‘Could?Will! Can you believe it? Finally.Finally!’ Cecilia rains kisses on her cheeks, then falters. ‘What’s wrong?’
Odette closes her eyes. ‘You know you can’t believe my mother.’
‘But Eddie Rutherfordiscoming. They’re all arriving tomorrow.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Don’t be so pessimistic.’
‘I’m not being pessimistic; I’m being realistic. What my mother says doesn’t mean much.’
‘But she wants you to have the money. It may take her a little time to work it all out, but she intends you to have it. Doesn’tthat meansomething?’
‘I don’t know. Does it ever mean anything?’
When Odette was eleven or twelve, her mother took her to Dulwich and the Picture Gallery in the bright, posied spring. Lydia led her from Rembrandt to Gainsborough to Canaletto to van Dyck, talking through each style, each artist’s use of colour and composition, the quality of oil and water paints, the play of light and dark, and brushstroke and blending. A small crowd gathered with them as they moved from room to room, mistaking Lydia for a learned guide, and Odette shone with pride. That washermother.
These memories are like gold amongst the silt, a narrow vein she mines carefully, mindful of collapses.
Because Lydia is only ever one false move from collapse.
The unfinished canvases abandoned in her studio, the promised drawing lessons that never materialised – each new vision of her future that Lydia conjures so vividly for Odette never takes form. It is all always too much.
And fool that she is, Odette swallows each hook and feels the pain of it ripping out each time.
She does not want to be gullible.
But she cannot help hope.
‘Then we must make sure it happens,’ says Cecilia. ‘We will not let your mysterious aunt become a distraction.’
Claudine. There it is. The fault that runs through Lydia’s new fantasy.
Odette leans back on her elbows, digging her nails into the moss that clings to the slates. She looks at the expanse of stars above them, the fog of the Milky Way indistinct against the bright wash of moonlight. A day ago, a moment like this would have brought her peace.
‘She wouldn’t say a word about her. It was all very peculiar. No one in my family ever wants to talk about anything.’
It is probably the worst thing she could do in her father’s eyes: ask him to talkhonestly.
Cecilia’s expression becomes fixed. ‘We shouldn’t think about Claudine. What does it matter? We will be away at university soon enough.’
‘I thought everything was set up for me to leave, but it can never be simple. There will always be something that comes along to drag me back to my mother’s side.’
Cecilia finds her hand and squeezes it.
At once, it is too much. Odette cannot bear it. The hope, the anxiety, the risk of disappointment, the fear that it will all undo her.
She sits up abruptly, pulls her hand free. ‘I don’t want to think about my mother anymore. What a waste of being here with you. Earlier, you said you had an idea.’
‘Oh!’ Cecilia looks at Odette from a sly side-eye. ‘Lady Godiva.’
Odette tips her head back and laughs. ‘If you wish to see me naked, you need only ask.’
Cecilia’s gaze flickers down to Odette’s body, half visible through the thin material of her nightgown. ‘Seeing you naked is why I know you will make the perfect Godiva.’
‘And you want to be the dirty peeping Tom?’
Odette means it as a joke, but it lands flat between them, this suggestion that there is something sordid or perverse in what they do, that Cecilia is somehow as crude as the men who cluster on the Haymarket in the West End.