Maybe it’s their laughter that brings Erica back to the door; when Vee looks that way, she’s standing, quiet and still, taking everything in. She decides to ignore her. Erica can watch, and Vee will claim ignorance if Ursula tries to tick them all off again. She puts a finger to her lips and Erica nods and mirrors the gesture, solemn as death itself.

24 April 2018

24 April 2018

A statue of Millicent Fawcett, intellectual, activist, political leader, writer, and suffragist, is unveiled in London. It is the first ever statue of a woman to stand in Parliament Square.

Two days before exhibition opening

The sight of Leonie’s face on the poster, here in the street for anyone to look at, has shaken Vee. And she knows she’s been overdoing it. She saw the solicitor yesterday. Fen’s niece has grown into a formidable woman – not that that is really a surprise. She now heads a firm of solicitors who specialise in working with women, and do a lot of pro-bono work for those who are still being abused by the world. She’s the media’s go-to person to comment on legal matters relating to women’s rights, whether domestic, reproductive or working. A check of a living will, and a change to a dying one, are way below Gloria Wolf’s pay grade. But she made time for Vee, like she always makes time for the women who helped her to make a start. That was followed by packing up the darkroom, and the hospital this morning. Now this.

Vee doesn’t know if she even wants to see the exhibition, really. But it wouldn’t be fair on Erica, who has been so meticulous and conscientious and – well, and kind. Erica deserves her support, and she’s going to get it. Vee deserves to be remembered, she knows she does. Erica has done that for her. She’s more grateful than she knew she would be.

Just this, then the session with Marja early this evening. And then sleep.

She hopes death will be a sudden switch, like clicking off the bulb in the darkroom and feeling the absence of light everywhere. She does not want a gradual diminishing, the opposite of watching an image emerge when the film is laid in the chemical bath to develop. Foolish to think that she has any choice, though.

There had been an almost giddy frankness to her conversation with Mr Wilding this morning. None of the usual hedging around ‘impossible to say’ and ‘factors at play’. Just straight answers to straight questions. It reminded Vee of the old days, conversations with editors who had two minutes to brief her, handovers to the lab who needed photographs in a hurry and just had to know how fast the film was, how it should be exposed, to get to the truth of the photograph that Vee took.