SHE TAKES THE train from Gospel Oak to Camden Road. It is full, this Saturday afternoon, packed with families heading home from the Heath. Children scream and cry, their faces pink and smeared with the remains of sunscreen and ice cream and picnic leftovers, their parents exhausted and sun kissed, a couple of bottles down. Women her age, fresh from the Ladies’ Pond, the ends of their hair damp. At Camden she manages to find a seat. The heat is terrible, the day overdone. Beside her, a teenager, the whites of his eyes red, blasts music from his headphones.

The train empties out at Hackney Central and Lissa makes her way across the park. Here—the province of the young—things are just getting going, the barbecues cranking up, people in groups of five or ten or twenty, the drift of cigarette smoke and charcoal and weed and the undertow of booze and soda and the night to come. She passes two young women, skirts hitched to their waists, holding on to each other and cackling as they pee behind a tree.

Her flat is just adjacent to the park, in the basement of the old house. She moved down here when she was still with Declan, who gave her the money for the deposit and helped her with rent. Since the breakup she has managed to hang on to it through a precarious combination of her life modeling, the call center work, the occasional acting job, and some tax credits to top it off. She has stumbled through, has survived. Just.

Inside it is mercifully cool, and she drops her bag in the tiny hall, goes into the kitchen, fills a glass, and drinks down water from the tap. On the other side of the garden wall, someone is being sung to—Happy Birthday, sing the half-cut voices, to youuuuuuuuu!!!

She lies down in the bedroom and shuts her eyes. Her head hurts—from the alcohol, from her mother, from the sun. We changed the world for you and what have you done with it?

She knows what Sarah thinks. That she has wasted time—fumbled the baton in the intergenerational feminist relay.

What she should have said—Our best. We’re just doing our fucking best.

The tinny blare of music from the park is irritating her. She goes next door to the living room, closing the blinds against the low sun.

She slides a DVD from her bag—Autumn Sonata. Sarah had a copy in the dusty TV room, a Bergman box set. The cover is an intense close-up of the two actresses. She weighs the DVD for a moment in her hand, then takes it and her computer over to the couch and slides it in.