ALICE: But she didn’t want to, and yet she did. He pressed a button and she acted differently all of a sudden. She was exuberant and free when she met him. And he sucked it all out of her like meat from a whelk.

INGA: Yes, I met Harry once. He came to open a new building at school. He was attractive, of course. Never ran to fat, kept his hair, into his fifties. Handsome throughout his life, if high cheekbones and a little bit of cruelty in the eyes are the kind of thing you like. I remember thinking, even then, A bit of a dick. I was sixteen years old.

STELLA: When there was a motion at the council to drop the patriarchal name of the Harcourt Hospital, I pulled up the clippings they have on Harry Harcourt-Vane at the newspaper archives. Posh is the first thing. A charming man, an effective communicator. Not reliable, I would have said. That’s probably why women liked him.

JEN: Of course, many women have asked the question: Why did Eva make herself his wife? Why? Because women do that. She is not the only long-suffering wife, is she?

ZOE: She never spoke to me about Harry, even though he was my grandfather. Not once. Nobody did.

JUDGE: [Pause] So that’s it? The case against Harry? No abuse, no neglect?

ALICE: They had an unhappy relationship. All the power was his from the start.

JUDGE: But the situation was not unusual . . . It is all well within the range of typical marital relations in this country.

ALICE: As I say, I think we should be careful when discussing Eva’s marriage. Yes, it was a motivating factor in her desire for change, but it would be prurient and unnecessary to reduce this to a story about a power struggle between a woman and her better-equipped opponent. Don’t you think? She told me once that when you are young, you see life naively, as something endless, full of optimism and luck, as fresh as a bunch of mint. It doesn’t occur to you to mourn the lost lives and mislaid chances. You don’t understand that your life is already marked by scars and stumps, and all the bright, blighted aspects of yourself that never came to be. When you are old, you look back, and it is the mistakes you made that stand out.

JUDGE: What were her mistakes?

ALICE: She read too many books from a bygone age. They set up in her an expectation that the most important thing in life is love between a man and a woman, romantic love; that love is bitter, and that bitterness must be borne. The books, her upbringing, society – she acquired the kind of temperament which accepted suffering, and grew adept at hiding it. It created a pathway and she walked right down it. It took a monumental effort of will to take a different way.