In his dream, he is sitting in a hotel dining room in a foreign country with his mother, who still has Alzheimer’s, but not as badly as she does in real life.

She’s dressed in a very smart tweed suit with a purple velvet collar. He thinks, I haven’t seen that Vivienne Westwood suit in years, not since we went together to have it fitted, although in fact, there was no such suit. They are waiting for Rat to join them and Gillem is trying to explain to his mother who Rat is.

“She’s my daughter. Not by Kate, by a Frenchwoman.” He keeps repeating this in a placatory sort of way, appealing to his mother’s Francophilia. Emphasizing that the girl’s mother isn’t Kate, whom he knows his mother considers infradig—“rather hot and sweaty,” as she once put it.

And finally, Celia Kidd seems to understand, and a big salacious grin spreads across her face.

“By another woman? A Frenchwoman?” she repeats. She cackles with satisfaction. “Well done, darling. You used to pretend to be so pious. But I always knew you were one of us!”

And Gillem feels himself maddeningly checkmated, because to protest, That’s not true, I am pious, I’m not one of you, would sound worse than ridiculous. Of course she’s right, he thinks, all that struggle has been in vain: I am one of Them.

In the dream, what being “one of Them” means is quite specific: to be one of the libertines, to whom nothing is of any weight.

When he wakes in the morning, Artemio is in the bed between him and Kate, hugging his mother tight.

“What’s this little tree frog doing in my bed?” Gillem asks, mock gruff.

“Artemio’s having a bit of a rough time, aren’t you, darling? He needed a cuddle.”

“Artemio havin’ bad dweams,” says the boy, in a baby voice.

“A lot of confusing things happening at once,” his mother sympathizes.

“Pwomise Artemio Mumma no take public twansport,” whispers Artemio.

“I promise you, darling. I’ve got my lovely new bike. But don’t worry. All the terrorists are gone. Everybody’s safe now. No more bombs, nothing scary. Didn’t you hear what they said on the telly last night? The government has it utterly under control.”

Gillem rolls over onto his side, and tries to block out the sound of his wife’s telling his son nonsense. But of course, the child would rather hear such totalitarian certainties than his father’s waffle about how the suicide bombers are men with understandable grievances against Western policy in the Muslim world, but a very distorted view of Islam, and that unfortunately there’s very little way of stopping people who are willing to blow themselves up, without turning yourself into a state in which Brazilian electricians get mowed down by policemen in a crowded Underground carriage because their skin is the wrong color.