Islanders are by and large not that familiar with people of colour. The odd mail-order bride from Thailand; the silent Pakistani waiters in the Indian restaurant in Ayrness; the occasional mixed-race cousin of somebody who visited for a weekend and then left again. Camille, glamorous and high-status, left them speechless. A tall, African-French woman with French- (not African-French) accented English, she was formidably dressed, in a trouser suit that was lush and green, and undoubtedly Parisian. Her hair, which she’d relaxed since moving back to France, illuminated her head like the halo of a saint in a Renaissance fresco. They were dazzled.

As a doctor of the hydra-headed disease of lust and passion (of genito-urinary medicine), Camille radiated efficiency and disapproval. Harry Harcourt-Vane, behind her in the painting, done in heavy oils, looked down with astonishment in his expression. She was the only woman to whom the judge listened without once interrupting.

JUDGE: You have stated that you were always an outsider in Britain; was it any different in the islands?

CAMILLE: Yes and no. As a doctor you are never an outsider. You are always immediately inside, looking at other people’s bodies. Thus, Britain I know through its capital, its infections.

JUDGE: Doctors are impartial, you mean?

CAMILLE: No. Doctors deal in generalities, like everybody else.

The press liked her. They were warmer with her than they ever were with Inga, for example. Something about Inga brings out the worst in all those men with cameras.

CAMILLE: In Harlesden, where I worked on first arriving in London, I was told by my colleagues that our black male patients contracted gonorrhoea on trips to the Caribbean islands, which they then spread, with much swearing, through a concurrency of female partners.

JUDGE: [Pause] Typically racist? Or sexist? Or both?

CAMILLE: Both. But it’s easy to come to these conclusions if you don’t belong to the group with which you are dealing. For example, at St Mary’s, Paddington, where the patients were Middle Eastern Muslims – it seemed to me that women walked through the door transfixed with guilt at the sexual act they had indulged in. At the Royal Free in Hampstead – largely white, quite teenage, fairly Jewish, with a median age of twenty-five, where seventy per cent of the HIV cases are homosexual – few of my patients considered sex and its outcomes taboo. No doubt I was wrong. The point is, everybody could do with some help understanding what it is like to belong to a different culture, black or white, man or woman. So, do something about it. That’s what I told Eva. Specifically, Your islands are so white!

JUDGE: How could she do anything about that?

CAMILLE: In the 1960s, many small islands in Britain gave land away to applicants from the mainland – it was about counteracting depopulation. The selection process was always a bit oblique. So that’s what Eva did. Her selection process was a bit oblique too.