ride.
‘Gone to his study, I think.’
Odette turns to go, but Leo stops her.
‘You’re off to Cambridge then.’
‘Yes.’
‘You think you’ll be all right there, on your own?’
Odette wrinkles her nose. ‘I think I can manage.’
Leo coughs, shifts his weight. ‘I’m sure you can.
You’ve always been better at the practical stuff than Cessy.
What I mean to say is—’ He coughs again.
‘Look, the fact is I would feel as though I hadn’t done my proper duty if I didn’t tell you that you can always write to me, if you get into any sort of trouble. ’
Odette flushes. ‘Leo—’
‘Let me finish. I know we haven’t been all that close recently, and I’m not your brother, but in another way I am, you see, so I thought I’d best make that clear.’
He looks at her with such an awful earnestness that Odette feels a flush of guilt. It has not occurred to her that perhaps the closeness that has grown between her and Cecilia has had the effect of shutting Leo out from a sense of belonging he once had.
She squeezes his hand. ‘I do know that. We’ll both be fine. I promise.’
He nods, pleased to be dismissed.
Odette tracks her father to the island of his desk.
‘Mother did well today,’ she says lightly. ‘I think this new piece will be a triumph.’
George continues to read the letter in his hand but acknowledges her with a brief glance.
Odette considers sitting, but it feels too formal, so instead she browses the shelves of books, the bound issues of The Westminster Review and The Athenaeum, volumes of Catullus and Seneca that she has copied out too many times to recall, sat in the corner of his office like another object to display.
Her father would always place her on her own chair at her own writing desk, tell her how good it was to see her, then bend his head to his own tasks.
He is so busy, of course, she should be grateful for the scant time he gives her, and it is something special to be his companion, his helpmeet.
She knows she was a good daughter, quiet and studious and never childish or demanding.
She is proud to have managed what so few children do, smug, even, that she so quickly cast off her naivety.
He makes less and less space for her in his world as she has grown older, and she wonders what it is she could do now to please him.
Not become burdensome like her mother, that she knows.
She thought Cambridge would gain his approval, it is independent and intellectual, and that is the world they can comfortably inhabit together, but he takes little interest in it.
She has meant, more than once, to ask him if he would go up with her to visit her new college – but she wants him to offer, not for her to have to ask, and so she has left it unsaid.
‘She has me as Lancelot,’ Odette continues. ‘But I imagine she’ll paint Leo’s face in over mine, unless she’s trying to be particularly scandalous.’
‘Art is always scandalous,’ says George, folding the letter and tucking it away. ‘Otherwise, there is no point to it.’
Odette preens at saying something right. ‘I quite agree. One can hardly call the heaps of cherubs on a Valentine card art.’
George laughs. ‘Ice cream and a day trip for the masses, everyone is comfortable and nothing changes.’
Odette warms to her topic. ‘I suppose I could make a fortune if I went into writing sentimental poetry or some sort of ladies’ advice manual on how to make your underthings smell like roses at any time of the month.
’ His expression shifts – she has lost him there – too much women’s business.
Quickly, she continues. ‘I hope Aunt Claudine’s visit won’t get in the way of Mother’s work. You know she can be so sensitive.’
‘I don’t see why it should.’
She stops at a bust of Seneca. ‘How long do you think she’ll be staying?’
‘I don’t know; it’s quite up to her. As a member of the family, she is entitled to stay here.’
Odette cuts a sidelong glance at her father. ‘That hardly seems to have been the case before now. Neither you nor Mother ever speak of her.’
‘Of course we do.’
No. They do not.
‘But why did you not tell any of us?’ says Odette. ‘I worry it has upset Mother.’
Her father laughs lightly. ‘A badly boiled egg at breakfast upsets your mother. This is a lovely surprise for everyone. It’s about time bygones were bygones.’
An invitation to smooth things over, to cast her mother as hysterical, unruly, and congratulate themselves on having mastered their animal passions.
Odette finds that she does not want to accept it.
There is some shifting in the ground beneath her she cannot quite identify.
‘Aunt Claudine thinks so, too?’
Her father ignores her. ‘I think it would be nice for you to have an older woman around. Your mother is not someone you can look to for any guidance. You live a very lonely life.’
Her cheeks flush. ‘I’m not lonely.’ She cannot work up the courage to contradict him about Lydia, and indeed she cannot honestly do so – but she will not admit he is right.
‘George.’ Claudine comes through the door, looking down at a notebook in her hands.
‘The brougham has gone to collect someone called Rutherford and someone called King from the station already, but there is absolutely no writing paper in any of the rooms yet, and the housekeeper tells me there were no orders for any in the first place. If you want me to take over running this party, then you have to let me manage the servants how I want. Oh—’
She stops abruptly when she sees Odette but makes no apology for the interruption. Odette feels somehow that it is she who has made the faux pas and intruded where she is not welcome.
‘What a fortuitous opportunity,’ says George. ‘Why don’t you take Odette in the Victoria and pick up some paper in town? Odette can show you where everything is, and I’m sure the two of you would enjoy some time to get to know each other.’
Odette’s expression hardens, and she is distantly amused to find a mirror in Claudine’s face.
‘I should stay to welcome the guests,’ says Claudine.
George smiles in a flattening way. ‘Lydia and I can do that.’
‘I am not the staff.’ Her voice is stiff with a warning that Odette’s father does not seem to detect.
‘Don’t worry about that; no one stands on ceremony here. If you’re worried about the paper, it won’t take you a minute to find.’
There is some silent battle in Claudine, and Odette waits, breath held, to see which side will win. Eventually, Claudine nods to her. ‘I will meet you in the hall when you are dressed properly.’
Odette blushes again. She had thought she was dressed nicely, in a plain but clean day dress. ‘As you wish.’
All the way to Sudbury, Claudine leans forwards at regular intervals to order the driver to increase the pace, then settles back under the leather hood for a short while before tapping the driver on the shoulder again in impatience.
It is sweltering under cover; the hood keeps off the blazing sun but traps the hot air, and Odette is sweating copiously between her breasts, along the length of her spine and the backs of her knees.
Occasionally, a bead will roll down her forehead and catch on her eyebrow.
Surely Claudine must be subject to the same forces of nature, but, if anything, she looks pale and drawn.
‘I have been away from England so long I had forgotten these dowdy little houses,’ says Claudine, assessing the low line of cottages that cling to the side of the road. ‘No wonder English people are all so parochial, closed up in sodden little boxes.’
She speaks with a light yet pointed tone, as though delivering a great witticism, then looks to Odette for a response.
‘I think the stone is pretty. It is like the houses are part of the landscape itself.’ Usually, when she is with either parent, she is meant to smooth matters, to keep alive the light when the world is painted dark.
Claudine laughs archly. ‘I suppose a peasant living in a hovel is as old as the landscape.’
‘I have been visiting with baskets at Christmas, and they do keep their places very clean, even if they are poor.’
Claudine’s jaw tightens, and she does not speak again.
Odette looks at her knees, heart fast with anxiety. A misstep – a stupid one. She does not know how to read Claudine or what it is her aunt wants from her. Agreement with her judgement, perhaps, but even then, she has the sense that Claudine’s problem is with Odette herself.
The carriage slows as they reach the edge of town; a crowd has gathered in the street with some commotion, some in black, and more wear black armbands.
A woman stands at the front of a cottage, hands covering her face.
The door opens, and a coffin is carried out to be placed on a wheeled bier that stands waiting.
It is a cheap thing, with only an old shawl for a pall cloth.
It is a small coffin, and Odette thinks, unbidden, of the girl that Leo mentioned who drowned in the Stour.
Then, of Cecilia submerged in the bath. Lydia changing the myth to drown Elaine, sunk by her love.
God, please let her mother finish the piece. Please let her be true to her word.
The bier is wheeled into the middle of the road, and a line of mourners forms behind it. It passes one side of their carriage, close enough that she could reach out to touch the ash, and then it is gone, and the procession streams past.
The driver gees the horses into movement.
‘There is a stationer’s on Market Hill,’ Odette explains. ‘They’ll have letter paper, though it’s only plain.’
‘Yes, I do know.’
‘You know Sudbury?’
‘What a question. Of course I know Sudbury. I grew up in Herne House.’
Odette blushes. How stupid of her.
She has a thin grasp on her mother’s lineage; she knows that Lydia – and, she supposes, Claudine – were orphaned at a young age and raised as wards of an unmarried family friend, whose nephew George was.
Neither of her parents speak much of their pasts and she had not pictured them all together at Herne House.
But of course they must have been, and it is only her childish myopia that has blinded her to this obvious truth.
‘I didn’t realise.’
‘If you ask no questions of others, you will learn little.’
She is saved from further conversation by their arrival at the stationer’s.
Claudine waits for the driver to offer his hand while Odette drops down to the street without thinking.
The heat is oppressive, with little breeze finding its way through the streets; the smell of standing water rises from the meadows nearby, and the manure, dried quickly in the sun, is enough to make Odette’s eyes sting.
The stationer’s interior is dark: displays of cards and envelopes, pens, nibs, ink, wax, twine, are arranged behind and in front of a counter placed across the shop. At it sits a woman a little older than Claudine, who fans herself with a sense of futility.
Before either of them can speak, the woman’s expression abruptly changes, and her face opens up in wonder. ‘Miss Hutton? As I live and breathe, it’s like seeing a ghost – pardon my frankness.’
Claudine does not smile. ‘I’m afraid I cannot return the compliment. I do not remember having met you before.’
‘You wouldn’t, but we all knew you up at the house. It has to be – oh, the best part of twenty years since you all but disappeared. Someone said you’d gone into a convent, but my Fred says you were away to the Continent.’
‘Yes. I have been in Germany. It suited me better to be somewhere more cultured.’
It is a close to the conversation; Odette can tell, but the shopkeeper cannot.
‘There – I’ll tell my Fred he had the right of it. Only, we were all so shocked, waiting for the banns to be read at church any day, and then you were up and vanished.’
Claudine’s expression is cold. ‘We require letter paper. And a supply of ink, if you have anything decent.’ Her voice is sharp enough this time that the shopkeeper understands the message and busies herself with bringing out samples.
The banns? A wedding expected? Odette files away this piece of information as she studies Claudine out of the corner of her eye.
Each type of paper in turn is dismissed as plain, low quality, inferior.
‘What a trial it is to do anything out of the city,’ says Claudine, removing her gloves to touch a sample. ‘This is for guests, not the clerk at the workhouse.’
The shopkeeper has gone pink, and she bends over to rummage in a low drawer.
‘This is the best we have, brought all the way from London.’ She lays out thick cream paper, so fine it is like silk to the touch.
‘I like it,’ offers Odette. ‘It’s so smooth, I am sure it will write well.’
The shopkeeper wraps their purchase, and Odette carries it back to the carriage.
Once they have passed the last of the houses and are back amongst the open fields, corn swaying high and golden, Claudine speaks. ‘I don’t appreciate being condescended to.’
It is like a stone has dropped through Odette’s stomach. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I had been condescending.’
‘You undermined me in front of the shopkeeper. I will not allow myself to be humiliated publicly, especially not by an ill-mannered child.’
Odette is unpleasantly aware of how close she sits to Claudine, that only a few layers of cotton provide a barrier between herself and someone she abruptly realises does not like her. ‘I really am sorry,’ she says quietly.
They sit in icy silence until the gables of Herne House finally crest over the hedgerows. Odette stares at her knees as she has done before and, as she does with her mother, finds herself letting her mind detach from her body and float up through the leather hood and into the hazy sky.