Taught by J R R Tolkien, Renault could have gone in a different direction: an early novel about medieval fantasy was later destroyed – no Game of Thrones prequel here. She castigated herself for writing of “knights bashing about in some never-never land”. Instead Renault trained as a nurse, and treated casualties of the Second World War, including those fresh from Dunkirk. Her work on the ward would give her words on the page a direct and intimate viscerality. Passages describing war wounds and the male body, both before and after trauma, have a sharp, steely truth to them. The sheltered graduate quickly learnt of man’s capacity for rapacious inhumanity. But her nursing profession also offered Renault a lifelong love: Julie Mullard, the woman with whom she would move to South Africa in 1949 and live in a “partyish” beach house called Delos until she died.