‘I’m not sure. I’ve read The Women’s Room.’ Vee starts to search her memory for what she thought about it. She remembers it was a fat book, and she read it on a flight to Kuala Lumpur, when she was on the way to Australia to photograph Barry Humphreys as Dame Edna Everage for the Spectator. She thinks she might have got bored somewhere in the middle of the story. It had definitely made her glad to be single.

But Leonie doesn’t want to talk about The Women’s Room. ‘Well, if this’ – she nods downwards – ‘is a girl, I’m going to call her Erica. After Erica Jong.’

‘Who?’ Vee definitely knows the name. Leonie narrows her lips, her eyes, somewhere between impatience and disappointment in Vee’s failure to keep up. ‘She wrote Fear of Flying. Which I gave to you when it came out in 1973. And you definitely didn’t read it, because I found it in the flat when you moved out. It hadn’t been opened.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Sure you are.’ Leonie leans back, and says, as though she’s delivering a great punchline, ‘If you’d read it you’d know I’m calling this kid Erica because she is a result of a zipless fuck.’

Vee almost asks whether she knows who the father is, but she doesn’t trust herself to do it without sounding prim. Instead, she offers, ‘I can help you to find an adoption agency. If you like.’

‘Thanks. But there’s no hurry. I’m going to talk to my sister. She might be useful for once in her life.’ Ursula, organised and serene, seems to Vee to be exactly the sort of person to deal with adoption agencies on Leonie’s behalf. The responsibility for Leonie that was starting to descend on her dissolves.

16 May 1979

16 May 1979

Pimlico, London

Vic Whistler asked for the shoot to be at his home, and Vee agreed, not least because she’s been asked to shoot DJs at work before and the lighting in a radio studio is not impossible, but it’s not easy. Small, sealed, dark-ish spaces are a pain to light, even if you like using flash, and there’s never enough room for the kit. So she’s done shoots outside the buildings, with the signs in the background, and there have been interruptions and distractions, plenty of them, not least from the young women who see DJs as some sort of accessible pop star. It’s taken twice as long as it needs to, and she’s gone home feeling ragged and unsure about what she’s got. There’s always been a good photograph in there, but she likes to feel more certain.