The winter day is low and pale. London spreads out to the south in a mass of smoking chimneys, coal smog settling across the houses below. It is not so cold, and already she sweats under her heavy woollen coat.
In her pocket is the letter from Odette that set out a time and location to meet. Cecilia has read and reread it, looking for some hint as to Odette’s state. Is she angry at her? Hurt? It has been two weeks since her previous letter – longer since anything meaningful from her, and Cecilia has spent the intervening time fretting, conjuring up horrible accidents or terrible illnesses that have taken Odette away from her.
Highgate Cemetery is a half-hour walk across the Heath, and she is glad of the exercise to keep her worry at bay.
She checks her watch – she is a little early, and there is no Odette.
Then the church bells toll the hour from St Michael’s at the top of the hill, and Odette steps out from behind a tree.
It is a piece of theatrics Lydia would have appreciated, like an attitude from one of her tableaux vivants. Cecilia can see it in her mind’s eye: Antigone at Polynices’ graveside, doomed for her forbidden mourning.
‘Odette.’ Instinctively, Cecilia goes to her, reaching out a hand in expectation that she will meet her halfway.
Odette does not move.
Cecilia falters, stops. Drops her hand.
I missed you, she almost says.
Instead, ‘It is good to see you.’
Odette wears small smoked glasses against the low winter sun; she is still in her mourning blacks, darkest bombazine with deep crêpe hems in the old-fashioned style of mourning reserved for widows. She is used to Odette in flannel skirts and shirtwaists, rational dress or tea-gowns – it is strange to see her so neatly done, her corsets tightly laced and her dress so precisely fitted that it is like armour. She is beautiful in her grief, her cheekbones cutting a sharp line, features brought into precise relief like clear air after rain. It feels wrong to desire her when she is so acutely wrapped up in grief, and yet Cecilia does. There is no end to her wanting when it comes to Odette.
‘You came,’ says Odette simply.
‘Of course I did.’
It is as though they are meeting for the first time, all the ease and familiarity with each other stripped away, and, God, if that is not enough to send a spike of fear through her.
Odette comes to her mother’s grave, toeing the edge of the sinking dirt as if looking for something.
‘Is there anything wrong?’
‘No,’ says Odette sharply. ‘What would be wrong?’
Cecilia considers asking about her clothes, the smell of cigarette smoke about her, the way she is measuring the length of Lydia’s grave with her footsteps.
‘You stopped writing.’ When Odette doesn’t reply, Cecilia continues. ‘Uncle George says they have heard nothing from you at all. You didn’t tell anyone when you meant to come home, only in that last message to me, and even then you come first here – what I mean to say is: we worried about you.’
‘Weworried?’ queries Odette, with an arched brow. ‘I did not know you were so close with my father and aunt – forgive me, I suppose I must saystepmothernow.’
‘Iworried.’ Cecilia comes closer. ‘I cannot imagine what you must be feeling about it all. Truly, it has shocked me beyond all sense, but—’
‘I don’t wish to speak of it.’
‘But what will you do when you go home? You must say something to them. I do not know how you can bear it—’
‘Of course I cannot bear it!’ snaps Odette. ‘My mother is barely cold in her grave and yet my father has found time to take a new wife and looked no further than my mother’s sister. It issick.’
‘I do not disagree.’
‘Then why do you ask so many questions?’
‘Because you won’t tell me what I can do to help.’
‘If you cannot change history and bring my mother back then you can donothingto help me.’
There is something unnerving about the perfectly formed carapace of Odette’s appearance and the lurching, untempered emotion of her words, taking her from control to chaos in a single moment. She holds herself as though she is primed to run – from what, Cecilia does not know, but Odette twitches at the small sounds of birds and mice in the undergrowth, darting furtive looks over Cecilia’s shoulder and to their sides.