Maybe she wants to be remembered. She’s been invited to one too many retrospectives, book launches and exhibitions of the male photographers who were her contemporaries. She has never gone. Why would she? Why spend an evening standing to one side with a warm glass of wine, knowing that even if she hasn’t done anything to speak of since 1984, she’s achieved easily as much as the men being admired left, right and centre? More. Taking photographs in a war zone is too easy. Point and click and you’ll get something. The same with photographing beauty, or fashion. The work is done for you. Stylists, makeup, studio lighting, a digital camera that will take thousands of shots in an hour – any fool can shoot a Vogue cover. Natural light, real film, real people – that’s where you see real skill.

And she had skill. Maybe has it, still, if she wasn’t too afraid to pick up a camera.

Erica had been very clear in her proposal: she would manage everything, she would seek other permissions, track down materials, negotiate with the gallery. All that Vee would need to do would be to give written agreement for her images to be used, and clarify any areas where Erica might have questions.

So she had said yes to the exhibition of her work. Not recklessly. She’d read Erica’s email and studied the attached CV. Erica had a doctorate in social history, and had lectured at several universities. Overall, she had seemed credible. She was Leonie’s niece: that fact woke a protectiveness, a sense of duty, almost, in Vee that she could neither explain nor dismiss. And she wanted to exhibit Vee’s work. She wanted to excavate the box of cuttings, prints and magazine portraits that Leonie had, apparently, kept, and turn them into an exhibition. At the point Vee was approached by Erica, she hadn’t put herself in the public eye for more than thirty years. She had been retired from lecturing for fifteen. So the thought of fading into nothingness – the possibility that seemed so achingly desirable for so long – was becoming a reality. At the time her career ended, Vee was too absorbed by other griefs to care about how she and her work would be remembered. She wanted to be forgotten. But in the years since, she has wondered at the way her career was stopped rather than having the chance to end her way.