Leonie feels around in her pockets, pulls out a tin and starts to roll a cigarette. She, Bea and Fen had been smoking Bea’s Benson & Hedges before. Vee had declined. She has tried smoking, with some of the typists from work who gather around their pooled copies of Marie Claire and My Weekly at lunchtimes: she just doesn’t like it. It makes the inside of her mouth hot, unpleasantly tingly. She can say the same thing about kissing women now. Maybe. Though everything, the first time, is more strange than anything else. ‘What do you think about that?’ Leonie asks.

Vee says, ‘I don’t know. I think we should wait a bit longer. He says I can keep working, and all that. At least until we have a baby. But he says we don’t need to do that straightaway.’

‘Does he? That’s good of him.’

Vee knows that Leonie is being sarcastic, and she can see that, for a lot of women, that sort of situation would be sad; they would be wasting their capabilities. But Leonie doesn’t know Barry. Barry’s mother has never worked, and she’s always making digs about Vee’s ‘little job’, like it’s a joke. But Barry takes Vee seriously. ‘He wants me to have a career. He thinks it should be normal for women to have serious jobs, not just work for pin money.’

Leonie takes a drag on her cigarette. ‘What do you want? Surely that’s the question.’

‘Me?’ Before she got here, Vee had been thinking that she has all that she wants, really. Her job isn’t perfect, but she can learn, and even if she is going to have to work her way up and earn respect, she’ll get there. She has enough money coming in, and Dad’s happy, and Barry’s happy. But sitting here, in a pub where the same people have been sitting on the same barstools for what looks like fifty years, and where close by, women in short dresses are shouting for their rights, like they really believe they deserve it, she’s no longer sure that what she has is happiness. If you see a wrong, right it, her dad says when he picks up other people’s litter from the pavement outside their gate.

‘Yes, you. There’s no one else here that I’m talking to, honey.’

‘I want . . .’ Vee senses that only her most audacious dreaming will be good enough for Leonie. ‘I want to take photographs that mean something to people.’

No, that’s not it. All photographs mean something to someone. Her first efforts, blurred line-ups of family and a shaky shot of a birthday cake, are terrible attempts at capturing moments, but that didn’t stop Dad from sticking them in an album.

She tries again.