Chapter 5
Cecilia
CECILIA FINDS ODETTE DOWN in the meadows, watching the farmhands build bonfires.
She disappeared after speaking to her father, and Cecilia cannot shake the worry that has crept around her. Something is wrong, something she doesn’t understand. Odette is slipping further and further into a world apart, and Cecilia would do anything she can to keep her.
Cecilia takes up position beside Odette, leaning on the fence that surrounds the field where the farmhands are stacking dry brush and hedge trimmings.
‘Come. We have a few days more. I would see you happy.’
‘Happy? I don’t think that’s what I’m made for.’
Cecilia tugs her elbow. ‘Come. Trust me.’
Odette relents and follows Cecilia into the open fields and towards the forest beyond.
This is the one thing Cecilia knows how to do: draw Odette out of herself, give her someone else to be, a private world of their own.
The sun is broad overhead, beating down in glory and gold. It is not a time for sad things – Cecilia will not have it so.
She sets off running through the meadow, past the bobbing heads of wildflowers and down, down, down, to the winding banks of the Stour.
At a fairy ring amongst a stand of beech trees, Cecilia lays Odette down and heaps her with leaves, a slain King Arthur ready for Avalon.
Cecilia gathers foxgloves and irises and sprays of meadowsweet to cover Odette where she lies, hands clasped at her breast over the hilt of a stick-as-sword.
Kneeling at Odette’s side, Cecilia speaks Sir Bedivere’s words.
‘Whither shall I go? Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? For now I see the true old times are dead.’
Odette sits up, brushing the petals from her face. ‘No, don’t say that. Nothing is dead. It is only changing.’
Cecilia leans back in the grass, her expression dropping. She does not want to talk about this. They will leave for university so soon, and the thought of it makes her quail.
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,’ she offers.
‘Yes, more like that.’
They run again, right to the edge of the river, where the weight of the heat casts a shimmer across the water and dragonflies dart between the reeds. Odette stands on the bank, eyes caught on the glittering water.
‘Here – I have an idea. Let me go into the water. I can be Shelley, and you can find my body washed up and rotting.’
Cecilia frowns. ‘Let’s not. Won’t you sit down? I stashed some brandy around here somewhere.’
But Odette is wading into the water, up to her knees. ‘It is not so fast-flowing. Here, I will lie face down in the shallows.’
Before Odette can suit action to word, Cecilia catches her elbow again and drags her away. ‘And I have strawberries. I don’t want to get wet – it’ll make my petticoats all itchy.’
They are silly protests, trifling things she fills the air with, smothering Odette’s fire.
It is as though Odette wants to push and push, to find the edge where someone will call her bluff, will see that she is not all right.
But it is not Cecilia’s attention she wants; this is not something she can give her.
It is Lydia’s she wants, George’s, Claudine’s even – for them all to come to their senses and see what they are doing to her.
Cecilia knows they will not. Their only path is to get out. Odette will never get what she wants from them, and if she cannot see that, Cecilia will make the path for them both.
Because without Odette, what life will there be for her? Her mother. Home. Four walls, a tea set, never saying what she thinks. Her own inadequacy. Her own failure.
There is a sense of a great, yawning empty space around her, ahead of her, her whole life blank and cold and hopeless. It is a life sentence, to be herself.
She finds the brandy and strawberries and sets Odette down with both.
‘We’ll write to each other all the time,’ she says, as though dictating to the universe.
She pictures it now: a dowdy writing desk in a room at Somerville, pen in hand as she writes amidst the stacks of books and blotting paper and notes from lectures, looking out across emerald lawns, to tell stories of her adventures, and read Odette’s in turn.
‘And we’ll be together every vac.’
Odette chews a strawberry, considering. ‘Yes. I suppose so.’
Cecilia pulls a book from the basket and instructs Odette to lie down so she can read to her.
‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?’
Odette throws a strawberry at her. ‘You’ve done that one enough times. Something new.’
Cecilia throws the strawberry back, and it splatters on Odette’s shirtwaist, so she unbuttons it and casts it off, red-stained and crumpled into the grass. Cecilia lets her eyes linger on the soft curve of Odette’s breasts above her corset and the dip at the hollow of her throat.
She licks her lips and continues reading.
The first time she read to Odette, they had climbed out of the dorm windows onto the roof of their school, to smoke a handful of half-crushed cigarettes lifted from Leo’s case and drink from a purloined bottle of port.
Odette had complained before that Cecilia asked so many questions that she didn’t get a chance to enjoy her smoke in peace, so this time Cecilia brought out a volume of Byron and gave Odette her favourite lines until she found herself reading the whole poem under the cold November stars, the two of them curled together for warmth in their winter coats and mufflers.
What started as lips shyly coming together, sticky with stolen port, as though daring each other to be the first to blink, had become giddy, illicit, magic.
Cecilia puts down the book, draws Odette’s hands from her face to kiss her, at first lightly, goading, until they move in more earnest passion.
Cecilia is greedy for the feeling of Odette against her, for each touch of her fingers, each press of her hot, slick skin.
It is always like this, her mouth between Odette’s legs, trying to serve her.
How can she serve her? What does she need?
Cecilia feels like a solider with no captain to follow.
From somewhere over the water, the church bell tolls and Cecilia sits back, wiping her mouth clean. Odette lies flat and boneless, staring at the sky above as she regains a steady breath.
In this, at least, they still belong to each other.