‘What can I do?’ she asks Mrs Binx instead.
‘Nothing, my love.’ Mrs Binx pats her hand. ‘Let the women do the work. We are here to see that it is tenderly done.’
First, the nightdress is carefully lifted up; the maid cradles Lydia’s head as the gown is removed, and she lies naked before them all as she has never done in life. Her illness has made her fragile. Each bone of her ribs is clear, and her hips jut through skin that is sunless pale.
Water, soap and cloths are brought, and her body is washed. Each arm, each leg, across her stomach and chest. She is rolled over so her back can be washed, too, and then each leg and foot is gently attended to.
The maid lifts her mother’s thigh, opening it out to the side, exposing her.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ asks Odette.
‘We must stop up the orifices, Miss Fairfax-Waugh,’ says the nurse, who is moving wads of cotton to between Lydia’s legs. ‘I would explain why, but I don’t think you’d like to hear it.’
‘Oh. I see.’
Claudine waves them on. ‘Do not be prim, Odette.’
‘I am sorry.’
Odette retreats to the wall again, catching her hands behind her to press them against the dado rail until they go numb.
They put cotton inside her mother’s vagina and anus and nostrils and ears and into her mouth. She never thought a human body had so many broken places.
Odette has seen dead bodies before: carcasses in the kitchen, dead sheep bloated and rotting in the fields around Herne House – even, a very long time ago, her grandmother laid out on her bed, ready for Odette to kiss her waxy cheek. She has seen unmoving bundles in rags on the streets around Shadwell, when she and Cecilia take the train east to sit in the dark corners of beer-soaked music halls where no one will recognise them and they can press as close together as they like. She has seen graveyards dug up to make space for more bodies, and a boat crammed with screaming people sink in the Thames.
Death is everywhere in this city. It is not so strange that it should be in her family, too.
When her mother’s hair has been washed and spread out to dry, they dress her in her grave clothes. Claudine bought them from the finest funeral emporium on Oxford Street, and they are beautiful and pointless. The buttons do not fasten; there is no overstitching across the decorative embroidery, so they can never be washed, and they are fixed only with ties at the side.
Then Mrs Binx brings the shroud.
Odette made this herself. Cecilia sat beside her, stitching the hem as Odette sewed the pattern of ferns and lilies and chrysanthemums, while they kept vigil through Lydia’s long dying.
‘No. Wait.’ Odette springs forwards. ‘We must photograph her first.’
Claudine stops. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. Why not? People do it.’
Odette feels the weight of Claudine’s gaze and every strained breath, every twitch of her mouth in exasperation – or perhaps distaste. That is what it is. However nicely she plays, Odette is not stupid.
‘If you must,’ says Claudine at last, and takes the shroud away.
The maid gathers up the rags and the scraps of cotton; the nurse takes the bowls of dirty water, and Mrs Binx brushes out Lydia’s hair again.
It is mundane. It is monstrous.
Odette is powerless to change a thing.
2
Odette
ODETTE HAS LOOKED THROUGHthe mourning clothes and picked out a plain day dress in bombazine with deep crêpe hems – but it feels wrong to have something shop-bought, so fragile and temporary.
Odette’s family has never been large, but she feels its smallness now; so few of them will show their grief outwardly for long. Oh God, who will come to the funeral? Will they be alone in the church? It is too awful to think about.
Cecilia has come to help button and pin her into her new outfit, into her new life: a daughter in mourning.