She never told him, and for thirteen years they hadn’t been in touch, so there was no way he could know. But she became a consultant in genito-urinary medicine and HIV because of his brother. He had an older brother whose escape from the banlieue took him as far as a hospital ward. He slept around; he shared – the thought makes Camille shudder – God knows countless needles; he contracted HIV. During her third year in medical college it developed into the condition known in France as le syndrome d’immuno-déficience acquise: SIDA. AIDS, as they call it in England. Camille never met the older brother but she saw what it did to the younger, and during the six months she spent at St Mary’s, the young Muslim men she treated made her think of her lover.

The second significant lover, the one who became her husband, found her at seven o’clock one Tuesday morning, in the Central Middlesex Hospital in Harlesden. He, tall and blonde with a white person’s large, bouncy, care-free curls, was a parliamentary researcher with a then-and-now obscure British political party. He was almost thirty. She, a junior doctor, was twenty-five. Seb would normally have considered this hour of the morning too damn early for flirtation; but for Camille he made an exception. During the politicking hospital visit he asked for her number, and Camille, who hadn’t yet been chatted up like this in Britain, found the brazenness a relief. All day long, he thought about the tall black lady doctor. He rang her that evening, and asked her to meet him for a drink. Hoping to impress her, he proposed the House of Commons Strangers’ Bar. They ended up that night, back at the flat where Seb lived with his Great-Uncle Hubert in the top two floors of a building with very dirty windows in Covent Garden.

HENRY: Now that I think about it, Mother never spoke about Father, really, after his death. She didn’t celebrate him as she ought to have done. We were young when he died, in our twenties. She didn’t reach out to us, emotionally, at all.

JUDGE: I am sorry about that.