Erica isn’t going anywhere. ‘I want to know how the camera works!’

‘Not now,’ Ursula says.

Oh, but whether Erica is her mother’s daughter or her aunt’s daughter, she has their stubbornness. It’s like she’s grown roots: she’s immovable. ‘I want to know,’ she says, then pointing at Vee, ‘she said she’d tell me.’

‘Well?’ Ursula glares at Vee. Leonie titters. Ursula turns up the glare a notch, switches it to Leonie, who refuses to look away. The tension nests into Vee, making a pain in her temple, another under her heart.

Vee just wants this to end. She bends to Erica. ‘It’s to do with letting the light in in a controlled way, to make a chemical reaction that makes a photo. When I press the button on top it opens a sort of little door inside, and that lets the light on to the film, and that’s what makes the picture.’

Erica looks as though she is framing another question, but Ursula isn’t having this go on for a second longer than it has to. ‘Now you know,’ she says, and then she’s moving towards the door, Erica held firmly by the hand. Vee exhales, stretches; her body is full of knots, as though she’s spent a day on a job, instead of half an hour in a conservatory on a converted farmhouse in Dorking. She and Leonie look at each other as they listen to the footsteps slamming their way upstairs.

Leonie might be crying; it’s the fact that she is trying to hide it that makes Vee hurt. She asks quietly, ‘Did it bother you? Giving her away?’

Leonie shakes her head. ‘Nope. Babies aren’t interesting.’

‘The woman she’s going to be might be.’ Vee raises the camera to her face again. Leonie is gazing out into the garden: rain is starting to spit and spot on the window, the light is a more solid grey than it was. She’ll give it another ten minutes and then, if she needs to, she’ll put a light reflector on the floor, angle it to bounce the light up to Leonie’s face. The skylights should still be enough, though.

Leonie shrugs. ‘Well, you opted out of that too, as I recall.’

There aren’t many things that stop Vee when she’s focused on photographing, but this does; she looks at Leonie over the top of the camera. ‘You can’t seriously have wanted me to take your baby?’

‘The baby. A baby. Not my baby. They’re all just – bits of evolutionary necessity. And I’d rather you’d had it than she get brought up in pink ribbons by my fucking sister.’