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ALSO BY FERNANDA EBERSTADT

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Title Page

Dedication

For Maud and Theo

Book One

Chapter 1

You try calling someone “Daddy” whom you’ve never met in your life.

Rat has this pad of pink bubble gum–scented stationery with mice on it that’s all the rage at her school. Kids will trade a mammoth marble or a jawbreaker just for one page. Rat’s got a whole damn pad of it she’s just bought with the money her English father’s sent her for her birthday. And now she’s already wrecked three pages trying to write this damn letter thanking him for the twenty francs he’s sent her. First she’s ever heard from her father. More money than she’s ever had in her life. Chr papa, mrsi … cher Papa, mersi. cher ppa …

You can see Rat’s difficulty in the monkish elaborateness with which she is transmogrifying her capital letters, turning the C into a snake with a hissing tongue, the P into an archer with a bow, the whole set-piece of greeting and gratitude grinding to a halt, firstly, because Rat doesn’t know how to write a letter, and secondly, because never having met her father or heard from him before, she hasn’t a clue what sort of child he would like her to be.

“Can I see the card again?” Rat asks, hoping for guidance. A picture of a clown sitting on a cake, and on the inside, in English, “To Celia, Happy Birthday, love Daddy” in an anonymously cursive script.

“Where’s the envelope? Can I keep the stamp?”

“It came with something else, some bank business. I threw it away,” says Vanessa.

“I didn’t even know he knew when my birthday was,” Rat says, wondering.

“Get back to your letter, girl.”

Rat groans. Looks up again, after a moment. “Are you sure it’s okay to write him in French?” She knows the answer already.

“Sure, sweetheart, your daddy speaks good French. He went to boarding school in Switzerland.”

Rat considers other options, diversionary tactics. “Maybe I should send him a photo, so he knows what I look like.” There’s a snapshot of herself Rat likes that’s tacked up on the living room wall. She’s on the boardwalk at Canet Plage, in her Rollerblades, wearing a denim skirt which their neighbor Cristel helped her make from an old pair of jeans. She is unsmiling. She looks tough, challenging, but pretty.

“Sure, sweetheart. Why not?”

“Why don’t I just send him the photo and skip the letter?”

Her mother makes as if to swat her on the side of the head, play-angry. “Go on, lazy brat, write.”

No need to feel sorry for Rat for having a father she’s never met, who only gave up denying she was his when the DNA test proved it. Lots of kids Rat knows are way worse off. There was a story on TV about a man who didn’t feed the dogs when his wife went away on vacation, so the dogs ate their toddler.

Besides, hard to see how there’d be room for a man in their lives. Rat and her mother are close as sisters, sometimes twins. Vanessa is so small—child-size, really—they can wear each other’s clothes. When one of them has nightmares or there are people staying over or they just happen to feel like snuggling, Vanessa comes to sleep in Rat’s bed.

“How’re you coming along?” Vanessa asks now.

Rat grimaces, clutches the letter close. “Don’t look.”

Her mother pushes aside Rat’s sheltering hands, and examines the mangled cross-outs.

“You’re a real case,” she says, fondly. “Here.” Vanessa writes out three lines for Rat to copy. “Dear Daddy, Thank you for the birthday money. Love, Celia.” Easy-peasy.

Rat tries to summon up the diligence to replicate these lines, but her concentration’s shot. She hunches her shoulders, stretches, picks her nose, yawns.

“You finished, sweetheart?”

“I can’t do it,” Rat grumbles. “I hate writing.”

“Just get it done with, Ratkin.”

“I can’t.”

Vanessa reads the letter, folds it, and stashes it in her big patchwork carryall. “Okay? You’re finished.”

But Rat is hunched, sulky with failure.

Vanessa rumples her daughter’s hair, bends down to blow into her ear, to tickle her. No reaction.

“You’re done,” she repeats. Waves a hand in front of Rat’s eyes. “What are you going to do with the money?”

Rat shrugs.

“Come on, grump. Let’s go to the beach,” Vanessa says. “You can buy me an ice cream. A Magnum.”

“No way,” says Rat. “I’m not spending my birthday money on an ice cream.” But already she’s on her feet, searching for her sweatshirt, the bucket in which she collects sea glass and shells.

The thank-you letter that Rat was obliged to write to her father sticks in her mind as an unsettling anomaly in a life otherwise devoid of any such old-fashioned rites of good manners. Or, indeed, of any communications from her English relatives.

Some years later, when it strikes her that a father might come in handy, Rat asks her mother why they’ve never heard from him again.

And Vanessa, who is in a lousy temper, feeling unappreciated by her now teenage daughter, laughs shortly and says, “Did you really believe that?” There never was any birthday money from Rat’s daddy, she explains. It was Vanessa who in the fullness of her heart invented this offering the year Rat moved from preschool to primary and was getting bullied by older kids at recess. “I did it to cheer you up,” she says.

Rat is so shocked her normally sharp tongue momentarily fails her. She feels made a fool of. She feels tampered-with, defiled in her innermost sanctuary, the place where she dreams about people who to her waking life are marginal.

“You made me write a letter you were never going to send?”

Vanessa shrugs. “I thought it might help you. You had things you needed to say to your father.”

“Like thank you?”

It’ll be years before Rat discovers that although her English father doesn’t send her birthday presents, he does pay Vanessa child support—a monthly sum which by London standards is probably pretty basic, but which, for the Pyrénées-Orientales, where they live, is royal.

Vanessa is a rich woman, but nobody knows, least of all her daughter. The monthly payments which are intended for Rat’s maintenance pile up in a Crédit Agricole account, separate from their regular account, which is always bumping on empty. And meanwhile, Vanessa and Rat live hand to mouth like everybody else they know, off a combination of welfare benefits, undeclared earnings, and gleaning.

To her friends, Vanessa is wide-open generous. The generosity is genuine. Vanessa would give you her only winter coat, and it wouldn’t be a game. It’s as if she’s unconscious of the fact that, unlike her friends and neighbors, she’s got serious money in the bank—if she knew, she would buy a new car, instead of rattling around in a broken-down Renault 5. Poverty is also something mental, and Vanessa honestly feels skint.

And Rat, later on when she learns about the child support and thinks it over, doesn’t begrudge her mother the money that should logically have been spent switching her to private school after she flunks out of eighth grade because the public high school at Canet is so big and rough that you spend all your mental energy figuring out how not to get beaten up. Or even just taking them on vacation somewhere nice.

Rat doesn’t mind, because thanks to Vanessa’s teaching, she’s learned to fend for herself. Later on, when she meets people who’ve been born rich, they will seem to her like dogs without a sense of smell. Bank accounts belong to the realm of the unreal. What’s real is your quick wits.

Vanessa is a brocanteuse: she buys and sells old goods. A natural-born forager, says she. The walls of their apartment are plastered with the kind of things she loves: printed cocktail napkins from a bar in Spain, a leopard-skin carnival mask with gold whiskers, photo spreads from old magazines.

Many of these photographs, laser copied and blown up, are of Rat’s English granny, her unknown father’s mother, whose name was Celia Kidd. Rat’s real name, too, is Celia. She was named after her granny, but everybody except for teachers calls her Rat.

Celia Kidd was a top model in London in the 1960s. There is a black-and-white blowup of her on the kitchen wall from British Vogue, a tall slinky girl, slim as an otter, with white skin and enormous eyes, wearing a poncho made of white feathers, and seemingly nothing else. Her gaze is merry and slightly mocking.

Rat’s father, Gillem McKane, was her only child.

Rat’s favorite photograph is of Celia and Gillem together, when he was a little boy not much older than Rat. It’s a two-page color spread, and it comes from a time when Celia Kidd was married to a British film director.

Celia, older than in her modeling days but still ferociously beautiful, is wearing a brocade fur-trimmed tunic. She is stretched out on the sofa, her long legs dangling over the armrest. Gillem is sprawled on the floor at her feet, drawing a picture. You can’t see his face, because he’s looking down. But he’s got long black hair, and he’s wearing a shirt with a frilly collar. In big letters printed along the side of the photograph, it says in English: “Mrs. Harbison’s drawing-room is midnight blue, a favorite Empire sofa is upholstered in hot-pink velvet.”

Celia and Gillem’s lives were so star-studded you would never have thought they would cross with Rat’s mother’s.

But later on, when Gillem was in his twenties, there was a period when he and his mother used to spend their summers in the Pyrénées-Orientales. They rented a big house on the cliffs above Collioure, which was the village where Vanessa and her parents lived. Celia Kidd would pack the house with her glamorous friends. And for a month in August, Collioure, otherwise rather sedate, would suddenly look as glitzy as Saint-Tropez.

Rat loves hearing the story of how her parents met.

One Saturday night, according to Vanessa, Gillem walked into the nightclub where she and her girlfriends hung out.

“Did you know who he was?” Rat asked.

“Of course. Everybody knew him. Celia’s son. He used to ride around town on his motorbike, usually with some drop-dead blonde hanging off the back, who me and my friends’d be doing hexes on—shrivel up and die, you old witch. He was gorgeous. And then that night, it was like, Oh my God, there’s Gillem. And he’s all by himself!”

“So you asked him to dance …?”

“We danced, we talked. He had this really cute English accent. I asked him where his girlfriend was, he said she’d gone back to London. I said, Oh, so my voodoo spells worked.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed. Then we danced some more, and he asked me if I’d like to go for a walk on the cliffs.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d had so much to drink I was scared I’d fall over. And he was like, Don’t worry, we’ll fall together.”

That remark Vanessa thought dead-romantic, but Rat found it a bit too weird, as if her parents might just as easily have died that night, instead of producing her.

“And after that summer, you never saw him again?”

“They stopped coming to Collioure.”

“So you never saw him again?”

“Never.”

“Wouldn’t you like to go find him someday?”

“What for? We do pretty well on our own, don’t you think?”

When Rat tries to picture her father, it’s never as a grown man, but always as a boy her age, like her friend Jérôme who lives next door, or the Gypsy kids she plays with in the market at Brix. She pictures him the way he looks in the photograph: a boy in a white lace shirt with a mass of tangled black hair falling in his eyes.

Rat imagines showing this boy the treasures she keeps in an old tin lozenge box: bits of sea glass, the china favors she’s collected from previous years’ Twelfth Night cakes. When she climbs a tree, Gillem is on the branch next to her. She can imagine her father as being this eight-year-old child, but she can’t picture him as a grown man. Can’t picture him eating supper at Vanessa’s kitchen table, or driving Rat to school in the morning, or coming to kiss her goodnight. Can’t imagine him doing any of the things fathers do on a Sunday afternoon: trimming the hedge, or tinkering with the car, or playing pétanque with the neighbors, or yelling at you to clean up your room.

The first time she is conscious of seeing her mother—whom she’d thought as much a part of herself as the scar on her forehead or her broken front tooth—judged by a stranger’s eyes.

Vanessa is taking Rat and the neighbors’ kids to the beach. To get to the beach from their place, you have to cross a highway. It’s not a megahighway—there are only two lanes—but it’s the kind of dead-straight, flat-as-a-pancake, five-kilometer stretch where drivers like to pretend they’re practicing for the Paris–Dakar. There’s a culvert that runs under the highway, which is where you are supposed to cross, but after it’s rained, the tunnel goes knee-deep in black mud. So Vanessa has made the kids scramble up the embankment, and now is urging them across the road.

There’s nothing hurried about Rat’s mother’s approach: she is strolling right into the threat of fast traffic, willing any oncoming cars to halt. Solenne, who is little more than a toddler, Vanessa is gripping firmly by the hand. Rat and Solenne’s big sister, Emilie, are following closely, like chicks with the mother hen, hesitant, then scrambling in jerky moves to safety.

Only Jérôme is left behind. Vanessa yells at Jérôme to move his butt, but he has frozen. Remains stock-still by the far side of the road, seemingly unable to budge. It’s obvious neither he nor Vanessa is going to make a move, so finally Rat goes darting back and grabs him. Jérôme’s a year older than she is, but sometimes he just spazzes out. On the near lane, there’s a gap in the traffic, but on the far side, as they cross, there’s a van heading right for them.

You’d never think a machine could be sarcastic, but the lordly last-minuteness with which this van grinds to a halt exudes contempt. When they are safely across, Rat’s mama smacks Jérôme’s skinny butt. “When I say come, you come.”

The driver’s window’s down. He’s watching the spectacle with an air of disbelief. Then he leans out his window and says, “Lady, it isn’t your son who deserves the spanking.”

Vanessa’s eggshell skin stains red with anger. “Connard!” she shouts back. Her words are lost in the engine’s departing roar.

Rat picks up Jérôme’s towel and bathing suit, but her head’s on fire. She’s burning from the shock of seeing her mother as others might see her. Vanessa has done something demonstrably dangerous, and she’s been scolded like a child for it!

“What an asshole,” Vanessa says, once they reach the beach. “What is it about people they can’t mind their own business, they have to stand over you, nya nya nya all the time?”

Rat doesn’t answer.

Vanessa takes her own sweet time choosing the perfect patch of sand, not too far from the water, not too damp, unrolling their mats and securing them with rocks. Jérôme and his sisters are already waist-deep in the sea.

When she’s done, she strips down to her bikini bottom and stretches out delicately on her mat. And only then notices that her daughter is still standing.

“What’s wrong?”

“What?!”

“What’s biting you?”

Finally Rat says it. “Mama, that was dangerous what you made us do. And why did you have to spank Jérôme?”

There’s an unspoken etiquette that’s been breached: unless you’re a teacher, you don’t smack other people’s children.

Vanessa sits up, bare tits bobbling, instantly furious. “Look, whose side are you on, anyway? All my life people have been standing over me, telling me what to do, snipping at me for even breathing. You think it’s easy, lugging four sniveling brats to the beach? Would you rather be back at the house, broiling? Enjoy yourself. Relax, have a swim, live it up a little. And leave me the fuck alone. Okay?”

Rat sits down beside her, chastened. “You’re going to get burnt on your shoulders.”

She rubs the suntan lotion across her mother’s back, all the way down to the butterfly tattoo nestled at the base of her spine, just above the two dimples on her buttocks.

She braids her mother’s hair, which is henna-red, but she has nothing to tie it with, and little coils and tendrils keep escaping. She tries to fasten it with a strand of seaweed, but the seaweed breaks.

“Yuck,” says Vanessa. “Horrible kid. Vile brat,” but her tone is affectionate now, and she rolls over and rubs her nose against Rat’s in an Eskimo kiss.

“Do you love your little Vanilla-do? Tell me you love me.”

“Yes, I love you, Mama.”

“I love you too, my little Ratkin. Don’t you forget that, I love you, love you, love you.”

Rat’s mother is exquisite. She has a tiny heart-shaped freckled face with a pointed chin, and huge eyes like a cat’s. Beside her, Rat feels raw-boned, gawky. She lies down beside her mother, so that she can peek into Vanessa’s eyes which are deep-river dappled. Her cat’s eyes change color, from green-brown-gray to brown to green again, depending on her mood.

Rat knows the language of those eyes. Brown when Vanessa’s sad (worried about a friend who’s sick, or a boyfriend she’s broken up with). Gray when she’s angry (a fight with Mémé Catherine, Rat’s French granny, or with the landlord who won’t fix the drain). Green when her favorite song comes on the radio, or when she’s dancing around the house, parading some crushed-velvet scarf or feather boa she’s found for nothing in the market.

“You’re so beautiful; you should have been an actress,” Rat says. “You’d have been a superstar.”

“Yeah,” says her mother drily. “Story of my life, one long string of should-have-beens.”

And Rat feels doubly bad, because she knows if it weren’t for her, Vanessa could have been any one of those things she dreamed of—artist, actress, singer, fashion designer.

Because Vanessa’s missed so many chances on Rat’s account, she feels extra guilty for giving her mother a hard time. When Rat grows up, she’s going to buy the two of them a big house with a walk-in closet, and a bathroom with a full-size bathtub and mirror walls and vanity lights with a dimmer. She’s going to take Vanessa to Venice and Africa and the Greek Islands, all the places she loves to read about, and she’s going to bring her breakfast in bed every morning.

Rat isn’t easy. That’s what Vanessa tells her friends, she isn’t easy. Other times, she says, “You’re the love of my life.”

Chapter 2

Summer evening. The sky is pale blue, but already an egg-yolk moon is hovering above the still, mirrored sea. The rising moon is orange with harvest dust.

Rat and Jérôme have been building a fort in the long dune grass of Saint Féliu Plage. Rat wishes they could spend the night, but Jérôme’s supposed to be home by nine.

Their fort is an observation post, positioned to spy on the tourists having dinner at Chez Ernest. It’s Saturday evening, and the beachside restaurant’s terrace is flush with elegant blonde women, glittering with makeup and jewelry. Tanned men. Vacationers who speak in the hard clipped accents of the North. Jérôme calls them all “Parisians.” “Parisien, tête de chien, Parigot, tête de veau.” Behind the restaurant, big cars with out-of-state license plates—Bordeaux, Toulouse. There is even a Mercedes-Benz with a Belgian plate.

Some of the grown-ups Rat recognizes as local—pals of Ernest and his wife—the local men are beefier than the “Parisians.” They talk about rugby and boats and how much things cost. I paid deux mille balles for this, he paid dix mille balles for that. Normal things—the grown-up’s equivalent of the way kids boast at school.

The “Parisians” are a race apart. It grates on Rat, how cosset-ted their children are. In the day, they are slathered in suntan lotion and made to wear hats so their skin won’t burn. On the beach, they wear sandals so their feet won’t get cut by broken glass. As soon the sun goes down, their mothers ease them into hooded sweaters, knitted cardigans.

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