I thank you for your condolences.
You write to me so loquaciously that I wonder where this woman has been these last few weeks. Where was she when I wrote and wrote from Oxford, and in London reached my hand to you only to be kicked like some craven dog.
I would let you kick me still, if it were not for this emptiness that has taken over me. It is all for nothing, don’t you think? All those games, all that love, your mouth on mine, the poetry and the fantasy. That is all it ever was. Fantasy. I do not know what there is left to me in poetry. I let the words pour through me like sand, fine-grained and fleeting.
We are not children anymore. We must put away childish things.
You are not the only one who has lost a mother now.
Perhaps that finally makes us equals.
[This, scratched out so violently it cannot be read.]
I don’t think I want to be here anymore.
Yours,
Cecilia
Act Four
December 1898, Herne House, Suffolk, Hampstead, London, and Germany
She murmured, ‘Vain, in vain: it cannot be.
He will not love me: how then? must I die?’
Then as a little helpless innocent bird,
That has but one plain passage of few notes,
Will sing the simple passage o’er and o’er
For all an April morning, till the ear
Wearies to hear it, so the simple maid
Went half the night repeating, ‘Must I die?’
And now to right she turned, and now to left,
And found no ease in turning or in rest;
And ‘Him or death,’ she muttered, ‘death or him,’
Again and like a burthen, ‘Him or death.’
‘Lancelot and Elaine’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1
Odette
THETICK-TICK-TICKof the clock fills the quiet drawing room. Odette sniffs, rubs at her eyes with her sleeve. The noise seems so loud that it fills her whole mind, as though she has been scourged and left empty but for the mechanical count of minutes and seconds.
Her mother stands in the corner of the room, silent, pale, accusing, shot through with light from the window like the half-shadow that she is.
She has stood there in life. Odette can remember it so clearly: her mother touching her fingertips to the china milkmaids on the mantelpiece or the oil-stained antimacassar on the back of the armchair, as though there were secrets hidden within the flotsam and jetsam of the world that she could discover if only she looked closely enough, some solution to the problem of her own existence.