This was now in full bloom, so that every night they were feasting from it on new potatoes, carrots, runner and French beans, beetroots, lettuces, radishes, spring onions and chives. Against the sunniest wall lazed a tangle of tomato plants, hanging with red fruit. Sybil undoubtedly had green fingers. But she was elderly and needed help. As she pottered, pulling up weeds and depositing them in a trug nearby, Sybil noticed Marek and Piotr watching her, pointing, conferring in Polish as to the names of things.

‘Ah, now if you two like gardening, I’ve plenty for you to do,’ she announced, straightening up, pink in the face, despite the shade of her straw hat.

‘Yes!’ Piotr enthused. ‘We like. We can help you! We do dig – everything!’

‘Well, the digging will be later in the year, but there’s plenty of weeding and hoeing. I’m stopping now – it’s too hot. I’m going to have a snooze in the shade . . .’

‘Snooze?’ Furrowed brows.

‘A sleep. We can work later.’

‘No – is OK. We do now.’

‘Well, as you please. You know which are the weeds?’

‘Of course!’

Sybil came and joined Katie, pulling up her deck-chair. ‘Ah!’ She sank into it and released her swollen feet from her mannish sandals. ‘That’s what we need – some young male muscles. And they seem frightfully keen.’

‘I want to go there,’ Michael said.

‘No, you’d better stay here,’ Katie said, trying to restrain him. ‘You’ll get in the way. What about this nice story? Look – Goldilocks came to the cottage . . .’

‘No!’ Michael squirmed out of her grasp.

‘Oh, I don’t suppose he’ll do any harm,’ Sybil said through a yawn. ‘Let him go and watch.’

‘Go on then,’ Katie said. ‘But don’t get in their way, will you?’

She watched as Michael advanced importantly on the vegetable patch and stood shyly at the edge. There was something touching about the way he was so fascinated by the men, and it made her heart ache. His father had been an absent ghost, just as hers had.

‘You want to help?’ she heard Piotr say.

Michael nodded and, as Piotr beckoned him forwards, Marek carried the large trug over and laid it at Michael’s feet. ‘You guard this, OK? When it is full, we go and put over there.’ He indicated Sybil’s bonfire pile further down.

Katie felt herself relax. After a hard week in the office it was nice to have a little time just to sit, for someone else to look after Michael. Sybil soon fell into a doze, her hat down over her eyes. Katie sat hugging her knees, watching as Michael solemnly accepted the fistfuls of weeds that the two men thrust into his trug. She wondered if gardening made them feel more at home, and felt sad for them. For a few moments she watched Marek’s strong limbs bending and straightening, tackling the weeding with a speed and strength beyond anything Sybil was capable of. Piotr started working with the hoe. Michael was happy and Katie smiled, realizing that she was too. With a grateful glance at Sybil, who in her odd way had created a home in this house for various stray dogs, she lay back on the rug and enjoyed the warm, languid afternoon until she fell into a snooze herself.