‘What happened in Cambridge?’ asks Cecilia. ‘Your letters were .?.?. They made me frightened.’
Odette laughs, forced and brittle. ‘Nothing happened.’
‘I cannot imagine how hard the idea of going back home must be now that—’ She cuts herself off. ‘Would it be easier if we went together?’
She is so simple that she hates herself sometimes. Would it not be easier to lie down in the dirt at her feet and beg Odette not to leave her?
‘I cannot ever call that placehomeagain,’ says Odette. ‘They have sown salt into the earth.’
‘You have to go home sometime. You can’t make it not real by never seeing them again.’
Odette stops pacing, so completely has she been struck. ‘That’s not what I’m doing.’
‘Isn’t it? I would not blame you if it were.’
‘Fine. I will go back – only—’
‘Only what?’
Odette hesitates, suddenly a girl again, young and unsure and lost. ‘Nothing.’
‘If it is nothing, then you might as well come back with me.’
They walk across the Heath together, stride matched for stride, but for the first time with Odette, Cecilia feels herself entirely alone.
*
‘Well? What did she say?’
Cecilia’s mother waits in the hallway of the Gate House.
When the letter arrived from Odette this morning, Penelope plucked it from Cecilia’s hand the moment she was finished with it, then demanded the others, everything sent from Cambridge. Her eyes moved greedily over the words, eyebrows rising at Odette’s scrawling hand and her strange sentences. It felt to Cecilia like being stripped and laid bare on the breakfast table. And the fear: will her mother see what they are to each other? Why had she given into her mother so easily? Why could she notsay no?
‘Well, you must meet her,’ said Penelope.
‘I thought you said I should keep my distance?’ replied Cecilia, as much of a challenge as she could brave.
Penelope tutted. ‘Don’t be so literal.’
Cecilia did not know what to say to that, so she fell silent.
Now, she is faced with her mother again, and she is still mute.
She hides her face in the unbuttoning of her coat and unpinning of her hat. She has spent the walk home turning over the conversation with Odette in her mind. Whichever way she looks at it, she cannot make sense of Odette, other than that she is thrown around by the wild currents of her grief. There is nothing she can repeat to her mother that will not feel like a betrayal.
‘You were gone for quite some time – surely she must have said something worth sharing,’ says Penelope.
‘I – don’t know,’ says Cecilia, slipping past her mother and into the parlour.
‘Good afternoon, Cecilia.’ Claudine is sitting on the settee, in a shocking pale-lilac dress and gold jewellery. It is not wrong for a sister to enter half-mourning so soon, but Cecilia finds it jarring all the same. Her mother has come in behind her, cutting off her exit so that she has no choice but to take a seat. Penelope shuts the door.
Why is Claudine here? Is this an ambush? What do they want from her?
‘I believe you have seen Odette? A rare gift she does not bestow on the rest of us.’
‘I have.’
‘What of her? How did she seem?’