For at least the first ten years of her marriage, Eva lived in London, where Harry represented the constituency of Kensington and Chelsea. She began having children, and neglected her writing. The first book had come to her so effortlessly, she took it for granted that she would write another. But Harry didn’t want her to go abroad again while their son was young. There was absolutely no question of the baby going with her. If she minded that the writer part of herself was hung up, alongside the children’s coats, its pockets full of mothballs, she did not say so. When her baby woke in the night, and her toddler had flu, and her five-year-old was being bullied at school, and her husband was so busy – and apparently so understanding about the lack of sexual contact with his exhausted wife – that she didn’t want to bother him with the comparatively insignificant complaint of her writing spirit leaching slowly away. It became easy to dispense with words: which are little more, after all, than a self-indulgent assembly of ideas and ambitions grouped together on the page, and meant next to nothing to Eva’s family, nor to Mrs Rendall in the islands, nor to Susan (who cleaned the London house every Tuesday). At least – unlike other writers – Eva never pinned her failures on her publisher or husband or children or the world. It was she who had failed to nurture the literary wraith inside her. She continued to write in her notebooks. But she published nothing further.

ALICE: Her marriage was even lonelier than her writing. Her ensuing life’s work should be understood as the antidote.

Eva moved to the islands around the time that Sebastian, her youngest, was sent away to school. He was eleven; she had kept him at home until then; at least she had managed that. Politics was the reason given for her move. Harry, ever-ambitious, had been promoted to cabinet, as Secretary of State for the Environment. He needed a rural hinterland, which Eva would incarnate.

ALICE: Eva was desperate for something different. She didn’t know what.

She found the islands immediately absorbing; both vital and remote. The shops stocked tinned things only, dusty packets. No olive oil or dark chocolate. Rare sightings of wizened tomatoes and apples tinged with the taste of the soap powder with which they had been brought over on the boat; robust local turnips, sturdy local carrots. Eva’s doctor was a drunkard; and although the abbey hosted occasional concerts, and the Selkie Café in Ayrness held regular ceilidhs, all the theatre and exhibited art which Eva had taken for granted, her entire life, in London – a high-culture which now seemed sickeningly rich, from a distance – was almost entirely missing.