‘What’s Jinny like? Different?’

‘Very different.’

‘No,’ I said instinctively. ‘No different. The same as always.’

‘A German,’ Dadda said. ‘She has become a German completely. It is wonderful to see her.’

‘She talks German,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

Dadda sat down in his accustomed chair. ‘She is changed,’ he said, quietly emphatic. He looked at Mamma. ‘She did not sing to us at all.’

I took the remark at its face value, missing the implications of that world in which Jinny’s singing had rocked my own cradle. We all like to think of the rainbow as our rainbow; Jinny had sung, it seemed, to me alone.