She’s sure she did. But she also feels as though she’s being – what’s the expression they use now, for when the rules change and you’re made to think you’re wrong – gaslighted. ‘Did you tell me? If we’re getting out from under the patriarchy are we not owning what we’re feeling? Telling our truth? Where was yours?’

Leonie wipes at her face; it’s not tears, but sweat, on her skin, but her voice has true hurt in it. ‘Would you have listened? You could have tried a bit harder.’

‘You could have been honest about what you needed,’ Vee says. She can hear tears in her own voice.

‘Didn’t you think it would be hard?’

It’s the she-devil and the sea. ‘Didn’t you think that me thinking it was hard was undermining everything you had taught me about women and motherhood?’

She reaches for her friend’s hand. Leonie’s skin is clammy. ‘You’re cold,’ she says.

‘You were always cold.’ Leonie smiles as she says it, so although that ought to hurt it’s a comfort, a return to familiar ground. This is how Leonie talks. Vee gets up. Although her body is used to moving into uncomfortable shapes for the sake of a shot, and to staying beyond comfort in squats and stretches, today she’s aching. Maybe it’s the tension, creeping into the creases in her body, solidifying there.

‘You were always impossible to contradict,’ Vee replies, ‘and anyway, if I was a man, being cold would be good.’

Leonie laughs, and Vee takes her camera out again. She takes a photograph, another, as her friend sits back in her chair, eyes closed, half a smile on her face. She looks like a lazy, self-satisfied cat; the only one who knows where the cream is. The sun has come out; it’s moved higher in the sky and beams down through the skylight, so Leonie is lit sharply, brightly, an uncompromising strength in her face. And Vee understands that this is the way to take her friend’s photograph: to let the details of her face show, the bags under the eyes and the blotches on her neck, the way her temples shine. Because this is how she would photograph a man. Every line and blemish. On a man, it would be character, not flaw.

‘Look at me,’ she says, ‘like I’m Thatcher.’

Leonie smiles, opens her eyes, then leans forward, a little, her face all fury. ‘You owe me, you fucking scarf snatcher.’ Click. Leonie will look mad as hell and only they will know what the joke is. Vee grins. ‘Now look at me like you’re Thatcher.’

Leonie holds up a hand, still smiling. ‘Enough’s enough, Vee.’