“On the contrary,” Morgan pipes up. “I adore a good red.”

This time, they all laugh.

“So you want to live in France?” says Rat.

“We’d heard that for the price of a bedsit in Exeter, you can buy a sheep farm in the Pyrénées.”

“You’re going to raise sheep?” Rat looks at Charlie’s pink jacket, Jane’s crocheted miniskirt. Funny how everybody she meets these days seems to be bent on raising sheep.

“Well, no, I thought we could get rid of the sheep and teach English. But it wasn’t any good.”

“Why not?”

“Because the man was insane. Turned out, he didn’t want to sell at all. Or rather, he wanted the money, but he didn’t want to move out of the house. He said, Where am I going to live?”

“And you didn’t want to live with him?” asks Rat, politely.

“No, because he was completely mad.”

“Well, a different sort of mad from us,” says Jane, laughing.

“So you’re going back to Exeter?”

Charlie heaves a theatrically deep sigh. “Yes, I suppose. Till we find the next dream house somewhere cheap and remote. Someone told us to try the Spanish side of the border, but I don’t speak Spanish. Or Basque, or whatever they speak there, and the thought of learning a new language at my age is rather dispiriting. What’s your story?”

Rat is feeling emboldened. She has a hope that this couple’s semisloshed jokiness might make it possible for more serious business to slip through almost unnoticed. She has been trying inconspicuously to check out the inside of their station wagon, see where there’s enough space.

“We’re trying to get to England.”

“How do you mean, trying? Are you Serbian war criminals or Liberian child-soldiers, or do you just not have enough money for the ferry?”

“No, we’re French. And we’ve got the money, but it turns out we don’t have the right papers. The woman at the ferry says my brother’s too young to be traveling without an adult, unless we have a special paper saying it’s all right. I mean, we have passports, but we don’t have this paper that’s got to be signed by our parents and stamped by the prefect.”

“How very unreasonable. Aren’t bureaucracies mad?”

“They are.”

“So you’re going to have to get your parents to—to—”

She looks him over. “I can’t. It’s a signed paper.”

“And?”

“My parents—well, my parents aren’t exactly paper sort of people. They can’t read, can’t write. Didn’t even want us kids going to school. Well, just me, because that way I can fill out the benefit forms for them.”

“Are you having me on?”