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“typically” that had really stung.
    “She looks like Frida Kahlo. Don’t you think, Frances? The eyes? Have you ever sat for anyone?”
    Lottie looked blankly at Adeline. Sat where? she wanted to ask. The older woman waited.
    “No,” Celia interrupted. “I have. My family had one done when we were younger. It’s in our parlor.”
    “Ah. A family portrait. Very . . . respectable, I’m sure. And you? Lottie? Has your family ever sat for a portrait?”
    Lottie glanced at Celia, toying with an image of her mother, fingers raw and stained from stitching shoe leather at the factory, seated like Susan Holden above the mantelpiece. Instead of posing elegantly, hands folded in her lap, she would be scowling, her mouth drawn into a thin line of dissatisfaction, her thin, dyed hair pulled back into two unflattering pins and welded unsuccessfully around rollers. Lottie would be beside her, her face as expressionless, her dark eyes as apparently watchful as ever. Where Mr. Holden had stood behind his family, there would be a big, empty gap.
    “Lottie hasn’t seen her family for a while, have you, Lots?” Celia said protectively. “Probably can’t remember whether you’ve got a portrait or not.”
    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