Then she flew down to London.

JUDGE: She never stopped feeling like she was stealing from them, really, did she?

JEN: Not really, no. It wasn’t an easy decision.

In London, Camille had been working late, finishing reports, trying to make Sebastian notice her absence. The only people who noticed were her children. The children: confused. Camille: unhappy. Sebastian: absorbed by this media furore.

It had been like this for a while: the harder Seb worked, the less time he had to spend with her, the more infrequent their love-making, the more her eye wandered. She had had her children; her body was her own again; her breasts were no longer being sucked by needy infants, her vagina would never again function as a birth canal. So she found herself being looked at by other men; she who had passed coldly through England’s flaccid pit of male snakes, now found their thrusting and writhing arousing. Stupid, crass men excited her at the most inelegant moments. Standing in a lift, walking to the Tube, crossing Hampstead Heath, she wanted to be taken away by the men she saw, and ravished.

Worse, in the meantime, deep inside, she felt a pathetic yearning for a world in which everything was clear. For a higher authority than herself; for a system in which the Book – whichever Book – was still revered for the wisdom of the elders. Of course she knew that her thoughts on this subject were irrational; that the yearning she felt came down to familiarity, to the so-oft-repeated poetry contained in the Book of her childhood devotions. Which was bad luck, because, despite the architecture of the French cathedrals, baroque music from Spain, the Madonnas of the Italian Renaissance, weighed in the balance, none of this was worth it, if the wisdom of the elders damaged her daughter’s sense of herself as a woman. Did it, or didn’t it? What she also knew, instinctively, was that a life without a Book was a life of indolence and corruption, of lust but not love, of anger and greed and envy, a life of not caring.

CAMILLE: Then suddenly our house was being doorstepped. They’d warned me about this but Seb worked for Defra. Nothing he’d done so far in his career had warranted doorstepping. Thank God for Eva.

Eva arrived in warrior mode. It was she who dealt with the journalists and photographers on the doorstep – the flash of cameras, the thrust of recording devices: the ridiculous onslaught which went on, day after day. Seb was no help. Possibly he was even enjoying it. That would have made Eva angry, had she had a moment to think about it, but – she hadn’t come down to help Seb. She was in London to lend support to her daughter-in-law and the grandchildren during her son’s ignominious hour in the media glare. Unfortunately, she could remember exactly what it was like.