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Colquhoun, who let out his bottom field to caravanners—all did better business in the summer months, and subsequently all paid great attention to the opinions and decisions of the all-female and immensely powerful Guest House Association.
    “There’s some think ten pounds a week. That’s what they’re charging over in Frinton.”
    “Ten pounds!” The whispered exclamation bounced around the room.
    “They’ll go to Walton instead, surely.” Mrs. Colquhoun had gone quite pale. “Walton has amusements, after all.”
    “Well, I have to say, Deirdre, I’m with you,” said Sarah Chilton. “I don’t think they’ll stand for it myself. And with the spring being as blowy as it’s been so far, I don’t think we should be pushing it. But as far as the association goes, I seem to be in a minority.”
    “But ten pounds. ”
    “The people who come here don’t come for the amusements. They come for a more . . . genteel kind of holiday.”
    “And they’re the kind of people who can afford it.”
    “No one can afford it at the moment, Alice. Who do you know with money to splash around?”
    “Do let’s not go on about money,” said Mrs. Holden as Virginia finally appeared with a refreshed teapot. “It’s a little . . . vulgar. Let’s leave the good ladies of the association to sort this one out. I’m sure they know best. So, Deirdre, what did you do with your ration books? Sarah, you must be relieved that your guests no longer have to bring them. I wanted to throw ours in the kitchen waste, but my daughter said we should frame it. Frame it! Can you imagine?”
    L OTTIE S WIFT HAD DARK, NEAR-BLACK EYES AND smooth brown hair of the type more normally found on those hailing from the Asian subcontinents. In summer her skin tanned just a little too quickly and in winter had a tendency toward sallowness. The undesirability of such dark, if delicate, coloring was one of the few things Lottie’s mother and Susan Holden would have agreed upon, had they known each other. Where Celia, generously, saw a darker-skinned Vivien Leigh or Jean Simmons, Lottie’s mother had only ever seen “a touch of the tar brush” or an ever-present reminder of the Portuguese sailor whom she had met briefly but with long-standing consequences when celebrating her eighteenth birthday near the docks in East Tilbury. “You’ve got your father’s blood,” she would mutter accusingly as Lottie grew. “Better for me if you’d disappeared with him.” Then she would pull Lottie fiercely to her in a strangulated hug and push her away again just as abruptly, as if contact that close were advisable only in small measures.
    Mrs. Holden, while less blunt, wondered if Lottie couldn’t pluck her eyebrows a bit more. And about the advisability of her spending so much time in the sun, “bearing in mind how dark you do go. You don’t want people mistaking you for . . . well, a Gypsy or something.” She had grown silent after this, as if fearful that she’d said too much, her voice tinged with pity. But Lottie had not taken offense. It was hard to take it from someone you yourself pitied.
    According to Adeline Armand, however, Lottie’s coloring was not evidence of her inferior status or her lack of breeding. It was proof of an exoticism that she had not yet learned to feel, an illustration of a strange and unique beauty.
    “Frances should paint you. Frances, you must paint her. Not in all these awful things, this serge and cotton. No, something bright. Something silky. Otherwise, Lottie darling, you overpower the things you wear. You—you smolder, non? ” Her accent had been so thick as she spoke that Lottie had had to struggle to make sure she wasn’t being insulted.
    “Molder, more like,” said Celia, who was less than pleased by Adeline’s comments. She was used to being the one who generated the attention. All that Adeline had said about her appearance was that she was “so charming. So typically English.” It had been that