Vee has found a table in the corner. At the next table along sits a couple, hands joined, a copy of Love’s Labour’s Lost between them; Erica can only see the back of his head, but she is animated, laughing, saying something about apples. It’s cheering and depressing in equal measure. When did Erica last see a play, or hold Marcus’s hand over a table? (When did she want to?) And why is she even thinking about such things – such trivial things – when the woman opposite her is dying?

‘Your photographs,’ she says, because she needs to say something about them, ‘they are so important. To everyone.’ Not least because Vee pointed her camera, when she could, at the unnoticed, and the unimportant. That’s what makes her Greenham archive so special. Everyone who was there knew that they were all changing the world: Vee captured that like no one else. And those women in the shelters, beaten by their husbands, had no recourse to the law, but they had a record of what had happened to them with Vee’s unflinching images. Erica had almost cried when she’d unpacked the envelopes Vee had couriered over to her: contact sheets of unidentified women, photographed with bruises flowering across their faces. And more, from later, when Vee returned and took photographs when these victims were happy and whole again.

Vee makes a gesture that Erica has learned means ‘I choose not to engage with that’: a slight pushing out of the lower lip, a dip of the head a fraction to her left. Instead of replying, she asks, ‘And what did you think of your first taste of activism?’

‘It was – I can’t believe I did it. I’m the most law-abiding person there is.’

‘You look more cheerful than you have done all morning,’ Vee says, with a smile that tells Erica that it’s OK to not talk about dying.

Erica laughs, a release of tension as much as anything else. ‘It was weird. I was so angry when I thought that policeman was having a go. And the next thing I knew I was in handcuffs.’

‘They didn’t charge you, though?’

‘No.’ She often thinks of those few hours, the fear and the excitement, the waiting with the other women and the smell of old sweat and industrial cleaning fluid, but it’s nothing, really, in the scheme of what people like Vee and Leonie did. ‘It must all seem tame to you,’ she says.

‘I never got arrested,’ Vee says, ‘at least, I don’t think I did. There are – holes, I suppose you would call them, in my memories.’

‘Holes? That must be awful.’