‘I go in the Friday before the opening. By then they’ll have built the new walls and painted everything. We’ll make sure the layout is right, the technicians will hang the prints, install the vitrines . . .’ Erica might be annoyed with Vee, she might be tired, but excitement is bubbling through her voice as she talks.

‘You’ve worked so hard.’ Vee used to work like this, but with only one job, not the two Erica is juggling, and without the complication of a family.

‘I have,’ Erica says, and just as Vee is thinking that she’s not sure she’s heard her take credit for herself before, Erica adds, ‘and I’ll take you round, a couple of days before, to see it all. If you’re sure you don’t want to come to the opening.’

‘I’m sure.’ It occurs to Vee that Erica has also had to manage Vee. ‘I suppose exhibitions are easier to curate when the photographer is dead,’ she says.

‘Vee!’ Erica sounds pained.

Oh. She should have thought of how Erica would interpret that. ‘I didn’t mean me! I was just thinking generally. If you’d been able to do this without—’ What is she trying to say? That once people are dead, their history is fixed, in that nothing can be added to it, they cannot try to skew it or protect it or take things away from it. Dead photographers don’t need to be looked after; they don’t need day trips to Greenham Common, they don’t refuse to come to opening nights. That’s all she meant. But Erica has taken it differently, is thinking, no doubt, of how much time Vee does not have, how close her own death might be. Vee doubts her own ability to explain this, though, so she says, ‘I’m sorry.’

Erica laughs, ‘You’re sorry?’

She deserved that. ‘For upsetting you. I didn’t mean—’

‘I know. But for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have prepared for this exhibition any other way.’

The tumour is definitely making Vee more emotional. ‘That means a great deal.’

Vee looks out of the window, and watches the landscape get gradually greener. She might never leave London again. She looks and looks. She has come to terms with a lot, these last weeks, but she cannot bear the thought of even a single day in an enforced darkness, not knowing who is near her, and maybe in pain.

The wheels eat the miles and Erica is quiet beside her. Vee is lulled into a sleepful waking by the movement, and the sound of three sets of breathing. She could easily have slept, if she had been willing to close her eyes.

When the car pulls to a stop, and Erica says, ‘We’re here!’, Tom laughs and Vee feels herself smile, surprised by her own pleasure at the sound.

18 October 1981

18 October 1981

Leonie