Gino went rapidly through three small chests of drawers, to be put in bedrooms, to the infinite gratitude of the occupants, one wardrobe and two bookshelves.

The bookshelves went in the living room where the ‘family’ congregated to watch television. Nikki was there, going through a photo album, but she looked up to admire.

‘You’ve got the shelves all the same space apart,’ she said, awed by this mark of genius.

‘It’s not that difficult.’

‘Well, Mummy can’t do it.’

Gino grinned. ‘I’d gathered that.’

He got to his feet, brushed himself down and came to look at what she was doing.

‘Hey, who’s that?’ he asked suddenly.

He was pointing at a picture of a young girl in jeans and shirt, with flowing fair hair swirling around her as she did a dance that was clearly energetic. She looked a bit wild, and bit mad, and totally happy.

‘Is that who I think it is?’ he asked incredulously.

‘That was Mummy,’ Nikki said, speaking, in the manner of children, as though her mother’s earlier self was somebody else, now deceased.

‘You mean it is Mummy,’ Gino suggested.

‘No, she doesn’t look like that. But she did then. That was before I knew her.’

‘Before time began,’ Gino said through twitching lips.

He studied the girl again. She was young; heart-breakingly so to anyone who knew how life had treated her later. She’d been perhaps seventeen, and she’d had no idea. She’d just known that life would go exactly as she wanted, the way you always knew that at seventeen.

The next set of pictures came from her dancing career. There she was in leotards, concentrating intensely on the steps she was practising. Then she was dressed up to perform in glittering costumes.