Odette wonders if Lydia thinks she is effectively concealing whatever this secret is. There is so plainlysomethingthat neither of her parents wishes to acknowledge directly, but for all their careful obfuscation, the shape of the creature behind shows through. It is maddening to see it plainly and yet be told there is nothing there at all.
Lydia opens her arms in a too-familiar gesture, and Odette submits to be drawn to her grasp.
This is how it is. This is the only way it can be, with her mother.
Lydia is lost at sea, and Odette is the life raft.
‘Never too old to be held by your mother,’ she says. ‘When you were little, it was the only way to calm you down.’
Odette makes a non-committal sound. The suggestion that she is notcalmwhen she has done nothing but ask simple questions. There is some rising noise inside her, like the drone of cattle, too many voices lifting at once until it is unbearable, loud enough to fill her chest.
So Odette speaks. Not about her real life, or anything she feels or thinks, or her complicated, agonising love for Cecilia, or how she fears leaving for university on her own, or how tense she is with so many people always in the house, servants and guests coming and going, how she doesn’t know how to behave in front of them, cannot work out what they want from her, how she cowers and tenses like a hunted animal and only finds solace in a closed door.
She tells her, instead, of the information Newnham have sent to her, of the lectures she will attend on Latin and Greek, of the papers she is expected to write, of the accommodation prepared for her and the rules set down about how she must live. She talks about what she might pack in her trunk, what books she will take, what she is reading now for pleasure.
A carefully penned portrait of a life.
It is a curious split she finds in herself: one part urgent in the need for some aspect of herself that her mother does not know, another in anguish to lose a moment of her attention. Her mother’s eye is always wandering towards her own pain, and it would be all too easy to lose her entirely.
The question is: which can she bear? The loss of self or theloss of her mother?
‘There is something I have been meaning to tell you,’ says Lydia.
Odette stiffens. ‘About Aunt Claudine?’
‘No. Put her from your mind. I would like to find a way to give you some money. If a woman is to be free, she must have her own means.’
Odette is almost too stunned to speak. It is a rush of frantic thought and feeling all at once. Is this real? Is it one of her mother’s fantasies? Will she remember this tomorrow? Can she be stupid enough to believe her?
After a moment’s deliberation, she asks, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I have come up with something of a plan. You know how long Eddie has been pressing me to do a show, and he says his friend, Mr King at the Jermyn Street Gallery, will gladly find space. There are so many pieces cluttering up the place here; I could sell them all for you.’
Odette’s heart pinches with a pain that silences her at first. It is a gift and a burden. ‘That is – that is too much. Are you sure you could part with them? And a show .?.?.’
Lydia smiles, holds out a hand. Odette takes it, feeling the cool, smooth skin of her mother’s fingers as she squeezes hers so faintly.
‘You’re such a lovely girl. You don’t know what it means to me that you have found something you are passionate about in going to Cambridge. You are so independent and sharp; I am so useless.’
If Lydia struggles, is lacking, suffers, it is only ever because Odette is golden, good, strong. It makes Odette wonder who her mother was before her. If it is Odette’s presence that casts her mother so deeply into shadow, then, without her, did she stand in the light?
It is as though they can exist only as two sides of one coin, andLydia has decided that she must always be in the dark.
‘I can’t accept that much,’ says Odette.
‘It is my decision.’
There is nothing Odette can say to that.Thank youis too transactional. ‘If you are sure.’
‘You can always come to me. There will always be a room for you here, whatever happens. You are my girl.’
Lydia squeezes her tighter, and Odette feels suddenly repulsed. It is too confusing, these feelings of love and revulsion co-mingled within her.
How is it possible to love and to hate the same person so completely?
5
Odette