Afterwards, she wished, in particular, that she hadn’t taken out her mobile, dialled her husband’s number, her head still ducked below the table, and in a shocked hiss told him that she had had enough, that his nation was small, his ethnicity corrupt, that she despised his brothers, that it was time for her to move away with the children – to Senegal. This last bit was a mistake. Because, although she might have felt, in that moment, like removing the children as far as possible from their paternal culture, she wasn’t going to move to Senegal, just like that; which made her sound irrational (hysterical), and she was a woman who had spent her entire life making sure the opposite sex couldn’t find any fault with her like that. She had no point to prove. Had she been able to grasp the scale of his crime against herself, she may well have acted differently. May not have acted at all. May have sat still and thought. May have sat still and weighed her love in the balance: its long history, its great early passion, the feel of him, the smell of his hair (animal), the tone of his voice (she liked it), the things he said, the ways he touched her. And if Seb was now in tears, and if it was, indeed, taking him a little while to realise what she was talking about, this only illustrated how annoying men were, how predominantly deaf always, when women spoke. Whereas, when she spoke, she seemed to feel the soft warm French-then-Senegalese breeze passing over her skin, in counterpoint to the cold English rage she was experiencing. She knew, even as she was speaking, that a stronger rhetorician than she would have left the argument at that. But she had months, if not years, of suppressed anguish to air. And so out came the things she had been thinking about Britain and her British life, into the startled air of the still-below-the-table phone conversation. She had tried to make her home among these people and these places but the task was too enormous and she now felt defeated. She felt betrayed by the politicians who were introducing structural financing which was taking the NHS to which she had devoted twelve years of her career down the route of part-privatisation, and this crisis was made exponentially more disastrous by the fact that it was her husband who was a part of that political process. There was a silliness to England that she found infuriating. A lack of seriousness! You still have a queen! Even your revolution, your civil war, whatever you call it, was a failure! Your women are so self-deprecating! Why was she often the only black person at parties, at the events they went to? Had her blackness been an asset to him in his political progress? Is that why he had wanted her to appear beside him in public? Was it? Had he no shame? She was a person with a life to lead, and British politics and British cultural life were making her life a farce. It was a colonised mentality; you people never have recovered from being a distant, unimportant colony of Rome. Did he know that there were at least two female rulers in Britain when Rome invaded – he hadn’t known that, had he? Celtic women owned property and land; they had professions. Unlike the women of the empire. And you British, without questioning whether what you had was actually better, allowed those Roman values to prevail; for they, with their anti-female mentality, made you feel like barbarians. You never got over it. Worse, you took that Roman woman-oppression and exported it around the world.