When I’ve finished I go to the library and find Ellen looking at all her books, fingering them as she moves along the shelves.

‘I shall miss them,’ she says, and she inches around the sofa, to sit down. She motions for me to sit next to her. I never did get used to how big you are, Special,’ she says, as the cushions sink and she topples into me.

‘Sorry.’ Her thin, drawn face with its bright eyes — how familiar it still is.

‘I want you to know that I’ve loved having you all here, seeing the house used as it should be. It was a lovely Christmas.’

‘Right.’

‘I can’t believe I spent all those hours in Thurlestone teaching you vocabulary and all you say is “Right” — don’t you remember anything I taught you?’

‘All of it.’

Sonja throws open the door, covered in flour, hair wild, and says it’s time to dress for dinner. Dress for dinner?

An hour later the four of us are in our finery, sitting at the Georgian dining table, candelabra blazing, decanters of wine spilling bloody shadows on the damask cloth, and my mother is telling us how she and Ellen were going to spend this night in the Tobago Cays, on a schooner floating from Bequia, the sea frothing with champagne. My mother is drunk but she does it so well that even a passing policeman wouldn’t spot it. She hasn’t been drinking at all because of Ellen so I told her I’ll take it easy and she can drink what she wants. I miss a lot of what she says because her mouth slackens when she’s drunk too much wine but I get the picture (when she drinks whisky I see every word, every picture). I look at Sonja, and the candlelight has erased the faint lines round her mouth and eyes and she looks like the woman who took my hand twenty years ago and said, ‘We both live on small islands,’ and I want her to know, right now, I want her to know that that’s all right as long as we live on the same small island. But then my mother walks in with a steaming plate of brustengolo and the moment passes. Ellen cuts the cake (she’s so weak I don’t know how she manages) and it’s magnificent. Sonja looks at me and signs, ‘Like clouds over Nebraska,’ pointing at the rich dessert and I frown because I know she’s never been there but I know exactly what she means (and would the Blind Man have known what she meant?).

Suddenly it’s ten to midnight and I help Ellen wrap herself in a duvet and carry her outside, to a chair in the garden that looks over the valley and the town beyond. My mother lit a bonfire an hour before and Ellen smiles as she feels its heat. Sonja and my mother come out with a bottle of Krug, a portable radio and handfuls of sparklers. Fireworks scatter over the town and I look at my watch and realise that, not unlike my heart, it’s running slow. I yank the cork from the bottle, my mother lights sparklers and it’s here, the new year, new century. Before I can pour champagne Sonja grabs and kisses me. Wraps her arms round my neck and pulls my face to hers and kisses me as if for the last time, her fingers locked in my hair.