Chapter 3
Odette
THE CARRIAGE TRAVELS THROUGH the frost-rimed Suffolk countryside to Sudbury, where Miss Rosebury efficiently and emotionlessly has Odette’s bags stowed on the train to Colchester, and Odette stowed in a compartment.
Odette finds she has absolutely nothing to say.
She finds she does not know herself. All seems lost, fractious, confusing.
Who should she be now? Is she a conversationalist?
Is she a wallflower? Does she like to sew, to read, to sing?
With her mother, her home, Cecilia, all stripped away, there seems barely anything left of her. Maybe there was never anything real to her, underneath her mother and her anger. Maybe there was never a whole girl.
She thinks of Cecilia as they travel. What does she do now? What does she wear? Does she eat, sleep? Could Odette smell the perfume of her soap if they were together? She longs for some token of Cecilia, a lock of her hair to curl around her wrist, but she has nothing.
The winter sun tracks low over the fallow fields; soon they are dropped into the darkness of midwinter, and there are only their own reflections to be seen in the window.
Miss Rosebury reads a Henry James novella, the title of which Odette does not recognise.
There are travelling rugs to put across their knees, and when they change trains at Colchester for Harwich, Miss Rosebury produces, of all things, a seed cake, which, once seated in their new compartment, she slices, handing a piece to Odette.
It is a strange kindness that she can hardly bear.
How mundane, how simple, how alien to the sort of life she now finds herself caught within.
The ship departs Harwich at nine p.m. They dine simply in the port before they embark and pass the night in a shared cabin.
Odette lies awake, looking at the snatch of stars through the porthole.
Her mother has not shown herself, and she wonders whether the spirit can travel over water, so far from where her bones are laid to rest.
Rotterdam is a noisy industrial port, the water slick with oil and the flotsam of smashed crates, paper, cabbage leaves, bottles, dirty scrap cloth and other effluvia bobbing around the docks.
A steamboat meets the Harwich ship and takes passengers through the canals directly to the city centre and then on to the station, where the train to Cologne awaits.
The train is modern and clean, with a corridor connecting the compartments, but it is busy enough that they share theirs with a family with two small girls.
Odette gives up the window seat to the children, and the girls cluster, faces pressed against the glass as they roll through the flat, reclaimed land of Holland, then across the border into Germany.
The sky is as broad and blank as in Suffolk, and Odette finds herself falling into a trance against the clatter of the tracks, the stop-start of the stations, the whistle and billows of steam, and the chatter in languages she barely speaks.
Here she is then. This is where all her Sturm und Drang has got her. It is a quiet kind of failure.
They reach Cologne in the late afternoon, when the winter sun has cast its fiery streaks across the clouds and a thick, clammy night has fallen.
The gas lamps are lit everywhere, and there is the same noise of carriage wheels and horseshoes as in London, though the clothes strike her as a little different, the smells a note shifted.
They will see nothing of the city. There is a little under an hour before their sleeper train to Munich, and Miss Rosebury leads them to a coffee room within the station.
Odette has a sense that Miss Rosebury has done this before, perhaps many times.
A minder, a pack horse, delivering delicate, flighty young women to their destinations, women who are allowed a fragile, porcelain quality of femininity that Miss Rosebury is denied on account of her birth – or her circumstances; Odette does not know which have led her to be on one side of the equation and Odette on the other.
It was an accident of fate that sent Claudine to teach in Germany and Lydia to Herne House, though neither woman seemed to have been happy with their end of the bargain.
It is not that Odette cannot sympathise with Claudine – she makes the horror of her life so plain – but still, Odette cannot understand why Claudine is compelled to take that pain and fear out on her.
It is as though Odette is some rival, some threat who possesses a terrible power to throw Claudine out of this new life that she has snatched for herself – and, Odette thinks, perhaps that is true.
If Claudine killed Lydia, and Odette is the only one who suspects, then of course Odette is a threat.
But before Lydia’s death? What harm had she done her then, other than to be a different person, living a different life, with different struggles?
It is as though any other suffering threatens to usurp and diminish her aunt’s, as though there can be none but her own, no one in pain but her.
She thinks, abruptly, of the last words she and Cecilia exchanged.
Cecilia accused her of the same thing. Of making her pain a punishment for others.
It is frightening to think that she and Claudine may not be so very different.
It is all not worth thinking on. Miss Rosebury orders them only a pot of coffee, as they will eat a meal on the train, and while they sit in silence, Odette stares at the plaster moulding that spiders out across the great ceiling of the room.
Claudine should be happy now, at least. Odette is gone and Lydia eliminated; she has George to herself.
Lydia glides into view – at first only a shadow in the corner of her eye, then the slow movement of the white shroud.
A sharp nail comes to rest against the side of Odette’s throat, and she thinks of how she has read that the nails seem to still grow on a dead body but it is only the desiccated flesh shrinking back.
She is a bad daughter. She has failed her mother.
Miss Rosebury folds her napkin and excuses herself.
Odette rests an elbow on the table and her chin in her hand as she watches her companion weave between the tables.
Ever since her mother died, the world has been so perfectly ordinary and so completely unreal.
People drink coffee, laugh, run for their trains, consult maps, stack sugar cubes, blow their noses, as though they exist, as though any of this means anything.
She will not cry in public.
What is the point? Crying means nothing. Pain, nothing. Madness—
Her mother drifts to stand beside the empty chair, where she raises one withered finger, pointing.
Odette turns her head away. There is a blare of emotion, a wave of anger and frustration that makes her cower. She understands; God, how she understands. She has failed. Her mother is angry.
‘Look.’ The words are dragged through stone, harsh and insistent.
Odette glances to where her mother indicates.
Miss Rosebury’s bag sits on her chair, worn, oiled leather, her initials embossed on the flap. There – where the flap has not fallen closed, is the corner of a letter. Odette frowns.
‘Look,’ her mother insists.
Odette does not know the significance of this glimpse of cream paper, but she cannot disobey now.
She leans across the table and pulls the letter free. It is addressed to a Frau Sterne – but before she can look further, her mother’s hand closes on her neck and she is back in her seat with a jerk, just in time to see Miss Rosebury returning from the conveniences.
She slips the letter into her pocket, her mother a cold, silent figure beside her.