The light of a March dawn is hardly strident, but still Vee winces as it starts to leak in around the edges of the blinds in her living room. It has been a long night. She went to bed at eleven, but the headache had come before she could sleep. The medication did nothing for her. At three she got up and groped her way downstairs, bore the bright light of the fridge-freezer for long enough to take out an ice pack and pour herself a glass of spiced rum. Her painkillers are not compatible with alcohol but they weren’t touching the pain, so Vee was damn well going to do all she could to get some relief.

She lay on the sofa. Perhaps she dozed. Now morning is coming and the night has exhausted her: the headache has neither attacked nor vanished, but is skulking in her jaw, across her forehead, round the back of her skull. This is new. It’s never hung around like this before. If Vee was one for prayer, she would pray to have the old headaches back. Even if she found religion, she thinks, she would like to believe she would still be a pragmatist. She wouldn’t ask for a miracle. Just a lessening of the pain; a return to familiar landscape, where she will know where and how the light falls. And her sight. She would beg and wail for her sight. She would have got down on her knees to Mr Wilding last week, if she though he had the power to save it.

She could cope with being a photographer who didn’t take pictures, but not with being a photographer (even a long-retired one) who could not see.

Still, her time is nearly done. So long as her sight holds fast for as long as her breath does, she will manage.

Vee thinks of Erica, so much life ahead of her, and feels almost glad her own time is nearly done.

Of course, that could be the tumour affecting her brain, making her think that dying is something worth having. She keeps waiting to care more about it. After the clinic she walked, then sat in Regent’s Park until the light faded, feeling old and cheated and bereft. Since then she’s felt very little. ‘I am dying,’ she says to herself in the bathroom mirror, and she watches her reflection for clues to how she’s feeling. It doesn’t help.

She could ring the clinic, about the pain. Calling an ambulance would be melodramatic. She isn’t an emergency, she’s a painful inevitability. And until she has a seizure, there’s really nothing else to be done.