Rottenheart

Chapter 3

Cecilia

THERE ARE FLOWERS ON Penelope’s dress. It is a fine print, delicate lavender and pinks, with a foaming spill of blossom along the sleeve and across the hip. Cecilia follows the curl of a vine over slender stripes, tracking lily and narcissus and peony.

‘Cecilia?’

Blossom like Blodeuwedd, a girl made from flowers. It sounds peaceful, she thinks, to be a creature of broom and oak and meadowsweet. Of soft petal and perfume.

‘Cecilia, are you listening to me?’ Penelope pinches the inside of her arm.

‘Yes, Mother.’

Claudine and Penelope look at her expectantly. The three of them stand in Penelope’s dressing room, a sharp December wind cutting in through the loose window frame.

Claudine has been as good as her word: Cecilia will not have to report on Odette directly.

It has all been arranged. She is to persuade Odette to visit the Jermyn Street Gallery, with the idea that such a familiar sort of environment may prompt some weakness in Odette that causes her to speak more freely.

Penelope and Claudine will take up a position where they may wait unobserved; Cecilia is to draw Odette to this location and induce her to talk.

It is all so simple when they say it. Betrayal. Deception. Manipulation.

‘You have the tickets?’ asks Claudine.

‘Yes.’

‘And you know where we will be?’ Claudine’s gaze pins Cecilia like a specimen in a display case. There is nowhere for her to run.

‘Behind the screens in the third gallery,’ repeats Cecilia. She has had it explained enough times that she can close her eyes and picture the exact spot, the clack of heels on the parquet, the winter daylight through the high windows, the hum of voices.

‘Make sure you are there before you speak of anything serious,’ instructs Penelope. ‘If she spills her heart to you on the way or after, you must tell us, but it is most important to encourage her to talk when we can hear. Bring up her mother, her grief.’

‘I understand.’

‘Good.’ Penelope pats her shoulder. ‘Don’t dally. You must catch her quickly.’

They usher her out, and as she crosses the road to Odette’s house, she can feel them watching.

Briefly, Cecilia hopes Odette has already gone out, slipped from the servants’ entrance where neither Penelope nor Claudine would have observed her.

It would be better that way, with her failure at the task entirely natural.

But no. Odette is there in the hallway, again in her neat, closely fitted black, dark smudges beneath her eyes.

She is tugging on a pair of gloves when Cecilia enters. At first, Odette says nothing, only watches her, warily.

They have not properly spoken since their uneasy reunion at the cemetery a few days ago; it felt like a rupture, a discordant noise interrupting the melody of their love, and she is unsure where it leaves them both.

‘Good morning,’ she says to break the silence. ‘Did you sleep well?’

‘No.’

‘Neither did I.’

Oh God, how is she supposed to do this? Her mother and Claudine assume everything is so simple between them, that it is no harder than fitting a key to a lock for Cecilia to extract the truth from Odette.

Once, before, she thought they had no secrets.

Now, she knows herself to be as guilty as Odette.

She cannot truly betray her, she will not – but there is no escaping her mother.

She will have to go through with this and endeavour to fail.

‘I am sorry that we have not spoken properly since you came back. I think I went about things all wrong when we met at the cemetery, and I want to find a way to make it right.’

Odette busies herself with her gloves, yanking each finger in place with a rough motion. ‘There’s nothing to make right.’

‘There is a new exhibition at Mr King’s gallery. I thought you might like to go with me?’

‘No, thank you. I’ve had enough of all that.’

She cannot let it sting. Odette is in pain, she does not mean to hurt Cecilia. It is not a rejection of her, but of – of—

Cecilia reaches for and fails to find a satisfactory end.

‘Are you going somewhere else?’

She cannot give up so easily. Any failure must seem natural, it must seem as though she really did try.

Odette stares at her gloved hands. ‘I had not . . .’ She seems almost fragile, as though the tension within her has been wound so tight that one sharp movement will send her shattering to pieces. ‘I cannot rest here.’

‘Then come with me.’ Cecilia hooks their arms together. ‘We can laugh at all the women with blank faces and overly pert breasts. You enjoy that. And all the portraits of little dogs with ribbons.’

Odette cannot help but smile. ‘There are always so many of them. I suppose it could be diverting.’

‘Then that is settled – we will go at once.’

Cecilia guides them out into the street.

For a moment, it is as though a ghost of their past has arisen, some scene that Lydia has conjured to paint: Odette and Cecilia, young and in love, dashing around the city as though it is all theirs.

It can be still, Cecilia reminds herself.

She will make sure Odette gets the money she is owed, and then they will both be free of their families.

Cecilia goes slowly, putting them first on the wrong omnibus, then on the right one but mistaking the stop.

She lingers to fix her hat, pausing to look in the window of a Lyons’ Corner House, commenting on the fashions, complaining that a street is too crowded so they must take another route – if she takes long enough, perhaps Claudine will give up?

They come at last to the gallery on Jermyn Street; it is one of the smaller galleries, but lively with the new showing.

In the press at the entrance, their arms slip apart, and Cecilia finds herself walking alone, hoping Odette will follow.

The rooms are hung high and teem with works, every new and interesting thing all pressed together; there are particular crowds around a new painting of Waterloo, and some piece on loan from a collection in Paris.

In a main room, filled with drifting crowds and poorly lit by the damp winter sun, they come across a painting that stops them both in their tracks.

It is a large, rectangular canvas hung at eye height, framed in gold, rich and dense with colour and light, as all Lydia’s paintings are.

There is Lancelot, kneeling on the stone quay of Camelot, face beautiful with grief, and Elaine of Astolat, the Lady of Shalott, dead in the water, Lydia depicting her boat half sunk and strewn about with flowers.

Only the oval of her face rises above the river, and one hand, still clutching the letter for Lancelot.

Odette and Cecilia, recast by Lydia’s brush: Lancelot a handsome, boyish youth with Odette’s long, straight nose and high cheekbones, and Elaine a faded, washed-out mirror of Cecilia, a corpse of a living woman.

Unthinkingly, Cecilia grasps Odette’s arm.

She has not seen this work since its painting.

It is unfinished – there are patches of bare canvas around the edges, where Camelot fades into indefinite blurs of colour or pencil sketch – but it is brilliant.

Beautiful and maddening, some sense of things not quite as they should be.

Perhaps it is in the blank, sightless eyes, or the unworldly, weightless way Lancelot and Elaine seem to hang within their surroundings.

Cecilia has grown up with her world reflected back through Lydia’s eye, and she has always taken it for truth, for wisdom, but now, with the link severed and Lydia in her grave, it strikes her as odd, a little disturbing.

Was her work always like this, but Cecilia sees it only now?

Or was the twist of Lydia’s illness already altering her sight?

Odette has covered her mouth with one hand, frozen in place. ‘Did you know this was here?’ she asks, voice coarse with emotion.

‘No. I swear it.’ Cecilia hopes the shock of it is clear in her voice. ‘Come away,’ she says.

But Odette is not listening. She whips round, pulling away from Cecilia’s arm, searching the gallery with wild eyes.

‘What is it?’ asks Cecilia. ‘What’s wrong?’

Odette searches a moment more, so tense that the lines on her neck stand out – and then, like her strings have been cut, she goes slack, closes her eyes. ‘Nothing.’

There. Another lie. They both know it. It hurts Cecilia like thorns on a rose bush; she tries to grasp Odette, the bloom of what she must still believe moves between them, and yet each time it draws blood.

Cecilia steers Odette with a hand in the crook of her elbow. ‘Come.’

It is not so many steps to the place in the gallery where a screen shields one part of the room from another. There is a shuffle of footsteps behind it, the rustle of fabric.

A bench is set before it.

‘Rest a moment.’

They sit in silence, Odette pale and unfocused, Cecilia working up the courage to speak.

‘You were not yourself at the dinner,’ she says.

‘Oh? Who was I then?’ Odette speaks lightly, but there is an edge to it – an edge to everything about her.

‘You hardly seemed in the room at all. And your letters—’

Odette stiffens. ‘What about them?’

‘I – I hardly know what to say. It is as though my Odette has disappeared somewhere and a stranger has come home.’

Odette gives her a look shot through with hurt and confusion. ‘You would have me smile and pretend, as my father would?’

‘No – of course not. I am trying to tell you I am worried about you.’

‘Worry more about my aunt who has become my stepmother. Worry about your mother, who has forgotten her dearest friend so fast. Worry about my father who brings incest into his marriage bed. Worry about my poor dead mother who had to die for everyone to finally be happy. Were they simply waiting for it all this time? Has no one ever truly wanted her here?’

Cecilia has lost her footing. There is some dark, open void within Odette she has never seen before, and it frightens Cecilia to find her so changed. She had hoped to engineer a failure of Claudine’s scheme, but Odette seems all too raw to contain herself.

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘How do you know? Maybe I mean all of it, and it is only that I don’t see why I shouldn’t say it now.’

‘You are grieving. I understand what that is like. I lost Lydia, too.’

‘You haven’t lost a mother. It’s different.’

Now it is Cecilia who retreats, hurt. ‘Is it so impossible to think I could feel some measure of what you do?’

It is as though Odette has stepped over the cliff edge, and now that she is falling, she cannot find a way to halt her momentum. Cecilia sees it in her eyes before she speaks, the inability to stop herself.

‘No one has lost what I have lost. You cannot understand.’

‘No,’ says Cecilia quietly. ‘I cannot if you will not tell me the truth of what is the matter with you.’

The pause stretches out long enough to become awkward, then heavy.

Eventually, Cecilia speaks. ‘You grieve so strongly that I am afraid for you. There is something else troubling you – and do not say your father’s marriage, because of course there is that, but, Odette, you look like a creature from the underworld.

You send me strange letters from Cambridge; you jump at shadows.

Yet you will not tell me a thing. It is like you have gone mad. ’

There is a look in Odette’s eye, and she thinks, for a moment, that she has touched some part of her, some old familiar place where they still know each other, where there is solid ground beneath her feet.

Odette’s mouth twists down, and she looks away.

Cecilia has got it wrong.

‘Mad. Yes. Call me mad. It is mad to live amongst all you lunatics. You bob about telling lies to each other, smiling and pretending anything makes sense, and you blame me for spoiling the party, for being troubled. Tell me, why am I supposed to be kind to Claudine? Why am I supposed to forget my mother so quickly? Like my father has? Was the earth even settled on her grave when he took another woman to his bed? I am sure Claudine could not believe her luck when my mother died so conveniently. Why must I shut up my feelings to make things easier for you all? Am I supposed to grieve quietly? Privately? Should I be on my knees in some chapel with a book of improving lines? Should I go and feed the needy or the sick? A dead mother is nothing so unusual, so the fault must lie in me. Is that not what you all think?’

‘No,’ says Cecilia, but she wilts under the force of Odette’s words.

This is a mistake. It is all a mistake. She is stupid, clumsy.

It was Claudine who called Odette mad, but is that fair?

What is madness? What does it look like?

She heard Lydia called mad, and she was strange, yes, erratic, melancholy, with great highs and lows like a tide, and loving her must have been like building a house on sand.

Cecilia has seen men raving on the street, talking to the air, seen girls throw themselves into the river.

But what made it madness? Their misery? The trouble they caused others? What is it to be mad? Is it anything?

Is Odette mad in her grief? Has she become lost to them all?

‘I don’t think—’ Cecilia stumbles over her words, and it is like bait.

‘Go on. Tell me what you think.’

‘I think – I think maybe you want to hurt us so we feel the pain you feel.’

‘Oh. Clever. Very neat.’

‘I’m not trying to be neat – I am trying to make you hear me.

’ Cecilia is losing her patience, and she can hear the childish, demanding note in her voice.

It is embarrassing to do this here; exposing.

People are already looking at them and her cheeks burn in shame.

She modulates her voice. ‘I know you are keeping something from me. I do not understand it. What have we ever kept from each other? Why will you not let me help you?’

She is seized by a sudden, urgent need to take Odette’s hand and pull her away, run to the first train, keep going until their money runs out.

She wills Odette to soften, to come back to her.

But something catches Odette’s eye, and she follows its movements.

She stands, backing away. ‘I – I have to go.’ She spares Cecilia one final glance. ‘I am sorry. I truly am.’

She turns abruptly, knocking into a mother with her young son in a sailor suit, before bounding back the other way, pushing through the crowds with an increasingly frantic desperation –

And then she is gone.