Erica opens the door with a smile. ‘Come through!’ she says, and turns, leading Vee through a hallway into a kitchen-diner that must run the length of the back of the house. It’s a bright room, with deep windows the length of one wall, and skylights too. It would be great for a photoshoot; Vee never stopped being anti-flash and a space like this would be a dream. A good quarter of it is given over to a great dining table, solid and dark, which has files and folders stacked along one side. There’s a pile of family detritus at the other edge – letters, opened and unopened, mugs, a plastic bowl with cereal in it, a cuddly animal of some sort. Erica, who is barefoot, hair in a pony-tail, wearing jeans and a shirt but still madeup, sees where Vee is looking, ‘I’m so sorry about the chaos. Marcus’s mother arrived late to collect Tom and I’m behind with everything. I’m nearly there.’

‘Take your time,’ Vee says. She could so easily be annoyed. But she knows how to wait. She likes it. Patience was her technique, really, the way she got her best photographs. Watch, wait, let the artifice fall away; wait for the people to be the people.

‘Thanks.’ Erica clears the table, bowl into sink and toy lobbed into a basket, everything else added to a pile of papers on the kitchen worktop. It looks as though it might be made of granite. Vee wants to rest her forehead on it, feel the coolness, the uncompromising hardness.

‘Coffee?’ Erica asks. There’s an elaborate red-and-chrome machine, which doubtless makes coffee a thousand times better than the stuff Vee boredom-drank at the hospital this morning, but caffeine isn’t exactly known for being the headache’s friend. She shakes her head.

‘Right, let’s get started.’ But Erica pauses and takes the lid from a slow cooker, stirs it. Seeing Vee look, she says, ‘Marcus is more of a child than Tom. If I don’t feed him within twenty minutes of him getting home, he’s a nightmare. But he doesn’t always know when he’s going to arrive. So – slow cooker.’

‘Well,’ Vee says, because – where to begin? She reminds herself that she has not had a child, a husband, has never had anyone to please but herself. It’s depressing, though, that this woman should think this is OK. She is curating an exhibition about the second wave of feminism. She is a university lecturer, and an expert in a corner of modern history in her own right. ‘Do you think of yourself as a feminist, Erica?’

‘Of course,’ Erica says, replacing the slow-cooker lid, wiping her hands on a cloth, and walking across to the table, ‘but the meaning has changed, hasn’t it? It’s not the . . . blunt instrument it was. In your day.’

‘Better a blunt instrument than a feather duster.’