She rambled for hours. I can’t begin to recall everything she said but I’ll try to when all this is over. She said she had a friend who lived by the sea, a friend who everyone thought was ugly but she wasn’t. I smiled when she said that.

The next time she woke it was with a small cry just before dawn. ‘Where am I? Am I dead yet?’

‘Sssh — you’re at home, Ellen, it’s OK. You’re at home. You’ve been sleeping.’ I stroked her arm.

‘Joan?’

‘Yes.’

Ellen sank back on to the pillow and one of the dogs licked her hand gently. She stared at the fire in the grate. ‘Can I tell you something?’ Her voice had changed — it wasn’t loud but the feathers had flown.

‘Anything.’

‘It’s not very nice. But I never told anyone this and I need to tell you.’

‘Then tell me.’ And I knew it might be our last chance to get personal.

‘We’ve often talked about that night when Matt didn’t come home.’

‘Yes.’

‘The conversation was never finished.’

Another unfinished conversation? Harry and Ellen could talk into eternity, their conversation for ever unfinished. ‘In what way?’

Ellen closed her eyes and her fingers began to pick at the blanket again. ‘Y’know I told you about the policeman who came to the hospital and hugged me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, thing is …’ and her voice faded again ‘… I let him hug me and I cried and cried. But, the thing is, I didn’t tell him that I was relieved. I was crying tears of relief. He was hugging me because he thought I was falling apart but I was relieved. Without Matt I didn’t want anyone else, I didn’t even want his child. Joan, I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I tried to keep it to myself, promised myself I would. Looks like I didn’t manage it.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ I said, and my voice sounded like mercury dropping down the tube as I wondered how Ellen had lived with that guilt all these years.

She dozed off and I watched her in the firelight. She was wearing the crazy turquoise bejewelled turban that I’d given her for Christmas to cover her near-baldness, and she insisted on wearing it in bed. Where else was she going to wear it? It occurred to me that Hyacinth would love it, would wear it to her Seventh Day Adventist church on Sundays, bumping and grinding her way through the service. Thinking of Hyacinth I reached over and took one of Ellen’s almost transparent hands, the blue veins bulging over prominent knucklebones, in mine and traced, ‘I have always loved you,’ on her palm. I couldn’t say it so I wrote it on her skin as she slept.

‘I know,’ Ellen murmured, and tumbled into a deep morphine hole.

Now I’m sitting here with coffee and a cigarette, watching the nurse walk up the path to the kitchen door as the sky flushes pink, as if it were evening. The dogs pad into the kitchen and wait by the door, tails wagging slightly, wanting to go to Ellen. They have always loved her when no one else has. Except me.