Unlike Zoe, Eva was not island-born. She remained an outsider, in her own perception as much as anyone else’s, even after living in the archipelago for some forty years, running its higher-education college and nurturing its political identity. During the inquiry, the soundness of Eva’s political opinions was repeatedly called into question with the rhetorical device of questioning her credentials as an islander. Man after man (many of whom had lived in the archipelago for less time than her) stood up to emphasise her comparatively short residence in the islands, remarks that were then used to justify dismissing what she thought, and had stated publicly, about the islands’ need for change. It didn’t matter that Eva was right.

Eva grew up in Hampstead, London, in a light-filled flat where she lived alone with her father, an architect. Her mother had died when she was a baby; her father had fallen out with her relatives, and his, on account of having no time for organised religion. He brought Eva up with a sense of her own freedom; but it turned out to be a fragile plant. Her formative intellectual years were among clever Jewish girls at school; she was taught by female tutors at university; and found her voice thanks to the outspoken Yugoslav women whom socialism had empowered. She was thus completely unprepared for Harry Harcourt-Vane and his ilk; for the adamantine seam of male dominance which runs through Britain like a geological fact.

ALICE: She had been planning to move back to Sarajevo after her book was published; she was in love with a man there – Daris. Her desire to return was written into the structure of her book.

JUDGE: How did she meet her husband?

ALICE: Her father did some work for him on a flat he owned in Aldwych.

JUDGE: What was her husband’s connection to these islands?

ALICE: In 1703, one of his ancestors bought a decrepit medieval mansion with a good sea view.

During her travels, Eva had become so used to being taken by young men of Harry’s age to flat-roofed cottages by lakes, or small stone dwellings on the Dalmatian coast – where the most extravagant features were hot-water cylinders and the most important cupboards the ones containing jars of preserved peppers, and bottles of plum brandy – that she expected to find a one-storey summerhouse at the end of the long stony drive, set in an orchard with a lean-to shed for chickens. The building her Yugoslav-delimited imagination conjured, as Harry and she flew north one Friday evening, was about twenty times smaller than the house Harry had inherited.

INGA: Inherited over the head of his elder sister; out of the hands of his younger brother. Inequality and inequity were there from the start.