It’s why we’re all so clever, Ruth liked to say. The fish; not the whisky.

Ruth was proud of having joined the police service at the age of just nineteen. She named her own daughter, Nina, after the suffragette who founded the first Women’s Police Service. Nina was proud of very little. She had spent her entire working life to date – bar the significant short stint in the Hope and Anchor pub which gave rise to Zoe – in the bakery at Lerston. It was a family business, Nina Brock the only outsider. Sometimes she worked in the bakery shop, sometimes in the bakery itself, and sometimes in an adjacent room, armed with a big syringe, with which she injected strawberry jam into row upon row of sugared doughnuts. In the bakery, her mother wore a white buttoned coat, like a nurse, and this had given six-year-old Zoe the impression that Nina was engaged in work of critical, clinical importance. She was disabused of this notion as a matter of course; it ceased to exist as naturally as a hymen breaking.

Zoe was well used to the whispers as she crouched down by the penny-sweet counter in the post office, calculating how to divide her weekend quota. Opaque, sugar-covered babies. ‘Harry Harcourt-Vane, such a good constituency MP, always answers letters, always drops in when he comes to the islands; must be a bit of an embarrassment, the connection with Nina Brock.’ Yellow flying saucers. ‘She’s never wanted for anything, if she hadn’t got pregnant what would she have done?’ Sherbet-coated snakes. But then the island gossip changed. Strawberry bootlaces. ‘An absolute travesty in this day and age, leaving Nina and Ruth to raise that girl alone, in that draughty police accommodation, he should have married her, look at him with his foreign black wife—’ White and yellow fried eggs. Ruth would have none of it. Pink and white mushrooms. ‘We have no need of a man around. God save us.’ Fizzy cola bottles.

Zoe developed her own opinions. Her father and she were definitely to blame for her mother’s physical decline/departed beauty. Nina Brock had only briefly been pretty: Zoe was able to judge this for herself from the photographs her mother stashed away haphazardly in a box behind the TV. The photos divided into three: Nina the chubby, lost-looking child; Nina the teenager, pretty as a peach; Nina the mother: overweight/bit stressed/could-be-happier.

REPORTER: Today at the inquiry, the issue of your mother’s weight was discussed. Isn’t body positivity what feminists are working to promote?

ZOE: The tyranny of the female gaze; one of our blindspots.

The pretty phase ended about three years after Zoe’s birth. Zoe raised this subject only once with Ruth. Her grandparent turned stern; explained that if you added up the hours which the average woman spent obsessing with her appearance, you understood why men had all the power.