Isn’t that what she’s so long dreamed of, being ensconced with her father and her grandmother in the midnight blue sitting room? Imagined, in this afternoon’s variant, as the minicab roared up the highway, her and Morgan cuddled on the sofa with Celia Kidd, making the grand old lady laugh, making her huge eyes pop, with stories of their misadventures—the dynamite factory where lost boys and lost girls lived off garbage and plotted their own parallel economy, Florian and his intercepted dealer (this, after all, is a granny with a wicked tolerance for drugs), the English schoolteachers to whom they pretended to be Gypsies, who were scared Rat and Morgan’s Gypsy clan would descend on their Exeter bedsit. All those harrowing scrapes and tender friendships transmuted into a fireside story, a story that would show Celia Kidd that Rat was plucky and resourceful, just like her. That would make Gillem realize, You are one of us. We were wrong to exclude you. Now you are ours and we will never let you go.

She has been so busy trying to decide what to tell Gillem about why she and Morgan have suddenly appeared on his doorstep—what cocktail of truth and evasion and pure wishful thinking to toast him with—that she’s utterly forgotten that he might have a story of his own.

There is no room for a wife in her conception of Gillem. There is barely room for Rat herself. If there is a wife, there may be children, and if Gillem has children—real planned wanted children, not just accidents—then Rat will have no reason to exist, nothing to offer this man in exchange for her huge frightening need.

The woman facing Rat looks indisputably wifely, even motherly. She has red cheeks and a cherry-red mouth and masses of curly brown hair, kept back, rather ineffectually, by a tortoise-shell clasp. She is plump, with an exaggeratedly curvy bosom and hips and, as much as Rat can see, bottom, too. She is wearing a flowery skirt and a lacy top. Her enormous round brown eyes, which have a lot of white around them, give her an air of astonishment.

She doesn’t ask the children in; she just stands there, goggling.

Rat doesn’t blame her. She and Morgan are both very bedraggled. Rat feels about as ugly and embarrassing as she ever has in her life. She had another go at getting them both washed in the bathroom of the ferry terminal in Newhaven, but it wasn’t a great success. There wasn’t enough water to rinse the soap from her hair, and she feels sticky all over.