Below them the breakwaters stretched away to the left, like the black teeth of a comb, the tide easing its way backward across the damp sands that were dotted with tiny figures braving the fierce, unseasonal winds. The arrival of Adeline Armand, the girls decided afterward, had been an occasion to match the arrival of the queen of Sheba. That is, it would have, had the queen of Sheba chosen to arrive on the same week it was announced that rationing had ended. This meant that all those people—the Mrs. Colquhouns, the Alderman Elliotts, the landladies of the Parade and their like—who could normally be relied upon to pass judgment on the extravagant ways of newcomers who arrived with whole truckloads of trunks, large paintings that featured not portraits of family members or scenes of horses galloping but huge splotches of color in no particular pattern at all, inordinate numbers of books, and artifacts that were quite
clearly
foreign were not standing silently at their gates noting the steady procession disappearing into the long-empty Art Deco house on the seafront but were queuing at Price’s Butchers on Marchant Street, just for the sheer pleasure of buying a cut of meat without a ration book.
“Mrs. Hodges says she’s minor royalty. Hungarian or something.”
“Rot.”
Celia looked at her friend, her eyes widening. “She
is
. Hodges spoke to Mrs. Ansty, who knows the solicitor or whoever it is was in charge of the house, and she is some kind of Hungarian princess.”
Below them a scattering of families had appropriated the little stretches of beach between them and could be seen seated behind straining striped windbreaks or sheltering in beach huts against the blustery sea breeze.
“Armand’s not a Hungarian name.” Lottie put her hand up to stop her hair whipping into her mouth.
“Oh? And how would you know?”
“It’s just rubbish, isn’t it? What would a Hungarian princess be doing in Merham? She’d be up in London, no question. Or Windsor Castle. Not in a sleepy old dump like this.”
“Not your end of London, she wouldn’t.” Celia’s tone verged on the scornful.
“No,” Lottie conceded. “Not my end of London.” No one exotic came from Lottie’s end of London, an eastern suburb liberally dotted with hastily erected factories, which backed onto the gasworks in one direction and acres of unlovely marshes the other. When she had first been evacuated to Merham, some eleven years ago, she’d had to hide her incredulity when sympathetic villagers asked her if she missed it. She had looked equally nonplussed when they asked if she missed her family. They tended to stop asking after that.
In fact, Lottie had returned home for a year after the war ended, and then, after a series of fevered letters between Lottie and Celia, and Mrs. Holden’s oft-stated belief that not only was it nice for Celia to have a little friend her own age but also that One Really Had to Do One’s Bit for the Community, Didn’t One?, Lottie had been invited to return to Merham, initially for holidays and gradually, as those holidays extended into school time, for good. Now Lottie was simply accepted as part of the Holden family, not blood perhaps, not
entirely
a social equal (you were never going to get rid of that East End accent entirely), but someone whose continued presence in the village was no longer to be remarked upon. Besides, Merham was used to seeing people coming and not going home. The sea could get you like that.
“Shall we take something? Flowers? So that we have an excuse to go in?”
Lottie could tell that Celia felt bad about her previous comments, as she was now bestowing what she considered her “Moira Shearer” smile, the one that revealed her lower teeth. “I haven’t got any money.”
“Not shop bought. You know where we can find pretty wild ones. You get enough for Mummy.”
There was, Lottie acknowledged, the faintest echo of a resentment in that last sentence.
The two girls slid off the park bench and began to walk toward the edge of the park, where a single cast-iron railing signified the start of the cliff path. Lottie would often walk this route in summer evenings when the noise and suppressed hysteria of the Holden household became too much. She liked to listen to the sounds of the gulls and the corncrakes skimming the air above her and remind herself who she was. This kind of introspection Mrs. Holden would have considered unnatural, or at least overly indulgent, and Lottie’s gathering of small bunches of flowers was a useful insurance. But almost ten years of living in someone else’s house had also ingrained a certain canniness, a sensitivity to potential domestic turbulence that belied the fact that Lottie was not quite out of her teens. It was important that Celia never regard her as competition, after all.
“Did you see the hatboxes going in? Must have been at least seven,” said Celia, stooping. “What about this one?”
“No. Those wilt in minutes. Get some of the purple ones. There, by the big rock.”
“She must have a heap of money. Mummy said the house needs loads doing to it. She spoke to the decorators, and they said it was an absolute tip. No one’s lived in there since the MacPhersons moved to Hampshire. Must be—what, nine years?”
“Don’t know. Never met the MacPhersons.”
“Dull as dishwater, the pair of them. She had size-nine feet. It hasn’t got a single decent fireplace, according to Mrs. Ansty. They all got looted.”
“The gardens are completely overgrown.”
Celia stopped. “How do you know?”
“I’ve been up there a few times. On my walks.”
“You sly thing! Why didn’t you bring me?”
“You never wanted to walk.”
Lottie looked past her to the moving van, feeling a silent rush of excitement. They were well used to people coming—Merham was a seasonal town after all; its seasons punctuated by new visitors, their arrivals and departures ebbing and flowing like the tides themselves—but the prospect of having the big house occupied again had added a certain breathless anticipation to the last fortnight.
Celia turned back to her bunch of flowers. As she rearranged them in her palm, her hair was lifted by the wind in a golden sheet.
“I think I hate my father,” she observed aloud, her eyes suddenly fixed on the horizon.
Lottie stood still. Henry Holden’s dinners with his secretary were not a subject she felt qualified to comment upon.
“Mummy’s so stupid. She just pretends nothing is happening.” There was a brief silence, interrupted by the rude cry of the gulls hovering above them.
“God, I can’t wait till I leave this place,” Celia said finally.
“I like it.”
“Yes, but you don’t have to watch your father making an ass of himself.” Celia turned back to Lottie and thrust her hand at her.
“There. Do you think that’s enough?”
Lottie peered at the handful of flowers. “You really want to go up there? Just to gawp at her things?”
“Oh, and you don’t, Mother Superior?”
The two girls grinned at each other and then sprinted back toward the municipal park, cardigans and skirts flying out behind them.
T
HE DRIVE TO
A
RCADIA
H
OUSE HAD ONCE BEEN CIRCULAR
; its remaining neighbors could still remember processions of long, low cars that halted with a crisp bite of gravel before the front door, then continued around its graceful sweep and exited back down the lane. It had been an important house, sited well inside the railway tracks (so significant was this distinction that houses in Merham were advertised as either “inside” or “outside”). It had been built by Anthony Gresham, the eldest son of the Walter Greshams, when he returned from America, having made his fortune creating an unremarkable piece of engine equipment that was bought by General Motors. He had wanted it, he said grandly, to look like a film star’s house. He’d seen a house in Santa Monica, owned by a famous actress of the silent screen, that was long and low and white with great expanses of glass and smaller windows like portholes. It spoke to him of glamour and new worlds and a brave, bright future (a future that, ironically, had not been his; he died aged forty-two after being hit by a car. A Rover). When the house had been finally completed, some of Merham’s residents had been shocked by its modernity and had complained privately that it was not, somehow, “fitting.” So that when the next owners, the MacPhersons, finally moved out several years later and it was left empty, a few of the older villagers felt curiously relieved, although they might not have said as much.
Now the northern side of the drive had become completely overgrown, a tangle of brambles and elder prematurely ending it by the gate that once led to the sea path and causing a large amount of gear crunching and swearing from those drivers of the delivery vans who, having offloaded the last of their cargo, were now trying to reverse around each other back to the lane, partially blocked by a car that had entered behind them.
Lottie and Celia stood for a while watching the puce faces and sweaty efforts of those still carrying furniture, until a tall woman with long chestnut hair pulled severely into a bun ran out, waving a set of car keys and pleading with them “just to wait a moment. Hold on. I’ll move it over to the kitchen garden.”
“Do you think that’s her?” whispered Celia, who had inexplicably ducked behind one of the trees.
“How would I know?”
Lottie held her breath, Celia’s sudden reticence having prompted her own sudden sense of awkwardness. They pressed close to each other, peering around the trunk, holding their full skirts tight behind them with their hands to stop them from billowing out.
The woman sat in the car and looked around her at its instruments, as if considering which one she should use. Then, with an anguished bite of her lower lip, she started the ignition, wrestled with the gearshift, and, relaxing slightly, took a deep breath and shot straight backward with an almighty crunch into the front grille of a removal van.
There was a brief silence, followed by a loud expletive from one of the men and the lengthy blast of a horn, and then the woman raised her head and the girls realized that she had likely broken her nose. Blood was everywhere—down her pale green blouse, over her hands, even on the steering wheel. She sat straight upright in the driver’s seat looking a little stunned, and then, glancing down, began to search for something to stem the bleeding.
Lottie found herself running across the overgrown lawn, her handkerchief already in her hand.
“Here,” she said, reaching the woman at the same time as several exclaiming people began to congregate around the car. “Take this. Put your head back.”
Celia, who had hurried behind Lottie, peered at the woman’s spattered face. “You’ve taken an awful crack,” she said.
The woman took the handkerchief. “I’m so sorry,” she was saying to the lorry driver. “I’m just no good with gears.”
“You shouldn’t be driving,” said the man, his bulk barely contained by his dark green apron, who was clutching what remained of his front light. “You didn’t even look in the mirror.”
“I thought I was in first. It’s awfully close to reverse.”
“Your bumper’s fallen off,” said Celia with some excitement.
“It isn’t even my car. Oh, dear.”
“Look at my light! I’ll have to get a whole new unit for that. That’s going to cost me time as well as money.”
“Of course.” The woman nodded sorrowfully.
“Look, leave the lady alone. She’s taken quite a knock.” A dark-haired man in a pale linen suit had appeared at the car door. “Just tell me what the damage is and I’ll see you right, all right? Frances, are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?”
“She shouldn’t be driving,” said the man, shaking his head.
“
You
shouldn’t have been so close,” said Lottie, irritated by his lack of concern. The driver ignored her.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman muttered. “Oh, dear. Look at my skirt.”
“Come on, how much? Fifteen shillings? A pound?” The younger man was peeling notes off a roll he had taken from his inside pocket. “There, take that. And take another five for your troubles.”
The driver looked mollified. He probably didn’t even own the van, thought Lottie.
“Well,” he said. “Well, I guess that’ll have to do.” He pocketed the money swiftly, his martyrdom apparently tempered by an astute determination not to push his luck. “I suppose we’ll be finishing up, then. C’mon, lads.”
“Look at her skirt,” whispered Celia, nudging Lottie. Frances’s skirt was almost down to her ankles. In a bold print of willows, it was curiously old-fashioned. Lottie found herself studying the rest of the woman’s clothes: her shoes, which looked almost Edwardian, her lengthy string of globular amber beads. “Bohemians!” she hissed gleefully.
“C’mon, Frances. Let’s get you inside before you start bleeding all over the interior.” The young man stuck his cigarette in the side of his mouth and gently took the woman’s elbow, helping her from the car. As she walked toward the house, she turned suddenly.
“Oh, your lovely handkerchief. I’ve covered it with blood.” She paused, looking at it. “Are you local? Do come and have some tea. We’ll get Marnie to soak it. It’s the least I can do. George, do call Marnie for me. I’m afraid I might splutter.”
Lottie and Celia glanced at each other.
“That would be lovely,” said Celia. It was only after they shut the door behind them that Lottie realized they must have left the flowers on the drive.
C
ELIA SEEMED LESS SURE WHEN SHE ENTERED THE MAIN
hallway. I
N
fact, she came to such a juddering halt that Lottie, who hadn’t been concentrating, smacked her own nose on the back of Celia’s head. This was less to do with any natural tendency toward hesitation on Celia’s part (in fact, her nickname among her younger siblings was “sharp elbows”) than with her coming face-to-face with the large painting stacked against the curving banister opposite the front door. On it, in impasto oils, a naked woman reclined. She was not, Lottie observed from the positioning of her arms and legs, the modest sort.
“Marnie? Marnie, are you there?” George led the way, striding across the flagstone floor, past the packing cases. “Marnie, can you get us some warm water? Frances has had a bit of a bump. And can you make some tea while you’re there? We’ve got visitors.”