“No—I think the man who owned it died. I seem to remember we talked to his heirs about buying it, but they hadn’t made up their minds yet what they wanted to do. After that, we used to go to the Atlantic coast of Spain, near San Sebastián. Do you know that part of Spain?”

“No.” She wonders if he has children there, too, whom he’s never met. She wonders if he’s thought about her even once in all these years. Did he know if she were a boy or a girl, did he know Vanessa had named her after his mother? She wonders what he thinks of her now, and why he won’t look at her head-on, whether it’s because he’s angry that she came.

She’s a bit angry, herself. In all the years she’s fantasized about coming to meet him, it was always in a more triumphal manner, look at how brilliantly your daughter’s turned out. Now because of sleazebag Thierry she’s shown up like a beggar.

“Oh, it’s a magnificent coast—wild. Huge waves. Those Spanish villages have a bit more life to them, too, than French ones. You know, you go into a bar and at midnight, it’s still jammed with little children running around. Festive. You ought to go one day, if you haven’t been.”

Rat ignores this. It’s not really for him to tell her where she should go. “So you’ve never been back to the Pyrénées-Orientales?”

“No. To other parts of France, yes. I go to Paris from time to time. Normandy. Kate has a sister who lives near Caen. But Collioure, never.”

She figures it must be her fault, and feels defiantly pleased even to have had this negative effect on his life: spoiling his taste for a place he once loved.

She studies the picture on the wall. At first glance, it looked like meaningless gobbets of rucked-up paint, but now she thinks she can make out shapes in it, scratched in and then smeared over. “Is that one of your pictures?”

He smiles. “I wish it were. It’s by a very great British artist whom I worked for when I was young. How are you feeling, Morgan?”

Morgan wipes his nose on a soggy scrap of toilet paper. “Fine, thank you, mister.”

Gillem looks at the kitchen clock. “You two must be exhausted. Has Kate shown you where you’re sleeping? I hope you don’t mind sharing a room?”

“Me and Morgan always sleep in the same room,” says Rat, stoutly.

The bedroom is on the ground floor, just beyond the kitchen.

There are signs of someone’s part-time presence: a pile of pop music magazines, an arsenal of candy-flavored toners and gels in the adjoining bathroom.