‘Cecilia.’ Odette’s eyes snap open. ‘Shut up. I don’t care. Keep your mad theories to yourself. This isn’t one of our plays. This is my real life.’
Cecilia draws back, wounded. ‘I know that. I’m not making it up.’ She has the terrible sense that if Odette speaks again, she will say something that will cut a jagged line between them that cannot be undone. She grabs at her hands again. ‘Let us go. Anywhere, you name the place. Let’s run away, like we planned. Bloomsbury, or – or Paris – or anywhere. There are ways to survive. We could manage it.’
Odette sneers. ‘For God’s sake, don’t be naive. You still think we have any chance of that without money?’
‘Why not? We have both tried our hands at living away at university – we are not so ignorant.’
‘My mother is dead and gone, and every promise she ever made is gone with her. She traps me even now. I will never be free of her. There is no future for us.’
‘There is, Odette – I know there is. There must be, or else – or else—’
‘Or else what? You would have to think for yourself who you are?’
Cecilia stills as though she has been slapped. ‘That’s not – you don’t mean—’
‘I don’t mean it? That is what you fail to understand, Cecilia – I meanallof it.’ Odette’s face grows cruel in anger, in disgust. There is some haunted, unnatural look behind her eyes that Cecilia does not recognise at all.
Odette has never hurt her before. Not intentionally.
She trusts Odette. She holds nothing in life more dear than the faith she has in her.
Perhaps it is that grief has cracked through to the truth of the matter.
Perhaps this is what Odette has been hiding from her.
She does not love her anymore.
Perhaps she never loved her.
Odette does not stop. ‘You cling to me like a drowning man because you have only ever been a poor copy of me, only alive when my mother and I let our light fall on you. Well, now she is dead and gone, so what are you now, Cecilia? What of a shadow when the light is gone?’
The blows are delivered with no pleasure, but are precise and cold and devastating.
‘Stop it. I won’t hear this.’ Cecilia speaks low and trembling. ‘I won’t let you ruin everything because you suffer. There will be a future after this – I know it, I promise you. Do not tear down everything you have – you will want it when you come through.’
‘Don’t you understand, Cecilia? This doesn’t matter. We do not matter.Nothingmatters. Love is like a dew – it lies across the world so briefly, then the weight of the day burns it out without fail.’ Odette is speaking wildly, hair falling loose from its pins and lips drawn back from bared teeth. ‘She is dead. My mother is dead.Iam dead – the Odette you knew. The things she wanted, that she cared about – how can I care about them now? They were desires in a world that is lost to me forever. It all means nothing. Do you hear me? You tell me I am changed, and you are right. Stop looking for me, because I am not here.’
Odette throws herself away from Cecilia, shaking like a dog, panting and beside herself.
Cecilia does not reach for her.
What will she do if Odette really does push her away for good?
The thought has not fully occurred to her before – but now it feels horribly possible.
Maybe they are not forever. Maybe they were only ever mayflies, for one bright, short summer’s day.
She does not know how they can come back from this.
8
Odette
THEHEATH IS A SPLASHof oil and watercolour. Great murky cloudbanks fill the sky with ashy light; the bare ground rolls out, in turns ochre-muddy and the golden-green of fallen leaves on frost-brittle grass. The barren trees reach up together, tangled, more brown bark than vegetal. It is a nothing kind of weather, neither the full frost of winter nor yet the fresh budding of spring, not for many months. They are caught in some island damp, the humid, sodden mess of England, London, coal smoke and fox dung, fog and the half-light of early dusk.
Odette walks. The Heath spreads from Hampstead to Highgate, and she crosses it once, twice, doubling back on herself and drawing in tighter knots.
She is angry. If she stops, she feels it rise up from her stomach, in the heat in her throat and the shake of her hands.