Chapter 4
Odette
ODETTE DREAMS ABOUT THE water rising up the sides of the house from the moat, stagnant and still and silent, swallowing it all up – worse than a tide she cannot stem; a slow, inexorable sinking.
Her mother is sinking first. Odette swims down, reaching out her hand, but her mother’s fingers always slip through. Then she has swum down too deep, and all is dark and cold, and there is no way back to the surface.
She wakes crying, and Cecilia rests her head in her lap and strokes her hair.
What to do with all this pain?
Nineteen. Money that will be hers alone. A place at university. A great love.
There is nothing wrong with her life. She should not feel melancholy or disturbed. She is lucky. Wouldn’t everyone say so? Why can she not feel her luck?
They are due to return to London in a handful of days, if the doctor agrees that Lydia is well enough to travel.
It is a delicate decision, George has explained to Odette.
The travel will be disruptive to Lydia’s health, but staying in the waterlogged house as the weather cools will be no better. Aunt Claudine is to accompany them.
There are plans to be made for her move to Cambridge: clothes to be packed, books to be bought, other essential items that she is sure she should be able to think of, but her head is too muffled. The future feels like a terrible thing, one that she would hold at bay at all costs, if she could.
*
She is walking in the gardens with Cecilia the morning after her birthday when her father comes to find her.
The weather is turning early for August, the brutal heat dying away as if chasing in the harvest. Herne House hunkers low amongst the trees, the stone and wood turning dull in the cooling light.
The fields are full from dawn until nightfall with the sound of the drays pulling the new reaping and binding machines or the swish of scythes and bent-backed labourers. The cloud draws in, a silent threat.
‘Come and sit with me,’ her father says with a soft smile.
She is glad of it. Glad to be remembered by him. She thought that something between them had begun to drift, that her understanding of her place with him was wrong – but he is still here. First the diary, now this. He is still an anchor point to which she can fix herself.
They walk a little further, under the fruiting trees of the orchard, to a stone bench set in seclusion from the house.
‘I wanted to speak to you,’ her father says, gesturing at the bench beside him.
Her gladness turns at once. She sits, a rock in her stomach. ‘It’s Mother, isn’t it?’
He frowns. ‘No, the doctor will not come until tomorrow.’
‘Then what?’
Her father fidgets like a schoolboy, and Odette realises that he is attempting to organise his expression into something authoritative. Not as he did the night Claudine caught Odette and Cecilia playing at Godiva; this is something real.
Odette stills, in confusion, then in apprehension. She does not speak.
‘The way you have behaved towards Claudine is not acceptable, and I have been derelict in my duties as a father for not disciplining you sooner.’
The birdsong is too loud. That is all Odette can think. Why is the birdsong so loud?
Maybe she can get up and start walking and walking and walking and travel far enough away that this isn’t happening.
‘I don’t understand,’ she says quietly.
‘She went to a great deal of effort to arrange a special dinner for your birthday, and you gave her no thanks at all. In fact, she told me she saw you making childish faces at Cecilia, pretending you didn’t like it.’
‘I – I did say thank you. I’m sure I did.’
She is a good daughter because she is discreet. Pleasant. She needs nothing, no guidance, no scolding, no help. Her mother demands so much, there is no space for Odette to demand too, and she knows what a comfort it is to her father that she asks so little from him.
Some lurching gap opens beneath her. She has not smoothed things over. She has not made things easy. She has failed.
Oh God, here’s the fear: will he stop loving her if she stops being easy?
‘Claudine has taken so much responsibility off your shoulders since she arrived, and you have not shown gratitude for any of it. She has been caring for your mother and running the house on your behalf so that you may go off to university, and you act as if you thought yourself entitled to all of it.’
Odette thinks she might be sick. It would be odd to be sick here, in the garden, on her nice shoes. She barely ate breakfast – would there even be anything to throw up?
‘But . . . but Mother is her sister. Why should she not look after her?’
George gives a short, mirthless smile. ‘You have a sharp tongue, Odette, and you cut more people with it than you care to know.’
She is hot with shame. This is all wrong, but she cannot put her finger on what or where or how.
Her tongue is fat and stupid in her mouth; she cannot work out how to say what it is she thinks, what it is that seems right, to defend herself.
No, she does not like Claudine, and perhaps that is obvious, but if Claudine is to string her up for her offences, then should Odette not get her chance to list Claudine’s own failings?
But she cannot find the right words.
‘I am sorry.’ Those words again. Is she? No, she is not, but she does not know how to fight, only how to roll over like a craven dog and bare her soft underbelly.
‘There. You’ll find a moment to say it to Claudine. I am sure she will understand.’
No, she won’t. Odette knows that already.
She feels the ground shifting again, the lines redrawn – and she finds herself pushed out and out.
‘Best behave yourself today; you know how women are.’
Her father pats her hand and leaves her in pieces.