Vee looks at the boots again – Erica has stretched out her legs in front of her – and she must make a sound, a tut or a sigh, because Erica sees where her gaze is resting, and says, ‘I like heels.’ That stubbornness – the particular timbre of it, the tug and fall of the consonants against the vowels, each word a fight – runs deep into Vee. It lands in her brain and heart and gut, and strikes a note through her body that she never thought she’d hear again. She closes her eyes for a moment, against the memory. Opens them, and looks at the toes of her own boots. She’s worn Doc Martens since 1972, when Leonie bought her her first pair, for her birthday. They only came in black, then. This latest pair, electric blue, must be five years old. They might be her last. She wonders how many there have been. It’s such a pleasure to never have to think about your feet; just to let them take you where you want to go.

Erica pulls a notebook from her bag. ‘I’d like to walk the space with you today, and tell you what I’m thinking. How the exhibition will be laid out, what I want to bring forward, and how I plan to use the ephemera and objects—’

‘Ephemera?’

Erica smiles. ‘Sorry. Jargon. Paper-based items that relate to the prints. So, a lot of Leonie’s archive of your work. The contemporaneous things that she kept. Magazines, newspapers and so on. The objects are the equipment. I mentioned them in my initial email? And I sent you a breakdown.’

‘I’m sure you did,’ Vee says, ‘I just need reminding sometimes.’

Erica accepts this – oh, she is young, and thinks she will never be old, and forget things in her turn – and continues, ‘It’s mostly the things I found in my mother’s loft after her death. In a box with “Leonie” on the side. I don’t think it can have been opened since my mother cleared Leonie’s flat.’

‘I do remember.’ Vee does, now. Leonie had had very little good to say at the time about how newspapers reported stories, how women were portrayed in magazines, or the way Vee had sold out by working for them. Today, the thought of Leonie quietly buying and carefully keeping a record of Vee’s work feels almost unbearably touching; like finding a lost love letter when the lover has died, Vee imagines, though she wouldn’t really know.