Her husband, it turned out, had come to the islands, not to see Eva, but for a week of shooting. He had three friends arriving the following morning. Eva met him in the kitchen, where he was frying himself an egg. She was glad that Lucette hadn’t taken up her offer to come in for some lunch; Harry would have taken it badly but worse, Lucette would have thought less of her. There was a bottle of gin on the table and a cigarette in one of her painted Breton porridge bowls. They immediately began to row: about where she had been, what she was up to, whether or not she had been warned about Harry’s visit and should have got the house ready. He, as always, remained aloof, and that in itself was a form of hatred; for in doing so he chased her down as inexorably as one of the hinds he had come up here to shoot, until, cornered by his logic, she shot herself in the heart by reaching out for something to throw across the kitchen, in this case the trusty bowl in which she kneaded bread every night – she was too cowardly or sensible to grab at his mother’s teapot or the gold-rimmed ancestral plates – and Harry watched, detached, as she wept, sweeping up little shards of cream-coloured ceramic. It would not be a straightforward bowl to replace. It would require a day trip by ferry to the mainland; and even then the bowl would be new, and thus bereft of its history with her, all the loaves she had carefully nurtured in its cavern.

Harry profited from Eva’s state of mortification for the rest of the week. Each evening that his friends were in the islands, she provided a well-appointed supper. His friends at first took Harry’s lead in treating her politely, as if she was little more than housekeeper, little less than spouse. What was she then? Eva did her best to keep out of the way. As the mother of three sons, she was used to being surrounded and outnumbered by maleness. But they flirted with her as she made their coffee in the morning, leapt towards her as she carried a saucepan of water from the sink to the stove (Let me help, Eva), followed her down to the cellar as she went to fetch more wine and offered, with a hand on her back, to steer her through the darkness. Eva felt that her Jewishness was a factor. In their eyes, she was not of their class. Were all the men of Harry’s ilk sexually ostentatious, socially assured? Would her sons be? She had begun to suspect so.

ALICE: You see? Something was happening inside her, a rebellion. And then the commune ended – she was distressed by that.