She waited for a moment outside the solicitor’s office, sitting in her car, her phone switched off, her stomach empty, her mind racing, reminding herself of exactly what she was here for. Then she got out, strode up to the building, and pushed her way through the door. Of course, even then, even later – especially over the ensuing week, as she endured, from afar, the public shaming of her son – she suffered qualms of conscience; knew that all three of her sons loved Harcourt House, just as they loved their father’s art collection. Or rather, that they thought of both as integral to their self-image. She knew that what she was doing would give them a terrible shock. But as Eva wrote in her notebook, Mariam and Lucija and Camille had each borne exile from their culture – as had she, in a way; it was often good for individuals to start afresh. That was the whole point of myths of exile, such as the one about Albina. Her sons had such good lives already, and a large unwieldy house like Harcourt would just be a burden to them, as it had, in part, been to her, as well as a source of unnecessary conflict. Well, from now on it would be different. Christians jeered at Hindus and Buddhists for their belief in reincarnation but that was what a house like this did to a family: it enforced repetition of habits, status, character, not to mention misogyny. And having rehearsed the arguments she had been through many times already, Eva felt strangely calm and light-headed.

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.