Chapter 2
Odette
ODETTE HAS NO MEMORY of how she has come to be on Waterloo Bridge. She is standing in the middle, carts and carriages rolling behind her. The reflected gas lamps shiver in the dark waves of the Thames, hiding the sewage and flotsam that lap against the embankment stones and grit-sand beaches.
Death has left on her only the beautiful.
Odette shudders at the image. Hood’s suicide, Owning her weakness, her evil behaviour.
Lydia never wanted to paint Hood’s ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, no matter how much she was encouraged, calling the story of romantic suicide a cruelty forced on women by men.
Odette first saw the Millais etching as a child, and the shrouded figure with her face so stricken with horror drove deep roots into her.
The Watts painting, Found Drowned, seemed too peaceful when she came across it, too kind an end, as though those who had driven the woman to her death by malice or indifference could be acquitted of their guilt by imagining.
Lydia hated it, so Odette did, too, listening earnestly as her mother explained that drowning was not so peaceful as people would tell you.
Only now does she wonder how Lydia might have known what drowning felt like.
Odette will not be brave enough to do it. She knows this. She can lean far over the stone balustrade and watch the rushing, muddy Thames pass beneath her and understands she is trapped.
Her mother stands a little way off on the other side of the bridge, obscured by passing vehicles, but Odette knows she is there, in the flash of white shroud and the glimpse of her pinched and yellowing face.
She will not come any closer, not yet. Odette knows this, too.
It is as though a veil has been ripped down between them and Lydia’s mind is her mind. They never were two different people, only sound and echo.
It would be easier to be dead like her.
But instead, she is mad, and she has lost Cecilia.
She saw the look in Cecilia’s eye when she asked her what she had experienced at the séance.
Nothing was her answer.
Lydia has come only to Odette, and so it is Odette’s duty to avenge her, to keep her alive in the memory of all those so keen to forget her.
Her mother walks behind her all the way back up to Hampstead. It is a long walk, and Odette lets her mind turn over the problem of Claudine.
Revenge. Murder. Remember me.
This is what her mother asks of her.
The air is brisk and fresh as she walks up and out of the smog that hangs low across the city. The colour is high in her cheeks by the time she steps back inside the house. It is quiet, and she pauses in the entrance hall, listening instinctively for footsteps, for a tapping.
Of course there is nothing. Her mother is gone, for now.
She is doing what her mother wants. She does not need reminding.
Odette strips her gloves and hat and fixes her hair in the hallway mirror, touching her fingers to the brooch at her throat, the one that contains a curl of her mother’s chestnut hair.
She pricked her skin pinning it in place this morning, and if she looks closely she can see a rusty speck on the black fabric where the blood has dried.
As she goes up to her room, she hears noise from the top of the house. Hammering, sawing. She follows it to her mother’s studio, where workmen have erected ladders and worktables as they set about boarding up the great arching window.
Odette flushes hot with outrage. It is her mother’s rage that runs through her, twined with her own, finding her voice before she knows it. ‘What are you doing? Who told you to do this?’
She realises too late that Claudine stands to one side, supervising.
‘These are long overdue repairs,’ she says. ‘I would remind you to moderate the way you speak.’
Odette is too angry to heed the danger Claudine poses. ‘This is my mother’s room – how dare you come in and destroy it?’
‘You forget this is my house now. This room is draughty and lets in damp. The window is impractical and no longer needed.’
‘Why not burn the whole place down? Then you never need think about her again,’ snaps Odette. ‘Surely that would suit you best.’
Claudine is about to respond, but suddenly her expression softens, and she transforms into an angel of the hearth. Odette turns to see her father in the doorway, filling his pipe.
‘What’s this?’ George saunters into the room. ‘Both my favourite girls together.’
For a moment, Odette and Claudine are united in horror.
‘Really, George,’ tuts Claudine.
‘Have I interrupted something?’ He smiles in confusion, and Odette cannot believe it is not feigned. Surely he can sense the tension simmering? She looks at him anew, considering this man who would so blind himself to the truth for the sake of an easy life.
Then he looks directly at Odette and beckons her. ‘Join me for a moment. There are a few matters I would speak to you about.’
Claudine’s mouth is a set line, but she seems pleased, as though some argument that Odette is not aware of has been won.
Odette allows herself to be ushered downstairs and into her father’s study.
It is warm, the fire banked high and the thick curtains half drawn against the cold that radiates from the windows.
She has always liked this room, the jewel-box quality of it, the towering shelves of books and wood panelling and the great globe by one side of the fire.
There are paintings on the wall of racehorses, prints of the Boxing Day hunt near Herne House, oddities her father picked up in his youth on his Grand Tour: a long, spiralling tusk, a curved sword, an embroidered hat.
As a child, she loved to sit and listen to her father tell the histories of each item, like bedtime stories, the same words repeated over and over until she could tell the story herself, as though they were her own memories.
‘Sit, darling, sit.’
George takes his seat behind the desk and Odette takes the one before it. She knows he likes to talk to her in this way, as though he is holding an audience with a member of his constituency, or some junior minister come to press his case for a certain policy.
‘Are you well?’ he asks, steepling his hands. ‘Is it very different being at home after Cambridge?’
Odette pauses before she replies. She has not thought about how she wants to play her hand before her father. ‘I find things quite changed,’ she says. ‘I wish you had told me of your plans sooner.’
‘Yes, perhaps I should have.’ He moves on without further thought. ‘Do you intend to return to Cambridge in the New Year?’
‘I – yes, I suppose so.’
‘Good, good. We are always happier when we can strike out from our parents. Lydia could never really be a proper mother to you, and I see now that you suffered for it. After everything that has happened, I think it is very healthy for you to want a life of your own.’
Odette cannot follow his meaning, and she is left with only a creeping sense that maybe he does not want her at home.
‘But it is only university,’ she says slowly. ‘I have not left home.’
‘No, no. Of course not. Until you marry, you will live here.’
Until she marries.
‘I have no plans to marry,’ she says, though she hardly understands why she has to state it.
He wants something from her, there is some crack she is to smooth over, but she cannot work out what it is.
‘At the moment, no. But you will want to.’
There is a bitter tang in the air, something a little like burning, the undercurrent of a danger she cannot yet place.
‘Claudine and I have been speaking, and we agree it is time that you consider your future.’ George smiles, leans forwards. ‘This childish antagonism towards Claudine must stop. She and I do not see eye to eye on everything she has said to you, but it is simply that you are very different people.’
‘That is hardly—’
‘It would be better for everyone if the two of you were no longer under the same roof. Claudine is very understanding of how difficult this must be for you. But you are not a child, Odette. This is Claudine’s home now, and she cannot welcome someone who treats her in the manner you have.’
She is back in the gardens of Herne House that summer, her father calling her sharp, entitled. Casting Claudine as the victim.
The crack splits wide and there is nothing she could do to cover it. It would eat her whole to do it. Send her mad.
Odette can barely speak. She feels Lydia’s shaking fury in her bones. ‘Are you throwing me out?’
George laughs. ‘Don’t be so silly – of course not.
You have said yourself that you plan to return to Cambridge in the New Year, and you will be there for some years yet.
I will make enquiries to find a suitable husband if there is no one who catches your eye.
Then everyone will be happier. You are too attached to me, Odette. It is not healthy.’
Odette stares, unable to believe what he is saying. ‘You are my father.’
‘Yes, and Claudine is my wife.’
He is captured. It is Claudine who speaks, not her father.
She stands so abruptly she knocks over her chair. ‘I need no reminder. It beggars belief that you expect me to sit here and accept all this without a single word. I am a saint not to have said more, in these circumstances. How can you expect me to swallow it? Mother was barely cold—’
‘That’s enough.’
Her father does not raise his voice. Not even now.
He only becomes cold as marble, every human thing in him closing off. He is a stranger, not the father who has loved her since she was born.
‘Fine. I understand the message you have delivered. I am not welcome here.’
He does not look at her. Maybe this is how his true fury takes shape.
Is he really angry at her for how she has behaved towards Claudine? Or is it that she will no longer play his game?
‘If that is how you choose to interpret it, I cannot stop you.’
A lightness takes her as she leaves. That is the end of that.
It is all so simple now.
If she is to lose, she will take Claudine down with her.
In her room, it is there, just as she left it. The oblong of folded pages, tucked carefully away on her desk. The memorial. Her last memory of her living mother.
It is like a dream. She can barely recall writing the words before her, though it is her slanting hand, her erroneous spelling. It has not been much more than two months, and yet those days after the death feel like a fiction she has built for herself.
She turns the pages like the delicate leaves of an old bible, tracing her finger along each line as she reads.
The last time she saw her mother, she was frail, a little distant, muddled by the laudanum, but their eyes met; there was a sense of communication between them, of interest in her presence.
There must be evidence here of Claudine’s actions, if only she could find it.
Claudine was hurting her, Odette is convinced, and there must be some telltale clue within this record.
But there is one unassailable fact before her: her mother is dead and buried.
This is not a detective novel. There is no body to examine, no crime scene to assess.
If she has her suspicions, then they are only taken from the situation as she knows it.
It dawns on her, slowly, heavily, like the weight of a tide drawing back to expose the soft and sinuous things on the seabed: if there is no proof, then the only path is to force a confession.
What a thought.
A confession? Could she really do it?
The rain comes now, drumming against the window loud enough to drown out any noise from upstairs.
How could she do it?
There is something so impotent about her position that it half makes her want to smash the window, break the furniture. How can she bring her will to bear on Claudine?
Does Claudine hope no one will ask about Lydia, think about her? That the memory of Lydia will dissipate from the world until no murder was committed at all?
There. That is it.
Odette cannot let her forget.
Odette must make her remember.
As her mother’s ghost has come to her, she must bring her ghost to Claudine.
If Claudine is guilty, then it will burden her conscience, and any weight Odette brings to bear upon it will make it untenable.
If she is not, then any antics Odette performs in aid of her goal will be easily cast off as grief, madness.
Very well. She will take it on as a mantle, as armour. Let them believe her driven from her senses with grief, believe that she is blind and deaf to anything beyond her own misery.
Let them think her mad.
So this is it then – the task before her.
She locks the memorial into her desk drawer. She must keep it safe.
There, on the neat surface she has yet to unpack onto, is a single photograph: herself, her father, Claudine, and the corpse of her mother, head tilted sideways as though she is asleep. She thinks of the cold hand at her throat.
She has an idea.
She fetches her hat and coat and slinks out of the house.
She will make her move first.
She must see this through, whatever the end.
Whatever the cost.