Her neighbour gave a brief nod. ‘We must not be a nuisance.’

Ellen laughed. ‘That’s what your mother said, and she wasn’t a nuisance; it would have been dreadful if she’d been on ’floor all day until you came home.’

Miss Johnson seemed to consider this, and nodded again. ‘Thank you,’ she repeated and put her hand on the door. ‘Good day.’

What a strange woman, Ellen thought. Filip had said that she didn’t want to talk to him, which was all very well; he was a man and a stranger to her, after all. But I’m a neighbour and her poor mother is stuck up in that room all day with no one to talk to and no one to help her if she should need it; and she felt quite cross that the younger woman should appear so unfeeling. Unless, she considered, she had some special reason for being the way she was.

As she walked the children round the corner towards the river she reflected that she was getting to know more diverse people than she had ever known in Holderness. And, she thought, they’re folk who have been daring enough to have travelled from afar. They have taken their lives into their own hands and finished up here. What tales they must have to tell.

Edith Johnson, as she was now known, locked the front door behind her and slowly climbed the stairs. Why had her mother not told her that the young woman from downstairs had been up to their room? Had she hurt herself when she had fallen out of bed?

Her mother was sitting in the chair by a low fire. Edith sighed; it was no kind of life in this small cold room with a washbasin meant only for handwashing but also used for preparing vegetables. For her mother’s convenience there was a bucket with a lid, which Edith emptied into the outside privy every evening; and she never forgot that they could have had a better life if she had been a more obedient woman.

She put down her shopping; when they had first arrived here she had traipsed a long way to find kosher food and had discovered a Jewish butcher whose wife had agreed to supply her with a cooked chicken once a week, for she had no means of cooking except over the fire in the small grate.

‘We will eat well today, Mutter,’ she said. ‘I will prepare the vegetables now and they might be ready by this evening. The fire is so slow.’ She was aware that she was repeating herself. It was what she always said, and her mother always nodded.

Mrs Johnson lifted her head. ‘You deserve more than this, Edyta,’ she murmured. ‘You are not happy.’ She gazed at her daughter. ‘Tomorrow your brother comes and he will ask the same question.’