Chapter 9 #2
‘Came to visit me over and over, told me how miserable he was with his awful wife and maundering daughter. How he regretted it all. I could come back, we would find a way.’ Claudine’s expression falls.
‘And then Lydia had to take even that from me. I should have known. She became sick, so sick the world revolved around her again. And then right as I thought I might finally be free of her, that she would die on her own – she began to get better.’ Claudine snarls.
‘She took twenty years of my life. I was not going to let her take the rest of it. I had to end it that night – she could not be allowed to drag on in a wretched half-life, destroying everything again. It was easy enough with a pillow. No one would know anything. Only a moment of struggle – then a lifetime of relief.’
Finally. Finally, the words Odette has known to be true. Finally, she hears them.
Just as Odette had play-acted with Cecilia. She was wrong about the poison, but the ghost had been telling the truth.
Oh, her heart is breaking. It is an agony, the death lived over again, as though the ghost of her mother has reached inside her chest and squeezed her heart.
The cold hand traces along her cheek.
Her mother’s face is all but skull now. There are shadows at her cheeks, in the hollows of her eyes. The rot pulls back the lips from her teeth, wears away her nose.
She looks so sad.
Odette’s soft mother is gone, and all that remains is grief and rage and anger.
‘She killed us,’ she whispers, her voice coming from inside Odette’s own mind. ‘She took it all. She cannot live.’
‘You didn’t have to do it,’ says Odette, one final plea. ‘No one was asking you to give up your life to care for her.’
‘She would have kept both George and me prisoner. Who else would be expected to do it but her spinster of a sister? She made my whole life a trap, then closed it around me.’ Claudine shakes her head. ‘She is better off dead. I don’t regret it.’
Sorrow turns to anger like a match to oil.
So be it.
Odette swings up with the broken frame, aiming the jagged wood at Claudine’s head.
Claudine shrieks, skitters back. Odette swings again.
A life for a life.
Odette’s is already over. She will make the tally even.
‘Yes, darling. Only I ever loved you. Do not let me be forgotten.’
They dance around the room, Odette throwing her whole weight behind the frame, Claudine stumbling back, in shock, then fury.
Odette lifts the makeshift cudgel, but Claudine lunges first, and Odette only sidesteps at the last moment.
Panting, chaotic, they dart and strike, unsuited to their sport but unable to retreat now. Odette’s shoulders ache – she is clumsy and desperate. Her mother is at her back, arms braced against hers, lifting the wood and swinging it again.
Claudine comes to meet her, grappling with the weapon, her face wild and resembling her dead mother’s far, far too closely. Now they back up against the window, neither one with room to manoeuvre. It looks down onto the long drop, the hard ground far below.
Odette thinks of Leo pressed up against her, the last few moments of his life, his beating heart, felt on her own skin.
Odette could do it.
Claudine would not see it coming.
Sideways, through the windowpane – a fall. The glass would break easily, she thinks, and it would only take tipping her own weight to bring Claudine down with her.
‘Do it, do it now.’ The voice is jagged and cracked, like something dragged from the deep. ‘We can be together then. Please. I am so lonely; you are all I ever had.’
Odette braces herself against Claudine’s body, digs her heels in ready to fling her weight.
Then comes the thought: her mother would not ask her to die for this. Not her living mother.
It is cold water over her head.
The ghost wraps its strong and bony arms more tightly around her, crushing her chest until she cannot breathe.
Who is it who embraces her? Who is it who urges her on?
To stay loyal to the memory of her mother is to step into her own grave.
Oh, but some part of her wants to; she longs for it. It is the only thing left to her.
And she cannot do it.
If there is anything in this world I can give you, it is yours. I ask nothing of you.
Her mother would grieve to see her dead. Her real mother.
Not this creature.
This ghost is her own creation.
A twisted memory, guilt, anger, pain, all built up into the shape of a woman who would never wish this: who, for all the hurt she had caused, would never do this.
Odette lets go of the broken frame, and she and Claudine fall to the floor.
Claudine clearly cannot believe what Odette has done, and she clutches at the makeshift weapon greedily, eyes darting.
But Odette only edges away, one hand raised in supplication, shuffling back over the boards, through Lydia’s scattered drawings, smudged charcoal sketches, rough studies for larger pieces.
Cecilia’s face looks up at her.
There, by her foot, a lost page from a sketchbook. Cecilia’s beautiful face.
Like the sun in winter. A desperate relief. A glimpse of hope.
Odette has been such a fool.
She has been caught up in a selfish madness, an obsession – but she did not need to look to her mother’s ghost for love.
Cecilia has been there all along.
Cecilia, who has always come towards her, when others have turned away. Cecilia, who has held faith in her to the end. The only one who dreamt of a real future for them. The only one who ever truly saw her.
Cecilia, who lies in hospital not so far away.
Oh, if there is any chance at all that Cecilia still lives, then she must go to her – should have gone to her above all.
Claudine doesn’t matter. George doesn’t matter. All of this is nothing but the past, the echoes of the dead and dying, pain from lives that are not hers, pain that is not her duty to tend to.
Cecilia is hers. Odette has made such a monstrous mess of it all, maybe there is no way through.
But she must find Cecilia.
She must tell her that she is sorry.
Odette stands.
Claudine is on her knees, braced, clutching the wooden club, but Odette holds up her hands.
‘You win.’ She looks around at the chaos, the destruction. ‘Have it all.’
‘No – no!’ her mother’s ghost hisses, scrabbling at her.
Without another word, Odette leaves.