Liselle sat in The New Yorker, Briony’s latest club, with her mother and watched her get roaring drunk. She was the life and soul of the place, as usual, and eventually got up and sang a few numbers to the delight of the audience. Bessie, who now sang there with the Velvetones despite periodic threats to go home to the States, stood in the wings and smiled. Until she turned and saw the black man standing by the stage door. Then her heart began to hammer in her ears and she closed her eyes tightly.

When she opened them again the man was gone.

It was the lights playing tricks on her, that was all, but for one moment she could have sworn she saw Evander Dorsey standing there. Fatter, greyer, but Evander all the same. As Kerry called her out on stage she put a smile on her face and stepped into the lights, but the niggling thought that she had seen Evander spoilt her evening.

As they sang together, that old favourite ‘Summertime’, she looked at Liselle sitting at the table, drinking soda and looking dead on her feet, and felt foreboding wash over her.

That girl wasn’t a child any more and soon, very soon, she’d need to be told the truth. She didn’t look Negro at all, at least she didn’t to the British, but in the South she would be known immediately for what she was, and Bessie knew from experience that the girl could give birth to children as black as the African slaves who were her forefathers.

Oh, the girl needed to be told all right, and Kerry wouldn’t be the one to do it. Kerry had enough difficulty just getting through an average day. Someone else would have to tell her, but who?

As the song finished she bowed and held on to a rather drunken Kerry, stopping her from falling over.

It was seeing that black guy that made her think these morbid things, that was all.

A little later Liselle helped her mother from the club and got a taxi to take them home. Tired out as she was, she didn’t notice the black man standing in the doorway at the side of the club. If she had, she wouldn’t have realised he was the man from earlier in the day.

Evander watched his daughter get into the taxi. He walked to the Roadster once more, and the three white men sitting in it.

‘Yeah, that’s her all right. I had to be sure.’ He lit himself a cheroot with crooked and deformed fingers. ‘Tha’s my girl, no mistakin’. Looks jes like my sister.’

The three white men in the car nodded.