Rat found herself spending hours on the McKanes’ computer, exchanging e-mails with Jérôme and, less frequently, Pauline, who was visiting another squat on her way up to the sheep farm. Once or twice, a message from Vanessa arrived from Jérôme’s address. She would open it, quickly skim the first few lines, then press Delete.

“I thought I might see about finding a job,” Celia says.

It’s Sunday noon, un-Englishly balmy. They are in the garden, Gillem and Celia, setting up the table and chairs for lunch.

Gillem, momentarily defeated by the holder into which the umbrella is supposed to go, sits back on his heels and gazes at his daughter. In the last couple of weeks, it seems to him, she’s blossomed into a new self-assurance. But today, for some reason, she’s looking rather subdued.

“A job?” he repeats. “Whatever for?”

Gillem, as his wife is fond of pointing out, is a man who’s never had a job in his life, unless you count that brief spell of stretching canvases for a famous painter friend of his mother’s, when he was twenty-seven.

“I just think it might be a good idea,” she persists. “You’ve both been so kind about giving me ’n’ Morgan money, buying us things, but maybe it would be better for me to begin earning my keep. Unless”—she adds hastily—“it seems like time for us to be heading back to France.”

Gillem avoids her placatory smile. He finds it appalling, the idea that this child imagines that he and Kate might begrudge her a few weeks’ board. Have they really made her feel so unwelcome? It’s true that Kate keeps urging him to spend some more time on his own with Celia—if you don’t want to take any time off work, just invite her into your studio, show her your pictures, she’d love it, Kate says—but he’s honestly believed the girl seemed very happy as she was, reading French novels and giggling with Mirjana and playing football with her little brother.

“Of course not. Don’t be absurd. But I can’t quite see the point of looking for a job now. The first week of August, we’ll all be going down to Somerset for the month: there’s this lovely house on Exmoor we rent every summer. I was very much hoping you and Morgan would join us. In which case, there wouldn’t be much point in starting something now.”

“Maybe a summer job,” the girl persists. “I’ve seen signs in café windows advertising …”