He felt his way to sit on the side of her bed. ‘Yes.’ There was a silence. ‘I need to be with you. Can I come into your bed?’

They had lain many times on top of the sheets, twined together, kissing. Now she pulled the covers back and felt his long, lean frame climb in beside her and his lips seeking out hers. Quietly, intensely, they loved each other and slept pressed together, his belly at her back. When the dawn came she turned to find him watching her, smiling when he saw she was awake. She leaned up on her arm and looked down at him, the light reaching in at the edge of the curtain picking out the angles in his face. How she loved that face! She always wanted to touch his cheek, feeling the sharp angle of his cheekbone. She stroked back his hair.

‘You’re very beautiful,’ he whispered.

‘So are you.’ She smiled joyfully, then lay and held him. ‘I love you so much. I can’t really believe it.’

He rested his hand on her belly. ‘Soon you will be my wife,’ he said. ‘My dear wife, Katie.’ He said it with such happiness in his voice that she almost wanted to weep.

‘I must go soon to my own room,’ he said, ‘or little Michael will be awake.’

He kissed her and sat up.

‘Marek . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘If we keep doing this, I might have a baby.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, I think so. That is good!’

And so it had not been the last time that he had slipped into her bed. Both of them longed for the time when he could stop creeping about and claim the room as their own, as husband and wife.

Appropriately, the news came just after Easter. They had journeyed through the days of the Easter Triduum, the darkness of death being gradually overcome by light, bringing a time of flowers and holiday.

Katie had spent as much time as she could on her dress and, having got in from work that evening, was down at the back of the house where the light was best, hand-sewing lace onto the bodice. She had made tea for Sybil and the two of them were sitting together. Marek had just got in from work, come and kissed her and run upstairs to change.

Then there came a thunderous, crazed banging of the front-door knocker and screaming, high-pitched and incomprehensible. Archie leapt to his feet barking crazily. Sybil almost spilled her tea.

‘What on earth?’ she exclaimed.

Katie was on her feet. ‘It’s Agnieska – I’m sure it is.’

Marek had heard and was running downstairs again, still pulling on a shirt, as Katie tore along to open the door. Agnieska almost fell in through it. She was in more of a state than anyone Katie had ever seen, her hair half down, eyes wild, tears on her cheeks. But Katie couldn’t work out what any of it was about, as Agnieska cannonballed past her, straight at Marek, shrieking in Polish, seeming barely able to get the words out. She had a piece of paper in her hand. She banged it on his chest, she slapped it with her hand, she yelled out a stream of words, then shoved it into his hand and burst into convulsive weeping, hands over her face.