scrawled across its back in lurid crimson, like a splash of fresh blood.
The sheep was lying apart from the rest of the flock, benign head lifted, gazing beyond the field to the village street.
Through the lens, Claire followed the sheep's gaze but saw only a litter bin attached to a low wall with grass growing out of the top. She took a picture, the sheep dark in the foreground.
The river was beautiful. It splashed and fizzed amiably over the rocks, calling out so strongly to Claire that she just had to scramble down the bank, camera bouncing around on its leather strap, until her feet slipped into the soft, cool water. One shoe floated off and she had to rescue it. Then, on impulse, she put the blue shoe back in the river and took a photograph of the clear water swirling gently around it, in the background the river-washed stonework of a bridge support.
The river, the bridge, her shoe — part of the scene.
She should have come to see him. If she'd known about him wanting to take her, just her, for that walk, down the lane to the village, past the church; if she'd known that, she would have come. She imagined him talking to her softly, musically, in Welsh — how beautiful. If she'd been told about that, she would have come. No doubt her mother had thought of that. Bitch. Until that phone call Claire had assumed she'd never met her grandfather, never been to Y Groes in her life. No wonder the village called out to her to come back.
Bitch.
Y Groes — always 'some ghastly God-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere' or 'some damp, dreary hellhole.' If only she'd known…
It was her own fault. Such a placid child, people always said. Incurious about everything until her teens, when she began to take photographs and the world opened out like a huge flower. And then always too busy: leaving home, catching up on everything she'd missed, carving out a career in what then was still seen as a man's world. And forgetting for years at a time that she had a grandfather on her mother's side, an estranged counterpart to good old Reg with his garden and his golf.
And here, unknown to her — all this.
Bitch.
Sitting on the river bank, in the lengthening shadow of the bridge, strange, conflicting emotions crowded in on Claire and she wept silently. Not soul-wrenching, God-cursing tears, as often wept by Bethan, whom she did not as yet know, but quiet tears of regret.
Another shadow fell across her and she looked up, a tall figure blocking the dying sun.
It's him.
Claire's heart leapt in fear. Fear and — and longing.
The voice was soft and high and sibilant, like the wind in a cornfield.
'I'm afraid I don't know your name. So I shall just call you Miss Rhys. How are you. Miss Rhys?'
Chapter XIV
Three-fifteen. Home time.
Bethan was bustling about the school hall attending to children's major crises: the four-year-old boy whose shoelace had come undone, the girl of six with a broken nail.
'Try not to get it wet or it will come off,' she said, adjusting the Band-Aid round the child's finger then turning to help a small boy who'd buttoned his coat all wrong.
A handful of mothers were waiting for the smallest children. They watched her with indulgent smiles, none of them rushing to help her. Perhaps they thought this was the kind of therapy she needed to cure her of widowhood.
The mothers took their kids and left, leaving Bethan with just three small pupils waiting to be collected and a strange woman standing hesitantly in the doorway, clutching one of those slim, garish packages in which prints and negatives are returned from processing.
'Mrs. Freeman,' Bethan remembered. 'You rang this morning. You wanted to see me.'
'Hello,' the woman said. She looked down at the photo envelope. 'I usually do my own or take them to someone I know in London,' she said half-apologetically. 'I've been to one of those fast-print places in Aberystwyth. Just, you know, wanted… to see how they'd turned out.'
She seemed embarrassed. Bethan couldn't think why. She smiled at the woman. 'Come in,' she said. 'Try not to fall over Angharad, she thinks she's a sheepdog.'
Buddug had left early, to Bethan's relief. In the emptying school hall, where an electric kettle was coming gently to the boil on the teacher's table, Bethan looked at the woman and the woman looked at Bethan. They were around the same age, one dark, one blonde, one Welsh, the other… well, very English. Bethan thought, but who could really say?
'I'm still rather feeling my way in the village,' the blonde one said. She was dressed like a very urban explorer, in fashionably-baggy green trousers and red hiking boots. 'I don't know quite how I should behave.'
Good heavens, Bethan thought, they aren't usually like that, the English, when they move into Pontmeurig, joining this and organising that and introducing themselves everywhere and even buying people drinks, sometimes.
'Don't be silly,' she said, pouring boiling water into a chunky earthenware pot. 'Sit down. Have a cup of tea.'
'Thank you,' the judge's granddaughter said, lowering herself, quite gracefully under the circumstances into a tiny chair designed for a seven-year-old. 'That's kind of you, Miss Sion.'
'Mrs. McQueen.'
'Oh. I'm terribly sorry, I was told—'
'Bethan. Call me Bethan.'
'Oh. Yes. Thank you. I'm Claire Freeman, but everyone seems to know that.' She laughed. 'Although they all seem to call me Miss Rhys — the women in the post office and Mr. ap Siencyn, the rector. My grandfather, you see, he was—'
'I know,' Bethan said. 'I'm afraid I never really met him. A bit before my time. He was staying in his house most of the time, when I was here. He used to study a lot, people said. In the village. I believe, he was very much… well, revered.'
This had the desired effect of pleasing Claire Freeman, who told Bethan how wonderful it had been to discover in the cottage and in the village this whole new aspect of her ancestry, long hidden, like the family treasure.
'But you said you didn't really know him,' Claire said. 'So you can't have been here all that long yourself.'
Pouring tea into a yellow mug, Bethan told her she'd been here nearly a year, then left, then come back. No she hadn't been here all that long, when you added it up.
'But it's different for you.' Claire said, 'and that's what I've come about. I suppose.' She'd opened the envelope and was flicking through the photographs without looking at them, still rather ill at ease, the child, Angharad, scampering around her feet.
'Milk?' said Bethan.
'Just a little.'
'Sugar?'
Claire passed. '
'Yes,' said Bethan. smiling a little, passing her the mug of tea. 'But only if you're trying to lose weight. Can I see?'
'I haven't really looked at them yet. They won't be very good. They're just snaps.'
Bethan pushed back her hair and adjusted her glasses. She opened the envelope and saw clear water swirling around a bright blue shoe. It was a startling picture. She drew it out and below it saw the judge's cottage, twilit. Then she saw the village street looking very still, with deep shadows: various close-ups of the timber-framed houses — including the tiny terraced cottage where she and Robin had lived, with the setting sun floating in its
