JUDGE: Why didn’t Eva do this on Cwen?

INGA: [Pause] Cwen is a holy island. It has a long and sacred female history. AWC is a business. The whisky distillery women tried to persuade Eva to let them use Cwen spring water for their products, but she refused. Anyhow, getting the nuns to manage it was the master stroke. Sister Brigid and Sister Geraldine, principally; Lucija is now in charge of the new retreat at the convent.

Most of the clientele of the Archipelago Women’s Club were well-to-do mainlanders, and the spa-hotel acquired quite a name in Edinburgh, Durham, and Glasgow. The rules were that island women could buy discounted membership; that any man was welcome to stay during the week as long as he was accompanied by a woman; but each weekend, from Friday at five until Monday at ten, the house was reserved for women only.

Queenie’s daughter, a graphic designer, provided the branding. She adapted one of the Neolithic carvings from the chambered cairn on Cwen, an elongated V; and the colour scheme (Precambrian grey, seal brown, gorse yellow). Queenie herself hired the chef – a Spaniard who had trained under someone famous in California. ‘Vagina tart’ is the kitchen’s popular hit: a bisected plum or fig lapped by an eggy bay-leaf custard.

Eva conceived the events and classes (Yoga, Dance, Massage: Tantric, Vedic, Celtic) partly as a joke, but patrons loved them.

INGA: I found it depressing, to be honest. A capitalist version of the original Bean commune.

JUDGE: Are there any profits?

INGA: Oh yes. Queenie and Eva receive salaries as directors but all profits go straight to the Islands of Women Foundation.

During the early women-only weekends, Eva sent all her women to stay there. Their only penalty was to fill in ‘Satisfaction Surveys’. The sheets are like cream, one of them wrote; I lay naked in bed feeling the wind-dried cotton lap at my epidermis, wrote another. Ooooh, wrote a third.

Eva took Zoe, too, to witness female solidarity.

ZOE: Solidarity? Female triumph. Female sheer enjoyment of luxury.

That night in the pool there were nine or ten women, all naked, and Zoe. She was probably twelve by then; quiet. Self-consciousness had dawned even if puberty hadn’t.

ZOE: The sight of those women was a shock. I had no idea that women were so different from each other, under their island uniform of jeans and jacket.

Naked breasts. Dimply, hairy, smooth, taut, saggy; vast brown patches around the nipples, pink points, freckly. A whole new landscape.

ZOE: One of them was pregnant. The skin on her stomach was stretched so tight I thought I might be able to see the baby.