“I’m not testy, I’m just—you might as well be accurate, if you’re going to pass judgment.”

“I say poor Hannah, because I know she’s been trying to have a baby for years. Trying and failing to have a baby. And I can’t think of anything worse.”

“Really? What about trying and failing to have a career?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“No, really.” Her mother’s eyes are sharp now; she has caught the scent of something. “What do you mean? Do you mean yourself? Is that how you feel, darling?”

“Yes. No. Actually no. Forget it. Let’s just forget it. Please. This is nice. Let’s not spoil it.”

“All right.” Sarah reaches down, scoops Ruby onto her lap, strokes her skull with an absent hand. There is quiet, the sound of Ruby’s motorboat purring. Lissa finishes the last of her food.

“Your generation,” her mother says quietly. “Honestly. You baffle me, you really do.”

“And why is that?” Lissa pushes away her bowl.

“Well. You’ve had everything. The fruits of our labor. The fruits of our activism. Good god, we got out there and we changed the world for you. For our daughters. And what have you done with it?”

The question hangs, heavy in the summer air. Sarah closes her eyes, as though summoning something from the depths.

“When I was at Greenham. Standing there with thousands of other women. Hand-in-hand around the base. You were there, beside me. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

A dusty campsite. A fence, covered with children’s toys. Other children who knew all the words to all the songs. Ruddy-faced women huddled beneath tarpaulin drinking endless cups of tea. Her mother’s friends: Laurie and Ina and Caro and Rose. No men. The only men were the soldiers who patrolled on the other side of the wall, their guns held against their chests.

She remembers a terrible blue dawn when the police came and dragged her mother out of the tent by her hair.

She remembers crying, asking to go home. Sarah taking her to a phone booth and calling Lissa’s father, who came to get her in his black Volvo. She remembers the look on Sarah’s face as her father drove away. The disappointment. As though she had expected more.

“We fought for you. We fought for you to be extraordinary. We changed the world for you and what have you done with it?”

Lissa stares at the wall where the wisteria fights for space with the ivy.

“I’m sorry,” she says, a tight, familiar feeling rising in her chest. “If I let you down.”

“Oh god,” says Sarah, grinding out her cigarette in the remains of her lunch. “Don’t be so bloody dramatic. That’s not what I meant at all.”