After that, Alice could only listen, and watch, as Eva – tall, bold in her movements – became a zoetrope of all the women she was describing. Their thoughts, words, arms, legs, mouths, vulvas, filled the kitchen with their clamour, a singing of brightly coloured birds in the apple tree outside; and as Eva talked, she prepared the coffee, tapping one finger urgently to her cheek and looking out at the morning, which by now was lashing its magnificence against the glass. She talked of things Alice had only imagined; until she remembered the bread: laughed when she opened the door of the oven; removed the loaves, tenderly as a midwife, holding up the glistening blackened bricks, so that Alice, too, could share in the glory: those trophies to the all-eclipsing importance of their mandate and their mission.

Before Alice left, Eva took her outside again. Her footprints had disappeared from the grass. In the distance the archipelago’s islands floated in the sunlight.

‘You see,’ Eva said. ‘This is what we have. This place. This chance.’

JUDGE: What did you see?

ALICE: I saw for the first time how. . .

JUDGE: Well?

ALICE: I saw the possibility of that ancient female power, resurrected. It’s there in the Neolithic, with the female symbolism of islands. We know from Roman report that there were female Druids on Anglesey. The Greeks and Romans write repeatedly about British islands where female mystery rites were performed. And it persists into Anglo-Saxon times, in medieval Irish legends, in Arthurian romances. The Lady of the Lake, you know? Eva thought so too, and when I got back to London, she wrote and offered me some work. She wanted me to help her collect those lost female epics. It seemed logical to me. Men have always collected epics for their own advancement. Why not women?

Alice didn’t tell her editor, but her husband knew. He disapproved. It’s such a distraction, he said; you haven’t got time. He was right that Eva took up a lot of her time. He was also right, annoyingly, that what Eva was doing in the islands could not be contained (as Alice had argued to him at first that it could) within her current book. It would not fold neatly into a convenient vignette. No, it was a thing unto itself. A monster. A ghost. A mermaid.

JUDGE: A monster?

ALICE: A mermaid.