It was on the tip of her tongue to say, ‘But you can’t,’ but she bit it back just in time. When the strike had first begun it hadn’t been so bad. Adam had joined his da and brothers and other men fishing the rivers and the sea, and she and Alice with the women and children picking winkles, crabs, seaweed and sea coal. Adam had fetched sand from the beach, washed it in buckets and sold it to builders and anybody else who could use it, and as a family they’d gone to the farms dotted around the countryside near Sunderland and picked potatoes and turnips and got paid a few pennies by the farmer or given swedes and kale and other vegetables by way of payment. She and Alice had gone to the lodge hall and joined the little army of women and bairns making clippy mats and tea cosies and scarves and socks with old woollens kind folk had donated, and the men had set to digging gardens, fixing roofs, cleaning chimneys and even doing tinker’s work by repairing kettles and pans and doing soldering jobs. Everything and anything they’d done as a community, all pulling together and united by common purpose, and in spite of the worry of where their next mouthful of food was coming from and how the rent was going to be paid, she’d found she was actually happy. Adam had been different; they’d been standing shoulder to shoulder like a real married couple and he had talked to her and even laughed now and again. But he hadn’t touched her in bed. It was as though in his softening attitude towards her that side of things had become unimportant to him, which she didn’t understand. He was a man, wasn’t he, and men had needs as he had demonstrated since their marriage night.

And not just men. Since she had admitted to herself that she loved him, she had longed for the very thing that she had feared for so many months and years; for his hands on her body, him inside her, needing her, wanting her, if only for the slaking of that primeval physical hunger on his part. When he took her he knew it was her and not Ruby beneath him. But he still cared about Ruby; even the way he was over her sister trying to help them out proved that. He didn’t want to appear any the less than he had always been where Ruby was concerned. It shouldn’t hurt, but it did.

Bone weary and suddenly bereft, she spoke what was in her heart for once. ‘She’s not looking down on us, Adam. Ruby isn’t like that, you know she isn’t. And you need something in your belly.’