The solid weight of her father’s hand is enough that Odette can rally.
There is a bustle of activity at the camera, then a great flash, and now they must hold as still as they can.
It is uncanny, like this. Looking at her mother’s shining hairand the set of her shoulder, it is as though she is alive again.
Odette is struck for a moment by the hideous sensation that if she were to lean around and look at her mother’s face, shewouldbe alive. Her quick, bright eyes and sensitive mouth would quirk, and Odette would feel her own heart flutter in response, because her mother would be here, she would not have left her, and it is so terrible and so wonderful she cannot bear it. If she looks, it will be true or not; she will know – if she never looks, it can always be true that, in this moment, that her mother was here. Her mother didn’t leave her.
Oh God, she is going to cry.
‘Very good!’ says the photographer.
George steps back, snatching his hands away from the dead woman and the living.
‘And now the whole group.’
The photographer brings in Aunt Penelope and Cecilia and Leo, along with Claudine, to group around Lydia’s body.
Odette cannot move. She is staring at a fixed point on the wallpaper, her hand on her mother’s shoulder. She must not cry. Not here – not yet.
The rest of the photographs are done quickly, then Mrs Binx announces tea. Aunt Penelope again ushers Cecilia away, taking Leo with her. Amidst the reorganisation, Claudine tries to touch George’s arm with a tenderness Odette has never seen from her before, but he slithers away and, with a mutter about a vote in Parliament, flees the house. Claudine, cheeks pink with humiliation, snaps orders at the staff about printing funeral invitations and summoning undertakers.
The footmen come to move Lydia back to the dining table, and at last Odette must relinquish her mother. She shuts her eyes and steps away, holding the vision in her mind.
If she never looks, her mother is still alive.
3
Cecilia
THE AIR IS TOO COLDfor Cecilia’s bedroom window to be open as far as it is but, though it causes her to shiver in her nightdress and silk dressing gown, she cannot bring herself to push the sash down fully. From here, she can see all the way across the road and past the tree branches, to the neat square of light that is Odette’s window in the Fairfax-Waugh house. On this clean, calm night, she can even make out the smudge that is the sketch above Odette’s bed: Cecilia and Odette at thirteen, in the pond at Herne House, posing as water nymphs for a larger piece Lydia planned but never completed.
Cecilia holds herself at the window now, a hand pressed to each side so it frames her. Is Odette there? She cannot quite see; there is no movement, but that does not mean Odette is not just beyond her sight.
This is how she first saw Odette, seven years ago, when Cecilia and Leonard and their mother first moved into the private square in Hampstead. Penelope and Lydia’s friendship stretches back long enough that, on the mantelpiece downstairs, there are photographs of the two of them together, before either Odette or Cecilia were born. But Cecilia only met the Fairfax-Waughs when Lydia summoned Penelope back to London from their tidy, unobtrusive house in Richmond and installed them in Gate House set just across the road from the Fairfax-Waughvilla.
In the four grey walls of her bedroom, in this new, alien place, twelve-year-old Cecilia set out her needle and thread and her embroidery and pulled the dustsheet from the mirror on her dressing table put there by the movers and—
There.
In the reflection.
Like Lancelot to the Lady of Shalott, Odette appeared in a scene of colour and beauty. Cecilia could not at first put together what she saw: a curious girl wrapped in a swathe of velvet, a silver crown on her waves and a sword slung across her shoulder. It was strange and brilliant and confusing.
Cecilia spun around and pressed herself to the window, hauling up the sash so that she could hang out across the sill and drink in this apparition.
Odette held a fixed pose, face raised in some sweet victory, her hair flowing around her shoulders. Only when Lydia stepped into view in a stained painting smock, brush brandished at Odette, did Cecilia understand what it all was.
Penelope brought them to Lydia’s house the next day, and there Odette was. Real. Tall and observant, leaning languorously across the arm of the settee, her hair flowing in burnished waves about her shoulders, her sharp, hawkish eyes following Cecilia about. It was like being stung, a shock rippling through her body at this sense of recognition, of some missing part to herself made flesh. She grew hot at once, flustered with yearning.
Odette took her up to her room, through the glittering maze of mirrors and paintings, shawls draped across lamps and Turkish lanterns dangling from the ceiling, silk wall hangings glowing in the gaslight. She pressed a volume of Keats into her hands, asked to be read to.
It was a bolt of sunlight into a gaol cell. Cecilia had been raised small and quiet, confined to a life reflected, the insipidshadow of something real and true and burning, but here Odette was, and she felt drunk on it. She knew then that she would walk after Odette wherever she went.
Only now, it does not seem so easy to follow.
The light in the window across the way flickers – it is Odette’s form passing before the lamp. She settles now at her writing slope, lithe form curved over her work. Cecilia has watched her like this so many times, watched her dress and brush her hair and read sprawled across a chair and, sometimes, Odette watches her back.
Now, Odette looks up and meets her eye. She picks up a pen and stands it upright in the inkwell.