Vee can tell from his face that he means no harm, but that’s not the point. Never miss a chance to educate, as Leonie used to say. ‘I appreciate that you’re trying to be friendly,’ she says, ‘but you have no idea what’s going on in my life, so telling me to “cheer up” isn’t appropriate. And neither is calling me “love”.’ She walks on, before she can see his reaction, but she imagines it: rolled eyes, the person behind her at the barrier saying something like ‘that’s what you get for trying to be pleasant’. Well, Vee might not be able to do a lot for the movement these days, but she can stop it going backwards when she sees the opportunity.

She should have thought today through better. For years her life has been quiet. She knows that she is ill and her emergency appointment with Dr Wilding after meeting Erica for the first time only confirmed it. And still she’s agreed to spend the afternoon with Erica, despite having spent this morning at hospital, being scanned and tested, questioned and touched. Every now and then Vee gets drawn into something, a meeting of old colleagues or a fundraiser, and she thinks it will be OK, because, she says to herself, how difficult, really, how trying, can spending a couple of hours with other people be? And then she does it, and she remembers. There are so many places where it’s such hard work. So many ways that you need to be thoughtful, and she just doesn’t think that way anymore. She used to. She used to do it too much, and Leonie helped her to see why she was allowed to put her own needs first, because that was her right. Not her right as a woman, but her right as a person, equally as important (and unimportant) as the next person. ‘Except you,’ Vee had said, walking home to their flat after a Woman’s Liberation Front meeting in the month after she moved in. Leonie had laughed, and looked straight into her – those eyes, sepia, so clever and so bright. If Leonie had kissed her, properly, then, Vee would have kissed back.

What Vee hadn’t known, of course, when she agreed to Erica’s exhibition, was that Erica would be so very Leonie-like, or that that resemblance, from eyes to tilt of head to timbre of voice and the way her stride lopes, would make Vee think about all the things she has banished from her mind for so many years. If only her memory was better, or more of it had remained after the surgery. Though knowing for certain might not really help.