“Wonderfully amoral. If she wanted to do something, she just did it.

“She took me everywhere with her, which I suppose parents didn’t do much in those days. We spent some wonderful holidays together, in these lost places. Northern Spain. The Mistra peninsula in Greece, where they have the most amazing Byzantine frescoes. There was one year, when I’d got kicked out of school, when we spent the entire winter up in Scotland, in a house some friends had lent us. She loved the country—the mountains, the sea, the moors. That was something strong she gave me. I’d wanted to be able to give that to Artemio,” he says, slowly. “The freedom of living in a wild place, where even a child can walk out the door and go for miles, with nothing around you but earth and sky.”

“I miss that, too,” Rat confesses. “London can feel kind of like living in a cage, if you’re used to being outdoors all your life. Back home, there’s this place near Collioure where I used to camp out with my friends—a kind of wildlife preserve, on the beach. Me ’n’ Morgan lived there for a while this spring, before we came to you. It’s my favorite place in the world. Sometimes I think I’d rather be sleeping there, in the wind and rain, than here in a cozy bed.”

She stops, struck by the rudeness of what she’s just said, but her father’s smiling at her. When he smiles, he smiles with his whole face, his eyes, even his hands seem to smile. A smile that’s sweet and sad at the same time. “What’s happened to that coastline? It’s not too spoiled? And you said you knew the house my mother and I used to rent?”

“Yes. It’s beautiful. But not kept up. I don’t think anybody lives there: the shutters are closed even in the summer.”

“Maybe we should all go live there.” They both laugh. “It used to belong to a man called Giraud. It must be a bit bleak and windswept in the winter.”

“Yes, but nice storms.”

“The British countryside is lovely, too. I think you’ll like it up on Exmoor. In my ideal life, I’d live there year-round.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Oh, really because of Artemio and school. He has the misfortune, poor boy, of having got into one of the top schools in London, and now that he’s in, we’re stuck. Britain still has this absurdly unfair system, you know, where the school you go to, aged seven, determines whether you’re going to be a banker or a bricklayer. Or at least that’s what they con middle-class parents into thinking. It’s a total fraud. Look at you, you went to state schools, and you’re not an absolute savage, are you?”

“Yes, I am,” Rat interjects. “An absolute savage.”