‘All the fucking time,’ Leonie says, earning a tut from a different man, also in a tuxedo, sitting further along the row. ‘My parents were really into classical music. My sister Ursula and me used to get dragged along to what felt like every prom. And the occasional opera in between. Ursula still comes, because she’s a good girl, but I’ve got better things to do.’

‘It’s such a beautiful building, though.’

Leonie shrugs. ‘If you like buildings designed for the wealthy to use to support the status quo, yeah, it’s the bomb.’

Vee will never, ever get the hang of this. There’s too much of it – there are too many invisible-until-pointed-out-and-then-they-are-obvious ways that women have been oppressed. When she’s talking to her dad, in their mostly good-natured debates after watching What the Papers Say, or when she’s writing out an invoice, she feels liberated, competent, strong. She’s confident in marshalling her arguments for why she might not want to settle down and have children, and even if she does, that’s no reason why she shouldn’t have a career too. The Equal Pay Act, thanks to the Ford machinists, should make that easier.

More than that, among some of her old friends from school, who are starting to settle down, she can talk about ambition, her own and theirs, and she makes a point of being a good sister to those who are thinking beyond what’s usual for them. She can point to Margaret Thatcher as one of many women doing important work and being taken seriously as they do it. Leonie would say one female Secretary of State is not enough, but to Vee’s friends she’s an object of speculation and strangeness. (What does her husband think? Surely her children suffer?) A Colchester local counsellor has admitted publicly that she’s a lesbian. Not ‘admitted’, that isn’t the right word for it. But the point is, the world is changing, and Vee is on board with the changes, and will fight for them, and even be something of a small trailblazer in her neck of the woods. Being the only female wedding photographer in Essex might not be all she wants, but it’s something. A start.

Except just when she thinks she’s got a handle on it, she admires the architecture of a building, and discovers a whole new level of oppression that hadn’t even occurred to her before. Leonie says she shouldn’t be ashamed of that, because it’s not her fault the patriarchy has normalised this shit. Vee loves the way Leonie talks, education and swearing in equal measure. And she loves that she says it’s always OK to ask questions, but it’s never OK to be deliberately ignorant.