‘We’ve got the women out there bringing Ford to a standstill, because for all their production lines and big swinging bollocks, those men can’t make cars without seats – and the women are the only people who know how to do it. We’re getting power. We deserve power.’

Vee feels her head nodding. ‘Yes we do,’ she says.

Leonie balances her roll-up on the ashtray, takes off her cardigan. The peace badge on it clatters against the edge of the table. Vee catches, unexpectedly, the scent of lavender; then a glimpse of unshaven armpit. There are jokes, of course, about women with hairy armpits, but Vee has always imagined they are an exaggeration, a cliché. Because surely having clean, smooth armpits is the same as having clean teeth or brushed hair? Vee feels something close to queasy, and at the same time she wants to put her finger in it, just to see how it feels. Her own armpits have been scraped smooth once a week for as long as she can remember. It’s just what you do. Her friend Patty’s mum had showed them both how, the summer they were fifteen. Leaning back against the wall behind her, Leonie asks, ‘Why do you like taking photographs?’

She just does. She always has. After Betty’s wedding, whenever her dad got out his precious Contax rangefinder on holidays and at Christmas, she asked and asked until she was allowed to use it, then she asked and asked until she got a camera of her own.

Leonie’s gone back to smoking, and though she’s watching Vee, she doesn’t seem impatient for an answer. Oh, this is pleasure: not to feel compelled to say something clever, fast, not to have to dive into a silence, say anything, if there is to be any hope of being heard. If work were like this, she might get further, faster.

‘I think,’ she says, ‘I like being able to control what I see. What other people see, when they look at my photos. I can tell the story how I see it. But nobody knows I’m doing it. Not really. They think the camera never lies, don’t they?’ The black box of the viewfinder that holds the whole world, in that instant: the way that, in moving the camera, or zooming in, just a little, she can change the story, make something else important – that’s what Vee likes. Well, one of the things. Leonie nods, and then she seems to wait for more.