I stood later in the room, to see if everything was in final order. A shaft of sunlight fell across the old floor, dust motes hung, and twirled slowly. A safe place, I thought. We’d also put an old wooden table and chair, there was a light. I had an idea the light wasn’t bright enough, it was just a bulb hanging from the whitewashed ceiling. He’d be a reader, I thought, he’d be reading. The weak light? I put it out of mind, I wouldn’t worry about it.

Before sweeping the room Josias had moved the stored things out, he’d stacked them in the garage, and some I had him throw out. I told him a friend was coming to stay, and I told Emily and Tiny that too. They may have been puzzled, but they didn’t say. Emily and Tiny didn’t really care about the garden, what went on there, because their domain was the house, and the yard where their own rooms were.

And the children? The children. I had taken, we had taken, care to teach our children from the beginning that the government, the system, in our country was wrong. They understood, profoundly I think, how much it meant to Howard and me. They surely could see the expression on Howard’s face when he spoke about it, could feel my anxiety and anger when I did. Long ago we had told them that one day, if things didn’t change, we would leave the country, Dad would move his job to an overseas country, and we would leave. The children knew, also, not to talk about this outside our home, they felt, no doubt, the fear and silence that surrounded us. A man working for the resistance was going to stay in our garden room. They were not to tell anyone, that’s all. The grandparents were not to hear about it, no one was to hear about it.

So our house was safe. A safe harbour for a man — for a cause — in need.

Did the man in the garden room haunt the children’s dreams later, much later, when they were at school in New York? I don’t know. They never said. They spoke of him as ‘the man from the resistance,’ and moved on to other things. They were strong children. They were not, perhaps, like me.

I’VE MENTIONED the grandparents who weren’t to know about the fugitive man, but Helena and Stephen had only one set of grandparents. Howard’s mother had died soon after Stephen was born, and his father before that, I had never met him.

His mother had spoken English with an accent, a Russian accent, I remember it. She had a soft voice, sometimes you couldn’t hear or detect the accent, and she spoke little. Sometimes I hear, on the streets here, a person with a strong Russian accent, and I remember her, Howard’s mother, at once. She had emigrated from Lithuania in 1931, before the war — or should I say, she had escaped from Lithuania, just in time. She was Jewish. Howard’s father too.