God knows when she would have found time to return to the islands, thereafter, were it not for the newspaper article: which she read, quite by chance, a few weeks later. She’s a Guardian reader, obviously, when she buys newspapers at all, but on this occasion it was a discarded copy of the Standard which changed everything. September, London, the optimistic half of the autumn term. She was travelling out to Barking, where she taught creative writing in a school. The article was a gossipy diary piece about the coalition’s new junior minister at Defra, a post entirely uninteresting to her – except that the incumbent and she had been at university together. She only knew him in passing, he was two years above her, but they were in the same college, and as a student he had been a visible presence, out and about, canvassing for his party, the now much-derided Lib Dems. Sebastian Vane had grown handsomer during the ensuing fifteen years: the spit and buff of power. The article was a puff piece about public figures and the places they grew up in:

Vane was partly raised in the North Sea archipelago where his mother Eva, author of a book on the former Yugoslavia, still lives in the beautiful family home.

Alice looked up from the newspaper. Eva. She knew that name now. Where had she put the number? And: Yugoslavia. She herself had visited that country, just as it broke apart. During her first week at university she signed up to a student aid convoy to the Bosnian mining town of Tuzla. They left after Christmas, travelling south through Croatia in three battered lorries, along the coast to Split, and north into Bosnia, the very month the war there finally came to an end. She continued to feel upset by her memories. The bullet holes, principally. The soldiers. The checkpoints. Her feet, picking their way through Mostar’s silence and rubble, treading where her brain dared not, into the holes punched in the skyline.

The next morning, in the British Library, Alice ordered Eva’s book. Eva had published Beyond Illyria in 1969, under her maiden name, Eva Levi – indeed, she wrote it before getting married to the Rt Hon Harry Harcourt-Vane – and Alice read it in one sitting, at one of the library’s green-leather-covered desks, with its view over Euston Road and Judd Street, as four things struck her.

First, it was excellently written.

Second, she never remembered Eva’s son, Sebastian, mentioning the war in Yugoslavia, which was going on while he was at university, in any of his student political addresses or literature, nor at parties, nor in the student bar, ever.