In the previous episode, Cassandra took her least-favourite mode of transport to visit Jack. Embracing him on the threshold of the house, Cassandra became acutely conscious of the contrast between her own relationship and the one Olivia and Jack seem to have had.
Three weeks later, after a strange, flat holiday season, Cassandra’s family packed like sardines into a too-small RT. Paul looked like a lion squeezed against the side of a tiny cage. Cassandra, in the middle, fidgeted in a dress she’d never worn, pressing her palm onto her nerve-bloated stomach. Only her mother looked composed in her corner of the vehicle.
‘Even when she was young, there was something about her,’ her mother said. ‘Everyone adored her. Your father certainly did.’
Dress code – fabulous, the memorial’s invitation had said, and in following that instruction they formed a motley group. Her mother wore a black-and-white sleeveless evening dress, antique opera gloves adding elegance and covering her arthritic hands — Olivia had always said Daphne’s fashion was wasted on tiny Thornfield. Paul did not go in for ‘fabulous’ but was modestly resplendent in the standard way of his class, in imperial-purple moleskin trousers, canary-yellow socks, and a striped-silk cravat in purple and grey, the colours of his house at boarding school. Cassandra had chosen an expensive designer striped dress Olivia had talked her into buying. She usually bundled her mass of brown curls into a high, utilitarian ponytail, but this evening she'd twisted it more deliberately into a chignon that rested low on the nape of her neck.
Olivia had blown what she’d inherited from parents and grandparents on her Soho house and never had enough money, only allowing herself certain indulgences, like Jack’s pricey cologne. She took vicarious pleasure in others’ expenditures. Thanks, Paul! she’d trilled, after twisting her friend’s arm about the dress.
I feel bad spending his money like this, Cassandra had said. She could never afford garments like this on her own income. Where am I going to wear it, anyway?
Neither of them could have imagined the ultimate answer to this question.
Olivia had shrugged. Why shouldn’t you? But you’re right, you need money and a room of your OWN. She never missed a chance to remind Cassandra of her solo exhibition of yore, where Olivia’s image had been the star of the show.
As the RT twisted and turned through sleet-driven January streets, drawing closer to Hogarth’s, Paul gazed at Cassandra steadily. ‘You look so beautiful,’ he said. ‘Look at my wife, Daff. She never does that with her hair. Sexy.’ Awkwardly he twisted to get a better look at the length of her, shoving her body closer against her mother’s in the process. ‘Maybe a bit too sexy for the occasion? For a funeral? Daff? What do you reckon?’
‘Paul…’ Cassandra protested, abashed.
‘Well, it’s not really a funeral, is it?’ her mother interrupted, slipping her gloved hand into her daughter’s and wincing slightly from arthritis pain as Cassandra squeezed it.
‘Sorry,’ Cassandra said quietly, loosening her grip.
‘You’re fine. She’s fine, Paul.’ Her mother leaned across and patted her son-in-law on the knee, reassuring him. ‘The invitation said fabulous, and Cassandra’s is being that. For Olivia.’ She touched a stripe in Cassandra’s dress. ‘This green colour really picks up your eyes. Well, what do you think everyone else will be wearing? Let’s guess. It’s very Jack-and-Olivia to have a memorial at a club. More of a wake, I suppose. A wake? Yes.’
‘God knows what people will show up in, Daff,’ Paul said. ‘It’ll be a freak show.’
Dashing inside to escape the weather, they squashed into a dark antechamber behind a heavy velvet drape, which kept out the draught but which also served as the proscenium curtain beyond which lay all the raffishness of Hogarth’s. Paul pushed it aside, and they stepped into an Aladdin's cave of candlelight, dark wood and plush textiles. The house’s historic status prevented modern heating systems from being installed – it’s like being an actual Georgian, Olivia had joked - but still it was toasty from fireplaces, the ovens in the downstairs kitchen, and warmth radiating from humans congregating in the warren of high-ceilinged rooms. People were everywhere, spilling down the staircase leading up to the first floor. Up there lay Olivia’s wake.
Paul thumped up the stairs ahead of them, annoyed at having been pressed into observing one of Hogarth’s rules of entry: despite the signal-blocking coating of its walls, the club still required the deposit of any smart devices into a many-drawered antique apothecary cabinet in the entry hall. These were not his people. He’d always liked Olivia, but Jack he had little time for. Cassandra’s ankles wobbled in her heels, and she held onto the handrail more tightly, whiffs of pine and orange wafting from the garland twisted around it.
The volume of voices and laughter and music increased with every step upwards. She felt as though she were stepping back through the looking glass to some long-ago holiday party, the sort of evening after which people find themselves having to apologise for their behaviour. As they reached the landing, a young woman offered them coupe glasses of cut crystal, brimming with bright-red cocktails that fizzed with sharp cranberry and Champagne bubbles. For those closest to Olivia, Christmas had been cancelled, but the atmosphere permeating Hogarth’s made it feel like the holiday had arrived late and in her honour.
Hogarths is based on Blacks Club, Dean Street
The last time she’d been in that room, it had been close to empty, and Olivia had been waiting for her there, at a table in the northwest corner. She’d looked drawn and sallow, diminished. Already partway through a bottle of wine, she had stared at the firelight through her half-drained glass, thousands of miles away, before spotting Cassandra and forcing a smile.
The frame of the portrait was draped with trailing ribbons of greenery, and it was larger and truer to life than she remembered. Pomegranates were piled on the massive marble mantelpiece at the painting’s base, like offerings to a goddess at an altar, and flames leapt high in the fireplace below and flickered from candles alongside it, making the portrait’s hair shine like Olivia’s had next to the campfire years ago.
Like a body blow, the full force of the reason Cassandra was there hit her. Olivia was not at a table, small and vulnerable, breathing air in and out and reaching her hand to Cassandra. She was larger than life, inviolate, on the wall, amongst the ranks of the glorious dead.
‘Stay here, darling. I need a proper drink,’ said Paul, starting to elbow his way through the crowd towards the bar. The room heaved with artists and actors, poets, and generic ne'er-do-wells. The overcrowding drove people onto the window seats, and standing on one was Verity, the other member of their childhood friendship triad, illuminated by streetlights outside and a wall sconce inside. She was talking to a man Cassandra didn’t recognise and blowing mist from her e-cigarette out the window. Music came from somewhere, the growling voice of Leonard Cohen, singing about the ending, and what happens to the heart.
The painting seemed to pull her through the crush towards it, the flames of nearby candles releasing the scent of the leaves around the picture.
‘Rosemary, sage, ivy,' her mother said, her small voice somehow cutting through the hubbub — she had followed behind. 'Remembrance, immortality, fidelity in marriage. I will remember you faithfully, my love, forever.’
Photo by Thee Lexa on Unsplash
At that moment the faithful-forever love of Olivia's life materialised from the sea of bodies.
‘Daphne,’ he said. Cassandra’s mother stretched up to kiss his cheek, her eyes rheumy with emotion, and he put his arm around her. Jack was far more self-possessed than the fortnight before. He'd dropped weight and his cheekbones were more distinct, but his eyes were sparkling. He was in host mode, flamboyant and energetic, as though he were on some sort of drug. His black and dark-grey silk shirt was made dandyish by a print of pure white tropical birds and exotic flowers. Parrots, perhaps, or cockatoos.
He pulled Cassandra in with his other arm. ‘Thank you,' he murmured into her ear. ‘It’s been too long since I’ve seen your work on the wall. No one could have captured her better.’
She saw that Paul’s back was to them, his attention on the bartender, and she returned Jack’s embrace. ‘It feels strange to see it there,’ she whispered to him. ‘Like time’s collapsing. It makes it seem even stranger that she’s not here.’
He led her by the hand to an upholstered bench against the wall by the fireplace and leapt atop it when they reached it, threatening to set his hair ablaze with a wall sconce and capturing the attention of the room. Everyone stopped, looked, laughed. Cassandra, uncertain of her role, caught Verity's eye and implored her to come over with a sideways incline of her head. Her friend returned her half-smile but did not move.
Jack spread his arms, palms up, and paused, waiting. Shhh, said the room, expectant, eyes up. Cassandra pressed against the wall. The three of them in a line, Cassandra on the floor, Jack on the seat, and Olivia on the mantelpiece, the highest of all.
'" I was married to amazement,"' Jack said, his voice ringing out over the hush. ‘The late great Mary Oliver wrote these words, in her magisterial poem about death. Two weeks ago, Death took my bride of 15 years. He took her, as Oliver says in the same poem, "like an iceberg between the shoulder blades". It was the middle of the night, as it was when the Titanic was taken down by that iceberg. And titanic is what she was. She was as fast and as elegant as that ship. And you all must have thought, as much as I did, that she was indestructible, too.'
She was overwhelmed. It didn't sound rehearsed. He was a writer, but even the best writer ought to struggle with a speech at his dead wife’s party. Folded up in Cassandra's clutch was a bit of crumpled paper with the few poor words she’d planned.
'Olivia was never like my wife,' Jack continued. 'She was my bride, for she was perpetually new to me. We were always poised at the start - not to say precipice - of an exciting adventure.'
At the word precipice, laughter rippled through the room. People exchanged glances, whispered to each other.
'Olivia was hungry. She needed life to feed her, and she feasted on it,’ Jack said. ‘To spend one day, one evening with her was to fall in love, to reel with pleasure. Imagine what it was like for me, to be given this incalculable gift, to never wake up to the same woman twice. Imagine what it was like for me - I am unremarkable on my own - to be made special because this woman, who so many desired, desired me.'
Cassandra, who had been looking at the floor, scanned the faces before her. What would be the tell by which she could pick them out, all the people here who had desired Olivia? Would they pluck nervously at their collars, declare themselves? Or keep their expressions impassive enough to hide the truth? Did it matter anymore?
'She was evergreen, continuously renewed through her engagement with life, and so my life with her never stood a chance of becoming hackneyed, or boring, or staid,’ Jack said. ‘Our marriage defied stereotype and prediction. I was married to amazement.'
Damp pellets of sleet, inaudible a few moments before, lashed the window with soft slaps; the flames whipped and cracked in the fireplace. The audience members were like waxwork figures arranged in a tableau at Madame Tussaud's, Verity’s right eyebrow frozen in a sardonic arch. Cassandra, aware her mouth had fallen open, shut it. Jack shook his head, recovered himself.
‘I first experienced that amazement in a gallery by the sea, where I was attending the opening gala for the work of a talented, then-emerging artist called Cassandra Parsons,’ he said, extended his hand towards Cassandra. ‘It was summer, and the evening light was streaming from the big windows of the rotunda and fell on this picture.’
The crowd rotated as one from Jack to the portrait above the fireplace, like sunflowers to the sun. When they turned back again, their expressions were different. Cassandra was acutely conscious of a hundred or more people assessing her with fresh eyes, new appreciation. The now-unfamiliar pleasure this provoked felt selfish, inappropriate to the occasion, and she pushed it away.
'In this place of light, I saw Darkroom,’ Jack continued. ‘Now, those who fall in love with portraits have been disappointed before...'
The room relaxed, relieved at the permission to laugh. 'Henry the Eighth!' shouted someone.
'If it could happen to an august person like old Harry, it could happen to me!’ laughed Jack, whose energy was beginning to climb again. Cassandra, dizzy with these peaks and troughs of emotion, found herself giggling with everyone else and felt ashamed. Jack’s engine was still running. ‘Henry and poor, doomed...who was it?...never mind, I'm a poet not a scholar. Anne of Cleves? First prize to the gentleman at the back, thank you sir, you win another of these splendid poinsettia cocktails, barkeep, would you be so kind...?...but I need to be serious now...'
Jack held up one hand to hush the room again and held the other down towards Cassandra. As everyone fell silent, she realised with horror her moment had come. He wanted her to step up to meet him. Hesitantly she clasped his offered hand and was instantly beside him, as though she’d blacked out for the moment in between.
She scanned across the room towards the bar, to Paul, his face as impassive as an Easter Island head, except for his eyes, which were flicking between her and Jack. She wished for a hole to open in the worm-eaten floorboards, dropping her onto the ground floor where she could make a clean break for the front door.
'I would never have met Olivia were it not for the extraordinary Cassandra Parsons,’ Jack said, sliding his hand familiarly around Cassandra's waist.
‘Cassandra Wood, now,’ she heard herself say, her voice squeaky and odd.
‘Olivia was Cassandra's muse, and her oldest friend. But before I hand you over...'
Jack craned over Cassandra's head to reach the edge of the portrait, plucked a sprig of rosemary from the garland, and dropped it in his drink. Turning to the image, he smiled into her painted face and held his glass aloft, his silence extending longer than anyone expected. The crowd became unsure where to look. As though to respect a moment of intimacy between a couple, people lowered their heads or turned away. When Jack broke the pregnant pause, his voice was clear but quavering.
'To my bride, Olivia.'
Dozens of hands reached for the ceiling, holding aloft their glinting glasses filled with liquid the colour of blood. Cassandra’s was empty.
'In our memories you live on, forever!' Jack said, his voice breaking at the last word.
The room reverberated with the toast. In our memories you live on, forever!
Giving Cassandra a last squeeze at her waist, Jack kissed her to the right of her mouth and jumped to the floor. People clustered round to hug him and perform their overwhelm. Someone twisted her dry glass from her hand, and she saw it was Verity, who had finally descended from her own perch and worked her way over, commandeering a bottle of Champagne on the way. In her no-nonsense fashion, her friend sloshed in a measure so generous that it threatened to overrun the lip of the glass and handed it back to Cassandra.
Cassandra remembered advice she’d been given on public speaking and tried to locate a friendly face or a point of focus. A man near the front, dressed in voluminous silk pyjamas. Someone near the back, wearing pink latex. Opposite Olivia was a portrait of the late Queen wearing a face mask, glaring at the copper-haired woman across from her as though she had noticed a striking resemblance to the first Queen Elizabeth, or perhaps aggrieved that Olivia's portrait was larger. The bedraggled paper with Cassandra’s poor speech was buried in her handbag, so she met the glare of the late monarch and opened her mouth without a plan.
There was a movement in the people assembled to her right, and she realised that Paul was shouldering his way through the crush towards her.
'Olivia was my impossible friend,’ she said, the words bursting from her.
Verity's mouth twitched, but her eyes radiated go on.
'What I mean is...it seemed impossible that she was my friend. She was just another child in Thornfield, she was no different...in some ways she was no different to me. But Olivia was like a celebrity. I was overwhelmed, and impressed, and in awe. At school, she was like a lion. I was a mouse.’
There was a gentle, kind ripple of laughter.
‘Every bold move I’ve made, I made because Olivia pushed me, pushed me to take a risk,’ Cassandra continued. ‘I would not have gone to art school if she had not been in my life. There would have been no portrait series, no exhibition. When she believed in people, she made good things happen for them, and she believed in me. And I think I may have let her down.'
She focused on the tops of people's heads, lest she meet Paul or any human’s eye, and become unable to continue.
'Every time I’ve ever compromised, or held myself back, it’s been because I wasn’t following Olivia's example. Jack...Jack and Olivia were the most incredible friends, the most extraordinary couple. Their relationship...most of us can only dream about...'
She corrected, quickly.
‘Most of us can only dream about living the way she did.’
Her heel slipped into a dip in the cushion and she pitched forward. Jack caught and restored her to a stable footing, beaming at her as though she were delivering the eulogy to end all eulogies. As she began her final sentence, she had no idea what it was going to be.
'It was really hard not to hate her,’ she said.
And then she laughed, for if she could not make a joke of it, she might have to go home and kill herself from the shame. The assembled mourners, each for reasons known only to themselves, laughed with her.
Next time: Cassandra debriefs with Verity after Olivia’s memorial, and Verity wonders: as Olivia’s best friend, why hasn’t Cassandra been onto Olivia’s Memor.I.Am site yet?
About the Author
Elaine Kasket ventures into new territory with Still There, her first novel. Known for her nonfiction work, she's now exploring the boundaries between memory, technology, and human connection through fiction. This serialised novel is being released exclusively on Substack, with new installments dropping every Tuesday and Friday. Join the journey from the beginning, and subscribe to make sure you don't miss a single episode.
