‘Well, probably. And idealistic. But if you’re changing the world you need to start with the ideal you want, don’t you? Not begin by aiming for a compromise?’ It’s strange to be talking as though she had been an activist when she was really a hanger-on, at the beginning at least, horrified by Leonie and her friends and drawn to them, like a ten-year-old tagging along with shoplifting teenagers. ‘My generation did what we could. Your generation needs to take this fight further, I think. We gave you enough for it to be possible for you to do that. Not . . .’

Erica’s face is interested but there’s something hard in it too, a Leonie look. ‘Not what?’

Vee shakes her head. She feels shaky, and her soul is exhausted by this conversation, and the memories it brings back. ‘I don’t know, Erica. I think we imagined that your generation would be – free. More free than we were. Sometimes I think you have it worse.’

‘Maybe,’ she replies, and Vee wonders whether, if she were a people person, if she was Leonie, or Ursula, she would put all talk of the exhibition aside and ask Erica how she was.

Erica nods, and then, laying out the contents of the Miss World folder – handwritten notes, printed notes, permission forms, newspaper clippings – says, ‘I haven’t got a contact sheet for this one. I wondered if you still have it? If you’re looking through them anyway. For the other photos we talked about.’

‘I should have that one.’ Vee always kept good records, unlike most of the newsrooms of the 1970s and 80s, which were uninterested in anything once it was yesterday’s copy. Once she started working for the newspapers directly, she always made friends with the lab technicians in the hope that she would be able to get her original films and contact sheets back. It worked until she was doing well and getting the good jobs. Then her films and contact sheets were filed more carefully, according to the celebrity she’d photographed. Even her most established contacts in the lab, the closest people she had to friends at the papers and magazines, didn’t dare return them to her after that.

Apart from that one time.

‘Did you know, the lab technicians used to go through the films at the end of the year, pull out the ones they thought no one would want again, and strip off the silver to sell, to pay for the Christmas party?’

‘Mmm.’ Erica’s not listening, not really; she’s scrutinising the images Vee took outside the Café de Paris: blurred faces, greyscale banners, but a sense of purpose all the same. After a moment she says, as though it’s nothing, ‘I’ve never actually been on a march.’

‘What?’ Vee hears that her voice is a bark. Making allowances for the world changing is one thing. This is another, ‘You’re not serious? Nothing?’