Every morning she gets up and is determined to make an effort. And every day something like this happens, and she’s sniping and carping. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at breakfast, but at dinner, and she’s started to count those days as wins. She has no idea when it changed. When Tom was born, they were joyful, delighted, united.

Marcus sighs, ‘Maybe we made the wrong call, with you doing this exhibition. It’s such a lot of work. And not a lot of money.’

‘It’s important to me,’ Erica says. She’s thirty-eight; if she ever wants to be more than a part-time, associate university lecturer she needs to start making a name, building a reputation that’s more than ‘turns up on time and does what she is contracted to do’. Consultancy on the occasional TV series is fun, and well paid, but confirming that the right sort of pans are being used and checking the Bakelite is the correct colour is hardly a stretch.

When she finished her PhD, she had such plans. And then she met Marcus. And then her mother became more ill. So now she teaches six hours per week during term time, delivering the modules on domestic changes that she taught before she had Tom. She really doesn’t think she was forced or coerced into any of it. And yet.

She had wondered, for a while, if that would be her lot. But then she’d found the box of papers and photographs in her mother’s loft, and started to see another side of her Aunt Leonie: the one who was a living feminist, way ahead of her time, rather than a woman whose death was more important than any other part of her story. When she put together Veronica Moon’s work with Leonie Barratt’s story, she knew she had a real chance to have the career she deserved, and rescue two women from obscurity as she did it. Acceptance of her exhibition proposal, and the funding to go with it, felt like a triumph. ‘It’s really important to me.’

‘I know. And I’m supporting you, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, you are.’ She hears how tired she is. This isn’t the time to try to explain – again – why this grudging sharing doesn’t feel like support. Marcus is checking his watch. If he misses his train then she’ll have to give him a lift to Kingston so he can get a fast one. Erica washes Tom’s face while he is still in the highchair. There’s Weetabix on her coat, which she’d left within range. Great.