MARIAM: Even then, it is not to be expected. And the actual best route to advancement is not to be black like I am. [Laughs]

LUCIJA: Soon enough the lessons were forgotten. But by then it was too late: the whole idea had driven Eva’s sons crazy.

That night, Lucija took out her phone and typed a message to Omer:

There is a Mevludin in this house. I gazed at it. A Mevludin! It brought back all the things that for sixteen years I have tried to block out, that come back in dreams only, so that I wake in my British bed, with the cold moonlight seeping through the curtains, and turn my head into the pillow to cling on as hard as I can to the sunlight in my head.

She lay quite still in the dark for several hours. Then she wrote to him again:

Oh Omer, a woman has appeared out of the English mist who is unlike me, or any other woman I have known. This woman, there is something which makes me catch my breath. She has a pure soul. I know I can hear you laughing.

At last Lucija pushed back her heavy blankets and walked out on to the landing. Moonlight came through the library windows, and the stair windows, and through the windows along the front of the house. Lucija moved around the house, seeking out the moonlight as it fell on her skin, stopping only when she felt the moon upon her. In this way she felt herself into the other women’s dreams, closing her eyes as she saw them, the visions, rising and mingling. The swoop of some beautiful, long-winged white birds; the clatter of cooking pots; the rush of water; the smile of a father. Tigers. A female Buddha. A runaway ship womaned by an all-Bosnian crew. And just once, around dawn, a young man, in a boat, far out at sea. Dreams which took only a few seconds to dream and yet felt like aeons. Long lives lived in seconds. She knew which dreams were which. It was her own dreams she could barely remember. Sometimes, when she woke, she recalled the tinge of things delicious and it scorched her. Kissing; soft skin; long fragrant hair. A love spasm. Inappropriate love for inappropriate people.

Lucija got up again when it was light. Eva, too, rose early. They met in the kitchen, where Eva made them both coffee, in the Bosnian way, in her long-handled copper coffee pot.

LUCIJA: We spoke that morning about Mevludin. You should invite his grandson over here, Lucija, she said to me. I nodded. I couldn’t imagine Omer in the islands.

JUDGE: Did Omer come?

LUCIJA: No. I wish he could have met her. She meant nothing to him.

They talked about Mariam.

‘She has a vagina stone,’ Lucija said.

‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Just like mine. My father gave me mine, over half a century ago, for safekeeping on my travels.’