When Nina went into labour, Eva left a terse message for Sebastian on his expensive new portable phone. Mobiles. They gobbled up money when you rang them. Then she drove to the hospital, and sat downstairs in the reception, reading, or thumbing through the already-thumbed magazines, under the terrible lighting. She was there all night. After she’d read every magazine, she sat in a reverie, remembering her own births, part ominous biblical hat-trick, part sinister fairy tale. Henry, her firstborn, had been pulled out by forceps, Eva with her legs up in stirrups. They’d taken him away for feeding with all the other babies in the hospital nursery. With George, they’d given her anaesthetics again, but at least let her push him out all by herself. Only with Sebastian did Eva really feel like she knew what she was doing. She’d been given a book by a friend: grainy black-and-white photos of naked women, their legs spread, their faces set in what was probably agony but might also have been ecstasy. Stubbornly, she’d paced the hospital corridors, grunting. It had been hard. Where was Harry? Elsewhere.

She’d breastfed George and Seb, at least. It had fallen out of fashion in Britain, so none of the midwives encouraged it. But she remembered how in Bosnia, under socialism, nursing mothers who worked in factories, and needed to breastfeed their babies, were allowed two hours off during the day, without having their pay docked.

Nina’s midwife called her in at eight forty-five in the morning. Outside, rain was hammering down through gutters and pouring along pavements. Puddles were reflecting the undersides of trees and patches of previously unnoticeable sky; fields were turning silver. Nina was lying on the hospital bed, the nails on her fingers and toes lacquered in an ever-changing configuration of stripes and dots and colours. She looked exhausted but serene, like Eva herself, back in Sarajevo, nonchalant but high, after a three-day trek across the forests of eastern Bosnia. Ruth, Nina’s mother, was clasping the baby’s tiny hand in her own. Her usually-severe face was suffused with relief. The baby. Eva gasped. She, too, felt giddy.

Outside, the rain kept falling. Zoe’s birth: the year of the floods.

JUDGE: In your submission to this inquiry, in paragraph 2, you have suggested that the arrival of Zoe caused friction in the family.

GEORGE: I was sitting my finals and wasn’t present for most of the family summits. But there was uproar. Typical Sebastian. My brother was always completely impulsive and irresponsible.

JUDGE: Zoe’s existence seems to have changed everything for Eva.

HENRY: Utter tosh. Completely untrue. My mother seemed to take the crisis in her stride. We all did.

JUDGE: Did you have much contact with your niece?

GEORGE: Look, she lived in the islands, I live in London, and whenever I visited she was . . . No, not much.