The third thing – which seemed irrelevant in the moment, a glitch of the brain, and only later came to be revealed as the key – was that, while an undergraduate, Sebastian fathered a child with an island girl. Nobody at Alice’s college ever met the baby, or her mother, but for a while they all talked about them. Back then, at university, parenting seemed a completely outlandish thing for anyone to do. Alice searched for the child’s name, sitting there at her desk. Sebastian Vane announces ... Sebastian Vane opens ... Sebastian Vane argues . . . There was nothing about Seb’s daughter, nor her mother, on the entire World Wide Web.

The fourth thing, was that Eva Levi made reference, in passing, to some excavations then taking place in the north of Yugoslavia, in the vanguard of a new hydroelectric dam about to flood the Danube Gorge. The archaeologists were examining a series of Neolithic temples along the banks of the river. At one of these sites, Eva described meeting a Slovenian archaeologist from an American university who told her that the temples were shaped like the female pubic triangle. On one of the altars, the archaeologist said, they had found a stone carved with a vulva.

ALICE: That was it. Electric. The same feeling I got in the museum. So, the following weekend, I flew north again.

It was a stupid time to have gone north – crazy, in fact. Her husband was on a work trip abroad. To go away, herself, for three nights, necessitated meticulous planning, of the kind that pushed out all other thoughts. But she called on her mother, her siblings, and two different childminders, and in this way concocted a three-day, twenty-four-hour roundabout of care. She left instructions about bedtime and breakfast; food in the fridge; money on the table for Friday dance class, Saturday bakery, Sunday market. Her daughter seemed oblivious to the drama. Alice kissed her goodnight, hugged her mother goodbye, and pulled the front door shut behind her. She was getting a night flight up to Edinburgh, out of Stansted; and on to the islands early the next day.

Throughout the journey north, Alice exchanged texts with the childminders and her mother. But the moment she checked in for her flight to the islands, it was all about Eva.

‘Oh yes, you must meet Eva,’ the besuited woman beside her in the airport departure lounge said. ‘She’s involved in so many things.’

In Ayrness, the taxi driver said, ‘Have you been to see Eva Harcourt-Vane? She teaches my daughter gender studies.’

‘Good?’ Alice asked, glancing at her in the mirror: brown eyes lined end to end in black, a pink bindi between the brows.

The woman laughed. ‘Vulvas and tits. Wisdom of the womb.’