There’s a pause. Vee opens her eyes, looks towards the window, the light. When she speaks, her mouth hardly moves, as though she is trying to keep her jaw still. ‘That’s depressing. Women of your age, your education and means getting swept up. It’s the opposite of what the movement was fighting for.’

This again. If Erica doesn’t start to confront it, she will be trampled. She won’t be able to look Tom or Marcus in the eye when she gets home, as it is. ‘Weren’t you fighting for the right not to be judged? It sometimes seems to me that you only wanted that in theory. I get judged every which way, and much more by women than by men.’ She thinks of Marcus’s mother, Sarah, who considers it shocking that she employs a weekly cleaner. An older former colleague told her that she was letting the side down by having a baby. Whereas most of the men she works with couldn’t give a toss about her childcare arrangements or the moral compromises she has made, so long as she turns up when she’s supposed to. ‘You would say you spent the seventies fighting for women’s freedom but that only seems to be true if we are the right sort of free.’

‘That’s probably a fair point,’ Vee says, after a pause so long Erica thought she was ignoring her.

Erica can’t help but nod, with a kind of ‘ha!’ abruptness.

They stand in silence for a moment, then another. Erica goes to the table and leafs through the photographs again. It’s the first time in a long time that her aunt has seemed more than an abstract figure, the family icon/tragedy. ‘She looks . . . dynamic. And angry, a lot of the time. My aunt.’

Vee half-laughs, an affectionate, remembering sound. ‘She was. We all were, to an extent, in that we were all trying to make changes, and we were aware of how unjust the world was, and we couldn’t believe it wasn’t changing faster. If you’d told me then that I was going on this march today, I’d have written you off as a pessimist. Leonie would have hauled you over the coals for not believing in the power of the sisterhood.’ She smiles, looking straight at Erica for the first time today. ‘Do you want to call a cab while I put my boots on?’

‘Are you up to it?’

‘I have no idea,’ Vee says, ‘but I sorted out my camera last night, so I’ll give it a try.’