Xanthe had built up an armour of anger in her twenties, filled up the chinks in it with other people’s ideologies. The squat, the Utopia they’d naively thought they were building there, the demonstrations and the building of the movement, all that idiotic hope; that was the first of many solutions she thought she’d found that turned to rot. With a baby girl to protect, she had run, again and again, from the negative elements in her life: her former friends and lovers, even Dido’s father. Especially him. She began listening to what other women had to say; burned harder and hotter with anger than she’d thought possible. She worked in women’s shelters and shaved her head, tried half-heartedly to be a lesbian, kept Dido in dungarees and pudding-bowl haircuts until she cried that other children were bullying her, and felt no more peace for any of it.

Eight years ago, still looking for something, she had taken Dido on a pilgrimage. They had flown to Athens with their clothes tangled together in one long rucksack, Xanthe clutching Dido’s thin white limbs to her in the line of tall, tanned twenty-somethings queuing at the ferry port. Dido, who had never been out of London, seemed to shrink at first in the face of so much strangeness, retreating into Xanthe’s hips like she hadn’t done since she was a toddler. Xanthe had thought of herself at that age, the leggy boarding-school brat already well accustomed to flying solo, with a built-in understanding of her place in the world, flicking her fingers at the stewardesses in business class. Much better to be this scared little mouse, gripping her mother’s hand tight.

If it had been a true pilgrimage, Xanthe would have simply toured Dido round the glossy Athens apartment buildings they’d shuttled between as children. But she wasn’t interested in reconnecting with her parents or the life they’d given her. This was about Greece itself, and what it meant. Dido’s skin tanned gradually, in days puttering in rock pools or on the decks of ferries, chasing tiny lizards over stone; Xanthe bought a kohl pencil in a Kos chemist, long heavy earrings and a flowing white dress from a shop targeting hippy backpackers. She lined her eyes and held her head higher. They curled up together under white sheets in budget rooms with shared toilets, the too-sweet smell of sewage rising in the heat of the night. They took a joint decision to renounce vegetarianism, just for the time they were there, and ate calamari, octopus and lamb in tavernas, swooning at each other over the richness of the tastes. Dido picked up a basic vocabulary: yes and no, please and thank you, enough to make elderly waiters clutch their hearts and beam.