IX. Cosima
IX.
Cosima
IT’S CLOSE, BUT SHE MAKES it back in time for the funeral.
As soon as she arrives, she goes upstairs to change, rifling through the chest of drawers in her room at Denby until she fishes out a black skirt that she last wore as a twelve-year-old.
It has an elasticated waist and still just about fits. Her phone beeps. It’s from Meadow.
‘He’s alive. Conscious, stable. Some broken bones but he’ll be fine. Mx’
Cosima shudders with relief, then starts to cry and sits on the edge of the bed, the mattress springing and creaking as the tears stream down.
She hadn’t felt the chokehold of her panic until Meadow’s text had released its grip.
Thank fuck for that, she thinks. She will get to see him again.
The realisation comes to her with surprising force: she is in love with River and there’s nothing to be done about it.
A knock on the door. Without waiting for a response, her father walks in.
‘Cozzie – oh my darling. Oh goodness. Don’t be upset.’
He rushes to her, putting an arm around her shoulders. She flips her phone over so he can’t see the screen and allows herself to be comforted.
‘It’s very sad, I know, but there was nothing any of us could have done. Fliss was on her own journey. Not made for this world.’
Cosima allows him to think this is the cause of her tears. It’s rare to have her father’s attention. She misses it.
‘It’s been hard on all of us.’
Anyway, she is sad about Aunt Fliss, the only member of her family who seemed to understand her.
When Cosima and her siblings were growing up, none of them knew Fliss very well because she travelled a lot, but whenever they did see each other, Fliss would remember things.
She’d remember Cosima’s friends’ names or the plot of a film they had talked about.
And now, she’d got drunk or high or possibly both and washed up dead on a beach in Bali, which was a pretty miserable way to go.
The media reports had called her ‘troubled’ and ‘a noted socialite’.
The Mail had interviewed several of her ex-boyfriends and splashed details of her supposedly voracious sexual appetite and predilection for cocaine across the inside pages.
The reporter speculated that ‘although an undoubted tragedy, one can’t help but think it wasn’t surprising that the life of the tortured Rt Hon Felicity Fitzmaurice should have ended in this way. ’
Cosima’s father had been enraged by the piece, but he hadn’t complained or got his lawyers involved, which surprised her.
She began to wonder if all the press coverage was helpful to him in some way; if, in fact, he’d had a hand in how it was all written up.
It’s not as if he couldn’t pull on certain strings if he needed to.
The last time Cosima had been back home from school for exeat, she’d gone to get a packet of biscuits from the kitchen and found her father sharing a pot of coffee on the window seat with Charlotte Arundel, the terrifyingly powerful female editor of Britain’s biggest-circulation national tabloid.
‘Hi, Cozzie,’ he had said when she walked in. ‘This is my friend Lottie.’
Her dad’s lawyers could surely have kept the story out of the papers altogether. Maybe, she thinks as she sits next to him on the side of the bed, he had wanted the story to run in the way it did for his own reasons. When it came to her father, she knew to put nothing past him.
She rests her head on his shoulder as he pats her back and then he makes a movement behind her head that she knows, without seeing it, is him checking his watch.
She draws away.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Don’t want to delay you.’
Ben doesn’t pick up on the sarcasm. He stands without protest. Always so quick to leave, she thinks.
‘No, you’re quite right. We need to stick to your mother’s military timetable.’
He winks at her.
‘What’s that?’ he says, pointing to her phone, lying on the duvet where she left it.
Too late, Cosima remembers she has put an Oblivion Oil sticker on the back. The orange devil horns are clearly visible.
‘Those people are a fucking thorn in my side,’ he says. ‘Why would you have their logo on your phone?’
‘You know I believe in doing everything we can to end human-made climate change,’ she says stiffly.
Her father sighs.
‘These things are extremely complex and nuanced.’
‘Not really. Global average surface temperature has risen by one degree Celsius since 1850.’
‘Please, Cozzie, spare me the lecture. Obviously I know all of this. I’m the Energy Secretary.’
And there’s the problem, she thinks. The generation that did most to contribute to this mess is now in charge of tackling the apocalyptic consequences.
Except to actually tackle it would mean admitting their own selfish ignorance in the first place.
No wonder they want to look the other way. Pellets of anger lodge in her chest.
‘So why aren’t you doing anything about it?’ she says, her voice quickening. ‘The ten hottest years on historical record …’
‘… have all occurred in the past decade, yes, thank you, Cosima. I’ve read the same briefing papers as you have. But that’s not a reason to support a bunch of … a bunch of trouble-makers who throw red paint in art galleries and glue themselves to the road in rush hour.’
‘Orange,’ she corrects him. ‘Orange paint. And would you have said that to the suffragettes?’
He pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
‘It’s not the same thing at all and I don’t have time for this.’
‘Yeah, well, neither does the planet.’
He makes a visible effort to contain himself.
‘This is not the time or the place, Cosima.’
‘You brought it up, Dad. And you’re actually in a position of power to make the changes necessary.’
‘You’ve no idea,’ he says, staring at her like she’s a stranger.
Her mother called her stubborn as a child.
‘Cosima is the stubborn one,’ Serena would say in a tone of long-suffering forbearance. ‘You can’t get her to do anything if she’s set her mind against it.’
It is only now that Cosima understands the stubbornness was a final resort. If you’re never listened to, you have to protest with the only means left available to you. If your voice isn’t enough, you become immovable. Intransigence can be your greatest weapon.
‘Well what’s the point, then?’ Cosima says, her voice rising. ‘What’s the point of being in politics and barely seeing your family and abandoning your own dead sister if not to make some kind of meaningful change?’
He looks stricken. She refuses to feel bad.
‘Is it all just a fucking massive ego trip, Dad? Is it?’
She wants a reaction but he denies her even this and walks out of the room. She grabs the first thing that comes to hand and hurls it against the closed door. The pillow lands with an unimpressive flump.
She is angry when she goes back downstairs, angry when she sits with her siblings in the chapel, angry as she watches her father give a half-arsed eulogy, angry as she watches Fliss be buried in the family ground, angry as they throw clods of soil on the burnished oak of the coffin, angry that no one is saying anything that matters and angry – so angry – that the entire Fitzmaurice family is acting out a lie and even angrier that she doesn’t understand what the lie is; only that it exists in a collusion of silence and no one is strong enough to shatter it.
The next day, she makes an excuse about having to go back to school early for a lacrosse match.
‘Since when do you play lacrosse?’ Hector asks from across the breakfast table. His acne is a pink constellation across his jaw. She feels sorry for him. He’d be good-looking without the spots.
‘Started this term,’ she lies.
Hector sneers. ‘So butters.’
‘Did you want the butter, Hector?’ their grandmother asks from the head of the table.
‘No, no, Granny,’ he says, adopting his Polite Voice for Adults. Cosima snorts. ‘Thank you, Granny. I was just …’ He trails off.
‘Lacrosse?’ her father says, glancing up from his copy of the Economist. ‘That’s great, darling. There’s a lot to be said for team sports.’
He is halfway through the plate of kedgeree Cosima’s grandmother still insists on serving every morning.
Breakfast is treated with turn-of-the century formality: silver-domed bowls of scrambled egg along the sideboard accompanied by trays of sausages, tomatoes and undercooked bacon, fat congealing at the edges.
Serena has already been and gone. She picked at half a tomato and drank three cups of black coffee before announcing she was going for a walk. Cressida and Bear are still in bed.
Lady Fitzmaurice has eaten her regular bowl of porridge and prunes and has placed her spoon delicately on the side plate. Her cheeks hang like hollowed-out sails from the bones of her face.
‘Are you going?’ she asks Cosima loudly.
‘Yes, Grandma,’ Cosima replies, enunciating with equal volume.
‘Oh,’ her grandmother says, haughtily. ‘I see. Well. We shan’t keep you, in that case.’
Her father rolls his eyes.
‘Want me to drive you?’ he asks, turning the page of his periodical.
‘No, that’s fine, thanks. I’ll get a taxi.’
He doesn’t push it, which disappoints her. He seems preoccupied, drumming the table absentmindedly with his fingers, making the orange juice glasses wobble.
‘Why were you talking to Martin yesterday in the study?’ she asks.
‘What was that?’