Stanley shakes his head. ‘This will all have to change once you’re married, you know, treasure. Barry won’t want you sneaking round here every Saturday afternoon.’

‘Barry doesn’t mind, Dad. And anyway, the wedding won’t be for a few years yet.’

‘Your mother was only nineteen when we got married.’ It’s eleven years since she died, but the hollowness of loss is still great enough to make a short, hard moment for them both before they look at each other and sort of smile in acknowledgement that she is gone, they are not, and they are the only two people in the world who could ever understand, precisely, what that means.

‘Will you bring some rhubarb? We can have it for afters, tomorrow.’

Stewed rhubarb and condensed milk is her dad’s idea of heaven.

Stanley nods, takes his hat from the stand by the door, and he’s gone.

*

Almost as soon as Vee had managed to get a camera of her own, when she was fifteen, thanks to savings and a birthday and Christmas present combined, she realised that she’d never be able to afford to have her films developed, so she set about learning how to do it herself. The novelty of her makeshift darkroom under the stairs, the sour/sharp smells and the eerie light, has yet to wear off.

Vee can still remember the first time she saw a photographer at work. It was at a cousin’s wedding. Vee was a seven-year-old bridesmaid, in shell pink with a little white knitted cardigan, pink silk roses to hold, and borrowed satin shoes with scrunched-up handkerchiefs in the toes to make them fit. Every picture of her from that day shows her staring into the camera. She remembers how much she wanted to know what was happening under that cloth the photographer was hiding in. When she wasn’t in the photographs she stood behind the tripod, listening to the clicks and winding sounds of the camera at work. When the photograph album was shown – cousin Betty had married up in the world, there was no one in the family who had had a proper album before – Veronica saw how the adults used the photos to relive the day. They commented on this hat and those flowers, what a shame it was about the weather and how handsome Betty’s husband was. That man, under the cloth, with a button and a handle to wind, had quietly made the shape of their memories.

She didn’t understand it in those terms at the time, of course. She just knew she wanted a camera like other children wanted a pogo-stick.