When the talking was over, Gayatri came forward with plates of refreshment, which consisted of onion pakora accompanied by island-grown rhubarb chutney (made by Mrs Anderson from Upper Braeside Farm), and the name of the island went to a vote. Bean was chosen by a narrow margin.

On Thursday morning, when Eva stepped off Fred’s boat again, she was still telling herself that everything the women had said was just a little too much. Then she drove back to Ayrness, and she saw it as if for the first time: men everywhere she looked: in the political structures of the islands and the country, running the council and the college, in the names of the streets, the churches, on lamp posts, road names, even drain covers. Overhead, underfoot, men were predominant without even trying. She parked her car, and walked up the road towards the college; she felt as if the women had inseminated her with ideas, and that her life up to that point had been a big joke. She shouted up at the birds wheeling overhead, and shouted out at the milkman (Billy, whom she had known for about ten years), and shouted hello to a male student coming down the hill the other way. The shouting made her breathless, removed from her body. She felt elated. Her attitudes, her thoughts, her demeanour – she wanted to change it all.

During the autumn, Eva visited Bean as often as she could. She took along a new friend she had made through her book group, Lucette, who had begun becoming a woman only after moving to the islands – she said she found them ‘freeing’.

LUCETTE: Eva found our friendship freeing, I think. There was always a frisson in the air, between us. The whisper of love. We were subversive, the two of us.

On Saturdays, the commune served a hot lunch from the main-house kitchen (Gayatri’s lentils and rice served with Patak’s mango chutney – the condiment a rare, tangy dollop of female business initiative). Lucette and Eva would eat their lunch sitting at one end of the huge kitchen table, listening to the bold-faced talk. Sometimes, Gayatri or Donna or Gloria would walk with the visitors around the island, pointing out the new, all-important female-features of the commune’s design. They told Eva and Lucette that they shared tasks non-hierarchically; were especially proud of the re-Neo breast-mound they had built of earth from their septic tank, scattered with grass seed—

More nipple than breast, Eva wrote in her notebook.

One Saturday, Eva came home from Bean, after dropping Lucette in Ayrness, to find Harry’s car in the driveway.

ALICE: It was horrible.