‘Quite right,’ Bea says, ‘you tell her.’ Leonie and Bea grin and Fen gets up, returning a few minutes later with four pints of cider. By then Leonie’s told her about the magazines she writes for, the stories that are coming up, the groups that are forming and the way that women are starting to make change happen for themselves, to organise, and Vee feels a fizz inside, something more than the martini and the cider she’s adding to it.

Fen and Bea leave after the second round; Vee and Leonie stay for another. As Bea and Leonie arrange to meet up later, they kiss, lip to lip, Bea’s hand, briefly, on Leonie’s throat.

‘You can stop staring,’ Leonie says.

‘Sorry,’ Vee says, and the cider, helpfully, adds, ‘it’s just that I’ve never met lesbians before. I think you’re my first lesbians.’

Leonie laughs, ‘I doubt it,’ she says, ‘and anyway, I’m not a lesbian. I just go with women some of the time. The rest of the time, I go with men. But, on behalf of the lesbians, hello.’ And Leonie leans forward and kisses Vee on the mouth. There’s a chorus of whistling from the journalists at the bar; Leonie gives them a V-sign and they laugh. Vee doesn’t know which is worse: the kiss, the odd soft buzz of it, or the feeling of being drunk, or the centre-of-attention discomfort that having a camera usually protects her from.

‘I’ve got a fiancé,’ she says, ‘we’ve been going steady since we were fifteen.’ Because one thing she is certain of: you can flirt (whatever Leonie says), but you don’t want to be a tease. And that must apply to lesbians too.

‘Good for you,’ Leonie says, with a smile Vee doesn’t really like. One of the crowd at the bar brings two more pints over. Leonie tells him to sod off, and he responds by telling her to sod off herself. From this, Vee gathers that they know each other. One of the strangest things about working at the paper is how rude everyone is to each other. Vee’s dad is a great believer in good manners and the result of this, for Vee, is that she spends most of her working life being either mocked for her politeness or shocked into silence by the casual, inconsequential rudeness of her colleagues. She cannot imagine what would provoke her father into telling anyone to ‘sod off’. And if he knew she was in a pub, talking to someone who uses the word ‘prick’ in public, he would not be happy.

‘He wants us to get married next year,’ Vee adds.