TARA: I guess she could have been bolder about articulating how women are hampered by society, by being valued for the wrong things? It is frustrating, because in other areas of her life she fought for female solidarity. When it came to her own family, she was really inconsistent.

If Ruth was hurt or annoyed by the outlandish things Zoe talked of when she returned from Harcourt House – Virginia Woolf, again; the ice-cream parlour called Egipat in Sarajevo; vagina carvings on Neolithic rocks – there was little she could do. The mother and father had ceded all control, and thus did the child learn to interpret the world: through the eighteenth-century window glass of Harcourt House, with its slight green tinge and ripple, its elevated vista; through the dense black mirror of the Oaklands Close television, the coloured-glass front door, the windscreen of a police vehicle.

RUTH: It could’ve been worse.

Ruth: the first island girl to make DCI.

By the time she got to secondary school, Zoe had begun to wonder: How is it that Granny R got emancipated? How is it that my mother appears not to care? She asked nobody directly. She made discreet enquiries. She came to these conclusions:

i) My mum has no island-pride because of the way I was conceived.

ii) Granny R is so fiery due to a teacher at her Astrid school, who, in the early 1970s, thought she saw in her fourteen-year-old pupil a candidate for university. (Except that Ruth Brock had set her heart on joining the police force.) And also to a nameless lover from over the water, about whom nothing further shall be spoken. (Except to say that he fathered Nina, was encouraged to disappear, and made Ruth appreciate the impudence of men.)

Absent grandfathers were one thing. Entering her middle-teens, embarking on her GCSEs, the thing most on Zoe’s mind was her own f—

WOEFULLY NOT THERE

Not having sufficient access to one of her own, Zoe spent her mid-childhood in deep study of other people’s. Her friend Kath’s dad, who worked as a ‘traditional island builder’, and took off his tool-belt only as he approached the table for tea, lectured Kath and Zoe on the importance of trying hard at science, and seemed a figure of impossible kindness and compassion. (Her own father never suggested that she try hard at anything at all.) Staying over at Kath’s, she watched their family rituals as if she was David Attenborough and they a pride of lions. She observed their feeding times, their argumentative-playful conversation, their attitude to schoolwork, weekends, and school-night television. Kath’s dad, for example, took no part in the preparation of food but always praised it, and was always on washing-up duty after. Pauline Parker’s, by contrast, was tall, with spiky blonde hair and an earring, and cooked one of his four special dishes every Tuesday, Friday, Saturday: macaroni cheese, cauliflower cheese with cherry tomatoes, feta and spinach filo pastry pie, spaghetti bolognese made from island beef. Zoe had tried them all. The bolognese was most complicated and required most swearing.