Girls

by Kirsty Capes

Genres: General Fiction; Siblings; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

*Don't miss the searing, dazzling and unforgettable new novel from the Women's Prize longlisted author of CARELESS - pre-order now!*

'Every word has the touch of a genius' BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH

'A pin-sharp, propulsive story' KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE


Everyone has heard of Girls.
But what happened to the women they became...?

At the time of her death, the press wrote many things about Ingrid Olssen:

She was a brilliant artist. She was a terrible mother to her girls, Mattie and Nora. And that her legacy would live on forever.

It's unlikely the world will ever see another Ingrid Olssen exhibition - her last request to her daughters was to throw her ashes in the canyon and her paintings in the sea.

But as Mattie and Nora reluctantly embark on an all-or-nothing trip to fulfil her wishes, they start to unpick the painful scars of their past.

And soon they begin to realise that the ties that bound them, might also break them...


Perfect for fans of Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason and Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Told partly in interview form, GIRLS is as devastating as it is hilarious, as tender and moving as it is shocking - this is a book that will stay with you long after you have turned the final pages.

** EARLY PRAISE FOR GIRLS **

'An extraordinary writer of lives rarely written about [...] in words that are wise, warm, painful and often witty' DALJIT NAGRA

'Phenomenal. I loved it.' KATE SAWYER

'Surprising, heart-breaking and dryly funny, Kirsty Capes is such an exciting talent.' CAROLINE HULSE

'GIRLS puts a lens to the awful things sisters do to one another and the absolute life-changing necessity of a sister's forgiveness.' ABIGAIL BERGSTROM

'Unmissable, bold and moving. This is Capes' best novel yet.' SARA JAFARI

'Thoughtful and deeply human, Girls is a masterful take on family at its most complicated' PHOENICIA ROGERSON

Release date: May 16, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 320

Sample

Sometimes i dreamed of the richmond house.

I left it when I was a teenager, so I remembered enough for it to stick.

The house was our mother, and our mother was the house.

She made her mark on each window, ceiling and wall.

With every year that passed, I returned to memories of the house and re-evaluated them through the lens of newly accumulated experience.

The way you feel about your childhood then is very different to the way you feel now.

Like a complex piece of music, the memories seemed to ebb away at times, soft and malleable, and rise to a horrendous crescendo at others.

I didn’t think the desert would heal us. But by the time we crossed the state line, in our failing van, from Arizona into Nevada, I convinced myself that it would.

I thought that in inhaling the dry, hot, unspoiled air, we would be cleansed and purged.

New, whole, perfect versions of ourselves.

I didn’t realise how deep the wounds went. I underestimated what it would take to cauterise them.

If the Richmond house had made me rotten on the inside, God only knows what it did to my sister.

Extract from the introduction to Ingrid Olssen: Visionary by Richard Taper (forthcoming from Orange Rabbit Press)

[…] Olssen had been a forty-a-day smoker from the age of sixteen. The development of a large-cell carcinoma on her left lung at fifty did not come as a particular shock to anyone who knew of the diagnosis. Olssen refused any treatment that involved radiation, according to her younger sister Karoline Olssen – who, as she detailed the medical minutiae of the illness that had led to her sister’s death, chain-smoked five Chesterfield Blues in the space of our forty-five-minute interview, with the assistance of a jade-stone cigarette holder.

Ingrid Olssen believed and spoke only in absolutes, and one of those certainties was that any chemotherapy that she allowed into her body would ruin her brain and numb her fingers so that she could never pick up a paintbrush again. Within a year of her diagnosis, the tumour had grown to three times its original size and protruded from the front of Olssen’s chest, stretching out the skin around it, thin and shiny. Olssen’s final (complete) self-portrait was finished about three months before she died. In it, the artist is standing in what most critics agree is a shallow cardboard box, naked, her figure grotesquely misshapen. The canvas is five feet and four inches long, the length of the artist’s body, and the rendering is life-sized.* The tumour seems to be an alien straining against her ribcage, desperate to burst through. The style of this final self-portrait is frenzied, the application of the oils – darker indigo hues for the flesh, more impressionistic than any of Olssen’s earlier oil work, and lacking in the characteristic details around the subject’s eyes and mouth – is a frantic and imprecise stylistic-impasto. Olssen’s face, indeed, seems to be melting away from her skull. Karoline Olssen tells me that in the final year, her sister began to hallucinate blackened and rotting winged demons the size of small children penetrating the house in Richmond and burrowing into the walls, where Karoline, alongside Ingrid’s daughters, delivered hospice care in those last months of Olssen’s life.

Her death was horrifying and heartbreaking for all close to Ingrid Olssen. Karoline cannot recall it without first dabbing at kohl-ringed eyes with a square of pale silk. After two years of grief, at the time of writing, the pain is still clearly very raw for Olssen’s closest family members.

A moving yet controversial obituary was published in the Observer, written by Ingrid’s younger daughter, twenty-two-year-old Nora Robb, who had recently completed a postgraduate degree at UCLA in Los Angeles, United States, majoring in Art History. She wrote:

At times I hated my mother. I hated her for how much she loved her work. More than she would ever love myself or my elder sister, Matilda. Growing up, the two of us were acutely aware of what little we could do to make her happy. Ingrid always told us that she was the observer, rather than the observed, although it was so often in her life that she courted a controlled cultural gaze. Olssen knew that her absolution lay in the reimagining of the world and the people around her. That the only way that she could understand the imbalance of the universe was to take what she saw and felt, and render it upon the canvas. She found ways to make people feel new and unfamiliar. With this mission, she was able to survive the wilderness. She once told me and my sister that when she died, we ought to throw everything she ever created into the sea. Ingrid Olssen never produced her art – never put brush to canvas or charcoal to paper – for anyone except herself. In that, her genius – and her destruction – lay.

Ingrid Olssen was cremated at Highgate Cemetery, twelve days after her death on 19th January, 2018. She was fifty-four years old at the time of her death. Her casket was made of cherrywood and inside was placed the April 1979 edition of British Vogue, the edition that had been on shelves the month she’d arrived in London from Hønefoss, Norway, as an estranged teenager. Also in her coffin were a bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume, a pair of quilted leather gloves gifted to her by Carolina Herrera and a single red rose placed by her ex-husband Edward Robb. She left behind a catalogue of over four hundred works of oil on canvas, several hundred silkscreen and linocut prints, and other work ranging from the size of a postcard to the length and height of the western portico at St Paul’s Cathedral. Her most celebrated work, Girls (charcoal and oil on reinforced canvas, 1999), remains on permanent loan to the National Portrait Gallery in London. Further works are displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles and the Tate Modern. Three paintings – including the scandalous Edward and me on a bed of lies (egg tempera on card, 1986) – are part of the permanent collection at the National Gallery in Oslo. All other components of Ingrid Olssen’s portfolio – her oils, her prints, her sketchbooks (of which there are rumoured to be over a thousand), her studies and the small number of works done in tempera – remain in her estate, inherited in equal parts by Olssen’s two daughters and moved into storage at the time of her death.

It is unlikely that the world will ever see another Ingrid Olssen exhibition. Her estate is closely guarded by her family, who in general respect her wishes to keep it away from public eyes. What remains is a life marked by obsession, heartbreak, disaster and the snuffing out of a bright and blazing star in the landscape of modern European art. There is the question of Olssen’s impoverished early life in a small Norwegian industrial community north of Oslo, alongside her younger sister, Karoline, and her widowed father, Lars, a pig farmer who died in the midst of bankruptcy in 2006. There is her migration to Britain in her adolescent years; her early education under the tutelage of one of the greatest European silkscreen artists of the twentieth century, Maurice Hoffmann. Her frenzied entrance onto the London art scene of the 1980s and her indoctrination into the culture of tabloid celebrity; her whirlwind affair and marriage to the Californian actor, Edward Robb. Her textured sabbatical as a mother to Matilda and Nora Robb, born 1986 and 1995 respectively. Her rise to prominence, and eventually international acclaim in the late nineties before her deteriorating physical and mental health led her to an early retirement, though the last ten years of her life (it has emerged) were her most prolific, and undoubtedly produced her most celebrated work.

This biography – written with the permission of Olssen’s immediate family and personal lawyer – will document Ingrid’s life, her work, her rise and her fall. With so little visual material publicly available, the Olssen and Robb families have kindly given me access to the private archives to share never-before-seen works and rare studies, captured here on pages 48-57 and 105-122.

Ingrid Olssen was untameable, flighty and feckless. Her life was marred by depression and addiction, as well as romance and celebrity, in equal measure. It is my hope that through her work, interviews with her closest friends and family members, and a critical examination of her patchwork history as a young ingénue of her contemporaries, a tabloid sensation, a teenage prodigy thrown from poverty into the centre of the cultural zeitgeist within the space of a few years, that we might somehow get a little closer to her; to understand some small portion of her genius.

 

 

 

 

* Self-portrait #42, oil on canvas, 2018.

I don’t remember seeing Nora at the funeral.

I didn’t notice her arrive. I forgot to say goodbye, and, when I remembered, she seemed to have already gone.

She had tried to kill herself for the second time early in the spring, the year before our mother, Ingrid, died. Her roommate had found her in the damp bathroom of their UCLA dorm, dead leaves on the windowsill, swinging idly from the curtain rail like a sock caught on a nail by a thread. She’d been wide awake, holding each narrow elbow with the opposite hand, watching the house finches clean their feathers on the neighbour’s roof through the frosted window.

She’d seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

Her second suicide attempt had been Nora’s fifth brush with death. The fifth time she would extend a hand beyond the veil and feel the breeze through her fingers. Whatever it was that was lurking on the other side would take her by the wrist but never with a firm enough grip to pull her through. It wouldn’t be the last time Nora shook hands with the grim reaper. There would be more.

At the funeral itself, everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

Nora had written the obituary, so Aunt Karoline suggested that I deliver the eulogy.

I did – and as I read, I looked out to the congregation. The people my mother had collected throughout her life, who had loved her enough to come and watch her be put to rest. In the front row was Aunt Karoline in velvet black, a satin shrug the colour of seaweed wrapped around her narrow shoulders. Her hair almost pink, so threaded through with white was the auburn. On Karoline’s left-hand side was Maurice Hoffmann’s widow, Angelica. On her right was Jules, an ageing, greasy-haired Los Angeles type who had at one time been a session drummer for Jefferson Airplane. He liked to tell people that he had survived the same strain of heroin that killed Janis Joplin. Further down were two Poet Laureates and one daytime television presenter. My dad, Edward, perched sheepishly on the end of the front row with his new wife, Marnie, who was the same age as me. He wore a pink polka-dot silk pocket square, which had become slightly crumpled over the course of the day and now hung limply across his lapel, as though it had lost interest.

Even now as I picture it, I can’t think of where Nora sat. Who was next to her, what she was wearing, what kind of expression was arranged across her face.

The father of my daughter, Gus, waited in the back row, a respectful distance. He wore his nicest lawyering suit, which made him look a little bit like the kind of man who speaks on the phone at an obnoxious volume when on public transport. In reality, Gus was the kind of person who tended to ask people questions about themselves and listened to their answers. Nevertheless, it wasn’t appropriate for him to be near the front, though he knew Ingrid as well as I did, or Nora did, and several boat-loads more than fucking Marnie did. He had been just as much a part of my mother’s life as I or Nora had, despite us breaking up a year after Beanie was born, and a year before either of us were allowed to vote.

Our daughter, Beanie, sat back there too, though there was no reason for her to. She had done her make-up the way Ingrid always had – eyeliner so thick and black it made her eyes flare out across high cheekbones like the wings of a crow. I’ll keep Dad company, she said. I shrugged and she squeezed my arm to show that it didn’t matter to her. At fifteen, she seemed to have a thousand years of patience in her bones. She became more like Gus every day.

I looked around for Nora but I couldn’t see her, out there in a sea of mourning.

After the eulogy, Aunt Karoline read a poem that she had written herself but that seemed to be overly derivative of Seamus Heaney. I could see the Poet Laureates eyeballing one another, unimpressed. Then, Sadie Nelson, bassist for punk sensation Acid Rain, who’d famously run away with Mum to Naples for a short time in the early 2010s to smoke opium in a squat, got up and played ‘Take On Me’ on an electric guitar while Ingrid’s coffin was slowly conveyed on a sort of airport baggage-check-type mechanism, and disappeared behind a thick red curtain. Nora had chosen the cherrywood for the casket and pansies for the flowers. They were burned too.

In the remembrance garden, I found Beanie and Gus by the gates to the car park. We stood there together as various people from Ingrid’s circle came up to us to offer condolences, shake hands, congratulate me on the greatness of my mother and the footprint she had left, on the coincidence of my being born to her. Aunt Karoline dragged me into an angular hug.

You’ve done such a wonderful job, Matilda, she said. She would have been so proud of you.

Thanks, I mumbled into her powdery neck. The smell of the concrete was hard and cold. Thick, dark smoke rose from the chimney of the crematorium.

The eulogy was just beautiful, Mattie, someone I didn’t recognise said from behind Aunt Karoline.

It was, wasn’t it, Karoline agreed. Her lipstick was bleeding into the pursed smoker’s wrinkles around her mouth. Really, so marvellous. So moving.

Sadie Nelson seemed to be having some sort of argument with a soap star next to the hearse. Aunt Karoline dashed away a tear with a handkerchief.

In the car on the way to the wake, which was to be held in the downstairs room of a pub off Richmond Common, Beanie said, Mum?

Yes?

I wasn’t looking at her, my hands claws around the steering wheel, rigid. I hadn’t seen Nora at the funeral. I had a horrible suspicion that she would ditch the wake; that she would leave me to deal with these horrendous people by myself. It was such a Nora thing to do. I was pre-emptively and uncharitably angry at her for it.

Nora, who only ever thinks of herself. Nora, who is always in some sort of permanent state of crisis. Nora, who can’t even get her shit together for Mum’s funeral.

Where did you get the eulogy from?

What do you mean?

The speech you read out today. You didn’t write it, did you?

I glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. Her black eyes filled up the visor, a streak of dark feathers across her face.

I got it off Grandma’s Wikipedia page, I admitted.

Beanie grinned at me through the glass.

I thought it was a bit strange when you started listing her Controversies. Me and Dad liked it, anyway.

Gus – in the passenger seat – smiled with the corners of his mouth turned down rather than up. He didn’t need to say anything. He had been a first-hand witness to the controlled self-demolition of Ingrid Olssen and her legacy since we were teenagers. And now he was here to witness the final blows as it all came crumbling down.

Nora wasn’t at the wake, as I suspected.

Now that I think of it, I wonder if she had been at the funeral at all.

Extracts [various] from interview transcripts, quoted in Ingrid Olssen: Visionary by Richard Taper (forthcoming from Orange Rabbit Press)

Marnie Robb, actress and wife of Edward Robb:

I heard that Ingrid Olssen was born in the pigs’ trough on a farm in buttfuck nowhere Norway.

Chad McCloy, journalist and host of television chatshow McCloy Who’s Talking:

I heard she was the illegitimate child of a Scandinavian prince who got exiled after she tried to make a claim for the crown, or whatever. Which Scandinavian prince? I don’t know. Whatever. Was she Swedish?

Angelica Hoffmann, wife of the late Maurice Hoffmann and Director of the Hoffmann Trust:

Maurice didn’t know a jot about her when she turned up on the doorstep of his printing shop in Golders Green in the spring of 1979. I don’t think he ever asked. That’s the kind of man Maurice Hoffmann was. He took you at face value, he believed the things you told him and he trusted strangers. Here she was, this slip of a girl, barely sixteen, clearly malnourished, barely a word of English or a penny to her, and Maurice gave her a job. He didn’t ask about how she got to London from wherever it was she came from, which someone told me was a dairy farm in the Swiss Alps. He just trusted her.

Edward Robb, actor and ex-husband:

She never told me a thing about how she grew up.

Karoline Olssen, sister and manager:

We were born on our family farm just outside of Hønefoss, Ringerike, about sixty kilometres north-west of Oslo. Ingrid was born in sixty-three and I in sixty-six or sixty-seven. Don’t you dare print my age, Richard. Our father, Lars Olssen, was a pig farmer in a small village that sat halfway up a mountain. Our mother died when I was about four, I think. Something to do with her lungs. I don’t remember much about her. Ingrid remembered a little more. We grew up there, on our farm, Olssengården. Our family had lived there for hundreds of years before our generation came along, slaughtering the pigs and farming the land. It wasn’t glamorous, I tell you. At fourteen, Ingrid decided to forego the farmer’s life and got herself a job at a papermill in the town. Our father didn’t like that one bit. But Ingrid was a stubborn type of girl. That’s what everyone liked about her. She never compromised on anything.

Edward Robb:

All I know is that she turned up in north London at Maurice Hoffmann’s printing shop when she was sixteen and homeless, and within a handful of years she was the most celebrated young new artist of the decade. That was before I knew her, though. By the time she found her way into my life she was a stunner – drop-dead-at-her-feet kind of gorgeous – she looked like she’d never seen a hard day’s work in her life. Cheekbones you could cut glass on. Skin so soft it was like it was made out of clouds. I’m a Texas boy, and I liked that about her. She reminded me of the girls back home. That was before things went sour, of course.

Karoline Olssen:

I think she felt that she was going to suffocate in Hønefoss. There are these enormous burial mounds there. From the early Iron Age, or so. They seemed to be everywhere. Surrounding us on all sides, though in reality it wasn’t like that at all. It just felt like that, you see? Quite the tourist attraction. At all times, growing up, Ingrid and I were thinking about how we were surrounded by dead bodies. Dead bodies in every direction, as far as you could see. We were living in a graveyard. I think that’s why she ran away.

Nora Robb, daughter and performance artist:

No, I didn’t go to her funeral.

Nora is still in London, isn’t she? Richard asked me, flinging the question over his shoulder.

He was my mother’s posthumous biographer and he was standing naked in my kitchen. It was four-thirty on a Sunday afternoon in the spring. A little over two years after my mother’s funeral.

What? I asked, even though I had heard him fine.

Nora. She’s in London, right? She started her PhD?

I hadn’t seen Nora – in person, at least – in the intervening time.

Don’t do that, I told him as I searched the fridge. Nothing edible: half a block of yellowing feta and wilted spinach in the drawer. Even the margarine had something suspicious growing on it. I itched to get some food in before Beanie got back from her dad’s place tonight. I dumped the margarine in the bin and turned back to Richard.

He had the look of someone caught in the act.

Don’t do what? he asked sheepishly. He handed me a mug of steaming black coffee. I took it and pulled my dressing gown tighter around me. There was a hole in the cuff, which I poked my thumb through, feeling the soft flannel against the pad.

Work, I responded simply.

He grinned, a naughty schoolboy, mischievous.

Sorry, he said, still smiling.

If you want to get hold of Nora, you can contact her yourself. You have her phone number. You have her email address. There’s no need for me to get involved.

I could hear the edge to my voice as I was speaking and regretted the sharpness before the words were even out of my mouth. Richard, the most forgiving, most apologetic man I had ever dated, pulled me into a hug, extracting the mug from my hands and setting it down on the kitchen counter.

I will do that, he said quietly. I didn’t mean to upset you.

You didn’t upset me, I lied. It’s just weird when you bring up work stuff when we’re together. As a couple.

I had been seeing Richard for six months, since the first time he interviewed me. Quite suddenly and without my say-so, it had become serious. I liked Richard. A lot. He was generous and thoughtful and considerate. He was also writing a book about my mother. Aunt Karoline had done all the work, commissioning him based on two flattering profiles he had written on Ingrid Olssen for culture magazines. He had narrated a short film about her work for the BBC that had won a BAFTA. He had interviewed her a few times himself when she was still alive. Aunt Karoline insisted that Mum had been quite fond of him, and enjoyed his writing on her. He was the perfect candidate to write the biography. I found it vaguely strange for him to be so interested in my mother, but I supposed that was the point of critics. And it was refreshing not to have to ask my boyfriend not to Google my name or the names of anyone in my immediate family. Richard had been pre-indoctrinated into the chaos when I’d met him: he’d already been an admirer of my mother and her work, and as her biographer there’d been no need for me to awkwardly laugh off old press clippings about Mum’s behaviour in the eighties and nineties. Richard had already seen all those clippings. He had a binder, in fact. It was unusual but helpful. After he’d agreed to write the book, Aunt Karoline had found the publisher and secured the advance, of course taking a fee for herself, in typical Aunt Karoline fashion. She’d then set about convincing me, Nora, my dad Edward, and an eclectic cast of characters from Ingrid’s life, to participate. In the end I’d agreed to give an interview to get her to stop calling me at work.

Perhaps, too, through his book, Richard would do something none of us had managed: he would pull on the threads of my mother’s life, unravel them and arrange them back together into some cohesive whole. I had read some of his journalism in anticipation of the interview; he was good – even I, someone who’d left school at sixteen with five GCSEs and whose day-job was helping kids process their feelings by drawing pictures, could see that – if a little melodramatic. Perhaps he would get to some truth of Ingrid that no one else ever could in her lifetime.

Richard had arrived at the two-bed Acton flat I shared with my teenager, Beanie, the following week, his face ruddy-red and freckled, his glasses sliding down a shiny nose, his jeans faded and crumpled. He’d looked unassuming, but the way he’d watched me, and the questions he’d asked, were sharp as a laser point.

Referring to Girls, he’d asked early on in the conversation, Is it you and your sister?

I shrugged, unimpressed. Yes, it’s us. Everyone knows that.

The composition is interesting, he said, almost to himself, fiddling with the notebook that sat tidily on his lap, the page unspoiled. He had the voice recorder on; the notebook seemed to be more of a prop, something to do with his hands while we talked. When recording, his clipped Surrey accent became more pronounced, as British actors did when they played parts in American movies. For someone who was a veteran in his field, despite only being in his mid-thirties, only a couple of years older than me, he seemed to be unsettled. He was ill at ease in my living room, perched precariously on the edge of the sofa, averting his gaze from the photo collage on the wall that Beanie and I had spent one evening putting together with a tub of cheesecake-flavoured Häagen-Dazs and the Twilight movies back-to-back, pasting pink glitter and heart sequins around the frames of our favourite memories: trips to London Zoo, the aquarium, the day she’d found out she had won a scholarship for drama school and we’d celebrated by getting our hair dyed matching shades of blue. My blue had long faded and been flooded over with a chestnut brown as close as possible to my natural colour. Beanie had kept the blue, and then moved on to violet, then pink, and now she was orange. She’d insisted that we have Ingrid and Nora in the collage too. I had no photographs of them, so Beanie had printed out Nora’s headshot from the art faculty pages of the Goldsmiths University website where she was undertaking her PhD; Mum’s photo was an old tabloid snap of her falling out of a nightclub in the eighties, writhing, spindly arms wrapped around my dad’s neck as he struggled to hold her steady, permed hair all frizz, bouncing across her shoulder blades, a sparkling green minidress hoiked up around her waist exposing turquoise underwear and the hipbones of a person who didn’t eat. The pupils of her grey-blue eyes black moons in the flashbulb of the camera. Just a slither of white powder peeking out from her nostril – it could be missed if you weren’t looking for it. I’d asked Beanie whether she was sure this was the picture she wanted on the wall to remember Grandma by.

She would love it, though, wouldn’t she? Beanie had asked by way of reply. She would get a kick out of it.

Mum had always hated the serious artist portraits, and her own self-portraits, that had invariably accompanied any articles about her work. She’d called them – the pictures, the publications, the editors and journalists – vampires.

She would love it, you’re right, I agreed with Beanie. She looked beautiful and effervescent and carefree. It seemed that even in that moment of bareness, of vulnerability, there was something the photographer had captured in her eye, a kind of knowing. That such a candid moment had possibly been orchestrated. There was never a moment with Mum, even when she was off her trolley on champagne and pills and powder, that she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. It was a photo of her from before she’d had children.

I’d heard Beanie on a video call to Nora one evening not long after, updating her on what was going on in our lives. Nora and I had always had a tricky relationship. Ever since I’d left the Richmond house at sixteen to have Beanie, we’d periodically collided like two dying planets: always in moments of crisis. The times that Nora had almost died or in the final days of our mother’s life. Nora didn’t really have her shit together, and she never said it but I knew she resented that I’d left when she couldn’t, all those years ago. When I was being honest with myself, I resented it too. Nevertheless, Beanie and Nora got on like a house on fire. Perhaps because there wasn’t much of an age difference between them: I’d had Beanie when I was sixteen and Nora was seven.

Now Beanie was past the age I had been when I’d given birth to her, and Nora was in her mid-twenties, they had the most in common than they had had at any other moment in Beanie’s life. I’d suddenly felt like the odd one out, encroaching on them. Nora didn’t like to leave the house all that much, except for her work at the university, and she didn’t like to have visitors either. Consequently, their relationship had existed almost exclusively online. Beanie had shown Nora, via FaceTime, the pictures we had chosen of her and Ingrid to go on the wall.

See, we used your university headshot, Beanie had said excitedly. Look how posh and serious you are. A proper artist.

Take it down, Nora said crisply on the other end of the line while I hovered in the kitchen, eavesdropping.

What! Why?

It’s horrible. I hate that picture.

I think you look lovely in it.

I look like a fraud in it. I’m not joking, Old Bean. Take it off the wall. I’ll tell your mum to do it, if you don’t.

You won’t tell Mum, Beanie said, scoffing. You don’t talk to Mum.

Just do it, Beans, Jesus.

Fine, Beanie said sullenly. I’ll take it down. It’s not like you’ll ever see it, anyway. You never visit us.

Beanie didn’t take it down. I chose not to ask her why.

As I’d sat opposite Richard, I’d looked up at the collage. In the corner was a postcard reproduction of Girls that Beanie had amusedly picked up from the gift shop at the National Portrait Gallery while on a school trip.

What do you find interesting about the composition? I’d asked him, humouring him. I reminded myself that I had agreed to just the one interview. One hour, that was it. Once it was done, Aunt Karoline would be off my back, I could get on with my life without pretending to be moved by the increasingly banal takes of yet another wanky art critic, no matter how well he could compose a metaphor.

We’d sat for Girls in Mum’s studio, under the sash windows in the Richmond house, for twelve days over the course of a month when Nora was four and I was thirteen. Mum had chosen lukewarm marbled blues an