‘Good,’ Leonie says. The waitress brings her sandwich and she closes her handbag, puts it on the floor, ‘I’ll eat this, then we’ll split. Let’s see if we can get you arrested. It’s about time you saw the inside of a cell.’ She laughs, ‘I wish you could see your face!’

*

At the Royal Albert Hall, a police officer looks at her twice as she goes up the steps, but a smile gets her through. And Leonie doesn’t see her smiling, so that’s good, because she hasn’t got into trouble for appeasing the patriarchy.

There are a lot of other women with suspiciously large handbags, coats that swamp them, ill-fitting dresses. They have obviously all decided to try to look like the kind of women who would be interested in a beauty contest. She realises that her chances of being arrested are not high. She had tried to look amused at the prospect, but the thought of it scares her. Which is shameful of her, really. She voted for the first time in June, and she’s been reading a book Leonie had given her about the suffragettes at the time. Standing in the polling booth, she’d tried to imagine what it was like to be imprisoned, force-fed, because of the strength of your principles. And she’d wondered whether she would ever really be brave enough to do the part that got the women arrested in the first place: civil disobedience, throwing bricks through windows, setting fires, resisting arrest. She hasn’t even brought lettuce to throw, and she’s terrified, her throat tight and her legs weak. But then again, there’s nothing to say that the suffragettes weren’t terrified. They did it anyway.

There’s a chattering excitement filling the building as Vee and Leonie follow the curving corridor to their entrance. Of course, most of the people here have no thought of protest: they’re excited about the pageant, and have probably never thought that a beauty contest could be exploitative and wrong. The crowd thickens at their door to the stalls, and Vee finds herself pressed up against a man in black tie who winks at her. She pretends not to see, and tries not to think of the suffragettes.

Vee has never been inside the Royal Albert Hall. The curves and detail of the interior of building, the sheer scale and beauty of it, from the red plush seats to the organ to the gilt on the carving on the ceiling, make her half-dizzy with awe. Leonie makes a joke about Albert’s massive organ, and someone behind chips in about patriarchal archetypes; Vee pretends to laugh, and tries for nonchalance, but cannot stop herself from gazing at the beauty of the place. She wishes she could photograph it, but there’s no point, not with this level of light. ‘Have you been here before?’ she asks Leonie.