Leonie slaps Vee on the knee. ‘Your education is progressing, sister. Some people don’t choose. If you were going to put a label on it’ – her expression shows exactly how little she thinks of that – ‘you’d call it bisexual. Swinging both ways. I’ve got enough on my mind without trying to work out if I want to shag everyone I meet, or only the ones with the pricks.’

Vee nods. She has wondered, quietly, whether not shagging anyone at all might be what she wants. When Barry touched her, she liked it; if Leonie kissed her she’d be . . . interested. But she can’t seem to conjure up the hunger for sex that everyone else seems to have. And anyway, thinking about sex, and love, must cloud the vision. A clear eye is what a photographer needs, above all. ‘Fair enough.’

Leonie begins to laugh, and every time she seems to have stopped, she starts again.

Vee doesn’t like being laughed at, but in the end she can’t help asking: ‘What’s so funny?’ Vee can’t help but to be pulled into the laughter, though she doesn’t understand where it’s coming from. This is Leonie’s great power, it seems to Vee: not just her words, her cleverness, but the sheer force of her pulls you in.

‘You wouldn’t have said “fair enough” to that when I met you. And you wouldn’t have said it in that voice either. You would have been much more “Cor blimey, Professor Higgins”.’ The remains of laughter make Leonie’s voice warm.

Vee rolls her eyes. ‘No I wouldn’t. And anyway, Eliza Doolittle was from the East End. Not Essex. How would you feel if I mixed up . . .’ Oh, if there was only an easy way to explain these things to Leonie. ‘Fulham and – and – Wales?’

‘I’d laugh myself stupid. Anyway, I was trying to be nice.’ She pours the last of the wine into her own glass; Vee is only halfway through her first. It has a dark, harsh taste; she didn’t really want it, but if she hadn’t taken it, Leonie would have drunk the whole bottle herself.

‘Were you? Trying to be nice?’

‘No need to sound surprised.’ Leonie is serious again, half-smiling, asking a question with her eyes. So Leonie wants to be liked, too, despite what she says. That’s reassuring.

‘It’s just that you’ve always been . . . anti-nice. So it’s weird when you are.’

Leonie fumbles in her pocket for her tobacco tin, takes out a roll-up, lights it, and shrugs. ‘Trying to stop you from flirting with blokes in pubs so the landlord doesn’t get challenged isn’t about nice or not nice. It’s about right.’