Chapter 6
Cecilia
CECILIA LOOKS AT HER TRUNK at the end of her bed and considers what it will look like in her room at Oxford. It is a mad thought. It is not much more than a month now until she will go, and it seems like a joke, a fabrication, as though she has made plans to visit the moon or breathe underwater.
The doctor is in with Aunt Lydia now, and Odette has spent the past half-hour pacing up and down Cecilia’s room, snapping when Cecilia makes any comment on it.
Lydia will be well; Cecilia knows it. It is not possible that something so awful could happen to Odette, not now.
Lydia will recover like Hippolytus being restored by Asclepius.
There comes the sound of voices and footsteps from downstairs, and Odette is out of the room like a shot, hanging over the banisters to watch the doctor and George descend the stairs in close conversation.
Odette is hesitant now to talk to her father – she has explained to Cecilia how she has been berated for her perceived slights against Claudine.
It is unjust. Cecilia wishes there was something she could do to wish away Claudine from their lives, but she cannot.
‘We had better speak downstairs,’ George says to Odette.
Odette reaches one hand back for Cecilia.
‘Yes, you too,’ George adds, looking at Cecilia, then behind her. ‘All of you. Claudine will stay with Lydia.’
Cecilia turns to see her mother peering from her doorway and Leo at the end of the hall.
George seems at first as though he will lead them to his study, but at the last moment he redirects them to the morning room.
Odette and Cecilia sit together on a low couch, Penelope perches on a chair to the left with Leo stood behind her, smoking, and the doctor sits before them.
George steps away, folding his hands behind his back and looking out at the meadows beyond the window.
Cecilia holds Odette’s hand tightly.
This will be fine. It will be fine.
The doctor explains the situation as he understands it so far, the treatments he has offered and Lydia’s response.
He is a short, stocky man, with sandy hair thinning at the crown and large, blunt hands; but there is a softness around his eyes and mouth, and Cecilia can see why he must be well-respected in his field.
Then he comes to it.
‘It is my professional opinion that Mrs Fairfax-Waugh is suffering from severe and extensive peptic ulcers throughout her digestive tract,’ he says, as though speaking to them of the weather.
‘They have not healed with rest, and now they are affecting her body’s ability to take nourishment from her food.
With her signs of fever, I fear they may have become infected.
I can give no explicit prognosis, but I guard you all to make your peace and help Mrs Fairfax-Waugh face her passage from this life into the next with the grace and love of God. ’
There is silence.
Penelope covers her mouth with her hand and lets out a small sob, genuine in its quietness. Leo puts his hand to her shoulder, though his own mouth trembles. Does he remember the news of their father’s death, Cecilia wonders? George stays at the window.
Cecilia squeezes Odette’s hand harder, looking at her out of the corner of her eye, but Odette seems hardly present.
Cecilia is aware of a great, deep howl lodged inside her that she cannot give voice to. It is not fair. Lydia is not her mother – her grief will be different – but, God, it is a wound ripped through the centre of her chest, and her very heart aches.
Eventually, George turns and dismisses the doctor with a handshake and a request for a full report to be sent to the physician in London.
George’s shirt has come untucked and pokes out between his waistcoat and trousers; the dishevelled display disgusts Cecilia. Lydia is dying, and he cannot ensure his shirt is properly tucked in?
There is a catch in his voice. ‘Lydia is sleeping now. I’ll leave you to your business,’ is all he manages before he turns and takes himself to his study.
To cry, Cecilia wonders – or not. She does not know if men cry or if it is a vulnerability they have wholly removed from themselves and allocated to women. How unfair on all involved. It would be inhuman to not let oneself cry, but she is not sure George allows himself to be human very often.
Penelope twists her fingers together. ‘Well, we had best see about packing, girls. We shall take the train to London tomorrow, where the doctors will be far better. He was a very pleasant man – I will allow that – but surely a London doctor will know what to do. Don’t think about it at all, Odette.
’ It is the first time Penelope has directed her words specifically at Odette.
‘Don’t give it any thought. We’ll find a better doctor. ’
Cecilia’s mother hovers for a moment, as though coming near Odette will bring some of her misfortune upon herself, but then she seems to decide it is worth the risk and pats her arm before leaving.
Leo stops before Odette, eyes red.
‘Rotten luck, old girl,’ he says, helpless. Language fails him, and he turns away, leaving Odette and Cecilia on their own, hand in hand in the empty, lifeless shell of Herne House.
Odette still has not spoken.
Cecilia turns to her, to say something, God knows what – there is nothing she can possibly say – but Odette’s face stops her short.
It is the perfect picture of misery, Cecilia’s own grief reflected back a thousandfold in her face: the world ending, the walls of the house crashing down, the earth rising up to bury them all.
Odette shakes her head. She cannot speak.
Cecilia trembles at the burden placed on her shoulders.
She cannot make this better.
She cannot make this right.
All she can do is bear witness and not look away.
They walk out of the house and across the meadows, over the wooden bridge that crosses the moat and past the sheep that like to die, past the orchard and down the track deep into the pastures with their boundaries of hazel and blackthorn, the leaning alder and ash trees.
They sit together in the crook of an alder, and Cecilia holds Odette as the hurricane of her grief rips through her.
There is nothing to be said. Cecilia only holds her, strokes her hair, offers a litany of soft noises, prayers, comforts.
When the evening turns frigid, she coaxes Odette back to the house, to suffer morsels from the cold tray of dinner that is brought up to her room. Cecilia reads to her until Odette falls asleep in her lap, and then she dozes upright, watching the thin summer night fall and lift too soon.
Odette wakes with the dawn, misery replaced by a sharpness behind her eyes. ‘I have an idea for a play.’
Cecilia stifles a yawn. ‘Are you sure? We could wait until later.’ Until she is not ripe with grief, Cecilia means, but she knows this cannot be said.
‘I want to do it now. Claudine prevented us from doing Godiva, but she will be occupied now. There is no one to spoil it.’
‘You want to do Godiva again?’
‘No, I have a better thought. Get up – come on.’
Cecilia follows her from the bed, drawing on her dressing gown and slippers, then down the hall and out of the house, along the path they took yesterday.
‘Do you see the bonfires set in the bottom field?’ asks Odette.
The dawn is fresh and new. A thin mist is cast over the ground that dissipates as they pass through. Flower heads droop under the weight of dew, and the birds announce the day to each other with urgency.
‘Yes.’
‘They will be perfect. They’ll be tinder-dry after the summer we’ve had.’
‘Perfect for what?’
Odette turns round, walking backwards. ‘The tableau vivant from my birthday. I want to burn Shelley’s pyre.’
When Cecilia hesitates, she continues.
‘Please, Ces. I need to do something big.’
There is an intensity to her that Cecilia cannot cross. ‘All right. I mean, I suppose it is going to burn anyway.’
‘Good.’ Odette squeezes her hand tighter and pulls her along.
In a divot in the landscape is the field where she found Odette yesterday; empty grazing land where a bonfire has been laid in a neat oblong, quite like a pyre.
Cecilia did not look at it closely before, but now she can see why it took hold of Odette’s imagination.
The scene is no desolate Italian beach, beset by storms; they have no bloated, rotting body, but all the same, the picture creates itself.
‘Damn,’ says Odette. ‘I should have brought a copy of Lamia. That was how Trelawny identified Shelley.’
‘It will look well all the same.’ There is a chill in the air, and Cecilia tucks her hands under her arms. ‘How will we light it?’
Odette produces a book of matches from her pocket. ‘Always come prepared.’ She laughs, then moves round the bonfire, striking matches and tossing them in between the stacked branches.
Cecilia hurries after her. This is happening too fast. ‘How will we play it?’ she asks. ‘Will you be Hunt or Byron? Or Trelawny?’
‘I don’t think you can trust anyone who would choose to be Byron,’ says Odette, tossing in another match.
The fire has caught in the depths of the wood, smoke seeping out from within. Odette stops to assess her work. Cecilia cannot read her face, and it is disconcerting. She did not ever think there would be a world in which Odette was a stranger to her.
‘Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange.’ Odette quotes the passage from The Tempest that is inscribed on Shelley’s grave.
She worries at the book of matches, ripping up the card and tossing it and the last of the matches into the rising flames. ‘It is not complete.’
‘We could strike poses?’ suggests Cecilia. ‘One of us could kneel like Mary Shelley in the painting?’
‘No. It needs a body.’
Without warning, Odette flings herself towards the pyre and tries to climb the side, as though she intends to lie upon it and be immolated.
With a shriek of horror, Cecilia throws herself after Odette, grabbing at her nightgown.
The flames seem to have come to life at once, swallowing the base of the bonfire and gusting up through it in long licks of red and orange.
The smoke burns Cecilia’s eyes. The whole thing will go up in a moment – she knows it. This is madness, madness.
Knotting her hands in Odette’s nightdress, she pulls her back, spins her round so that Cecilia stands between her and the flames. Heat rises up her back, startling and close.
Suddenly, Odette’s horrified face is almost touching her own.
‘Get down!’ she cries, pushing her to the ground, rolling her over on the dew-wet grass – and then comes the slap of cold, as brackish water fills her nose. Odette has thrown her into the stream at the foot of the fields, quenching the flames that singed her own nightdress.
Coughing, they sit together in the shallow water.
‘Don’t ever do that again,’ says Cecilia, when she can find the breath to speak.
If she were a different person she thinks she would slap Odette.
Instead, she clings to her. They wrap their arms around each other, press their bodies together and take some familiar animal reassurance from the feeling of hot skin and heartbeat.
‘I’m sorry,’ whispers Odette.
Cecilia shakes her head, beyond herself. ‘Why would you do that?’ She is crying, hot angry tears. ‘I love you so much – why would you do that to the person I love?’
Here, Odette breaks. ‘Because I don’t know what else to do, Ces. What do I do? What do I do if she dies? What’s the point of me? How do I live if she dies? I will be dead, too.’
She buries her face into Cecilia’s shoulder and sobs again.
Odette’s expression makes Cecilia more afraid than she knew she could be. There is some new, broken wildness in her. Odette has stepped through a door into a place where Cecilia does not know if she can reach her anymore.
As they walk back up to the house, shamefaced and shaking, the clouds darken and a squall of rain blows through. Behind them, the smoke from the bonfire slopes away, rain hissing as it meets the still burning fire.
It is the end of one world. The next one will meet them, whether they are ready or not.