Hours and hours at the inquiry were dedicated to working out what she thought, what she wanted. But as soon became clear, there was no theory, other than the obvious one, propping up her vision. She was a private woman, who never justified her project, ideologically to anyone. She read books – they are there on her shelves – but there was nobody in particular she quoted, no single thinker whose theories she borrowed as a shield. Perhaps all the glory and faults of the system she created lie exactly there: in her unformed sense; her preference for instinct over dogma.

What Eva did do was fill forty-three notebooks. Recently, Zoe and Alice counted and numbered them, from first to last. They begin with Yugoslavia, which is where her note-taking habit was formed. The twelve Yugoslav notebooks comprise transcriptions of interviews, jottings during conversations, thoughts scribbled on buses and trains, pages sometimes marked by the coffee cup she placed there as she sat in Sarajevo cafés, thinking through her journey as she waited for a friend. A book, Beyond Illyria, grew out of them. They themselves have been lodged for posterity in the Islands of Women Foundation Archive.

There are also seven London notebooks, which Eva kept during the early years of marriage. Later, she went over them heavily in thick black felt-tip, crossing out anything tragic, demeaning or offensive. Even so, the London notebooks make distressing reading in the main. Stylistically, moreover, they sometimes resemble diaries or journals in the hurried quality of the prose – the clarity of her thought marred by the internal chaos she was experiencing. Zoe, in particular, hates dwelling at any length on Eva’s marriage. Of course it was important to Eva’s formation as a thinker; but Zoe, at least, insists that it is best to see Eva’s reflections on marriage and motherhood as nothing more than a painful prelude to the project that gave such shape and satisfaction to the second half of her life.

It is impossible to tell how long Eva spent thinking before acting; the notebooks do not say. What is clear, however, is that the moment she committed herself, everything changed for the better within her. The final twenty-four notebooks, unlike those which went before, are identical. She bought them in bulk from the stationery shop in Ayrness, nothing fancy: the cheap, spiral-bound type, a brand called Black n’ Red. She wrote in black fountain pen, and from the moment she put pen to paper (in that record-breaking cold October, the day after Zoe’s christening), her recovery seems assured.

JUDGE: You were the pivot?

ZOE: Yes, well, clearly the personal heavily influenced the political.