Odette

by Jessica Duchen

  Drifting towards sleep, she could see Mitzi again, the way she stood with her hand on her hip, head on one side, every passing thought and feeling visible on her face. Her long legs, her large hands and her fair hair, the way her nose tilted slightly down at the end, the gleam of her sudden smile. ‘I shall never see her again,’ she thought. Pain welled up in her and she found she was trying to cry.

  Swans cannot cry. When she’d flown away, devastated, from the prince’s ballroom, she couldn’t cry. The release, when her humanity returned to her, had been an indescribable relief. Half asleep, she reflected that it wasn’t the thought of Harry that made her want to weep, but the thought of his sister. Harry was the one who had let her down, yet all she felt for him was pity – and a new emotion, a big, benevolent kindness, involuntary but definite: forgiveness. Mitzi had tried to save her; she wanted to kill the owl, peaceful Mitzi who never hurt a fly, though she was so easily pained herself. Mitzi, who had taken care of her when she might have thrown her out, had taken her to the vet, bought her clothes, found her that incredible book to read, which now she would never finish. Mitzi had tried to help her, for no reason but that she was in trouble.

  How tender her days in Cygnford seemed. She leafed through her human hours. She remembered her father, dead so long ago yet as vivid in her mind as if she’d only just left him. Her nurse and her governesses, their fondness and their strictness. Once she’d been sent to bed supperless with a dose of something ghastly for knocking over a pile of books in her father’s library. She’d spotted a volume that she wanted to read high up on the shelves. If only she could remember what it was.

  She recalled her first days as a swan, how frightened she was – and then how she had grown to love the power of flight that was suddenly hers. Flight was freedom: the air, the sky, the vast lake, the deep forest, all belonged to her. But if she were free now, she was also alone. It wasn’t only the love of men she would miss, but companionship: a friend, someone to talk to, someone to trust. She wanted to finish War and Peace, to read as many books as she could lay her hands upon, to see plays like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, perhaps with Harry in the leading roles. She wanted her piano back so that she could learn to play all the music written in the century and a half since she met Franz Liszt. She wanted to master a computer like Mitzi’s – she would write about her experiences and perhaps become as famous as Pushkin. She remembered how it felt to say, ‘I feel so happy’. Swans were peaceful companions, as long as they didn’t feel threatened. Yet to dance, to play music, to sing, to shout with joy, these were not within a swan’s capability. And to cry—

  She thought of her last glimpse of Mitzi and Harry, the way the brother had held the sister with such sorrow and let her sob on his shoulder as Odette rose into the sky. She thought of the devastation in Chris’s light, short-sighted eyes – hadn’t he loved her more than anybody, through their music? They would miss her as much as she missed them. She could see their closeness to each other and to her; and with that, she understood that she loved them all, Mitzi, Chris, her father, Franz Liszt and Harry, regardless of the spell, for no reason other than that she did. She loved them and their world, she loved to be one of them and to give her love and express the music that welled within her, and now she felt herself so filled with that love that she imagined the floods of it could spill out and drown the whole earth.

  Her heart swelled and seemed to burst beneath her feathers. She had to weep for all she had learned and all she had lost, and her need to cry was so great that nothing, not even her physical form, could prevent it. A sob escaped her throat and then another, then an uncontrollable torrent took hold of her, and Odette, curled up in a space that was much too small for her, felt the tears springing in her eyes and sliding hot and fresh along her cold skin and plopping onto the old material of her white shift. She buried her head in her arms and wept and wept. A couple of ducks drifted past her to find somewhere quieter. She wept as the snowflakes began to fall from the yellowing night sky into the water and sprinkle their transformation upon the trees, she wept on as the first light of day brushed the lakewater with lilac. She wept without noticing that sunrise had begun, without feeling the winter wind and the crystals of snow on her bare arms, without even noticing that she had human arms and hands to feel the air and human eyes with which to weep. At last, exhausted with crying, she sank into her tree hollow, rested her head on a curving root and fell asleep, while the snowflakes fluttered down to lay a soft white blanket over her body.

  ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’

  Odette, drowsy and sluggish, sensed a touch on her shoulder and light in her eyes. The snow seemed to have seeped into her bones and she could scarcely move or speak for cold. Someone was shaking her.

  ‘Are you all right? Give me a sign you can hear me.’

  She tried to sit up and rub her eyes in the sunlight. The snow had passed. A middle-aged man in a flat cap and a green rain jacket was staring at her, speaking to her.

  ‘Da?’ said Odette.

  ‘You’re OK? Thank almighty God. I thought we’d lost you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Odette. ‘Thank you for finding me.’

  ‘Normally I’d have to ask you to move along now,’ said the warden. ‘Bird sanctuaries aren’t a place for you people to sleep. But just last week we found a guy here who was sleeping rough too, and he wasn’t as lucky as you. We got him to hospital, but he didn’t make it. Come with me, let’s get you into the warmth.’

  Helping the befuddled girl to her bare feet – no shoes, in the snow? – the warden scrutinised her. She did not have the look of the vagrants who sometimes came into the wetlands trying either to reach London or to escape it. The softness and wonder in her face was disarming, though she was shivering from dark hair to blue-tinged toes. His van was nearby; he pulled a large sheet of something crinkly and silver from the back of it and wrapped it around Odette’s shoulders before helping her into the passenger seat.

  ‘Where are you trying to go, love?’ he asked.

  ‘I am trying to go home,’ said Odette in her best English, pulling the foil blanket around her.

  ‘That’s good. Where’s home?’

  ‘I – I not know – you see – but I do not understand!’ For it had dawned on Odette that she was speaking with a human voice to a human being, twisting together her human hands, and that it was broad, shining daylight.

  The warden started his van, shaking his head. Something about the young girl reminded him oddly of his beloved waterbirds. She had the same poise, the same unaffected and unconscious perfection in her face. ‘You’re not from these parts, anyway. You haven’t fallen off the back of a lorry, so to speak? You’re not from Syria or Libya or been through those shitholes in Calais?’

  ‘No, I come from Russia,’ Odette told him, encouraged by the kindness in his voice. ‘I stay in Cygnford with my friend, but because – I cannot explain, but I must try to go home. I arrive here last night, I fall asleep, now I not know what to do.’

  Strange, thought the warden. In some ways so typical – a lost kid who thought it’d be easy to get home without taking even a cardigan. The bare feet were bizarre, for sure, but the weirdest thing was that she was grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘Have you got any ID? A passport? Cash? A bag of some kind?’

  Odette shrugged and opened her arms. ‘I have nothing.’

  ‘So how on earth do you think you’re going to get home?’

  ‘I think I fly,’ Odette let slip, quickly adding, ‘but now I not know.’

  ‘This is a bird sanctuary, love. Not many planes here. Look, I’ll give you a nice cup of tea and some breakfast in the hut, and then you can tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Tea?’ Odette’s eyes lit up. ‘So wonderful! I drink tea again!’ He watched, astonished, as she threw back her head and gave a shower of laughter so joyous that he found himself joining in, despite having no idea why.

  Soon she was sitting at his office table devouring a bowl of
cornflakes and some steaming tea, black with a generous spoon of sugar, in his biggest mug. ‘Good thing I found you,’ he told her. ‘Anything can happen to a kid out there alone – you could have frozen to death. I’m amazed at your friend letting you set off like that.’

  Odette, her mouth full, did not reply.

  ‘Didn’t you tell him – or her – what you were doing?’

  ‘I not have chance.’ Odette thanked Mitzi silently for having taught her discretion.

  ‘Now, you were hungry, and you were cold, but you’re not ill, are you?’

  ‘I very well, thank you. And you know, this is not really so cold.’

  She looked him straight in the eye and her gaze, if a little brilliant, was steady and quite sane. What on earth had happened to her? Why wasn’t she telling him the whole truth? Surely she was too young, certainly too innocent and forthright, to have escaped from a women’s prison? In any case, no women’s prison he knew of dressed its inmates in white shifts. Perhaps she had indeed escaped from a trafficker – but even then, wouldn’t she at least have had shoes?

  ‘You’d better put on a jumper or you’ll freeze. And some socks.’ He rummaged in a cupboard by the sink and produced an ex-army sweater with green pads at its shoulders. Odette put it on; it reached to her knees. She laughed again.

  ‘So, no suitcase, no bag at all?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Money? Getting to Russia costs money, you know.’

  ‘No money.’

  ‘And seriously, no passport?’

  ‘What is passport?’

  ‘You’re a rum case, for sure. Are you going to fill in the blanks for me?’

  ‘Very complicated, you see,’ said Odette.

  ‘I bet. Look, have you got your friend’s phone number? We can give them a call. Assuming you want to, that is.’

  ‘I do want, but I not have her number,’ said Odette.

  The warden sat, counting to ten before he spoke. ‘But she has a phone, da?’

  ‘Da, da,’ said Odette eagerly. ‘She lives in Cygnford and her name is Mitzi.’

  ‘Mitzi what? What’s her surname?’

  ‘Her surname… that I do not remember.’

  ‘Oh jeez…’

  He managed to extract the information from Odette that her friend was a journalist; then, astonished at his own generosity, he spent most of the morning looking up the phone numbers of all the newspapers and magazines in Cygnford, calling them one by one, asking whether they had a journalist named Mitzi on their staff, and explaining why he was looking. At least there shouldn’t be too many people in Cygnford named Mitzi. Hours ticked by and he was neglecting his work.

  Eventually the assistant editor of one magazine, who had never heard of any Mitzi, thought the situation sounded intriguing. She misunderstood the warden’s enquiry after a writer, and rang Joanna Hill of the National News to alert her to the story of a young Russian girl who might have escaped from sex traffickers but insisted she hadn’t, even though she’d been found without money, passport, luggage, clothes or shoes beside a lake in a Suffolk bird sanctuary.

  ‘Mitzi?’ Joanna’s voice was friendly. But Mitzi was in her dressing gown, purple shadows under her eyes, with Harry and Chris, who had stayed awake with her, administering cups of tea and giving her Kleenex when she needed them. All night long, every tear she had never allowed herself to shed had flooded out of her. Harry wept with her a little, protesting that he’d never got as close to loving any girl as he had to Odette. Chris found himself speaking hopeless platitudes about how it was more important that Mitzi had let herself risk loving Rob than that she had lost him, and that she would be stronger for it; and that they would ask Stuart to offer her a room in the house with them all if the flat was hers no longer; and that she was a writer and an artist, and a keen observer, so she should try her hand at writing plays for them to stage; and that she mustn’t feel guilty about what had happened, because von Rothbart was destroyed through all their joint efforts, together, while they’d done everything they could reasonably do to save Odette. Mitzi’s tears, though, flowed free as the dawn broke beyond the empty chestnut tree and the snow, falling faster, began to coat the branches in a magical transformation of its own.

  ‘Oh, Joanna,’ Mitzi snuffled. ‘Was the article all right?’ Chris had pressed the ‘send’ button for her at nine on the dot.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ said the editor, ‘and something else has come up that I thought might interest you, to do with a bird sanctuary not so far from Cygnford. It’s almost like an extraterrestrial thing. I just had a call from Anglia Life saying that the park warden had rung up looking for a local journalist because he found a Russian teenager sleeping rough by the lake – she’s got nothing, not even a passport, and she’s trying to get home. She insists she wasn’t being trafficked or seeking asylum; she has no explanation of how she got there, she just wants to go home and the one thing she knows is that she has a friend in Cygnford who’s a journalist. Can you chase it?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘A Russian girl wearing a sort of white shift, but no shoes…’

  ‘Give me the number?’ Mitzi dropped her tissue and grabbed a pen.

  Odette, in huge, borrowed Wellington boots, was walking on the grass outside the warden’s office, bending to run her fingers through the green spears and humming to herself. The sun was at its midwinter highest: she felt its light flood over her as it melted away the last of the morning snow. She could not remember, at all, feeling the warmth of the sun on her body. The bright joy of it made her want to sing. She longed to fling herself bare-skinned into the best patch of sunlight she could find. She drank it in with every pore of her human self.

  Inside the office a telephone rang. After a moment the warden came out of the hut, smiling.

  ‘It’s for you,’ he said.

  Acknowledgements

  I first drafted the novel that has become Odette back in 1992. The number of people I must thank for their assistance over the intervening decades could fill the book all over again, so I’ll be brief, and plead forgiveness from anyone I may inadvertently have left out.

  First, profound thanks to everyone who encouraged me to keep going with it: those close friends and family members who said to me from time to time, ‘What happened to the one about the swan? That was always my favourite.’ This book wouldn’t be here now without you.

  Special thanks to Tom for a valuable suggestion that helped to transform the novel into the shape you now see it, and for putting up so heroically with my Very Special Occasional Panics. Another massive thank you to Sara Menguc, my literary agent, for her encouragement, efforts and patience.

  Immeasurable thanks to everyone at Unbound for your confidence in this book and all your devoted hard work, especially Xander Cansell and his fabulous editorial and design team. Last but by no means least, Odette would also not be here now without the kind and generous input of everyone who has contributed to the funding scheme. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  Jessica Duchen, London 2018

  www.jessicaduchen.co.uk

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  By the same author

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  Ghost Variations

  Songs of Triumphant Love

  Hungarian Dances

  Alicia’s Gift

  Rites of Spring

  Biography:

  Gabriel Fauré

  Erich Wolfgang Korngold