Yet as time passed, she found her gaze drawn more and more to Marek, and every so often she would turn to find his quiet gaze fixed on her. She liked watching him in the garden, when his back was turned, that long, strong spine bending and straightening as he forked over the now-empty potato patch, sometimes holding up in triumph a stray potato, which they’d missed first time round. She would look hard at him, wondering. Often she was overcome by the sheer strangeness of a life so brutally uprooted, of their having to come and begin again somewhere new and foreign to them. She was moved by their courage and cheerfulness.

At first she had told herself she was imagining it – the way each of them sometimes looked at her. It was the same way Simon Collinge had looked at her. Wasn’t it? Or had she got it wrong. These men were foreigners – perhaps they did everything differently.

Then one warm afternoon, just as she was walking in from the garden, she met Piotr coming from the other direction, by the back door. Both of them dithered, in each other’s way.

‘Sorry!’ Katie laughed, leaning back against the wall to let him pass.

‘Thanks!’ Piotr smiled, but stopped, fixing her with a stare. To Katie, pressed against the wall, the back corridor suddenly felt very narrow and her summer dress felt thin, and rather too low in the neck.

Piotr faced her, looking into her eyes, his dark-brown ones full of longing. Then he said, ‘I would like to kiss you.’ And with no further ado she found herself in his arms, his warm lips on hers, his strong, manly smelling body pressed against her. Pushing his tongue in her mouth, he gave her a long, hungry kiss. She was too taken aback to react at first and did not feel repelled by his kiss, just embarrassed. She began to push against him. Piotr drew back.

‘Don’t,’ she said crossly.

‘But you are beautiful woman.’

‘Well, thanks . . .’ She couldn’t help being flattered, and she liked him too much to want to offend him, but she felt panic-stricken as well. She had to put a stop to any ideas he might have! ‘But you can’t just announce that you’re going to kiss someone and simply grab them! It’s not very polite.’

‘Polite?’ Piotr looked offended. ‘So you did not like my kissing?’

‘It was . . . Well, yes – I mean, no . . . Look, it’s not that I didn’t like it. It’s just not right – I mean we’re not . . .’

‘So, we can be . . .’ He made gestures pointing back and forth at her, then himself. ‘You, me’ – he seemed to rack his brains, then said in triumph – ‘we can be courting!’

‘No!’ Now she really was panicking. ‘The thing is, Piotr, I’m not free just to be, well, courting. I have a child . . .’