Chapter 5
Odette
THE LETTER IS NOTHING in Odette’s pocket. She can hardly feel it. And yet it weighs like a stone against her side, a stiff line in her skirts, and she is possessed with a fear that it will rustle or crackle each time she moves.
But she goes unnoticed.
The night train rolls out of Cologne, heading south and east through the smut and yellow light of the city into the dark countryside.
They take dinner in the restaurant carriage, and Odette is thankful when Miss Rosebury takes out her book again and eats her soup without removing her eyes from the page.
She treats Odette like something to be watched, monitored, not to be touched without terrible caution, like a pot boiling on a stove.
Odette pushes her sauerkraut around her plate, impatient for the evening to end. Her mother is not with her here, and it is a strange loss.
She thinks, again, about Cecilia. The curl of her hair that always came loose from its pins and fell across her eyes. The scatter of freckles along her breast bone. The hitch in her breath when she was surprised. What she would give to hold her again.
Eventually, they are evicted from their table for the second sitting, and Miss Rosebury retires to her own compartment and Odette to hers.
While they were eating, the blind has been drawn across the window and the bed has been made up in the narrow space where the seats were, crisp white linen with the railway’s logo embroidered on the corner.
The steward brings a bowl of hot water for Odette to wash, but she knows at once what she must do with it.
She shuts and locks the door and quickly takes the letter from her pocket before the water has time to cool.
A thick head of steam rises, and gingerly she holds the letter over it, letting the glue soften until she can ease open the flap.
Light-headed, she sits on the edge of the bed to read.
When she is done, she folds it, puts it on the covers beside her, and digs her fingers into the hard mattress. She is shaking uncontrollably.
The letter is simple, direct, yet driven with an intensity of feeling that Odette recognises only too well.
It is from Claudine to a Frau Sterne, the matron of a sanatorium – but Odette knows this means asylum.
The letter speaks with carefully detailed compassion of a poor, troubled stepdaughter, parted from her wits by a grief so strong it has made her mad and a danger to others.
The incident with Cecilia and the pillow is written about at length, and Odette feels sick with the shame of it.
She has gone mad, has she not? The letter calls her delusional, paranoid.
There is with it a legal document half in Leo’s hand, and signed by George, giving his permission for Odette to be detained.
She does not yet have her majority; her freedom is not her own.
Not a health resort – a madhouse.
Not a rest cure – an incarceration.
So this is it. This is Claudine’s final move.
Odette is terrified.
But there is something more to it than that. After so long in the dark, fumbling, here at last is something concrete. Claudine has shown her hand so openly, thinking that Odette will never return to confront her.
Odette cannot let that become true.
Somehow, she has forgotten how to breathe. Her chest hitches; her heart hammers. She is faint and trembling, desperately drawing at breath that does not come.
A weight settles on the bed beside her, then her mother’s cold arm embraces her, and she lets herself be drawn down to lie with her head on her lap.
She smells of rot now, carrion sweet and sharp, like the old city churchyards when the rain comes heavy and the ground splits to spill out fresh and decayed bodies alike.
If she is truly mad, maybe that is no bad thing.
In these moments, it is a muddled confusion between herself and her mother: did she die that day, too? Is she the ghost haunting the world?
Lydia runs her fingers through Odette’s hair, and Odette thinks of the last time they were together like this, in the studio in Herne House, the nude propped against the wall, surely her mother’s masterpiece.
‘Come and be with me, my girl.’
‘What do I do, Mother?’ Her voice is a whisper.
‘Do not let them get away with this.’
Odette presses her face into the shroud and sobs.
Words are all very well, but what can she do now?
The trap has closed around her. They will arrive in Munich in the morning, and Odette has nowhere else to go: no money, no friends, nothing to do but keep going.
It seems now a foolish errand to walk forwards into destruction.
But has she not already done that? Is it not too late to turn away?
If she were a woman like Miss Rosebury, she would at least have the means to move about the world on her own.
Then, there, an idea – only the flash of it, but even in the moment she lets it rest in her mind, it grows, unfurls, each step falling into place.
There is one way out. One narrow, monstrous path along the cliff edge.
For a moment, she baulks at what she must do, then shakes herself. Is it any more monstrous than what she has done to Cecilia, what has been done to Odette and her mother? There is nothing left in life for her. There are no more consequences for her actions.
This is the only way.