Vee doesn’t usually mind the overground lines out of London – she used to know them as well as she now knows the names of all the pills in her bathroom cabinet – but today, it’s hard work. Two families gaggle onto the carriage at the last minute at Waterloo, and Vee is not far enough away to tune them out, so she has to listen all the way to Hampton, where they get off. The mothers are talking to their offspring in that quasi-educational way that people do now: yes I see the bus, what colour is the bus? Do you see what the number is on the front? Yes, it’s a bit like a 45, but have a look at the second number again . . . The two fathers (or uncles, or brothers, or friends) sit in seats across the aisle from their families. One is on his phone, and the other slouches, hands in pockets, looking out of the window, as though the children squawking less than five feet away are nothing to do with him. Maybe he will hoist one of them on to his shoulders, later, when they are tired, and expect the mother to be grateful. Vee is composing the photograph of it in her head, now, the man with the child held aloft, smiling, talking, the woman carrying bags, her body partly cut out of the image by his, her tiredness clear in the way her shoulders drop, her switched-off face.

Bloody men.

Oh, she’s tired.

She hires a cab from Hampton station, even though it’s not far to Erica’s house. She is driven through streets of stately, semi-detached houses, most with loft conversions, two cars on the drive, tidy front gardens and shining windows cleaned, in all likelihood, by someone who isn’t the owner. They scream middle-class convention. Erica has ended up in a life that is surely not the one Leonie would have wanted for her, though Ursula no doubt would have been perfectly content. Well, it was ever so. Parents want safety for their children. Vee’s father would much rather she had settled down with a man, after all.