There is the terrible sense of a door having shut.
The chance to be happy, the chance to be loved, behind her, missed – and the rest of her life yawns open before her like a head-first tumble, over already.
She walks out again, walks onto the Heath and across its blustery grass.
Is she cold in her blouse and slippers? Does she cry?
What is a heart, that it can hurt so much?
There are burrowing creatures here for which she holds much envy. How warm and safe it must be under the earth, like allthe corpses lined up in their coffins not so very far away. It is a kind thing, death, a good thing. A safe thing. Her mother is lucky. Aunt Lydia is lucky. Perhaps Odette will die, too, and they can be in the underworld together. It is the sad living who are abandoned to the relentless sky, the rain and wind of fate and chance. Far better to go under.
The ponds are unused on this blustery day. Reeds fill their banks; trees skim down to brush their leafless boughs against the murky water.
Here, she will lie flat in the shallows, like the painting, the one that hangs in Mr King’s gallery, the last moment of Odette and Cecilia together, captured and unfinished.
She should have brought Malory with her – Lydia always preferred the Malory telling to the Tennyson.
The cold is just as much a shock as it was that day in the summer, but just as quickly, she finds she grows numb to it, and it is easy. There is a pressure all around her, the dense weight of her clothes pulling her down, and the sensation is close enough to an embrace that she laughs again.
If Odette were here, this would make the perfect play. Stones in their pockets and their hands bound tight together.
For a moment, she thinks: what if Odette walks out of the trees at this very moment? Imagines it so purely that it could be true. She will be seen. She will be stopped.
Someone must stop her. If there was someone who loved her, they would stop her.
Is there nothing she can do to be seen?
She has failed Odette. Her mother. Herself. Of course, there is no one here to stop her.
As the water closes up around her mouth and nose, she thinks:
Oh. She is not sure she meant to do this.
5
Odette
THE LETTER IS NOTHINGin Odette’s pocket. She can hardly feel it. And yet it weighs like a stone against her side, a stiff line in her skirts, and she is possessed with a fear that it will rustle or crackle each time she moves.
But she goes unnoticed.
The night train rolls out of Cologne, heading south and east through the smut and yellow light of the city into the dark countryside. They take dinner in the restaurant carriage, and Odette is thankful when Miss Rosebury takes out her book again and eats her soup without removing her eyes from the page. She treats Odette like something to be watched, monitored, not to be touched without terrible caution, like a pot boiling on a stove.
Odette pushes her sauerkraut around her plate, impatient for the evening to end. Her mother is not with her here, and it is a strange loss.
She thinks, again, about Cecilia. The curl of her hair that always came loose from its pins and fell across her eyes. The scatter of freckles along her breast bone. The hitch in her breath when she was surprised. What she would give to hold her again.
Eventually, they are evicted from their table for the second sitting, and Miss Rosebury retires to her own compartment and Odette to hers. While they were eating, the blind has been drawn across the window and the bed has been made up in the narrowspace where the seats were, crisp white linen with the railway’s logo embroidered on the corner. The steward brings a bowl of hot water for Odette to wash, but she knows at once what she must do with it. She shuts and locks the door and quickly takes the letter from her pocket before the water has time to cool. A thick head of steam rises, and gingerly she holds the letter over it, letting the glue soften until she can ease open the flap.
Light-headed, she sits on the edge of the bed to read.
When she is done, she folds it, puts it on the covers beside her, and digs her fingers into the hard mattress. She is shaking uncontrollably.
The letter is simple, direct, yet driven with an intensity of feeling that Odette recognises only too well. It is from Claudine to a Frau Sterne, the matron of a sanatorium – but Odette knows this meansasylum. The letter speaks with carefully detailed compassion of a poor, troubled stepdaughter, parted from her wits by a grief so strong it has made her mad and a danger to others. The incident with Cecilia and the pillow is written about at length, and Odette feels sick with the shame of it. Shehasgone mad, has she not? The letter calls her delusional, paranoid. There is with it a legal document half in Leo’s hand, and signed by George, giving his permission for Odette to be detained. She does not yet have her majority; her freedom is not her own.
Not a health resort – a madhouse.
Not a rest cure – an incarceration.