Rat moves her head in some equivocal way that could just mean a fly has alighted on her ear. And turns to go.

They trudge down the drive, Morgan bearing the knapsack with his sleeping bag, Rat hauling a larger backpack with the tent and both their sleeping mats attached.

When they are almost out of sight, Morgan turns to wave good-bye, but Vanessa’s gone back into the apartment.

When they reach the road to Saint Féliu, Morgan remembers he’s forgotten his water bottle.

“It don’t matter, Morgan. That metal one weighs a ton. We’ll pick up a plastic bottle somewhere.”

Chapter 3

If you were around in the seventies and eighties, long after Celia Kidd had quit modeling, you might have seen her traipsing about Europe with her son.

She, an impossibly leggy woman with milk-white skin and a merry mocking laugh. The boy, black hair down to his shoulders, a kind of negative Lord Fauntleroy, radiating unease, yet unable to think of a better game than tagging after his mother and trying to keep her suitors at bay.

They were at fashion shows in Paris. They were at outdoor cafés in the Piazza Navona. They were on the beach in Majorca, she sitting under a parasol in a droopy straw hat and a ruched bathing costume, he, diving off high rocks. They worked the fancy flea markets, the auction houses, they went to film festivals and art openings.

Celia Kidd had two husbands and a great many lovers. She sent her son to school when she thought of it. There was a progressive English boarding school from which the boy was expelled for smoking pot, a Swiss one from which he was expelled for taking heroin. He signed up for art school in Paris and then dropped out. Got a job stretching canvases for an important British painter who was a friend of his mother’s.

Celia Kidd occasionally reappeared in the gossip columns, once for getting arrested for driving drunk after her license had already been revoked, another time when her secretary stole several hundred thousand pounds of art from her.

And Gillem dallied, unable to break loose. Until there came a day when Celia Kidd’s son decided it was time to draw up accounts. He thought about what he loved: painting, the English countryside, a woman he’d met at a dinner party who looked absurdly voluptuous but acted strict as a schoolmarm. And what he hated: waking at noon with a head like a rotten melon. Fooling himself that his real life had not yet begun.

His mother, meanwhile, was beginning to forget things she’d always known. And Gillem, censorious, blamed it on the booze and pills.

He and the voluptuous schoolmarm (in fact, she worked for a film producer) married and bought a house in West London, with a shed at the bottom of the garden where he could paint. Eventually, they had a son.