That first morning, Eva awoke in the high four-poster bed. She slid out to stand in her bare feet on the worn rug by the window, gazing on the misty layers of island green. Despite the cloudiness she felt in her head, she thought how exactly the house was circumscribed by the fields, the fields by the bounds of the island, and all this, by the sea. It gave her a feeling of calm but also trepidation.

Start with the house, and the husband, and all the rest unfurls like a fistful of gravel – male-to-male inheritance, entitlement, belittlement. Eva’s study was full of it, folders and notes, shelves of books, historical clippings and photocopies. She knew exactly where the Harcourt name, initials and crest (a handsome prancing stag) were printed and stamped and moulded in features and furnishings all over the house. She knew about the Harcourt-Vane fathers, and the Harcourt-Vane wives. She knew about the black maid, Darcy, introduced from Jamaica along with the architectural renovations of 1720; and the Indian valet, Babu, imported to these shores in 1850 with a large consignment of Darjeeling tea. She felt their presence. They suffocated her, at first, with their unhappiness and mistreatment.

JEN: You see, she always intended Harcourt House to become a female sanctuary after she’d gone. She wished to invert centuries of male domination. For it’s true, when you think about it: men had always owned it, a male architect redesigned it, the masons and carpenters and builders who cut wood and dressed blocks of stone, they were male too. Crazy, isn’t it.

JUDGE: There must have been women who cleaned it.

JEN: No one remembers them.

Painful though it was, the house was part of what made her. And certainly, even now she is gone, Eva Levi remains in this building: all along its passages, through its rooms, up and down its stairs: the momentum of her body. Harcourt House: Eva’s house. Her House.

Later, when one of the women dropped in to visit, or Zoe got in from school, Eva would be sitting on the front lawn, if it was summer, with her account book or pile of correspondence on her knee, her telephone lying on her papers. She would glance up at the house, sometimes in silent admiration at its resilience, sometimes with resentment. It was a scar she touched to remind herself of everything that impinged upon her as a woman.

JUDGE: As for her husband – you never met him, of course?

ALICE: No, not me. But I read about him in her notebooks. It shocked me.

JUDGE: What did?

ALICE: How meek she is with him, by her own admission. She cooks his supper, arranges his clothes, organises his diary – this was when she was living in London.

JUDGE: He was still her husband, after all.