No, she does mean it. This conversation really is happening. Vee takes a breath, a drink, a bite of sausage roll, just for the sake of making some space in her head and her heart. Does she want a baby? Need one? Her dad sometimes talks about how she’ll be ‘all on her own when I’ve gone’. She doesn’t think she minds. But she closes her eyes and thinks about the space in her body where, theoretically, her child could grow. It feels the same as it always does: a blank, rather than a yearning. Vee opted out of relationships somewhere around 1975, when the man she was seeing said that she loved her camera more than she loved him. She’d protested, but he was right. Darkrooms were better than dinner. Publication was better than sex. Being able to buy her own house with money she had earned was the proudest moment of her life. And, then, she had Leonie to love.

Vee has a vision of herself on a shoot, baby strapped to her front in one of those sling things, or maybe in a pram next to her, wailing and waving its arms as she tries to get a CEO to drop their professional guard, or a woman famous for her looks to stop posing and just be. It wouldn’t work. And anyway, if she did want a baby, she’d decide. Not hope that someone would give her a child the way her dad loads her car with the extra potatoes from the allotment. She says, gently, ‘I’m like you, Leonie. I don’t want – I’ve never really wanted a child. I just assumed that I would because that’s what the world told me.’ Thinks: you’re the one who showed me how to think differently about all that. She almost says so, but she doesn’t trust her voice to keep steady if she tries. And what they really need to talk about is Leonie. ‘You’re really serious? About giving it away?’

‘Oh, I’m serious, sister. What would I do with this?’ She puts a hand on her belly, briefly, and then takes it away, as though the child within has shaken her off.

‘And you’d give it to me?’

‘If you wanted it. So long as you promised not to give it to fucking Thatcher.’ Vee laughs, despite herself. But another feeling follows. In three months from now she could be responsible for another human being. If she wanted to be.

The old, gentle smile appears on Leonie’s face. She’s the woman Vee met at Dagenham, less scary than she is now, less unpredictable. ‘What is it, Vee?’