‘Yes.’ Once she started to live with Leonie, see more of her private self, she saw more of what would normally be hidden. Vee’s married friends back in Essex went to great lengths to keep what they considered unfeminine from their husbands; they hid razors, plucked eyebrows behind locked bathroom doors, talked about keeping romance alive with lace negligees and euphemisms for menstruation. Leonie broke wind at will, left greying bras hanging over the shower curtain, and ate cereal from packets with her hands. She teased Vee for her occasional skirts and the way she left a hairbrush by the mirror in the hall; she never let her forget the time she said she wanted to be ‘presentable’. And, if anything, all of these things made Vee love Leonie more than she had before she moved into her flat, taking the spare bedroom and, later, converting the box room to a darkroom. Vee’s father had been big on privacy, scant on touch, and so living with Leonie was the most physically intimate that Vee had ever been with another human being, before or since. From this distance – and with her punctured memories – she has to wonder whether she was in love.

‘Do you think people still remember the Miss World protest?’ Erica asks, when it’s clear Vee isn’t going to say any more. ‘Or are aware of it, if they weren’t born? It’s so important to get the level of detail right.’

Vee can see, from where Erica has opened another of the folders, just how much Erica has been putting into this exhibition. Well, good. People talk about talent and luck, but as Dad used to say, it’s graft that makes things happen. There’s tightness across the top of Vee’s chest at the thought of what Leonie kept, the skin around old scars flexing. ‘I don’t know. Does it matter? It was about what the protest achieved, as much as anything else.’ Vee thinks of the humming of excitement in her gut for days afterwards, the way the disruption was all over the papers, reported on the news.

‘But,’ Erica says, ‘I think I need to find a way to contextualise that. From this distance, it looks . . . it’s difficult. It was still women attacking women. Not that that’s stopped. But it’s different. The protest looks – brutal.’

It’s so hard to explain what it was like to people who weren’t there, who take so much for granted now. ‘We were working things out, then. We were trying to break the world down to make it again, and this was one of the obvious ways to do it. We saw women in heels and lipstick as . . . as bonded, trapped.’