The old man Hubert had a thing for Frenchmen, which (Camille said) showed in his conversation. His speeches in that language were impeccable, the product of another age, when people learned things lastingly in England. He was an Anglican priest, who had recently retired from St Paul’s. This was the church he still attended, and it was Camille – not Sebastian, nor his brothers, nor Eva – who was honoured with a tour of this peculiar breast-shaped English-British icon. Together, they stood beneath Wren’s dome, as the old man pointed out what a travesty subsequent generations, especially the Victorians, had made of the interior. Against some black marble doors in the transept, on which had been inscribed in gold the names of viscounts, two angels slept as they leant on their large black swords. Beside them a brass plaque described a naval disaster: ‘In Memory of the Officers, Seamen, Mariners & Boys.’ Everywhere, the original had been graffitied over with memorials. Everywhere, she saw, were the names of men: lists of clerics, lists of deaths, lists of triumphs in battles, lists of male achievements.

(Zoe remembers Camille telling this story one evening at Her House; Eva loved it, of course; Sebastian tried to look amused, and the museum’s Quine Commission followed not long after. The artist was a woman from Aberdeen; her work, ‘Loons’, a massive bronze sculpture on a plinth which, from a distance, looked familiar for being phallic. Up close it was composed of a jutting array of different fonts from the past three centuries, all copied from the islands’ fifteen or so graveyards: the names of every woman buried in the archipelago.)

Camille could spend ages in Hubert’s company, taking pleasure in the way he spoke, while Sebastian, who could not take part, exiled himself to the kitchen, to do the cooking. When the old man Hubert died, eight months after her wedding, Camille was distraught. He had shown her a straightforward affection which she missed, being away from her family, and making do instead with Seb’s, which was wary of her, she thought, as if, being black, and a doctor of STDs, and French (those seemed to be the issues, in order of importance), she stood at a remove from their concerns. And although she liked the island house in which Seb had partly grown up, she didn’t love it in the instinctive way with which she took to the eccentric flat in Covent Garden, with its shelves of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French novels, and its row of tinned cassoulet in the kitchen, and its papier d’arménie in the bathroom. In the years after Hubert died, Camille would occasionally complain to Seb that it was actually the old, homosexual French-speaking priest who had wooed her; that Seb had merely stood by: handsome, silent and virile. But Seb always laughed when she told this story.