JUDGE: Whom did she choose?

CAMILLE: Single mothers. Amrita Gill, who runs All Island Taxis, moved up about ten years ago. Her elder daughter studied with Jen. The younger one is the campaigner, Tara, Zoe’s friend. Banu Yildiz, she came to Britain from Turkey aged twelve. Her elder son has moved away but Banu married an island man with whom she has a son, Raymond. Marigold Zhu. She runs the Golden Lotus.

JUDGE: Positive discrimination—

CAMILLE: Minority ethnic, yes. Black, no. As I said, these islands . . .

Speaking to the judge, Camille feels the irritating presence of those ghosts she isn’t mentioning, hovering around her. The men in her life. She won’t speak of them in public, but they are the ones who formed her.

Her father, who grew up in Dakar.

Her cousin, Basile, who thought Sebastian a real tête de bite, and told her so, in front of him, adding the Serer insult that he was a goat, a dog. (Sebastian, who understood neither language well, looked on, smiling.)

Her first significant lover, whose name she now never even uttered, who was born in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, to north African Muslim parents. His family came from Algeria; her father was from Senegal; she was raised a Catholic; he a Muslim. While Camille didn’t consider herself very dark – compared to her cousins in Dakar, for example; she was mixed-race, her mother was white – she was well aware that to the majority of the French people she met, she was black as night, ebony, deepest Africa. Certainly, she was the blackest student in medical college, and since he was the next-darkest in their year group, it was only because of this, she shouted at him later, that their friendship existed. But the truth is, for some reason she is unable to explain, he got deep inside her. She doesn’t mean the sex. What she means is him and her, their closeness. And either (she jabbed the air as she spoke) that was forced on them by their skin-colour ghetto, or it was a rare unrepeatable marvel of two embracing souls.

He had a hardness in his heart about the women he slept with: she was warned of this in advance. With her he was different until they were lovers. Then the closeness of friendship vanished, leaving in its place the irritation of a man encumbered. And such an amount of pique and hurt, she felt she had absorbed it from all the women who had gone before: their accumulated rancour. He left her, as predicted. In shock at his coldness, Camille decided to finish her medical degree abroad. She applied for an elective in London.