Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, London, 1948 (1961)

Nearly all the words for ‘queen’ are obvious fem. derivs. of those for ‘king’. Exceptions are the following:

OE cwēn, ME quene, NE queen

Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, Chicago, 1949

The island is the necessary minimum for this re-beginning ... the one place on earth that remains uncovered by water, a circular and sacred space, from which the world begins anew ... Ocean and water embody a principle of segregation such that, on sacred islands, exclusively female communities can come to be.

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desert Islands’, unpublished article (French), 1950s

12
Ruth

By chance, Ruth saw Eva coming out of the airport on the evening she got in from London. Everybody in the islands knew why she had gone – no islander ever went willingly to the capital.

Eva looked exhausted.

JUDGE: How well did you know Eva Harcourt-Vane?

RUTH: Not well at all, really. It’s a shame. [Sniffs] What a waste. While she was in London we were texting each other every day. I told her: It’s all right, pet. Zoe’s OK. The journalists went home and Zoe’s life, at least, went back to normal. Momentarily. For Eva, Zoe was always the most important thing.

At least sixty per cent of people on island flights tend to know each other, more or less; and normally there would have been at least five people keen to talk to Eva. On a normal day Eva would have stood there, chatting in the warmth of the terminal building, or suggested that they fetch a cup of tea and cake from the café and sit for a moment by the big window overlooking the runway. But that evening she merely nodded and walked quickly out of the building and across the wet tarmac of the car park. It was so windy the plane almost hadn’t made it. Ruth could see, from where she was standing, that when Eva opened the car, the wind almost tore the door off.

RUTH: I thought about waving hello – but I was on duty. That was the last time I saw her.

It wasn’t until Eva drove out of Ayrness, and along the coast, and the hill of Harcourt loomed up before her, darkly – a layer of ancient black overlaid upon the other layers of darkness – that her fingers finally unclenched themselves from the steering wheel. She had hated being in London. She had hated how Seb was oblivious to the damage he was doing, how much he liked the media attention. How he thought Camille and the children would get over it. She had given up feeling distressed by George. She pushed all thoughts of Henry out of her mind. Right now, he was irrelevant.