Letter 4th October 1898
My darling Odette,
I cannot believe I sit here at Somerville, writing my very first letter to you as a university student.
I miss you terribly, though it has only been a matter of days, but I am unaccustomed to living even one hour without you near.
It is quite taxing. I shall give you a description of my rooms so that you can picture me; please do the same for Newnham, as I dearly wish to hold an image of you there in my head, so that at any moment I can conjure you, like a ghost at a séance.
I am proud of you for going, despite it all. I know this will do us both good.
I am in a building called West, for that is where it lies in the grounds of the college, and we have a great rivalry with the other building, called House.
West is quite charming, and very newly built, so I am only the second or third girl to use my room.
We each have our own bedroom, which is simply but elegantly furnished, and we share sitting rooms and dining rooms, so it is nothing at all like school but far more like being at home.
We also have a paddock and an orchard and a vegetable garden, and some of the girls have already invited me to go punting, and there’s a group who hole up in one of the sitting rooms and give dramatic readings, and I feel quite intimidated of course, but I thought I could read that section of Endymion you always complimented me on – I will try it and report back.
It is very strange to do all this without you.
I could never picture it before, being all on my own, but I find it quite exciting.
I have my books arranged on a shelf and much writing paper and ink in stock, and I have brought the sketch of you and me as dryads and hung it up above my desk.
At dinner the other night, someone mentioned Lydia’s Psyche and Venus, and I was dying to tell her that I modelled Psyche, but I kept quiet because no one likes a brag, and anyway they’d hardly believe me.
It is strange, I find myself missing my mother – I even miss Leo!
I can hear you laughing at me. Of course I miss them, it is natural.
It is only that I thought, being apart from her, I might finally come into some new sense of myself.
But instead I feel as though a stark light has come on in a once dark room, and there I am, exposed, some spineless, wriggling insect.
It is odd to think at least with Mother I always know where I am.
I am sorry. I shouldn’t have written all that. It was thoughtless of me.
I miss Lydia too, very much. I think she would have obtained so much joy from seeing you at Cambridge, I really do.
She would have some clever little story about all the brilliant people who have walked where you now walk, and some little fact about a college building being used for something during the civil war or a Roman general who once bathed in the Cam – that sort of thing, don’t you think?
I must say sorry again, for I write far too much on matters you cannot want my opinion on.
My darling, I think of you all the time. I am pressing my kisses to your forehead (and elsewhere). Please write me a long letter. I want to know every last thing about how you are and what you are doing.
Your ever loving,
Cecilia
*
10th October 1898
Dearest Cecilia,
It brought me such comfort to receive your letter.
I confess I have found it hard to be in a new place that feels so cold and alien.
We are west of the Cam here, while all the major colleges are on the east; there is no one out here with us save Selwyn across the road, but that is full of missionaries and clergy, and people avoid them even more than they avoid me.
I am in my blacks, of course, and send everyone letters on black-edged paper, and half the girls have offered their condolences, which I cannot but find hateful.
I want to snap at them in their simpering faux kindness.
They do not know me; they did not know my mother.
They live their happy, untouched little lives and think themselves so generous for tolerating my ghoulish presence.
It means something to me, that you remember her.
I think, sometimes, that I wish to go home, but then I remember with a sensation like a blow that home is gone. Purely a place of memory. I can never return there. Is it possible to be homesick for a person? A time?
Is this grief?
I think, often, of that awful weekend when Claudine arrived.
Mother fell ill so abruptly. She had always been delicate, but at that moment, it was something quite different.
I should have found some way to help her.
It was all I was good for, helping her. She needed me.
Oh God, she needed me like no one else, and in the end, I let her down, didn’t I?
She told me often that I was her reason to live, and now, she is dead. So I must have done a very bad job.
There is something I must come to. It will seem like a strange turn of conversation, but you must have faith that I write in all seriousness and earnestly wish to hear your sincere response.
Do you remember when you asked in the summer if I believed in ghosts?
I have been thinking on it quite often, and it strikes me that you were so very certain that you did not, and I must know: why are you so sure?
What is it that sets things out so clearly in your mind?
Do not ask me why I have come to this matter – it is not important – but I would know your answer.
Yours always,
Odette
*
11th October 1898
Darling Odette,
A letter from you, at last! I will tell you that when the porter gave me this missive and I saw your hand, I took it straight to my room and did a dance between the bed and desk, in what little space I have.
It is a tonic to hear your voice in my head as I read your words, to think that I hold this piece of paper that once, not so long ago, was in your hands.
I wish I could visit, but they are so strict about what we do and where we go.
I cannot believe there are still weeks and weeks until I see you again.
I have enclosed a list of my lectures and tutorials and notes about what we discuss in each, so that you may consult it at any time and know where I am and what it is I am doing.
Will you send the same by return? My studies are engaging, but I have not found a girl of any fellow-feeling here.
They are pleasant but all quite serious and many study the sciences, and I feel quite stupid when they speak at dinner.
I think you would like it here. Oxford is a lively place; there is always someone about at any time of day, and the Ashmolean is so close it makes me think of our own little flat in Bloomsbury that is waiting for us one day. I would be happier, I think, if you were here. It is a little lonely.
I have prevaricated because I wish to linger in the goodness of having news from you for a little while, but I must say also that your letter has made me so unhappy.
You must not think like this, Odette. Your mother was ill; there was nothing any of us could have done about it, and it is certainly not remotely reasonable to think that you could have done any more to help her than a doctor.
She loved you and she needed you, and she would want you to be happy, to live your life fully and not lose yourself to grief. Of this I feel quite certain.
I must, then, come on to your question as to the matter of ghosts.
I will not call it strange, for I do take it with the gravity you give it – but I suppose I do not know what to say.
It is not something I have given much thought to, but perhaps it is simply that I cannot see any way in which they are real.
They seem like such an old-fashioned notion to me, something from a world before the Reformation, the idea of souls in limbo for whom we must still fight.
But I think I understand why you have asked me this.
Lydia has been gone such a short time; she is still so alive in so many ways.
I have read stories of widows seeing their husbands or hearing their voices from another room.
I cannot imagine what it is to lose a mother, but I know what it is to lose a father, and they stay alive in your heart for so long.
But it does not mean they are a ghost.
I do not think you haunted, Odette. Only grieving.
Darling, please will you send a list of your engagements so I can see if there is any way I can manage a visit?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together.
Your Cecilia
*
20th October 1898
Dearest Cecilia,
Cambridge is a cursed place; I feel it deep in my bones.
When I rise in the morning, there is a damp mist everywhere, turning us all into demons from some level of Signore Dante’s Inferno.
The men are everywhere in their black flapping robes, clicking and fluttering, and I feel as though I have come amongst a colony of bats, in some hell-fire cave of damnation.
I am not sleeping.
Sleep seems so impossible.
I feel as though my mind is not my own, as though I cannot bring reason to bear on my own thoughts.
I think that I am well and capable, and then I find myself at the back of a lecture with tears streaming down my face in the most humiliating manner, with nothing at all to have set me off, and I have to excuse myself before I become a topic of conversation.
I am troubled. I wish I could tell you all that is in my mind, but I fear you would think I have lost my senses, and I fear that I may have.
[The following is crossed out with deep incisions of the pen nib.]
I think I see things. Her. Oh God, she has not left.
You are wrong about my mother. I do not think she would release me so unbegrudgingly.
Do not visit. I do not want you to see me in the state I am in now.
I think I have become quite selfish and utterly unable to tolerate the company of others.
I stay up late into the night reading, for I do not wish to be myself.
I hate joy in any form I see. I hate laughter or singing or any softness that I cannot have.
People are more than strangers; they are some other species.
Unmarked. Naive. They think death will not touch them.
They walk as we all walk, on a narrow ledge above a great drop, but they do not see it – they do not know it is something to be feared. But I see now. I know.
There is horror in this world, and I do not understand how I can continue to live in it.
O
*
21st October 1898
My darling Odette,
I am so relieved to hear from you. I must confess, the delay in receiving a letter from you put me ill at ease.
I cannot bear to think of you without a dear friend in such a difficult time.
You must know that I am thinking of you always, and when you are awake late at night, I am awake also, reading our dear Idylls, though I find it means less without you here.
I am not sure I know what to do with myself without you.
What a silly thing to say! You don’t need to hear my nonsense now.
Yesterday, I went to Blackwell’s and bought a very fine volume of Keats, and I enclose it here. I have underlined passages where I felt particularly moved, and if we cannot be together, I can still share this with you. No, no, go not to Lethe, my dear Odette.
I do not know what else to write. It seems banal to tell you about my days. The work is difficult, and I find little pleasure in it. My rooms are always cold, and I have chilblains on my hands, which Mother would surely comment on most cruelly.
This university business is not what I thought it would be. I feel very stupid for being so naive about it. Mother and Leo did try to warn me, but I thought I was better than their idea of me. I fear I am not.
Would it be mad for us to run away?
I have been thinking of it. I have seen advertisements for typing courses, which we could both take, and then we could work as secretaries or clerks, and we could be together, which would surely be so much better than this horrible separation. What do you think? Am I being too wild?
Write to me soon.
Your Cecilia
*
31st October 1898
[There is no addressee, and the paper seems to have been scrunched up as though to be thrown away, then smoothed out again before being sent.]
Remember, remember. Do you ever think about all those Catholics burning up, being chopped into pieces?
Are they right? Do we all suffer after death?
Or is it just Hell and the Devil torturing us while we live?
The children push Guys down the street, bellowing for pennies with their frightful burdens, a human figure all twisted and cruel and unnatural. I am sick with the horror of it.
O
*
1st November 1898
My darling Odette,
I am worried about you. Are you still attending lectures? Leo says you have not written to anyone in Hampstead since you arrived, which is your right, I suppose, only it does make me worry more. Our minds can become traitors when we do not sleep, and all manner of things can seem – real.
Is there someone in your college to whom you can speak? The vice-principal or some other mistress?
Please tell me when I may visit; only give me the word, and I will pack my things and take a train at once. I am always at your disposal. I think of you hourly. I cannot believe I have left you when you must need me so.
Oh, Odette, please tell me and I will be there at once.
Your loving,
Cecilia
*
9th November 1898
My darling Odette,
I have had no reply, and really, I worry very much about you. Please, when you have a moment, can you send me one message?
Yours always,
Cecilia
*
14th November 1898
Oh God, Odette, Mother has just written to me with the news. Are you all right? It must be an unbearable shock. She says Uncle George has written to you first, and surely the letter has reached you by now? I did not even know they had left the country – did he tell you?
I did not think it could be possible – the Marriage to a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill has failed enough times that we should certainly know if it had passed, but Mother has enclosed something from Leo who says it is legal because Claudine is still resident in Germany, and since she and Uncle George could marry there, then it must be accepted here.
I do not know what to say.
Odette, please reply to me.
I love you.
Cecilia
*
19th November 1898
[There is no signature, the ink is blotchy and the lettering spidery and unsure.]
I don’t understand. I don’t understand this.
What have they done?
I think I must go mad