Since then, whenever she’s had a spare daylight hour, she has stopped women in the streets near their flat. There are always people passing: workers in a rush in the mornings, pram-pushers, afternoon drinkers, evening strollers. After her first afternoon of loitering, nervously and indecisively, Vee made a rule that she would stop the first woman she saw. Otherwise she’d only have photographs of the approachable-looking, the friendly, and she may as well not bother. Most have agreed to being photographed when she has promised to take no more than five minutes. Vee has not given any of them time to tidy their hair, put fresh lipstick on.

She had a feeling there might be an exhibition in it, eventually: a year in the life. This morning she is taking a first look, thanks to a shoot being delayed: Fleetwood Mac are flying in from the US a day later than planned, so she can’t photograph Stevie Nicks until tomorrow. Stevie Nicks! Vee still can’t get over the fact that she is the photographer on these shoots – but this unexpected darkroom time is exciting, too. So exciting that she forgot to lock the door from the inside.

She’s about to put the lid on the developing tank, and exhale, when the door doesn’t so much open, as crash through its maximum arc, bouncing off the wall behind.

Vee crams the lid on the developing tank but she knows it’s too late.

‘NO!’ she shouts, as though sheer volume will wind back the light, unruin her work. If she was melodramatic she would sink to her knees. She isn’t. She takes a step towards the man in the doorway. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’ve just ruined a year of my work, you bloody idiot.’

‘I’m bursting for a piss,’ the man says. He’s clearly just woken up; he’s disorientated, still drunk, maybe. He’s wearing Leonie’s red dressing gown, though Vee isn’t sure why he bothered to put it on, because it’s not fastened. He smiles; it’s probably meant to be charming, ‘I’ll just do that and then – and then I’ll come and help you.’ He looks around, blinks, in the hope, presumably, of seeing the damage he has clearly done. ‘I’ll come and help you . . . fix it. What I broke.’

‘You cannot,’ Veronica says, ‘wind back the light.’ And she looks away because she truly has never had a genuinely violent thought until now, when she could, happily, throw whatever liquid comes to hand at his crotch and hope to see his pathetic cock shrivel up and drop off. Not that anything in the darkroom is especially caustic. But for a second she wishes it was.

‘I’m sorry,’ the man says.