I’ve spent ages staring at that photo, hoping Evelyne can tell me something about what happened back then; hoping I can glean some information that would help. She’s the reason Mum was here in 1976, so maybe she knows something. She might even still be here. But so far I’ve found nothing about her online, and my scouring of the British Library only turned up a brief mention of her in a book about feminism in Europe. It seems she didn’t have much of an impact on the world beyond Switzerland, but I know how much Mum admired her when they met back then, because it’s evident in this article, which I downloaded from the newspaper’s online archive after much scouring of past issues. When I finally found it, I was overwhelmed to see it, to read the words Mum wrote about these women fighting for rights I know I take for granted, to see what she saw through the photos she took herself.

Mum was here. And while she was, something happened that changed the entire course of my life. Perhaps, if I can summon the courage, the next eight weeks will help me finally figure out what that was.

MARCH 1976 Lausanne, Switzerland

SYLVIA

Was Paris really the last time she was abroad? Sylvia recalled her student year at the Sorbonne with a rush of nostalgia for those walks by the Seine, coffee in smoky cafes, wine-fuelled dinners in the Marais, lectures on Sartre and Camus and Molière. It was only three years ago but seemed like an age, although she remembered the feeling it gave her so well – a voracious desire to devour everything she saw, to lap up every new experience, to revel in the sense of freedom being abroad gave her. Sylvia hadn’t realised until now, walking through customs in Geneva, how badly she’d needed that again.

The train swept her along the length of Lake Geneva until the guard announced their arrival at Lausanne station in three languages. She stepped off the train and walked through a fug of cigarette smoke spiralling up to the high ceiling of the station concourse. She took a cab up the steep hill to the Hôtel de la Paix, a grand old building offering a glorious view of the lake far below. Not that she could see it from her room, of course, a pokey cube whose only window faced onto a building on a side street. Janice had warned her. Budget’s limited, love, this is the best you get. Like hell it was. But Sylvia was abroad, on a foreign commission – the room could be in a shed for all she cared.