Chapter 4 #2
She continues, all restraint gone. ‘You are too like Odette – so self-righteous, though you know so little about that which you speak of. I suppose you have no idea that Lydia used your mother’s secret to steal her from me, when your father died.
She held it over her, promised her support if only she would help persuade George to cut me off and marry her.
If she would take Lydia’s side and spurn me in the scandal that followed.
Your mother was my friend first, and she threw me away to save herself.
Why should I not use my knowledge to my own advantage?
You do not know the half of what was stolen from me – what everyone took from me. ’
It unfurls before her: the anger, the hurt, the betrayal, the secrets.
Claudine so trapped within her own pain that she is ruled by it, twisted into someone paranoid, jealous, vicious.
The pain is a fist beneath her breastbone.
Her mother, her poor, cruel, loving mother.
She lost her life trying to protect Cecilia from this secret that will destroy her future all the same.
‘You told my mother to follow Odette and her father that day, didn’t you?
You used her to spy on them as you used me.
Could you not trust George to do your bidding unmonitored?
Were you jealous of even that brief time he spent with his daughter?
That is why my mother was on that train platform. You are the reason she is dead.’
Claudine’s face is a scowl. ‘No, that would be her own stupidity.’
‘You and Aunt Lydia both used her,’ says Cecilia, eyes prickling. ‘She is not a pawn; she is my mother.’
Claudine shifts almost to lean over her, growing quiet in her menace. ‘Tears again. All you girls know how to do is cry. Who cried for me? Did any of them cry for me? This is not my doing; it is theirs, for what they did to me when I was so young.’
Cecilia quails. There is a quality to Claudine’s anger that brings up a visceral fear in her: that shimmering, latent tension like the shift of a crowd before a fight.
They are no longer in a world of calling cards and tea and mourning wear.
They are animals. Cecilia knows, so deeply and personally, that she is – and always will be – prey.
‘George!’ Claudine raises her voice suddenly. ‘George!’
There are footsteps, then Uncle George opens the drawing room door. ‘Yes? Oh, good morning, Cecilia.’
‘Cecilia was just leaving,’ says Claudine. ‘Would you walk her home?’
‘Of course.’
‘We have agreed I will find her a place as a governess – isn’t that right?’
‘What a relief,’ says Uncle George. ‘I will be so pleased to see you well-situated.’
Cecilia is too cowed with fear to speak. George is not her ally. He is not the absent, kindly uncle she once saw him as. If he will cast off his own daughter, then she will mean nothing to him at all.
Everything so neat and polite. Tea. A chaperone home. A rest cure. No one here will wear their claws openly.
No wonder Odette has gone mad.
‘I do not need to be delivered like a parcel,’ she says plainly. ‘I will go alone.’
‘Well. If you prefer,’ says Uncle George.
Cecilia walks, floats, from the door, across the rain-slick cobbles. At the Gate House, it is dark and the fires unlit. Perhaps they cannot afford coal. Leo has not said.
It is done, she thinks. No more. No more.
There is the terrible sense of a door having shut.
The chance to be happy, the chance to be loved, behind her, missed – and the rest of her life yawns open before her like a head-first tumble, over already.
She walks out again, walks onto the Heath and across its blustery grass.
Is she cold in her blouse and slippers? Does she cry?
What is a heart, that it can hurt so much?
There are burrowing creatures here for which she holds much envy.
How warm and safe it must be under the earth, like all the corpses lined up in their coffins not so very far away.
It is a kind thing, death, a good thing.
A safe thing. Her mother is lucky. Aunt Lydia is lucky.
Perhaps Odette will die, too, and they can be in the underworld together.
It is the sad living who are abandoned to the relentless sky, the rain and wind of fate and chance. Far better to go under.
The ponds are unused on this blustery day. Reeds fill their banks; trees skim down to brush their leafless boughs against the murky water.
Here, she will lie flat in the shallows, like the painting, the one that hangs in Mr King’s gallery, the last moment of Odette and Cecilia together, captured and unfinished.
She should have brought Malory with her – Lydia always preferred the Malory telling to the Tennyson.
The cold is just as much a shock as it was that day in the summer, but just as quickly, she finds she grows numb to it, and it is easy. There is a pressure all around her, the dense weight of her clothes pulling her down, and the sensation is close enough to an embrace that she laughs again.
If Odette were here, this would make the perfect play. Stones in their pockets and their hands bound tight together.
For a moment, she thinks: what if Odette walks out of the trees at this very moment? Imagines it so purely that it could be true. She will be seen. She will be stopped.
Someone must stop her. If there was someone who loved her, they would stop her.
Is there nothing she can do to be seen?
She has failed Odette. Her mother. Herself. Of course, there is no one here to stop her.
As the water closes up around her mouth and nose, she thinks:
Oh. She is not sure she meant to do this.