It was no different with Eva’s archipelago. As soon as she began going there regularly, Alice got used to explaining, in the face of repeated perplexity: North Sea, north of Lindisfarne, English–Scottish border. Placing it for people, with slightly patronising glibness. Between the two Berwicks? Well, due east of the mouth of the Tweed. And then, making a geopolitical point: You see, while the land border is fixed, the sea border keeps shifting.

Her daughter refined it further: Mummy boat, Mummy sea, Mummy-pelago.

Mummy-Wonderland, said the child’s father, just a little too wryly.

Now, of course, Alice can see that Eva sacrificed too much. She risked her life – and left them all alone. She left Zoe alone. Sometimes, Alice wakes in the night, fearing Eva’s ire, if she ever returns. She hopes (but isn’t sure) that Eva would have understood her decision to collect, not just lost female epics, but also, where appropriate, accounts of Eva’s work, with diverging opinion from family and friends. Although she is glad that Eva acted as she did, when she stops to think about it, it sometimes takes away her breath. She herself wouldn’t dare. What to make of Eva’s sons, for example, who are now claiming that by giving away all their money, she was acting in the least motherly of ways?

JUDGE: What do you have to say on this point?

ALICE: What can I say? Yes, arguably this is so. She did not act in the way society expected in their regard.

Alice’s official line on how she got involved in Eva’s work was the islands and their epics. But in truth there was another, deeper, more mysterious connection, which drew her back there again and again. That very first night, for example, when she returned home to London, her legs stiff from driving, she stood on her doorstep feeling in her pocket for her house keys. What she pulled out instead was a small green business card. She looked at it, in the dim yellow glow of a street lamp. It was a picture of Mary, Mother of God, dressed in a green tartan sari, standing in a seashell, and holding in her hands a grey, vulva-carved stone. All Our Holy Mothers Convent, Papa Astrid. Alice felt her memory stir and stretch. She recognised what it was: a kitsch hotchpotch of cultural appropriation, such as her own Catholic childhood was full of. But she also saw, reaching back through the centuries, the reassuring spiritual devotion she had known once and lost.

Suddenly she remembered the dream she had had on the ferry: Mary, Kali, and women’s vanished prehistoric wisdom, all entwined.

Cwen’s father had seen what she could see. They had sung the same songs. Sometimes he is there still, when she sweeps her mind up and searches for the words she needs above the clouds, or beneath the seaweed, or under the rocks with the squid. She can find him if she listens very carefully to the seashells she brings back from the beach. She sometimes hears him when she crouches through night vigils in the mound. She knows that she still owes him an answer to the question that concerned him. She has failed to pass her knowledge on.