“And she’s got character, too. Unlike her old trollop of a mother. Oh, Vanessa, I didn’t see you there,” jokes Jean-Luc.

Vanessa tweaks his ear affectionately. “You, I’ll take care of you later.”

It will be the last evening Rat sits down to a meal with her mother for a very long time. And somehow it’s almost as if they both sense it, the way you savor what you know will be the last swim of the year, the last of the autumn figs. Neither of them puts a foot wrong. There are no explosive exchanges, no sarcastic rejoinders, bitter undertones, recriminations. None of that mother-daughter shit that can ruin a good time.

And then, one a.m. or so, when everybody’s gone home except for Jérôme, there is the sound of a car turning into the drive.

The motorcyclish roar of the broken muffler is unmistakable. It’s Thierry’s Clio.

Vanessa glances at her watch, frowning.

Jérôme makes as if he’s going to leave—Rat doesn’t blame him, she would too if she had anywhere to go—then changes his mind.

Thierry takes a long time to get out of the car. When he comes into the house, followed by Vesuvio, he’s moving slow. Eyes bloodshot. He casts a look around the room. “What’s with the leopard skin? It looks like a bordello here.”

“Where’ve you been?” Vanessa demands.

“Where do you think I’ve been? I’ve got a job, remember?”

That’s the way the lovebirds talk these days. Snip, snip, snip. Voices tight and sour. Nastiness ricocheting back and forth like Ping-Pong.

“I got a call from Jens this morning, saying he needed to get hold of you urgent,” Vanessa says. “I’ve been trying you all day.”

“Yeah, my cell phone’s out of juice. Anyway, Jens did get hold of me. I’ve just come from seeing him.”

Vanessa does not seem satisfied. “He sounded pretty pissed,” she persists. “He said there was some problem with a renter, and he couldn’t find you anywhere. What was wrong?”

Jens is Thierry’s boss. He and his wife are Danish; they have a restored farmhouse above Brix where they spend half the year. Jens is retired, but he’s the kind of retired person who likes to keep busy. It just so happens that Jens’s hobbies are more lucrative than most people’s jobs. He can’t help it, he has a golden thumb, as Vanessa puts it. Over the last decade, Jens has been buying up houses in the hill towns above Brix—little village houses, nothing fancy. Jens’s wife, who is a decorator, then does them up very rustic in that style foreigners think of as French country, and they rent them out to vacationers.