Leonie sighs. ‘Tell me about Thatcher. If it really is funny. I could do with a laugh. Then I’ll tell you my news.’

‘Are you sure?’ Leonie doesn’t usually opt to go second, either. But she nods, and picks up the sausage roll.

‘We were on Parliament Hill. They chose the location. Good light, but it’s windy up there this morning. And Thatcher was – well, like a lot of these people—’ Leonie raises an eyebrow. ‘Famous people. Polite, but a bit distant. They’ve had their photo taken a lot and they just want to get it over with. Anyway, I started taking photos, but she was worried about her hair, kept putting her hand up to her head.’

Leonie laughs, ‘I’d have thought you’d need a gale to shift it.’

‘I’d already got her to take her hat off.’ Vee had suggested to the Prime Minister that it was going to blow away, so it was a good idea to remove it. But Vee hadn’t wanted it in the shot – it was an ugly thing, a sort of pillbox but a bit too tall. ‘She gave it to one of her security people, and he stood there holding it as though it was a cake.’ Vee holds out her hands in a mime, straightens her spine, and Leonie laughs again. It’s such a pleasure to Vee to hear it. Being with Leonie is still one of the best things in her life. She is like an old cat that scratches and bites, but is worth suffering for the memory of her warmth. Not that she is old. But she seems to be ageing faster than anyone else Vee knows.

‘I thought she might relax after that, but she still looked . . . it wasn’t right. I was shooting but I knew that what I was getting was the same as every other official photograph of her. You know.’

Leonie nods. ‘Constipated headmistress.’

‘Yes,’ Vee says, ‘exactly. And when she smiled it was worse. Constipated headmistress pretending to enjoy a school pantomime.’ Leonie splutters cider. ‘And then the wind caught a bit of her hair – a chunk of it, really, because it was sprayed solid – and she said, “I don’t want to look unkempt.” So I took the scarf you gave me out of my hair—’

‘My scarf?’

‘That’s right. From Dagenham.’ It’s been in Vee’s camera bag ever since then, as much as a part of her kit as her light meter.

‘You still have that?’

Vee nods. ‘Of course,’ she says, ‘I use it to keep my hair off my face when it’s windy.’

‘Are you going to tell me you gave it to Thatcher?’ Leonie’s smile is getting wider by the second.