He sets off down the path, and Jericho watches as some boys run towards him. They love him. Jericho has sat at the back of a class, and heard him through the windows. He’s seen the performer in him as he recites poems and the children perform them back. It’s Derek Walcott at the moment.

Alone in the house, he takes another book from the shelves of rough planks that Milton has built. Baldwin again. Another Country. Jericho’s never read it. Mildew has formed behind the shelves, large black blooms of it. The concrete floor is damp, staining the woven mats, and the paint, long past its prime, is flaking. The house of an intellectual, Jericho thinks, and then doesn’t know what to do with the thought, which began with Leonard’s book-lined study, and peters out to nothing.

He gets up and stretches, and when the school quietens and the classes begin, he walks down past it, skirting the classrooms and the offices, and takes the path to the river. He walks upstream to a place where the older boys swim. There are signs of them everywhere – clothes laid out to dry on rocks and branches, sly cigarette ends, an exercise book – but he is there alone. He takes off his clothes, wades into the water, feels the current and the sun on his skin. Above him, a ripple of thin cloud against the blue, the whisper of trees. Birds.

There’s a voluptuous feel to the water as he dives under, holds his breath, comes up, sits on a rock, lets the water tumble between his legs. His body is strong and confident. But inside he is roiling. This water comes from the mountain; its streams are headwater tributaries. Yet his thoughts are not of that – of the future, of where he is headed – but of Rika, and the past. The years she stayed in Oxford while he was at school, and the flat she kept not far from Leonard. Jericho knew she was only there for him, and whenever she went away for work – to London, to Paris, to New York, and he could stay on with Leonard – oh, the relief of it; the quiet ease, and the knowledge that this man was the one fixed point in his life. He wouldn’t want to go back to Rika’s, and Leonard would say, ‘It hurts her if you don’t.’ So he’d go, learn not to hurt her. ‘Did you bring me back to England to please Rika?’ he asked Leonard, and always the same answer. ‘I brought you back because I am your father.’ And Rika? ‘For her too. She’d become your mother.’ Had she? She came to parent nights. He called her Mummy. And there in the river he remembers back to the school in Oxford and the boy who said, ‘She’s not your mother. Your mother’s black. Nig-nog.’ The shame of it. Not that she was black, and him too – it was the 1970s, after all – but the shame of teachers overhearing, and the whole class sat down to hear the talk about equality and the colour of our skin, the great rainbow of mankind, when everyone knew that the boy who’d said it was an idiot. And fat with thick glasses. Pebble eyes. That was worse than nig-nog. ‘Nig-nog, have a snog.’