Rat was reduced to mumbling, “I thought X-rays gave you cancer.”

Kate’s assured her that the dentist won’t do anything but look at her tooth today. Besides, she says, going to the dentist isn’t what it used to be—they’ve got this whole new generation of technology that means it’s about as scary as a trip to the dry cleaner.

Rat’s not convinced. Doctors belong to the class of adult she prefers to stay clear of.

Eight forty-five.

The train is full of people on their way to work in offices and shops. This is the world into which Rat is dipping an amateur, part-time toe: the workaday world of people who wake to an alarm clock every morning because there is some job they are paid to perform. Even if it’s as menial as bringing customers a cup of coffee, noting down what time they log on to their computer, what time they log out, she wants to be part of that world. She can’t imagine going back to school, and being treated as a baby.

The men are reading newspapers whose headlines celebrate London’s winning the Olympics. A news story she reads over her neighbor’s shoulder crows at the Gallic inanity of France’s president, who’s accused the British prime minister of “cheating.” The women are reading novels. Rat wonders why women in the Tube don’t read newspapers and men don’t read novels. That same sort of playground division she’s known since preschool—boys play marbles, girls play hopscotch—continues. Does it matter? Would men and women get along better if they shared the same tastes?

If Vanessa were interested in why Protestants are weak in the visual arts instead of being interested in famous people from star magazines, might she and Gillem have stayed together for more than a night? Or is Artemio right, and the bottom line is that nobody from his father’s background could ever have anything in common with a southern French ragpicker?

Maybe Rat was misled by Gillem’s bare feet, his longing for the moors and the sea, his inveighing against posh school parents and their private jets. Maybe those anarchic puritanical impulses that made Rat feel, despite the obvious differences, that she and her father might have something in common were simply part of a more complicated form of snobbery than she could get her head around.

Or maybe there’s some screw loose in Rat’s head, some permanent disgruntledness which means she’s never going to be able to settle down, never be able to fit into anybody else’s home life.