‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, prising my fingers from my lips to kiss them again.

‘It does,’ I said, speaking nothing but the truth.

‘Kiss me,’ he begged me.

‘Well, very quietly . . .’

I kissed him and felt his mouth melt under mine. He rolled underneath me and guided me to mount him. At the first touch of his hardness between my legs I moaned with pleasure and bit the back of my hand, trying to teach myself to stay silent.

He turned me so that I was underneath him. ‘Put your hand over my mouth,’ I urged him.

He hesitated. ‘It feels as if I am forcing you,’ he said uncomfortably.

I gave a little breathy laugh. ‘If you were forcing me I would be quieter,’ I joked, but he could not laugh. He pulled away from me and dropped on to his back, and he pulled me to lie beside him, my head on his shoulder.

‘We’ll wait till they are all asleep,’ he said. ‘They cannot wake all night.’

We waited and waited but his mother’s heavy tread did not come up the stairs until late, and then we heard, with embarrassing clarity, her sigh as she sat on the side of her bed, the ‘clip, clop’ as she dropped one wooden clog then another on the floor. Then we heard with a sharpness which showed us how thin the walls must be, the muted rustle of her undressing and then the creak of the ropes of the bed as she got under the covers.

After that it was impossible. If I even turned the bed creaked so loud that I knew she would hear it. I pressed my mouth to his ear and breathed, ‘Let us make love tomorrow when they are all out,’ and I felt the nod of his silent assent. Then we lay, burning up with desire, sleepless with lust, not touching, not even looking at each other, on our bridal night.

They came for the sheets in the morning, and would have flown them like a bloodstained flag from the window to prove the consummation of the marriage but Daniel stopped them. ‘There’s no need,’ he said. ‘And I don’t like the old ways.’

The girls said nothing but they raised their eyebrows at me as if they well knew that we had not bedded together at all, and suspected that he could not feel desire for me. His mother, on the other hand, looked at me as if it proved to her that I was not a virgin and that her son had brought a whore into her home.

It was a bad wedding night and a sour wedding morning and, as it happened, they did not go out all day but stayed at home, and we could not make love that day, nor the next night, nor the next night either.

Within a few days I had learned to lie like a stone beneath my husband, and he had learned to take his pleasure as quickly as he could in silence. Within a few weeks we made love as seldom as possible. The early promise of our night of lovemaking on the boat that had left me dizzy with satisfied desire could not be explored or fulfilled in a bedroom with four nosy women listening.