For Sebastian, as a child, observing his father, politics must have seemed a life of constant travel, sudden absence, and urgent conversations on the phone, away from the dinner table. Camille suspected that his father enjoyed every minute of it even as his wife had suffered.

JUDGE: But what she was building in the islands, wasn’t it political too?

CAMILLE: Yes, but she was trying something new.

There were so many things Camille missed about home. The longer she spent in England, the longer the list grew. Most were so obvious you never thought you’d miss them.

– Friends, former lovers, her family (an edited version).

– Her language.

– The proximity of warm southern climes (not misty northern ones).

– Sorry to say, but a certain way of dressing.

– Her ancestral culture.

Camille’s father had married the daughter of a village baker. Not in his native village, Ziguinchor, in Senegal, but N—, in southern France. A bakery that was run on the highest principles and visited by bread-eaters, biscuit-fanciers, from over twenty-five kilometres away. Camille’s parents met at university in Grenoble. They finished their degrees, got pregnant immediately after, and were married in the town hall. He, who had studied engineering, once planned a productive career in bridges. Instead he moved to his wife’s village (actually a small town with a weekly market and a museum of agricultural implements) where he joined his father-in-law at the bread oven. Even today, Camille’s father still bakes everything he cooks with wood. As a result, Camille grew up with an understanding of the landscape’s purpose. It was the chestnut forests beyond the town, which became the heat that cooked Grandpère’s staple almond biscuits. The cows in the fields which provided the butter. Camille, sitting as a little girl by the window in the front of the shop, heard the pride in her mother’s voice: The best ingredients, vanilla from Réunion, almonds from Spain, stone-ground French flour, butter from the farm shop. (Given this, it was hard for Camille not to disdain the bakery where Zoe’s mother worked. She tried. She understood that the English didn’t have high standards. She bought her children the disgusting English-British doughnuts.)

An only child, Camille was quiet, studious and uncomplaining – except, that is, when she was visiting her cousins in Senegal. Every summer, in August, when the bakery was closed, they flew to Dakar, where her cousins went to school, where her aunt and uncle worked, and the next day took the boat south to Casamance, where the family house was. Over the next month, Camille had her hair done in a ripple of plaits, and her father wore capacious, vibrant wax bazin suits. In the market she watched him haggle for vegetables and fish. She and her favourite cousin, Basile, walked into the forest with her aunt to collect madd fruit. For a whole month, Camille forgot about N—, about the bakery, about her schoolfriends, Marie-Claude and Anne-Marie. She cried when the month was up, and she had to go home again to France.