He didn’t touch me in the first week but I was as alarmed by his new nakedness as I was by his total lack of self-consciousness. I was constantly struck by how beautiful he was even as my stomach twisted when he just came in, stripped off and slid into bed without a word. The whiteness of his skin only served to make his dark hair darker and he always slept naked, brazen. The deathly chill on the linen sheets didn’t even slow him down. I was always there before him, eyes jammed shut and limbs clamped into a ball.

He got to me slowly, a deer stalker stepping light, breathing into my hair, inching his way closer, putting his arm around me. One night pulling me round to rest my head on his chest, another night fitting his whole length behind me and many more nights holding my hands, my sweaty little-girl hands still in fists, in his palm. He kept a pillow between me and him as if I mightn’t know what was brewing.

All of these things took root in the silence we had been cultivating for years and so we came to know each other without the handicap of words. When he lifted my nightie and licked me slowly from the back of my neck to the base of my spine, I had to hold on to my nipples in case they pinged clean off me and rolled under the bed! I prayed he would never open his mouth for any other reason.

I caved in in the end: seems he did know about kissing girls way south of the border properly in bandit country and, damn my pedigree tramp’s DNA, I rose up to meet him. He was so big, so smooth, so patient, he covered me easily. When he kissed me like that, when he kissed me at all, I was glad that my daughter and Bridie were far away out of earshot. I hated myself for not being able to deny my need. I was entirely undone.

The sounds of us together under the eaves made the silence of us together during the daylight hours seem less strained. We’d never be yammerers, that was for sure, but now when he stood close to me, just to reach past me for the milk or to kiss Serena when she was already in my arms, I had to concentrate on not tipping headlong into him instead of pitching back. I don’t know if he felt the same pull towards me. If he did, it didn’t show; nothing showed on his face and I did my best to match the lack of change in the atmosphere between us. I couldn’t risk forgetting that he wasn’t in the market for a wife even though now I had become one. If he wanted to be a husband, it was no business of mine.