What is the point, Kate wonders. Is she just a tiny bit jealous of this girl, who with no apparent effort seems to have taken up residence in a corner of Gillem’s being that to her has always seemed off-limits?

In the past, Kate could blame Gillem’s emotional inaccessibility on his mother: Celia Kidd’s narcissism, her semi-incestuous manipulations had left Gillem too scarred to let anybody into his heart. You’re too angry at your mother to love anybody else, she’d once told him. And he’d been shocked. Because he did love Kate and Artemio: deeply. He just wasn’t very expressive.

But suddenly this long-lost child has appeared, and it’s as if she’s opened Gillem to everything wonderful about his mother and the magical things she and Gillem used to do together. Now all he wants to do is reminisce about ravishing Collioure, and when Artemio asks, “Why didn’t you ever take us there, Dad, if you loved it so much?” Gillem goes completely blank, because, of course, the reason he never went back was because this self-same daughter was there. Scene of the crime.

And as if Gillem and Celia’s love-in hadn’t been irritating enough for those excluded, now they seem to have had some kind of quarrel, which Gillem refuses to talk about or to do anything to repair, but which is obviously making the poor girl speechless with misery. You can be positively autistic at times, Gillem, even though you think of yourself as so sensitive.

“Well, not for a long time, I hope. She is your sister.” Kate can say such things with a kind of no-backtalk firmness, which is why Artemio has gone to her, and not to his father.

“Yeah, but Morgan isn’t my brother, is he? He’s, like, a totally different color from me.”

“No, he’s not your brother. He’s not exactly your stepbrother, either. There’s no name for it. Oh, bloody hell!”

A man in an Audi won’t let her cut into his lane, so she misses the turnoff onto Warwick Road. “What a bloody creep. These—”

“Do you think he’s Muslim?” persists Artemio.

“Artie, I’m trying to concentrate on the—all right? Just be quiet for a—Are we still talking about Morgan? I have no idea.”

“Why don’t you have any idea? He looks Muslim.”

“What does ‘looking Muslim’ mean, for heaven’s sake?” Kate is hoping if she sounds sufficiently exasperated, her son will shut up and let her navigate the Saturday afternoon traffic.

“You know, Mum. He has brown skin.”

Kate relaxes. She’s found her way back on to the right road.

“Don’t be silly, Art. That’s not ‘looking Muslim,’ any more than it’s ‘looking Christian.’ It’s a worldwide religion, Islam. You can be a blonde Muslim in a miniskirt, though there are bigots who say you can’t.”