‘Don’t you like it?’ asks Cecilia. ‘I thought it was fitting.’
It is not that she dislikes the gifts, only that they are too close an echo of that morning.
‘I’ll take them back.’
‘No.’ Odette speaks reflexively. ‘I want them. It was only – nothing. It doesn’t matter.’
She leans over to kiss Cecilia softly. ‘Thank you.’
Cecilia tries to draw her into another kiss, but Odette cannot, not now, not after—
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise.’ Instead, Cecilia brings her down to lie at her side, chaste and chivalrous. ‘I love you like this, too.’
Odette closes her eyes. She will not cry.Don’t leave me, she wants to say, but it feels unfair. No one can promise to stay forever. No one can promise to never change.
Dying is the only unbreakable promise.
The end is all there is.
4
Odette
ODETTE DREAMS ABOUT THEwater rising up the sides of the house from the moat, stagnant and still and silent, swallowing it all up – worse than a tide she cannot stem; a slow, inexorable sinking.
Her mother is sinking first. Odette swims down, reaching out her hand, but her mother’s fingers always slip through. Then she has swum down too deep, and all is dark and cold, and there is no way back to the surface.
She wakes crying, and Cecilia rests her head in her lap and strokes her hair.
What to do with all this pain?
Nineteen. Money that will be hers alone. A place at university. A great love.
There is nothing wrong with her life. She should not feel melancholy or disturbed. She is lucky. Wouldn’t everyone say so? Why can she notfeelher luck?
They are due to return to London in a handful of days, if the doctor agrees that Lydia is well enough to travel. It is a delicate decision, George has explained to Odette. The travel will be disruptive to Lydia’s health, but staying in the waterlogged house as the weather cools will be no better. Aunt Claudine is to accompany them.
There are plans to be made for her move to Cambridge: clothes to be packed, books to be bought, other essential itemsthat she is sure she should be able to think of, but her head is too muffled. The future feels like a terrible thing, one that she would hold at bay at all costs, if she could.
*
She is walking in the gardens with Cecilia the morning after her birthday when her father comes to find her.
The weather is turning early for August, the brutal heat dying away as if chasing in the harvest. Herne House hunkers low amongst the trees, the stone and wood turning dull in the cooling light. The fields are full from dawn until nightfall with the sound of the drays pulling the new reaping and binding machines or the swish of scythes and bent-backed labourers. The cloud draws in, a silent threat.
‘Come and sit with me,’ her father says with a soft smile.
She is glad of it. Glad to be remembered by him. She thought that something between them had begun to drift, that her understanding of her place with him was wrong – but he is still here. First the diary, now this. He is still an anchor point to which she can fix herself.
They walk a little further, under the fruiting trees of the orchard, to a stone bench set in seclusion from the house.
‘I wanted to speak to you,’ her father says, gesturing at the bench beside him.
Her gladness turns at once. She sits, a rock in her stomach. ‘It’s Mother, isn’t it?’
He frowns. ‘No, the doctor will not come until tomorrow.’