I lingered for a moment. Rudy kept going, maybe to let me process alone, although I sensed he was deliberately reserving some other comment after the contradiction he’d just shared, like something caught in his throat. I exhaled, thinking about how this was Lynton land, Rebecca’s dowry even – and here was this tree. Who knows how long it had stood there, who knows what it’s seen, what it’s felt. I thought of my grandmother, of her categorical assertions like ‘Slavery was never harsh here’. What kind of slavery was it, then? Good? ‘Better’? Maybe the standards set by the worst days of the American South, Jamaica, Brazil and Haiti enable a statement as sad as that one. I took a photo of the tree, focusing on the thorns. That’s how I took it with me – so I can look at it again, now, as often as I need. It’s a brilliant irony, I think: that the very darkest thing can be turned around in such a way. That what’s most painful is also the only cure.

‘My grandmother didn’t know any of this, I’m sure of it. Maybe not even Rebecca knew,’ I thought aloud as I caught up with Rudy, jumping over the roots that bulged up from the winding downward path. The dry leaves crumbled underfoot and the ground was cracked with thirst.

‘Probably not,’ Rudy replied, adjusting his smudged glasses. ‘This stuff doesn’t exactly make a family proud, does it?’

‘Josephine said something like that. Suffering isn’t a source of pride when you’re the one who’s doling it out, but colour is…’

‘Colour? White? Always!’ he said at once. ‘This is the Caribbean, this is the world of plantations, but what makes you put it that way?’

‘I guess because my grandmother always insisted there was no African blood in my family. But look at my nose and my hair in front’ – I showed it to Rudy, teasingly. ‘Does this look British to you?’

He looked as if he was trying not to laugh. He’s a shy sort. ‘The “wash out”, the shake up di cola.’

‘The wash what? Is that what it’s called?’

‘Yeah. Even today, lots of grandmas still want their daughters and granddaughters to end up with lighter-skinned men. Maybe it’s unconscious. Go ask Josephine what she thinks,’ Rudy laughed.

‘Wash out.’ I repeated it aloud. Whitening as cleansing.

‘So now how am I supposed to learn more about my black ancestors?’ I complained, trying to take the drama down a notch.

‘Well, they must be in there somewhere. You’re fifty-fifty, or three-quarters – is that what you’re trying to find out?’

‘Fifty-fifty?’

That’s the nickname for mixed people, Rudy explained. ‘Three-quarters’ of something, like some ingredient in a still unresolved recipe. Miti-miti, fifty-fifty. I’m maybe seventy-thirty, eighty-twenty, five-ninety-five. ‘It’s like a rundown trunk!’ he exclaimed, emphasising ‘rundown’.