Celia knew very well that the nearest Lottie’s mother had ever come to a portrait was the time she had appeared in the local paper standing in a row of factory girls when the Leather Emporium opened just after the war ended. Lottie’s mother had cut out the photograph, and Lottie had kept it, long after it had yellowed and become brittle, despite the fact that her mother’s face was so small and indistinct that it was impossible to tell whether it was her.
“I don’t really go to London anymore,” she said slowly.
Adeline leaned forward, toward her. “Then we must make sure you have a painting done here. And you can give it to your family when you see them.” She touched Lottie’s hand with her own, and Lottie, who had been transfixed by her elaborate eye makeup, jumped, half afraid that Adeline might try to kiss it.
It was the fifth visit that the girls had made to Arcadia House, during which time their initial reserve about the strange and possibly fast crowd who all seemed to stay there had gradually dissipated, to be replaced by curiosity and a growing recognition that whatever else went on there, nude painting and uncertain domestic situations notwithstanding, it was far more interesting than their traditional alternatives of walking to and from town, refereeing the children, or treating themselves to ice cream or coffee at the café.
No, like some kind of ongoing theatrical performance, there was always something happening at the house. Strange painted friezes appeared around doorways or over the range. Writings—usually about the work of artists or actors—were scribbled and pinned haphazardly onto walls. Exotic foods appeared, sent from people in various grand estates around the country. New visitors metamorphosed and drifted away again, rarely—apart from a core group—staying long enough to introduce themselves.
The girls were always welcomed. Once they had arrived to find Adeline dressing Frances as an Indian princess, draping her in dark silks spotted with gold threads and painting elaborate markings on her hands and face. She herself had dressed as a prince, with a headdress that, in its elaborate peacock ornaments and intricately interwoven fabrics, must have been genuine. Marnie, the maid, had stood looking mutinous as Adeline painted Frances’s skin with cold tea, withdrawing in high dudgeon when she was instructed to bring flour, to make Adeline’s hair look gray. Then, while the girls watched silently, the two women had posed in a variety of arrangements while a thin young man who introduced himself rather pompously as “school of Modotti” had taken their photograph.
“We must go somewhere dressed like this. To London perhaps,” Adeline had crowed afterward, as she examined her altered appearance in a mirror. “It would be such fun.”
“Like the
Dreadnought
Hoax.”
“The what?” Celia had temporarily forgotten her manners. She frequently did when at Arcadia.
“A very good joke Virginia Woolf played. Many years ago.” George had stood and watched the whole proceedings. He only ever seemed to watch.
“She and her friends blacked up and traveled to Weymouth as the emperor of Abyssinia and his ‘imperial entourage.’ Some flag lieutenant or somesuch ended up giving them a royal salute and escorting them all around HMS
Dreadnought
. Caused a frightful stink.”
“But such fun!” said Adeline, clapping her hands together. “Yes! We could become the raja of Rajasthan. Visiting Walton-on-the-Naze.” She twirled in a circle, laughing, so that her elaborate coat flew out around her. She could be like this, childlike, exuberant. As if she weren’t an adult woman at all, weighed down by the responsibilities and worries that being female seemed to entail, but more like Freddie or Sylvia.
“Oh, Adeline. Nothing too dramatic.” Frances looked weary. “Remember Calthorpe Street.”
They were like that. Half the time, Celia confided afterward, she hardly understood a word that was said. It wasn’t just the accent. They didn’t talk about normal things—about what went on in the village and the cost of things and the weather. They would go off on tangents and talk about writers and people Lottie and she had never heard of, all draping themselves over each other in a manner that the girls knew Mrs. Holden would find scandalous. And they would argue. My God, they would argue. About Bertrand Russell saying they should ban the bomb. About poetry. About anything. The first time Lottie heard Frances and George “in discussion” over someone called Giacometti, it had become so fierce and passionate she’d been afraid that Frances would be struck. That had been the inevitable outcome at home when her mother argued with her boyfriends at such a pitch. And at the Holden house nobody ever argued. But Frances—normally subdued, melancholy Frances—had batted back every criticism of this Giacometti that George put forth and then finally, having told him that his problem was that he needed to “respond with instinct, not intellect,” walked out of the room. And half an hour later come back in as if nothing had happened to ask him if he would take her to town in his car.
They seemed to obey none of the normal social rules. There had been the time that Lottie had come by herself and Adeline had walked her around the entire house, showing her the dimensions and unique angles of each room, ignoring the piles of books and dusty rugs still unplaced in various corners. Mrs. Holden would never have let someone see her house in this unfinished—and often unclean—state. But Adeline didn’t even seem to notice. When Lottie tentatively pointed out a missing banister in one of the stairwells, Adeline had looked mildly surprised and then observed in that impenetrable accent of hers that they would tell Marnie and she would take care of it. What about your husband? Lottie wanted to ask, but Adeline had already glided off to the next room.
And there was the way she was with Frances, less like sisters (they didn’t argue like sisters) than a kind of old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences, laughing at private jokes, breaking off into half-explained anecdotes about places they had been. Adeline told everything, and she revealed nothing. When Lottie thought back after each visit, which she did—each being filled with such color and sensation that it had to be digested slowly afterward—she realized that she knew no more about the actress than she had on their first visit. Her husband, whom she had yet to refer to by name, was “working abroad.” “Darling George” was something in economics—“such a brilliant mind.” (“Such a brilliant beau, I bet,” said Celia, who was working up something of a crush on the linen-clad one.) Frances’s tenancy of the house was never explained at all, although the girls noted that, unlike Adeline, she didn’t wear a wedding ring. Neither had Adeline asked much about Lottie—having established only the details that she needed to relate to—whether she had been painted, whether she was interested in certain things—she displayed no interest in her history, her parents, her place in the world.
This was exceedingly odd to Lottie, who had grown up in two homes where, despite their myriad differences, one’s history informed everything that was likely to happen to one. In Merham her history within the house meant that she was accorded all the advantages given as a right to Celia—all the education, the upbringing, the clothes and food—while both parties were subtly aware that these gifts were not quite unconditional, especially now that Lottie had come of age. Outside the house the Mrs. Anstys and Chiltons, the Mrs. Colquhouns would assess one immediately by history and associations and ascribe all sorts of characteristics simply by those virtues (as in “He’s a Thompson. They’re all prone to laziness” or “She was bound to leave. The aunt bolted two days after her confinement”). They were not interested in what one cared about, what one believed in. Celia would be held to their collective bosom forever, for being the doctor’s daughter, for being from one of Merham’s best families, despite officially having become “a handful.” But if Lottie had turned to Mrs. Chilton and asked her, as Adeline Armand had once done to her, “If you could wake up in someone else’s body for just one day, who would it be?” Mrs. Chilton would have suggested that they remove Lottie to the nice institution over at Braintree where they had doctors to deal with people like her (like poor Mrs. McGrath, who had been there ever since her monthlies turned her funny).
They were definitely bohemians, decided Lottie, who had just discovered the word. And it was only to be expected of bohemians. “Don’t care what they are,” said Celia. “But they’re a damn sight more interesting than the old bores around here.”
I
T WAS NOT OFTEN THAT
J
OE FOUND HIMSELF THE FOCUS
of attention from not one but two of Merham’s more attractive young ladies. But the longer Adeline Armand lived in the village, the more disquiet had been expressed about her unconventional way of living, so that Lottie and Celia had had to become increasingly inventive about disguising their visits. And the Saturday afternoon of the garden party, they had been left with no option but to call on Joe.
The presence of most of their friends’ mothers in the house meant that they couldn’t use visiting as an excuse, while Sylvia, feeling mutinous after Celia had reneged on a promise to let her use her new record player, was threatening to follow them and tell if they went anywhere even remotely off-limits. So Joe, who had the afternoon off from the garage, had agreed to come and pick them up in his car and pretend to be taking them on a picnic up at Bardness Point. He hadn’t been terribly keen (he didn’t like lying—it made him blush even more than usual), but Lottie had employed what Celia now referred to sarcastically as her “smoldering look,” and that had been Joe in the bag.
Outside the filtered gloom of Mrs. Holden’s front room, it was a glorious afternoon, the kind of May Saturday that hinted of simmering summer afternons to come, that filled Merham’s streets with dawdling families and sent shop displays of beach balls and postcards spilling out onto the pavements. The air was filled with the cries of overexcited children and the twin scents of cotton candy and sun oil. The fierce winds that had so far plagued the east coast had for the last few days dropped, lifting temperatures and moods so that it felt, prematurely, like the first true day of summer. Lottie leaned out the window and tipped her face up to the light. Even so many years on, she still got a faint thrill of excitement to be at the seaside.
“So what are you going to do, Joe? While we’re inside?” Celia, in the back of the car, was applying lipstick with a new compact.
Joe blushed slightly and pulled out through the level crossing that separated the two sides of the town. Although Arcadia House was, as the crow flies, less than a mile from Woodbridge Avenue, to get there by road one had to dip into the town, past the municipal park, and come out again on the winding coast road.
“I’ll go to Bardness Point.”
“What, by yourself?” Celia snapped her compact shut. She was wearing little white gloves and a bright red dress with a circle skirt that nipped in almost painfully at the waist. Celia didn’t need a girdle, although her mother was forever trying to persuade her to wear one. It would, apparently, hold her in “properly.”
“It’s just for if your mother asks me anything about the weather when I drop you back. I shall need to know what it’s been like up there, so I can say so without messing up.”
Lottie felt a sudden pang of conscience at their using him in this way. “I’m sure you don’t have to do that, Joe,” she said. “You could just drop us outside when we get back. She won’t get a chance to ask you anything.”
Joe’s jaw set, and he signaled to turn right into the high street. “Yes, but if I do that, my mother will want to know why I didn’t pass on her good wishes, and then she’ll be in a temper.”
“Good thinking, Joe,” said Celia. “And I’m sure Mummy will want to say hello to your mother.”
Lottie was pretty sure Mrs. Holden would want to do nothing of the sort.
“So what’s going on at this house after all? When do you need picking up?”
“If it’s a garden party, I’d imagine they’ll be doing tea, don’t you, Lots?”
Lottie found it hard to imagine sponge cakes and scones being laid on at Arcadia House. But she couldn’t imagine what other form a garden party might take.
“I suppose so,” she said.
“So about half past five? Six o’clock?”
“Best make it half past five,” said Celia, waving at someone through the window before remembering that it was Joe’s car she was in and sinking quietly down on the backseat. “That way we’ll be home before Mummy starts going on.”
“We won’t forget this, Joe.”
There were only two cars on the drive when they arrived, a paltry total that, when Joe remarked upon it, prompted Celia, already snappy through overexcitement, to observe that it was “just as well he wasn’t invited, then.” He didn’t snap back; he never did. But he didn’t smile, even when Lottie squeezed his arm with as much apology as she could muster while they climbed out. And he drove off without waving.
“I do hate a man that sulks,” said Celia cheerfully as they rang the doorbell. “I hope they don’t have coconut cakes. I do detest coconut.”
Lottie was feeling faintly sick. She had none of the appetite for social gatherings that Celia displayed, largely because she still felt uncomfortable explaining herself to those who didn’t know her. People were never satisfied if she said she lived at the Holdens’. They wanted to know why, and then for how long, and whether she missed her mother. At Mrs. Holden’s last garden party (Poorly Children in Africa), she made the mistake of admitting that it had been over a year since they had last met and subsequently found herself, uncomfortably, an object of some pity.
“They’re outside,” said Marnie, who looked, if it were possible, even more grim-faced than usual as she opened the door. “You won’t need your gloves,” she muttered as she followed them down the hallway, gesturing toward the back.
“On or off, then?” whispered Celia as they walked toward the light.
Lottie, her ears already trained on the voices outside, didn’t answer.
It was not your standard garden party; that much was clear immediately. There was no marquee (Mrs. Holden always insisted on a marquee, in case of rain) and no trestle tables. Where is the food going to go? thought Lottie absently, and then she cursed herself for sounding like Joe.