Maybe Leonie hears something in her voice, because when she comes back from the living room with their coats, she holds Vee in a brief, tight embrace. ‘Not everyone could do this, you know. Thanks, Vee.’

21 November 1970

21 November 1970

‘WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU move out?’ Vee was prepared for her father to be hurt, or angry. Confusion, she is finding more difficult to handle. It’s always been obvious, to her, that this was going to happen at some point.

Stanley has been more strict about her paying half of the bills since she split up with Barry: it’s obvious he thinks she is going to be alone forever, so he needs to make her self-sufficient. But she didn’t really think that he assumed she would live here until – well, until he died. (Her body shrinks in on itself at the thought.) It seems she was wrong. He, apparently, thought she had two options: marry and leave home, or not leave home.

In fairness, he’s never treated her like a girl; she can use a hacksaw and a lathe, light a fire, change a fuse, top up the oil in the car. But those were things he showed her because she asked, or because she was keeping him company in the garage while he worked on a chest of drawers for her bedroom, or mended a neighbour’s bedside table. They were things that stopped both of them from being alone. Now he seems to be preparing her for the dry spinster life, although it’s obvious from the way he drops Barry into the conversation whenever he can that he hopes she will see sense and settle down. ‘Settle for’, she had said, and she doesn’t want to do that.

Your London friends won’t be there when you’re old, he had said. Your fancy feminists won’t be able to build you a dining table or fix a faulty fuse box.

You don’t know that, she had said, and anyway, I’m not sure Barry was much good with a screwdriver. Estate agents aren’t, usually. She’d hoped that he would call her out for making assumptions, so she could point out that he was doing the same. But he’d just smiled and said, you know what I’m saying. And she had known: he was saying that he cared. She knew, too, that the only way to convince him that she could manage was to do it: move out, work, make a name.

‘I just don’t know what to make of this, Veronica,’ he says, now. ‘I know we have our differences, but I didn’t think . . .’