‘Maybe.’ Erica looks like Leonie but she doesn’t have the scrappiness. No way would Leonie have let Vee get away with a comment like that.

Erica spreads the folders around the table. There are seven, each with a photograph on the front – the prints Erica has chosen to be the focal part of each section of the exhibition. She’d sent Vee an email about framing and sizing last week. Vee had been desperate to go to bed – it wasn’t just her head that ached that day, but her whole body, in a way that was more than the aches of being an old woman – and, though it wouldn’t be fair to say she didn’t care at all how the work was framed, she has reasonable confidence in Erica to do a reasonable job. So she hadn’t read the email properly, and hadn’t therefore seen which images Erica was leading with. And now, here they are, laid out in front of her in manila folders, each with a poorly reproduced print on the front, apart from the last one, on which Erica has written ‘Self-Portraits (?)’.

Her work can all be boiled down to this, then. Veronica Redux.

Vee pulls the Miss World one towards her, for no reason other than that she hasn’t thought about it in a long time.

‘This was not long after the Women’s Liberation Front started, wasn’t it?’ Erica asks.

‘It must have been,’ Vee says.

‘Did my aunt Leonie get you involved?’

Vee feels herself smile, ‘Leonie got me involved in everything. She was the first active, unapologetic feminist I met. She pulled me in. My life wouldn’t have been what it was without her.’

She’s just used the past tense about herself. Well, may as well start now.

‘She was a kind of a mentor to you, then?’

‘I suppose she was. Though I wouldn’t have called it that then. It’s one of the words I wouldn’t have known. Leonie helped me in a very – basic – way.’

‘Mmm.’ Erica is sorting papers; it seems that she’s looking for something. Vee looks back at the photograph and thinks of all the things she didn’t know in 1970. She didn’t even know the words. She had started looking them up in her old school dictionary: ‘patriarchy’, ‘misogyny’, ‘eunuch’ when she read Greer. She once went to a meeting where people were talking about a new lexicon for an equal world. She didn’t know what ‘lexicon’ meant.