This winter, Rat’s finally decorated her sleeping loft the way she always wanted to. For years, she’d had this dream of making herself a kind of Oriental tent, so she could be completely private and enclosed. Then one day, Vanessa brought her back from the market an enormous orange-and-purple-patchwork Indian spread with tiny mirrored sequins, and they hung it from hooks on the ceiling like mosquito netting.

Inside is just big enough for Rat’s mattress and her bedside lamp, which casts a cozy golden light. If you look at Rat’s loft from the outside, when the light’s on, it looks like a glowing jack-o’-lantern.

On the wall she’s taped a galaxy of photographs—snapshots of her and Max and Morgan on the beach outside Tangier; of Vanessa and Aunt Marie-Christine as children at a ski resort, perched on the slope in their snowsuits and goggles; a blown-up photocopy of Celia Kidd from the old black-and-white Vogue, big boppy mascara-gummed eyes, wearing the white-feather poncho, and seemingly nothing else. Pages torn from more recent fashion magazines.

These are Rat’s household deities.

When Rat was younger, she believed in gods—the water nymphs whom the ancient Celts used to worship at the hot springs above Brix, or Artemis, who had the man who saw her naked turned into a stag and ripped apart by his own hounds. Even Jesus—not Mémé Catherine’s blue-eyed babe, but Max’s Jesus, who taught you not to judge and not to set too much store by worldly things. Now all she believes in is finding somewhere quiet in your own head.

Below, she can hear the soft rumble of Morgan’s sleeping breath. It’s the only safe sound to hang on to, like a match flicker you need to keep alight.

Normally at this hour of the night you might hear the owls hooting from their nest in the hollow plane tree. Or farmyard dogs barking, first one, and then all the others. Or distant trucks rattling back and forth to Spain. Night sounds, lonely but not unpleasant.

Tonight all she can hear is the shouts from her mother’s bedroom, voices ugly with anger, recrimination. Rat tries to plug her ear holes with spitball Kleenex, but it doesn’t keep the sounds out.

Occasionally she can make out a word or phrase: Money. Lies. Money again. Most of what Vanessa and Thierry fight about is money.

The shouting is louder and angrier than usual. It seems as if it will never stop. Suddenly, Thierry’s voice, right outside their bedroom door: “Is that what you want, bitch, is that what you want? If that’s what you want, watch out, because you might just get it.” And Vanessa, mocking, shrill, “No, it’s what you want.”