Eva would see Nina, in town, walking along the sea wall, in her hunched but steady way, dressed in a tracksuit. By month five, Nina dropped out of school, and spent the early summer days sitting with her bump on a bench against the sea wall, reading lurid teenage magazines, and allowing the entire archipelago to witness her steady inflation outwards. ‘Like some perverted pregnant sex doll,’ said Eva’s elder son, Henry. Eva was shocked at his viciousness; but secretly it hurt how Nina paraded herself as visual proof of Sebastian’s lack of judgement.

Soon enough, to her surprise, Eva found herself looking out for her daughter-in-law – she thought of her as that, even though no one else did. She grew immune to the island gossip; the voices that stopped speaking when she entered the bakery, the greengrocer’s, the post office. The bigger the bump, the more exciting it was. She once caught sight of Nina through the window of her office. She was swimming out from the little beach beyond the bay, moving slowly through the water. Eva was alarmed; there were unpredictable island currents. She walked down to the beach and stood there, waiting, her heart thumping. At last, after many solemn strokes, Nina turned round and swam back. As she came closer, Eva could see her smooth child’s face, furrowed in concentration. She watched, straining her eyes. When Nina emerged from the sea, walking up the shingle to the grass where her towel was spread out in the sunshine, Eva felt with a jolt to her heart how, inside that belly, a new thing was growing, with its own spirit, irrespective of the feelings of its forebears.

They looked at each other across the shingle.

Eva wished Nina and she could have been friends. But some borders are impossible to cross.

Sebastian, father of the bump, spent most of his first long vacation, Nina’s third trimester, out of the country. He returned home a week before the baby was due, talking with exasperating confidence about communal theories of child-rearing, his skin still hot from the Mediterranean sun, his hair blonder and curlier than before. As he stood in the kitchen talking non-stop while Eva prepared one of the dishes she had been cooking throughout his childhood and adolescence, she didn’t ask how many Israeli, Italian or Greek girls he had slept with; how many other babies he had spawned across the ancient world. As he lounged in the garden, she felt angry. In Bosnia, a war was breaking out. She wrote in her notebook:

In 1245, as the south wall of Harcourt House was being built from local stone, Islamic learning and culture was flourishing in Sarajevo.

During the construction of the Victorian tower in the orchard, the Austro-Hungarian empire was sending its troops into Bosnia.