Her father’s smile becomes fixed. ‘Claudine has made a great effort for tonight’s meal, so I am sure you will do everything you can to make her feel at home.’
At home– the words send a bristle of anger through her. She wants to throw herself on the ground and beat her fists, reduced to a child in a way she finds hateful, embarrassing.
‘She has made herself at home quite thoroughly, I should say,’ she says instead.
For a moment, it looks as though her father will caution her, and she feels a thrill at it – that she might elicit a spark of honest emotion from him. She thinks of all the time she has sat with him in his study, or listened to him speak on his reading, his work, listened to him explain the world for her, set it out in rules and wisdom. Nailing it down so thoroughly until all the meat of life is twitching and limp, unable to fight back. He has always wanted her to help him in this effort, to agree with him that, yes, this is how things are, yes, his understanding of the world is right – because her mother’s must be wrong, so fragile is it – therefore, his choices are the correct ones, his wants are reasonable.
What was once so certain is cast into absurdity. How can she go on as she had with him? How could she support him in this?
But he does nothing. As always, he sinks back into a vague smile, and continues as though he has not heard her.
He pats her shoulder. ‘You’re looking well.’ With that he goes to his study.
Odette breathes hard through her nose. It is unthinkable to go upstairs, to change for dinner. Smile at their guests. Eat, drink. Make conversation. It is mad – this whole world is mad. What does it matter, then, if she sees a ghost? She is too alive with feeling; her hands are clammy, her breath short. How can she endure this? How can she be here?
It is all she can do to make herself turn mechanically into the drawing room, where Penelope, Leo and Cecilia have already gathered to wait for the dinner gong. Drinks have been poured, and above the mantelpiece the large painting of Cecilia cowering and scared as Mary at the annunciation has been removed. The London house is airy and modern where Herne House is ancient and brooding, and the effect is strengthened by the gaslightsbeing turned up brighter than her mother would ever have set them. But they cannot dispel the winter dark, and the shadows seem to fall more heavily in spite of them.
Claudine stands a little apart in a purple velvet evening dress with beaded appliqué and regards Odette coldly.
‘Are you not joining us for dinner?’
It is like the abrupt slap of a cold ocean wave to see her again. Odette cannot look at her – cannot look away.
Her aunt. Stepmother.
Her mother’s murderer?
‘I am,’ says Odette.
‘You are not dressed.’
Odette looks down at herself. ‘I do not believe I am naked.’
Leo chokes back a laugh and earns a discreet smack on the arm from Penelope. Cecilia does not meet her eye.
Claudine draws her lips into a bloodless line, though she does not speak.
Oh. She should not have said that. What does she mean by it? Why does she draw Claudine’s ire?
Revenge. Murder.
She can hear the ghost’s words now as plainly as the night they were spoken.
Odette takes a glass of sherry and holds it tightly for support.
Can she really believe Claudine had a hand in her own sister’s death?
She thinks again of her mother folding in on herself, the blood pouring from her mouth.
The sickness that started only after Claudine’s arrival.
Claudine, who now sits prettily as a new wife, mistress of the London residence and Herne House, instructing her dead sister’s servants and sleeping between her dead sister’s sheets.
For a moment, Odette’s eye is caught by the shape of a figure in the shadows behind Cecilia, in the lee of the chimney breast,and she thinks another of their party must have arrived – but when she looks again, it is gone.
Finally, George arrives amidst the safety of the dinner guests; Eddie Rutherford leads the way with Mr Wrexham, in hot debate over the merits of Hardy’sWessex Poemsand Wilde’sThe Ballad of Reading Gaol, which have both been published this year. Mousy Mrs Wrexham follows, and a few of the usual crowd, though Odette notes that the more beautiful, artistic women have been replaced by stolid society wives whom Odette has heard her father call terrible bores.
‘Are we all here?’ says Eddie. ‘I saw Mullen heading towards the gong.’