Vee holds her gaze. She’s impressed by this woman – the unapologetic way she goes about what she sees as her business, her bravado – but she’s fought for her career, such as it is, and before that she fought for her place on a photography course where she was the only woman. ‘So what do I do? What you tell me?’

Bea laughs, a wet splutter. ‘She’s got you there, Leonie.’ Then, to Vee, ‘You need to keep her in her place. Stand up for yourself. It’s not just the men who are the oppressors.’

Leonie has the grace to laugh too, and then she looks at Bea, slides her hand under the table and squeezes her thigh. Vee feels herself blush as she realises what she’s seeing. It took her a moment to recognise flirting out of its usual context. And then Leonie turns back to her, ‘I didn’t mean to sound patronising. What I was trying to say was that women have learned to get what they want from men by wheedling around them. But actually, we have the right to ask.’

Vee nods. ‘It’s easier, though. Ain’t it?’

‘It’s easier to work for seventy per cent of what men get paid than to strike,’ Leonie counters, ‘but if we’re satisfied with that – we’re never going to get anywhere, are we?’

‘No,’ Vee agrees, and then she thinks about her dad, how he would order a drink at the bar for a woman if those were the rules, ‘but those blokes just wanted to help us out, didn’t they?’ She’s drinking too quickly, and she didn’t have breakfast. The alcohol is going straight to her head. She feels as though this is an important conversation, but she can’t hold on to the threads of it for long enough to work out why. It relates to the feeling she had, earlier, photographing the women on the picket line; that there’s something else going on in the world, that she has a job greater than trying to be taken seriously.

Someone-beginning-with-F is tittering, saying something to Bea in a voice too low for Vee to catch. Leonie hears it, though. ‘Shut it, Fen. Everyone needs to learn. It’s hard to see how pervasive the patriarchy is when you’ve grown up in it.’

‘I’m not Eliza Doolittle, you know,’ Vee says. She wants to say, ‘I’m not sodding Eliza Doolittle’, but her dad doesn’t like her swearing. And though that’s probably patriarchist (that might not be the word, Vee thinks) of him, she loves him, and he’s all she’s got, apart from Barry. He might not be exactly on board with women’s lib but he’s always been on her side, always taught her things she wanted to know and encouraged her to follow her career.