So thatwedid not include her mother.
Odette reaches around for something to say. ‘I hope you will enjoy your stay in Suffolk.’
Make it smooth, make it easy. If her father has done something, then there will be some reason for it, and she must do her best to tidy up the loose edges.
Claudine sips her tea.
There is a little strained conversation, until Claudine announces that she would like to attend to her toilet after a long journey, and they break apart in unspoken relief.
A rearrangement of bodies: Hester, Lydia’s lady’s maid, is instructed to settle Claudine in her room, and George goes to attend to some matter, while Odette slips away to the painting studio.
The house is the same – stink and sun, old wood, stone, faded curtains and glass – and yet it is all wrong. The world has tilted over, as though it turns on some axis that Odette has, until now, been entirely unaware of.
Why has Claudine come? Why was this plan concealed?
She must find her mother.
3
Cecilia
WHEN CECILIA WAS FOUR, maybe five – the memory is unrooted in that way of early life – Leo would laugh at how she said her own name. Too many sibilants, the vowels all tight and high and whistle-like. A little mouse, he called her, squeaking and snuffling. Cecilia cried over it, because she was not sure he was wrong.
In the vast, ancient emptiness of Herne House, she scurries along the corridors unnoticed, padding silently up the sweeping staircase, the noise of her own breathing flat against her ears. The house is so old it is as though it swallows her up in the expanse of its own past, as though she could cease to exist entirely. Here is Camelot, Cecilia thought, when Odette first drew her across the moat to the ivy-clad walls, through drawing room and solar. Here is Avalon, Arcadia.
Dismissed by Uncle George, she is untethered. With Odette, everything has purpose; severed, she is cast adrift.
What will Oxford be?comes the traitorous thought.An entire undoing?They will be parted for so long, with Cecilia at Oxford and Odette at Cambridge. Summer will stretch for weeks yet, but she has been bracing herself for the autumn, arranging it in her mind so that she can make some sense of it. Odette wants to go to university on her own, so Cecilia will want it, too; they will split for a time and it will only prove their love more constant, atest, or that is how she makes herself understand it. Cecilia can wait for Odette to be ready for their life together.
But it wasn’t supposed to change yet.
Cecilia has heard nothing of an Aunt Claudine. She does not know what to make of this new actor upon the stage.
Her mother is in her room, sat before her dressing table, a pot of rouge open but discarded. She holds an oblong of paper in her hands, unfolded to be read.
‘Is it true Aunt Lydia’s sister will be staying?’ asks Cecilia, tucking herself against the doorframe so that Penelope will not see her grass-stained skirts. ‘We found her downstairs and now they are all talking in private.’
Penelope glances at her, distracted. ‘Then leave them to it.’
‘I didn’t know Aunt Lydia had a sister. Did you know she was coming?’
Penelope shoves the paper into a drawer, shooing Cecilia from the room. ‘So many questions! Anyone would think you’d been brought up in the gutter. It is rude to pry.’
‘But—’
‘Go along with you and keep out of the way.’
The door shuts firmly in Cecilia’s face.
She scowls, as there is no one about to see. If Odette were here, she would do such a perfect impression of Penelope’s tone, the twist of her mouth, that Cecilia’s frustration would dissolve at once.
Fine. She willkeep out of the way.
Halfway along the twisting corridor that runs the spine of the Jacobean wing is a section of panelling that does not lie flush to the wall. If Cecilia hooks her nails into the edge of the grain just so, she can prise out the panel that swings on concealed hinges. She steps through and finds herself in blessed darkness. For a moment, all she does is breathe. She is truly invisible now, a mouse behind the skirting boards.
The old servants’ passages were closed up not long after Cecilia was born. When Uncle George inherited Herne House from his uncle, he declared them unfit for purpose, too narrow and dirty and poorly maintained. He considered himself a great radical; allowing his servants to see daylight was an act of magnanimity on his part. Now, they are all but derelict, the home of spiders and crawling things, broken furniture, leaks and smells and, in the bottom of the house, seeping, stagnant water.
The first summer she spent at Herne House, Cecilia discovered a way into the passages through the old priest hole beneath the stairs, in which Odette would lock her when they played at Reformation. She tried to share the passages with her, but Odette disliked the dark, recoiling, frightened, so Cecilia banished it from their play – and kept it for herself.