Odette turns at once to the wall, scrubbing her eyes, and Cecilia takes a few paces away just as Claudine comes in. Behind her in the hallway, there is a mass of hats and scarves and coats being removed from heads and shoulders, the jabbering sound of conversation and even muted laughter, and George there in the middle of it, alive in the clasp of his circle.
Claudine surveys the flowers with distaste, which snaps to anger when she sees the coins on Lydia’s eyes. ‘What is this? Get rid of those at once before people see.’
Odette stands very still. ‘She is my mother. Why should I not do as I please?’
‘And she was my sister. Don’t act as though I have no feeling in this. Remove them. At once.’
For a moment, Cecilia thinks she may challenge Claudine – and oh God, has the time come already for Cecilia to declare whose side she is on? – but then Odette goes slowly to her mother’s face and plucks away the coins.
The Fairfax-Waughs’ circle – Liberal politicians, art critics, poets and professors – crowd into the dining room and make unbearable conversation, rehearsing the same stale dialogue over glasses of brandy and sherry. George appears relieved to disappear into the safety of friendships that demand no real intimacy. It all reminds Cecilia of her mother’s threats a few days before. Odette is surrounded by people offering their condolences and wringing her hand and telling her in detail who her mother was, as though Odette does not know best of all. They admire Lydia’s paintings and sketches, which cover the walls. Odette’s face is in more than half, the model forever at hand for whatever Lydia was struck to try.
Cecilia’s face is there, too, but it is as though she is invisible. They cannot see her beside Odette in a sketch of Lancelot coming to Guinevere – Odette as Guinevere and Cecilia the maid who tends to her – or in the painting that hangs above the sideboard, of Cecilia’s Cassandra, put to death by Odette’s Clytemnestra on the return of Agamemnon, modelled by Leo.
She is drawn again to that painting, thinking of the cold spring day when Lydia dressed them in sheets and muslin, put a tin sword in Leo’s hand and knocked Cecilia to the floor to bring her to a position of supplication and despair.
She is alive there, at least, in the moment captured in ink and oil. In the memory.
A gasp of horror snaps through the room, and Cecilia comes back to the present at once.
All stare at Lydia’s face.
Her eyes are open.
There are mutterings of shock. A woman slumps into a chair, and there is a general drawing back from the body. Odette trembles, one hand holding onto the coffin, but a neighbour, a doctor, closes Lydia’s eyelids, explaining how the muscles of the face contract after death and it has been known for a corpse to wink.
But Cecilia is watching none of them.
Claudine is at the door, one hand searching behind her for the handle, the other clutched to her chest in fear. She is ashen – the shock, of course, but it is more than that. She looks as though it is Judgement Day and the dead have risen to give their final testimony.
Odette is so caught up in herself that she does not see it. Cecilia glances between Claudine and Lydia, at the rictus of some unnamed emotion that fixes Claudine’s expression.
Guilt at taking her dead sister’s husband, perhaps.
Cecilia cannot rightly place it.
All she knows is that she must act with caution.
She only wishes Odette would do the same.
7
Odette
THE COFFIN SITS INthe hall now, open and covered in a black velvet pall with a white velvet border. Odette has chosen the old-fashioned shape that resembles a person, rather than the new oblong style that reduces a body into four straight lines. They are burying her mother; there is no need to hide it.
The dining room has been turned over now to the funeral breakfast, the mourners gathered together in their black, passing out scarves and hatbands and eating from the great piles of funeral biscuits that Mrs Binx has produced.
There is a buzzing in Odette’s head as she comes to the open coffin.
Her mother’s eyes are closed.
Of course they are.
Her cheeks have sunken in now, and her skin has become pinched and grey. She is dead.
She is dead she is dead she is dead.
And the thought strikes Odette, brief and giddy.