Eventually, the two women started chatting, cracking jokes about the other mothers, and before you knew it, when Rat came home from school, Souad would be hunched over a cup of coffee in the kitchen, chain-smoking these long skinny cigarillos that made her breath stink. And her little boy would be sitting under the plane tree in the courtyard, silent, just staring at you with baleful black eyes.

Souad definitely made enough noise for two. She had this way of saying quite aggressive, confrontational things in order to cut through all the preliminary stages of getting to know someone. When she was talking to you, she would grab your arm, and follow you everywhere, even into the bathroom, till she’d finished her story. And when she got to the punch line, she’d clutch you even harder and throw her head back in a loud harsh guffaw, so that you saw the roof of her mouth. Rat didn’t like her much at first, but later on, she could sympathize with her.

Souad worked at the Sol y Mar campground.

When the warm weather came, she used to invite Vanessa and the kids over for the day to swim. Some of the campgrounds at the beach were said to be dirty or unsavory, but this one, Sol y Mar, was run by the ex-mayor of Crussols, a decent guy who had put money and care into the place. Souad and Morgan lived there year-round, in a snug little trailer of which Rat was frankly jealous.

And the ex-mayor had done everything correctly, on the books, so that later on, when Souad was too sick to work, she got full pay.

Rat and Jérôme could spend hours cavorting in the campground pool, splashing each other with cannonballs, while Solenne with her water wings squealed with joy at the shallow end. But when you asked Souad’s son, Morgan, if he wanted to come into the water, he shook his head. Ask him twice, and he’d go into full retreat, taking himself off into the shade of a eucalyptus tree. “That’s a real child of the Mediterranean for you,” laughed Vanessa. “You spend your whole life by the sea, but you’d never dream of actually getting wet.”

Vanessa had a kind of crush on Souad; there wasn’t any other word for it. She found Souad’s background intensely romantic—her early childhood in the Algerian hinterland; the three-room shack in the north of France where she’d lived with her parents and eight siblings, till the government found them an apartment in the projects (“Running water, central heating: the Ritz!” Souad laughed); the arranged marriage to an older cousin who beat her; her years on the street, after her family renounced her for leaving her husband.