Vee’s publisher called to say they thought it best to delay publication of her book. She agreed. She tried to care, but she couldn’t. She hunkered down over the winter, and when the phone didn’t start to ring again, she drove to Scotland in the spring, photographed skies, cliffs, seas, wondered at the beauty of nature but in an intellectual, headbound way. Nothing touched her heart. Her lens didn’t capture anything remarkable, or if it did, she couldn’t see it. She came home to a still-silent answering machine, rented out her house, and went to Canada for a year; more space, more beauty, more lack of inspiration. First, she stopped taking film to be developed, then she stopped taking photographs at all. Instead she walked, and looked, and breathed deeply. She had money, but it wouldn’t see her out. She had twenty, maybe thirty years left to live. She needed to do something.

She went back to Essex – not the place where she grew up, not those streets, not that anyone would know her there. She bought a house, another, turned them into flats, rented them to young women who were trying to set out in life without using marriage as a means to doing so. She charged a rent that was below the market rate; she vetted the applicants herself, looked for the ones who needed a stepping stone. She made money, bought more houses in more places, turned them into flats, and rented them out too. She employed a female manager, and a maintenance team made up of women. When she couldn’t find female plumbers and electricians, she set up bursaries to train them. The men she employed she used on an ad-hoc basis; she interviewed them herself, first, was at her frostiest and least compromising. One ‘love’, one patronising explanation of how water needed to be under pressure to travel upwards, and they were out. She went travelling again. China, this time, then India. She didn’t bother to pack a camera.

When she got home after one of these trips, there was a message on the answering machine from Bea. They were going to run courses in photography at the university, she said, as part of their new media degrees. Would Vee be interested in teaching on portraiture and on photojournalism? Could she design and teach a module on the technical side of photography, drawing on her specialism of flash-free images?

Vee’s first instinct was to refuse. But then she looked at her diary. It was tiring, to fill her time. She called Bea back. She taught. She wasn’t terrible at it, and it wasn’t terrible. Five years passed, ten.