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baby, as it happens, on the sea coast of Bohemia, where-after he was immediately eaten by a bear. (‘ Exit, pursued by a bear ,’ read the famously silly line. I hated this bizarrely particular detail.) Perdita was found, and raised by friendly shepherds. Sixteen years passed. The king had learned the error of his ways, and worshipped a statue of his long-dead wife. Perdita, beautiful and marriageable, arrived at Leontes’ court and was reunited with her repentant, foolish father. Perdita , I understood then, was the lost one found, the lucky child. I was pleased with my name, and did not think, those days, to read a wider allegory.
    It was not until I was about eight, when Stella taught me the play in a home lesson, that I discovered that in Shakespeare’s story Hermione is restored to life. Her statue unfreezes and she is miraculously alive. The stone rolled away. The blip-blip, blip-blip, on a lit screen somewhere, converting a lime flatline to amountainous heartbeat. (‘ O, she’s warm! If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating .’) Hermione rediscovers the daughter she thought was ever-lost, and is instantly reconciled with her errant husband.
    In her first telling my mother omitted this happy ending. I do not know if she really thought herself dead, or if my naming was truly circumstantial, the product of that desperate time in the downpour shack, when she thought herself dehumanised, negligible, a zero, when she lay listening to rain as if it was the sound of her own obliteration. The initial untruth of her telling was perhaps her truth; she was resigned to a life immobile and tyrannically fixed. She could have escaped my father but she did not, even when his contempt for her was ruthlessly evident. She stayed firmly put. I was an adult before I discovered there is no sea coast in Bohemia. Telling makes it so. All my childhood I believed in distant Bohemian beaches, where there might be wild bears, homicidally prowling.

    When Nicholas returned from his week with Freddie Trevor, he discovered his little shack overtaken by women. For a few months he moved into the Trevors’ house, and enjoyed there relative comfort and babyless quiet. And when Stella was moved to the hospital in Broome, it seemed all the more reasonable that he should stay where rational adults were, and not return to the bawling and the chatter and the black women, limp and sprawled on the floor of his shack, acting as if they owned it.
    At the Trevors’ Nicholas discovered that he could force the cook, Martha, and that she would not tell. All the white men did it; he felt manly and justified. At first he put his hand over her mouth, and watched her dark terrified eyes as he pushed hard into her. He made threats to kill her if she ever told. But gradually, he reasoned, Martha simply knew what to do; she believed his murderous threats and was sure to remain silent.Nicholas liked to pull her head back by its tangled hair and feel that he penetrated so that he hurt her. Martha was fifteen or sixteen years old and a wonderful cook, good as any, the Trevors claimed, in a civilised household. When, a few months later, Vera Trevor discovered that Martha was pregnant, she was sent away, down south, with few questions asked. The new cook, called Sheila, arrived almost immediately to replace her.
    If there was any hesitation in Nicholas, moral or otherwise, it was one generated by the disquieting presence of Billy, the Trevors’ youngest son. He was perhaps only eight or nine years old, but had about him the gravity of an older boy. He had the habit of appearing unexpectedly, as if spirited from place to place, and then he would just stand there, and stare, and unequivocally hum. If Billy was upset in any way he would often flap his hands, beating at his confusion, stirring up the air, attacking and shooing invisible entities. He had upstanding ginger hair and stippled greenish skin. Nicholas thought it best to