Chapter 4
Odette
THE PUBLIC CONVENIENCES IN the gallery are winter-cold, porcelain and tiles with frigid air pouring in through narrow, frosted windows. There is no one else inside, and with great relief, Odette shuts herself in a stall and locks the door before the great tide of her panic hits her.
She is seeing things. In every flash of white skirts, every face looking at her, there is her mother.
Her panic, and her shame.
Behind her closed eyes, she sees Cecilia’s face crumple. The soft curve of the mouth she has kissed so often, pulled down in misery. Odette did that. Odette hurt her.
She worries that Cecilia is right: she is taking her pain and turning it into a punishment for all around her.
Cecilia is not wrong: Odette is concealing something from her. Cecilia, the one person she should trust above all others. The thought flashes briefly across her mind, like the warning glow of a lighthouse through fog: if she loses Cecilia, she will have no one left at all.
If only there was a way to show it to her, to have Cecilia understand for herself.
The idea is there, in the magazine. She can try to prove the ghost real. She must stop prevaricating and act. Her cowardice frustrates her, shames her. She has been weighed and found wanting.
The door to the room must have opened – though Odette did not hear it – because there comes, abruptly, the rustle of fabric.
She stills, sniffing back her tears. She does not want some well-meaning busybody enquiring if she is all right.
The rustle comes again, and then – soft footsteps.
A rush of cold sweeps through her.
Bare feet.
Unmistakably. It is the slap of bare soles against tile.
Odette draws back, pushing herself into the gap between the toilet bowl and the wall of the cubicle.
The sound of her breathing is too loud and harsh and quick.
It is as though all the noise of the world beyond has died away: the horseshoes on cobbles, the chatter of the crowds, the tolling church bells, all just beyond the windows – gone, and it is only her breath and the footsteps.
They come to a halt before her door. Beneath it she can see a dirty white hem and two ice-white feet.
It cannot be – it cannot be – her hands are shaking, and she is breathing so fast it makes her light-headed.
She thought—
Earlier – she thought she saw someone.
Saw her.
Just for a moment.
When she and Cecilia stood before Lydia’s painting, there was the faintest sense of cold fingertips at her throat, and she whipped round at once, searched for that white shroud, the chestnut hair, in vain.
Perhaps the truth is this: she hides from the ghost because she is frightened by how badly she longs for it to be real.
In her sick, broken heart, it is her only wish.
She remembers that monstrous, unnatural voice against her ear. The horror of her own madness.
She aches to hear it again.
‘Mama?’ She fumbles quickly, desperately, with the lock on the door, jerking it open. ‘I am here – it is me.’
There is no one there.
‘Mama?’ Her voice is plaintive. ‘Mama, come back. Don’t leave me.’
Silence.
*
On her return home, she meets Leo going out as she comes in.
‘Are you quite all right?’ he asks, searching her face.
She tries to sidestep him, but he blocks her. ‘Yes – no – it doesn’t matter.’
She fled the gallery, too ashamed to look for Cecilia. She has another task now: one she cannot put off. Not after what she has seen.
‘Look, I know—’ he fumbles for the right words ‘—all this is quite a lot to get one’s head around, but don’t you think you could lay off the dramatics a bit? It would be easier on everyone, and on you too, I think.’
‘I don’t want any more lectures, thanks.’ She pushes past him.
‘Odette,’ he calls after her, ‘stop being an ass. I’m trying to look out for you.’
Ignoring him, she heads up past her room, all the way to the top of the house.
She cannot be around them, any of them. They do not understand.
The slow rumble of approaching thunder greets Odette as she opens the door to her mother’s studio.
The rain has not yet come, but the sky is already dark, and with only an oil lamp to light her way, the room is a mass of shifting shadows and the bobbing reflection of her own hand carrying the lamp.
No one has thought to come and cover the furniture with sheets, so there is a thickening layer of dust across each surface, and the windows are rimed with dirt.
Odette waits by the door for a moment until she is sure she has not been followed, then closes it and pulls a chair beneath the handle to fix it in place.
The last time she was with her mother in this studio, Lydia was bright and lively, dashing between her paint stores and the canvas as she made great, swooping brushstrokes across a scene of Ariadne arriving in Naxos.
The last time Odette saw her mother anything resembling her usual self was before Claudine came to England.
Revenge me. For I am murdered.
The spray of red blood across the front of Lydia’s dress as she collapsed against Odette.
At the writing desk, she sits and considers for a moment.
Her mother’s memorial still lies where she left it, the loose pages written in a messy, erratic hand.
She reads through it, looking for some new understanding.
If only she had written about her mother’s illness from the start.
It is too convenient that it began so soon after Claudine’s arrival – does Claudine think her naive?
Stupid? She had a hand in it, Odette knows this.
She reads the memorial twice, but can find nothing that paints any obvious guilt. It will be there, she knows it must; like some trick of the light, it will become clear when she least expects.
She folds the pages and slips them into her pocket, to take down to her own room.
For now, she must try another route.
How to do this? It is not the kind of task that comes with instructions in an issue of Cassell’s Magazine.
A pen and paper – that is obvious. Or should it be a pencil? Yes, a pencil, so the nib will not need recharging with ink.
Odette finds both and sets them before her, then, after a moment’s debate, holds the pencil loosely in her fingers and rests the tip against the paper.
What should she say? Should she speak to her mother?
Even alone, she is too embarrassed to do it.
Instead, she closes her eyes, lets her mind drift, loosen. Rain hammers at the glass, wind rushing down the chimney in gasps.
There is a flash of lightning as bright as daylight. Her eyes snap open, and in the arching glass window, Odette sees a figure in white behind her.
Her heart races, but she does not turn.
‘Mama?’ she whispers. ‘Tell me what to do?’
What a foolish want. Her mother could never have done as she asked in life – what hope is there of it now?
Is she so sure she wants her mother back?
She shuts her eyes again and focuses on her hand where it rests on the paper; on the press of the graphite, waiting.
There. A sense of weight. Pressure. So faint it is almost nothing, but she feels her hand urged to move. Down first, then a loop, then down again – she cannot follow it. Her hand is cold, as though there is something laid atop it, guiding her.
It lasts only briefly, and then her hand is a dead thing, flaccid and inert.
She must look at what she has produced; there is no hiding.
A mess: that is what she has made. There are great loops and scrawls, lines bisecting lines, flourishes and curls. It is nonsense.
She picks up the paper to scrap it, but the changed angle causes something to catch her eye. It is a wobbling, misshapen word, like a trick-eye puzzle. At first nothing and then – remember.
Her eyes flick to her reflection in the window, to the figure she had seen behind her. Nothing. She is alone.
Remember.
Remember what? Her mother? The ghost’s command?
It is not proof. Not proof she can share, not something she can show Cecilia. She must do something else. Something more.