ALICE: I felt a jolt. Oh my God! Really? I’d spent the past two years visiting islands, and island shrines, from Orkney to Jersey. I’d never noticed the breast shape, the womb. And so, the shame rushed in: Why hadn’t I thought of that?

Two museum guides, young women smartly dressed in black, were conversing quietly by the large windows over the water. Their accents showed that they were local—

ALICE: I felt transported by the realisation. Those amazing, mysterious Neolithic people had put women into their most important artistic creations. There women were, emblazoned upon the landscape in sacred monuments. There they still were! It was breathtaking.

—soft, as the accent of the archipelago is: distinct, different, neither Scottish nor English, southern nor northern. Alice approached them and asked, ‘Excuse me, who wrote the section on the Neolithic?’

ALICE: You have to understand that the island histories I’d been researching until then were so overwhelmingly male, apparently – Neolithic builders, Druid priests, Roman soldiers, Christian monks, Vikings, raiding and fishing. Plus, in the islands themselves it was always men I found myself interviewing – fishermen, politicians, monks. My cousin pointed it out to me: she said, women rarely put themselves forward to be heard. They are too modest, or too busy. Or they just aren’t used to having people listen.

The guides glanced at one other.

‘Felicity, I would think?’ said one; ‘Felicity Davidson? The museum’s director?’

‘Wasn’t Eva involved?’ said the other. ‘And Jen?’

The first shrugged. ‘Felicity’s away at the moment but I can give you her card.’

‘Eva’s the important one, though, isn’t she?’ the other woman insisted.

Alice sensed a wordless struggle taking place. Then the first woman reached out and took the other’s hand.

‘Eva’s who you need to speak to.’

‘Eva Harcourt-Vane.’

‘Eva Levi.’

‘We’ll write the name down for you, so you don’t forget.’

‘We’ll give you her number, she always calls back.’