We took a cab there, soft snow was falling as we drove, everything white. I would have seen more paintings and works and rooms, but a few were enough. We stood in front of the Tiffany mosaic.

It’s called Garden Landscape, and it is a garden, with a serene, blue pool. Do you think it escapes me that it’s a paradisal garden like ours in Johannesburg was? It doesn’t escape me.

The mosaic: tesserae, and iridescent glass. If you look closely you can see each stone, each glinting stone a different colour, opalescent, with many, many blues.

Helena took photos of it with her phone that day. I don’t think Mark’s ever seen it, she said. It’s wonderful. I nodded. It is, it is wonderful.

It’s a summertime scene, a garden, as I said. With a pond, or stream of water, and two, white swans.

Afterwards Helena and I sat at the café alongside, tall windows overlooking the park, a vision in white with so much snow that day, and ordered tea, a carrot muffin for her, have something, Mom, she said. But I only had tea, a ginger tea. I felt very happy, then.

HELENA SLEPT in the room she had as a child, nothing has changed in it. Sometimes she says I should change it, perhaps it needs a coat of paint, Mom, she says. There’s a painting of mine that occupies one wall, I only hung it there in recent years. It has many browns, many shades of brown, in it. Helena was so pleased when she saw it for the first time. Her bookcase is there, with some of her childhood books, although most of them she had taken with her, years ago, when she had her first apartment, her first job.

And I lent Helena Ta-Nehisi Coates’s newest book, the one published last year. Actually, I said, take it with you, home, I’ve read it. You can have it. I pictured Helena’s long train ride home, through the towns, the snow: Holyoke . . . Brattleboro . . . White River Junction . . . Randolph. She’d have a new book to read.

The book I first thought to lend Helena was Snow Country, I forget the writer’s name, he’s Japanese. It’s a love story. To my mind it’s a spare book, filled with many spaces, quiet spaces, not overfilled with words. Perhaps it’s the translation from Japanese that gives this effect, but I don’t know.

I thought then that Helena wouldn’t like that book, so I didn’t mention it. Its cover is a deep, clear blue.

Helena cooked for me again, this time I didn’t protest, she was going to do it anyway. She cooked another soup, a vegetable soup, perhaps it was squash, it was so deep a colour. We ate, we sat over the steaming bowls, there was fresh, crusty bread Helena had bought. We sat talking afterwards in the soft light, the snowflakes falling outside, you could see them. We talked about Nicholas, about his plans. She said she missed Howard — her dad. She remembered him taking her swimming in the river in Villiers, she talked about that, about the river in Villiers. And I said: me, staying at the house and reading on my blanket! Was I a selfish mother, Helena? Oh Mom, she said, not at all.