Over the next half hour, Zoe, sitting very still with the tray of vol-au-vent on her knees, learnt several melancholy/unholy things: that Octavia had never counted the numbers of shoes she owned; nor had she admitted to George the number of handbags in her possession. The three most expensive, made of animal skins so rare it was a form of bad luck even to utter their names, she kept in the safe in her office in London. So tiny and beautiful, they rarely saw the light of day, and yet even in the office, the feeling one got – fingertips running over something scaly, cheek pressed to predator flank, nose inhaling rainforest interstitched with savannah – was, in some months, the most sensual pleasure that Octavia derived from her life as a thirty-seven-year-old PR executive, wife, and mother of children aged eight and five. The handbags smelt and felt like impeccable taste, elegance, comportment, success, and all the other things which it was impossible to teach, and which Octavia, upon regarding her grubby-faced daughter Polly, who at eight favoured Gap sweatshirts over smocked dresses, despaired of passing on. Also, with two mucky children, and a husband into countryside pursuits, it made sense to keep spoilable purchases away from jam-smeared fingers, muddy gumboots, bottles of gun-cleaning fluid and leaking felt-tips. The pieces she chose to expose to the coarse environment of home were made from cows, lamb and other animals so common the islands were full of them; in fact, now that one thought about it, fields themselves were nothing more than shopfronts of little mobile handbags. Octavia laughed. The other items were too expensive for everyday life: which gave rise to the existential issue of there not being enough days left in Octavia’s life to do their exquisite workmanship justice. The thing she dreaded most was them falling, one by one, out of fashion.

TARA: It saddens me how Eva allowed frivolous people, such as her daughters-in-law, into her house, and said nothing about their conspicuous consumption—

JUDGE: Eva couldn’t outlaw frivolity.

TARA: It’s not just frivolity. It’s the insidious way in which women are held down. At the college Eva actually ran a campaign against handbags, pro pockets in women’s clothing. She wanted the students to learn to see something seemingly innocuous and irrelevant like a handbag, as part of something larger and much more sinister: the way women are prevented from having their hands free to defend themselves, or make things. Men’s clothing always has loads of pockets. Men don’t carry handbags, because handbags are annoying. So men reap the benefits of two million years of evolution. That was why Homo sapiens learnt to stand up: to have their hands free. It’s just one example of women’s fetters. And Eva knew all this, and had a handbag obsessive to stay, and said nothing.

JUDGE: This seems excessive to me. What could she have said?