Claudine removes herself from his grip smoothly. ‘She is with God now. Her suffering is over.’
They have clustered in the hall, half blocking the view into the dining room, but Leo is taller than them all, and he looks over their heads at Lydia propped in the chair. His mouth goes slack and trembles.
He kisses Odette’s cheek next. ‘She was the best of all of us,’ he says faintly, though Odette knows none of them can think that true.
‘Thank you. I know you loved her,’ she says, as though she must lay out the people on her side, the people she can call upon to remember that her mother mattered. And surely she did matter to Leo? Surely he grieves, too? He holds her gaze and, for a moment, they are children again, growing up together in Herne House, the three of them sitting for her mother’s paintings, hiding in the hay meadows, catching tadpoles and climbing trees.
Cecilia takes her arm, and Leo’s expression shifts, closing down. He does not understand the true nature of the relationship between Cecilia and Odette, but he feels it all the same, a change that marked the end of them as a trio.
‘Mrs Binx, tea for Mr Moore. In the drawing room,’ instructs Claudine. She turns to Odette. ‘Well, get your father.’
Aunt Penelope ushers Cecilia and Leonard into the drawing room, and Odette goes to her father’s study.
It is a small room, tucked away at the back of the house, where the windows open onto the wild rose bushes in the garden, and is filled high with books and scattered issues of psychological journals. When the house was newly bought, most of the rooms were papered with William Morris designs; here, broad acanthus leaves twine across the walls in pale blue and ivory. Her father’s red dispatch box sits atop the desk beside a ceramic model of a human head, marked with the sections and meanings of a phrenologist.
George Fairfax-Waugh sits behind the desk, face as grey and pallid as the hair scattered through his beard and at his temples, and he startles when Odette speaks.
‘Father? We wish to take a photograph. With Mother.’
‘A photograph?’ There is a moment of horror, a flash of eye-whites and a mouth drawn into the beginnings of a grimace.
‘Please,’ says Odette quickly. ‘The photographer is here, and it will only take a moment.’
His features settle into a more assured expression, the momentary glimpse of vulnerability gone. It hurts Odette more than she would have expected. She did not realise how badly she has wanted her father to join her in her grief, but he keeps himself apart from it, just as he has kept himself apart from the rest of them, shut into his private space since Lydia died.
Maybe there is no one who understands her now.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘A good idea. It is important for the human mind to progress through the stages of grieving in order to meaningfully separate the memory of a living person from the mortal remnants.’
He waits, wisdom proffered.
Odette does not know how to respond. Does her father think this is comfort?
‘We are in the dining room,’ she says instead.
The photographer and his assistant are waiting, the cameraon its tripod and a space cleared around Lydia. Odette’s father stays at a cautious distance from the body. He will not look at her. Instead, he inspects the rug, the silver on the sideboard, the tassels on the curtain ties, everything but his wife.
‘George, don’t linger.’ Claudine ushers the photographer to begin his work.
The man dances round, positioning George behind the chair, his hand on Lydia’s shoulder, and Odette alongside her mother. Then he hesitates, looking at Claudine in her mourning blacks. ‘The whole family?’ he asks.
There is a terrible moment when no one can meet the other’s eye, looking instead to the photographer in the hope he will solve this unsightly problem for them.
Eventually George says, ‘One like this. Then the rest.’
Claudine flinches almost imperceptibly and steps back.
Odette shifts closer to George. He isherfather. This isherfamily. There is a fragile, final, fleeting moment when the three of them will all be together again. She must savour this.
One like this.
Apparently, onlyone.
The photographer readies the plate, and Odette braces herself. She must touch her mother. This is important; she feels it deeply in her bones. They must have a record of how much they meant to each other.
She holds her breath and places her hand on the cold fabric of her mother’s shoulder. It is all she can do to suppress a shudder.
‘Mr Fairfax-Waugh, you could place your other hand on your daughter’s shoulder?’ suggests the photographer.