She gets to her feet. Sweat sits in the small of her back; her arse is damp from the ground. Indoors is better. ‘I need to get on with the job,’ she says, and looks around for Vee. She’s probably got enough material to work with, from what she’s seen and what she’s been told; she’ll keep her views to herself, and quote the stuff that’s been said about solidarity and women needing to protect the planet because no fucker else is going to. (She won’t say fucker.) And what she hasn’t actually heard she can make up. It’s not like she doesn’t know what these conversations are. Christ knows she’s been part of them for long enough.

Vee’s nowhere in sight and Leonie is thinking of heading back to the car. She spends so much time on her own these days that even an hour of this sort of sociability tires her, makes her shoulders ache with the effort of not curling in around herself. But then another voice calls her name, and she turns to see Bea.

In the Dagenham days, when they had their little fling, Bea had always given the impression of playing at being a feminist, and Leonie wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d married her own trust fund to another and gone off to the country, limiting her Good Works to local charities, if she bothered at all. But no, Bea had surprised her. She’d done a PhD on the feminist movement as a reaction to poverty, rather than patriarchy; spent a few years teaching in the US; come back and is running a department at a London university, where she gets her way with a combination of charm and refusing to listen to anyone who disagrees with her. Bea hugs her; Leonie clings to the embrace.

‘Hey,’ Bea says. ‘What brings you here?’

‘An article. Veronica Moon is doing the photos.’

‘Oh yes.’ Bea looks around. ‘She took some at the meeting we were having. I’m just down for a couple of days.’

‘Were you there at Dagenham? When we met her?’ Leonie doesn’t know why she’s talking about Vee, unless it’s that she doesn’t want to talk about herself. Not to the towering feminist achievement that is Bea, anyway.

‘Oh God, yes, I’d forgotten! She was very – new, wasn’t she?’ Bea says. ‘What else is happening? What have you been doing? It’s been – how long has it been? I feel like I hit thirty-five and everything just accelerated.’

Leonie shrugs. ‘I wrote some books. Nobody wants them.’

‘Why not?’ Bea looks concentrated, all of a sudden. She was always the one with Sellotape, a spanner and a spare pair of knickers in her handbag. She mostly used the spanner to break things. She could do a lot of damage to a porn shop.