COLIN: That’s totally disingenuous, not to say dishonest. I checked the archives at the Women’s Foundation. Eva Harcourt-Vane records in her notebook that she rang both Jen and Inga that night. And a few months later, Ursula King conducted a purge of old-timers, me included.

—but Zoe needed clarity, she wouldn’t be put off.

‘It’s a really really strange situation,’ she said.

‘What’s strange about it?’ asked Eva, glancing round at her.

They were driving up to the ruined convent in the north-east. Eva liked to go there every now and then, when she couldn’t get across to Cwen.

‘Well, shouldn’t they be fired for talking like that?’

Eva scared her by thumping the steering wheel and shouting, ‘Zoe! They are dinosaur men.’

‘The women in the office say things like that,’ said Zoe, unhappily. ‘I don’t think it’s an emancipated place. I don’t think I should be there.’

‘It’s good for you to learn what needs to change,’ said Eva, perhaps a little too glibly. She brought the car to a halt outside the convent. ‘When I first came here,’ she said, ‘I used to hear people talking about the monks in the abbey. Can you believe it? And yet, until the Normans banned double monasteries – convents inhabited by monks and nuns, and run by abbesses – and, in their place, imposed celibate Benedictine rule, these islands were one of Britain’s most important centres for early Christian female worship. I didn’t know that for years. But it’s really not surprising at all because, for centuries, every single aspect of female history that is important or inconvenient has been either suppressed or ignored or stolen from under our noses.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ said Zoe.

‘Here,’ Eva said, ‘have a wine gum.’

They got out of the car. ‘So you have to be constantly on guard, that’s all,’ Eva went on. She led Zoe through the kissing gate that kept out the sheep. They walked in the sunshine over the close-cropped grass, into the refectory and on to the dormitories, and then to the church itself. Its cruciform shape was still evident in the tracery of stones in the grass. The ruin was deserted; very few people came out this far during the week, only birdwatchers; there weren’t any houses because this side of the island was too exposed, the cliffs too steep. Somebody had recently mown the grass between the walls of the convent, however, and in that lovely long-shadowed evening, the convent seemed alive, and watchful, its well-maintained lawns and jagged walls suggestive both of domestic propriety as well as the violence of its end.

‘It was big, wasn’t it?’ Zoe said, as they strode the length of the church together.

‘Ninety nuns, they think,’ said Eva. ‘They lived out here, all by themselves.’