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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