‘You are grieving. I understand what that is like. I lost Lydia, too.’
‘You haven’t lost a mother. It’s different.’
Now it is Cecilia who retreats, hurt. ‘Is it so impossible to think I could feel some measure of what you do?’
It is as though Odette has stepped over the cliff edge, and now that she is falling, she cannot find a way to halt her momentum. Cecilia sees it in her eyes before she speaks, the inability to stop herself.
‘No one has lost what I have lost. You cannot understand.’
‘No,’ says Cecilia quietly. ‘I cannot if you will not tell me the truth of what is the matter with you.’
The pause stretches out long enough to become awkward, then heavy.
Eventually, Cecilia speaks. ‘You grieve so strongly that I am afraid for you. There is something else troubling you – and do not say your father’s marriage, because of course there is that, but, Odette, you look like a creature from the underworld. You send me strange letters from Cambridge; you jump at shadows. Yet you will not tell me a thing. It is like you have gone mad.’
There is a look in Odette’s eye, and she thinks, for a moment, that she has touched some part of her, some old familiar place where they still know each other, where there is solid ground beneath her feet.
Odette’s mouth twists down, and she looks away.
Cecilia has got it wrong.
‘Mad. Yes. Call me mad. It is mad to live amongst all you lunatics. You bob about telling lies to each other, smiling and pretending anything makes sense, and you blame me for spoiling the party, for beingtroubled. Tell me, why am I supposed to be kind to Claudine? Why am I supposed to forget my mother so quickly? Like my father has? Was the earth evensettled on her grave when he took another woman to his bed? I am sure Claudine could not believe her luck when my mother died so conveniently. Why must I shut up my feelings to make things easier for you all? Am I supposed to grieve quietly? Privately? Should I be on my knees in some chapel with a book of improving lines? Should I go and feed the needy or the sick? A dead mother is nothing so unusual, so the fault must lie in me. Is that not what you all think?’
‘No,’ says Cecilia, but she wilts under the force of Odette’s words.
This is a mistake. It is all a mistake. She is stupid, clumsy.
It was Claudine who called Odette mad, but is that fair? What is madness? What does it look like? She heard Lydia called mad, and she was strange, yes, erratic, melancholy, with great highs and lows like a tide, and loving her must have been like building a house on sand. Cecilia has seen men raving on the street, talking to the air, seen girls throw themselves into the river. But what made it madness? Their misery? The trouble they caused others? What is it to be mad? Is it anything?
IsOdette mad in her grief? Has she become lost to them all?
‘I don’t think—’ Cecilia stumbles over her words, and it is like bait.
‘Go on. Tell me what you think.’
‘I think – I think maybe you want to hurt us so we feel the pain you feel.’
‘Oh. Clever. Very neat.’
‘I’m not trying to be neat – I am trying to make you hear me.’ Cecilia is losing her patience, and she can hear the childish, demanding note in her voice. It is embarrassing to do this here; exposing. People are already looking at them and her cheeks burn in shame. She modulates her voice. ‘I know you are keeping something from me. I do not understand it. What have we ever kept from each other? Why will you not let me help you?’
She is seized by a sudden, urgent need to take Odette’s hand and pull her away, run to the first train, keep going until their money runs out.
She wills Odette to soften, to come back to her.
But something catches Odette’s eye, and she follows its movements.
She stands, backing away. ‘I – I have to go.’ She spares Cecilia one final glance. ‘I am sorry. I truly am.’
She turns abruptly, knocking into a mother with her young son in a sailor suit, before bounding back the other way, pushing through the crowds with an increasingly frantic desperation –
And then she is gone.
4
Odette
THE PUBLIC CONVENIENCES INthe gallery are winter-cold, porcelain and tiles with frigid air pouring in through narrow, frosted windows. There is no one else inside, and with great relief, Odette shuts herself in a stall and locks the door before the great tide of her panic hits her.