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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