Odette cannot explain herself. She is crying. There is a sense of some foreboding that has taken root in her heart, and it makes her sick – as though there is something she must do, if only she can think of what it is.
Her mother’s cool fingers find her neck, soothing against her hot skin.
‘You should eat something,’ Lydia says when Odette is done crying and has mopped her face with a handkerchief.
‘Will you come with me?’ Odette looks up at her, open-faced.
Lydia baulks, then seems to catch herself, and forces a smile. ‘All right.’
Odette rises, brushes down her skirts, wipes her eyes again.
But when Lydia stands, she stumbles. Steadies herself against the easel.
Then doubles over, retching up red blood.
Letters
October to November 1898
4thOctober 1898
My darling Odette,
I cannot believe I sit here at Somerville, writing my very first letter to you as a university student. I miss you terribly, though it has only been a matter of days, but I am unaccustomed to living even one hour without you near. It is quite taxing. I shall give you a description of my rooms so that you can picture me; please do the same for Newnham, as I dearly wish to hold an image of you there in my head, so that at any moment I can conjure you, like a ghost at a séance. I am proud of you for going, despite it all. I know this will do us both good.
I am in a building called West, for that is where it lies in the grounds of the college, and we have a great rivalry with the other building, called House. West is quite charming, and very newly built, so I am only the second or third girl to use my room. We each have our own bedroom, which is simply but elegantly furnished, and we share sitting rooms and dining rooms, so it is nothing at all like school but far more like being at home. We also have a paddock and an orchard and a vegetable garden, and some of the girls have already invited me to go punting, and there’s a group who hole up in one of the sitting rooms and give dramatic readings, and I feel quite intimidated of course, but I thought I could read that section of Endymion you always complimented me on – I will try it and report back.
It is very strange to do all this without you. I could never picture it before, being all on my own, but I find it quite exciting. I have my books arranged on a shelf and muchwriting paper and ink in stock, and I have brought the sketch of you and me as dryads and hung it up above my desk. At dinner the other night, someone mentioned Lydia’s Psyche and Venus, and I was dying to tell her that I modelled Psyche, but I kept quiet because no one likes a brag, and anyway they’d hardly believe me.
It is strange, I find myself missing my mother – I even miss Leo! I can hear you laughing at me. Of course I miss them, it is natural. It is only that I thought, being apart from her, I might finally come into some new sense of myself. But instead I feel as though a stark light has come on in a once dark room, and there I am, exposed, some spineless, wriggling insect. It is odd to think at least with Mother I always know where I am.
I am sorry. I shouldn’t have written all that. It was thoughtless of me.
I miss Lydia too, very much. I think she would have obtained so much joy from seeing you at Cambridge, I really do. She would have some clever little story about all the brilliant people who have walked where you now walk, and some little fact about a college building being used for something during the civil war or a Roman general who once bathed in the Cam – that sort of thing, don’t you think?
I must say sorry again, for I write far too much on matters you cannot want my opinion on.
My darling, I think of you all the time. I am pressing my kisses to your forehead (and elsewhere). Please write me a long letter. I want to know every last thing about how you are and what you are doing.
Your ever loving,
Cecilia
*
10thOctober 1898
Dearest Cecilia,
It brought me such comfort to receive your letter. I confess I have found it hard to be in a new place that feels so cold and alien. We are west of the Cam here, while all the major colleges are on the east; there is no one out here with us save Selwyn across the road, but that is full of missionaries and clergy, and people avoid them even more than they avoid me. I am in my blacks, of course, and send everyone letters on black-edged paper, and half the girls have offered their condolences, which I cannot but find hateful. I want to snap at them in their simpering faux kindness. They do not know me; they did not know my mother. They live their happy, untouched little lives and think themselves so generous for tolerating my ghoulish presence. It means something to me, that you remember her.
I think, sometimes, that I wish to go home, but then I remember with a sensation like a blow that home is gone. Purely a place of memory. I can never return there. Is it possible to be homesick for a person? A time?
Is this grief?
I think, often, of that awful weekend when Claudine arrived. Mother fell ill so abruptly. She had always been delicate, but at that moment, it was something quite different. I should have found some way to help her. It was all I was good for, helping her. She needed me. Oh God, she needed me like no one else, and in the end, I let her down, didn’t I? She told me often that I was her reason to live, and now, she is dead. So I must have done a very bad job.
There is something I must come to. It will seem like a strange turn of conversation, but you must have faith that I write in all seriousness and earnestly wish to hear your sincere response. Do you remember when you asked in the summer if I believed in ghosts? I have been thinking on it quite often, and it strikes me that you were so very certain that you did not, and I mustknow: why are you so sure? What is it that sets things out so clearly in your mind?