Gillem picks up a fork and reaches into the pan to take a bite. “Delicious,” he pronounces. “Funny—it doesn’t taste like that when I make an omelette. Would you like a glass of wine? Oh, I suppose you’re a bit too young to drink, aren’t you? What age do people start drinking in France?”

He’s trying to picture Celia’s mother, but he can’t. All he remembers is that she looked like Isabelle Huppert and that she was absolutely minute—so tiny he was scared of crushing her. Otherwise, he can only get at it by subtraction, by seeing on this girl what clearly doesn’t come from him—the snaggle teeth, the catlike nose.

“Sit down, sit down. Eat. I just came in to make sure you had everything you needed.”

He’s disrupted their cozy lunch. Even when they go back to eating, they’ve gone stiff and silent, and he doesn’t know how to put them back at their ease. Kate teases him about his ability to cast a convivial gathering into instant paralysis.

What on earth does he have to say to these two children? Nothing. Because this, finally, is what it comes down to: this girl, because of the way she walks and holds her head, may look deceptively familiar to him. But in fact she is utterly alien. They have no more meaningful connection than if she had drawn his name by lottery. It is only some internal adolescent melodrama, a misbegotten quest for “identity,” or perhaps her mother’s troublemaking, that can have brought her here.

She’s already washing up. “Oh, leave that,” he says. “Mirjana will do it. Our daily. She’s—” He looks at his watch. “She’s gone to pick up Artemio from school.”

“You don’t look the way I was expecting a French girl to look,” Artemio says, accusingly.

It is Day Five of Rat and Morgan’s stay.

Artemio has finished his homework, and has come into their room, where Rat’s lying on the sofa bed, reading, while Morgan sits on the floor, organizing his football cards.

“Haven’t you seen French girls before? I thought you had a French nanny.”

“She wasn’t a girl; she was a hag.”

“C’est quoi, hag?”

Artemio mimes something witchy.

“What’s he up to?” asks Morgan.

“Dunno. I think he thinks it’s Halloween.”

Artemio likes to come into their bedroom and hang out. He will install himself on the bed or wander around the room, fiddling with Rat’s MP3 or Morgan’s Happy Meals mini-skateboard till you’re sure they’re going to break.