The signal for Cecilia to come over.
It still makes her heart stutter, even now. Odette wants her. Odetteneedsher.
She slips on her shoes, hooks her skirts into the belt of her dressing gown, and climbs from her window, onto the roof of the bay below, then down a trellis to the ground. There is no one abroad at this time of night, and she passes unseen across the road and into the grounds of the Fairfax-Waugh house. It is not so easy a climb this side, the house standing taller, but ivy winds wild up the brickwork, clematis and wisteria vying for space and proffering hand and foot holds.
Cecilia slips at last through the open window into Odette’s room.
Odette waits, hands twisted together, a little distance away, as though she has forgotten how they can be together.
Cecilia will remind her.
She takes Odette in her arms and kisses her firmly, her mouth, her jaw, pulls their bodies flush and sets Odette steady. Here, she tries to say, this has not changed. This will never change.
‘Do you think the photograph will turn out well?’ is the firstthing Odette says when Cecilia draws back.
Photograph? It takes her a moment to place Odette’s thoughts. ‘Of course it will,’ she says.
‘There are so few of her, and what if one day I forget what she looks like?’
‘You won’t.’
‘I will. I can barely remember my grandparents.’
‘She’s your mother. You’ll remember.’
‘Do you remember your father?’
It is an abrupt and cruel question, and Cecilia smiles reflexively to hide the hurt.
No, she does not remember what her father looks like. How can she when he died before she was born? Odette knows this. She means nothing by it. There are a handful of photographs that her mother jealously guards in an album, and Cecilia has committed each of them to memory; she has quizzed Leo on what little he can tell her and turned each image – gentle hands, fierce temper, bright eyes – into something like a whole man. But she does not rememberhim.
Odette picks at her cuticles. It is painful to watch.
Cecilia takes her hands. ‘It has only been a few hours. It is still such a shock—’
‘Oh, do not try to be kind to me – I cannot stand it.’ Odette snatches away her fingers, paces like a cat. ‘If I cry, I don’t know if I will ever stop. I can feel it all there, waiting for me, something so big it’s like an ocean that will drown me if I ever stop kicking, so please, Cecilia, do not ask me to stop kicking.’
She presses her hands to her temples, pulling at the fine curls that are escaping their pins.
Cecilia comes to her again, kisses her cheek, then her forehead. ‘I ask no such thing. Whatever it is you need from me, I will do it. Tell me.’
Odette’s mouth twists, her full, Cupid’s-bow lips and her finedark brows drawn together. ‘Distract me.’
This is a request Cecilia knows well. It is a game, their game.
She brings her to a sofa and sits in the corner so that Odette can rest her head in her lap. Cecilia strokes her hair, her eyes drifting around the room, to Lydia’s sketches, the half-finished work Odette has been allowed to keep –La Belle Dame Sans Merci,Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,Lamia.
‘One day,’ she begins, ‘we will take a train. We will go all the way to the coast.’
‘To Brittany?’ asks Odette, noting which picture Cecilia is looking at.Tristan and Iseult.
‘To Brittany. Cornwall. Ireland. All of it.’
‘No. I don’t like that one. It all ends in death.’
She is not wrong. The stories that Lydia has painted them into court suffering and lovesickness, heartbreak and grief. Now, it seems a folly, inviting in something for which they were not ready.
‘Then what about our flat in Bloomsbury?’ Cecilia asks.