The familiar path in the firebreak through the Corsican pines, which down the years has always seemed endless, brings you all too quickly to the clearing where you’ve left your car. You want to accept Eurig’s invitation to rest for the few hours that remain of the night, but you recognise that the odds are against there being much calm between you. You need at least a few hours sleep if you’re to make it through the morning clinic. And you want some time by yourself to question your motives and consider the fishes’ prophecy.

Eurig

Already missing Dylan, you lay on the chaise-longue and stare at the red light on the new answering machine, almost as though to de-code its Morse-like flashes. You are half afraid to listen to whatever voice has been recorded, in case its message pulls you back into the debris of your broken family. Eventually you hear Seimon say that he’s sorry; he asks if you can meet. Through Fflur’s window, the dawn bloodies the sky over Snowdonia. You tug the chaise across the living room, dragging the rug with it. Lying in its familiar embrace, grateful that you no longer have to watch the comings and goings of the men along the path just beyond the buddleia bush, you roll Dwynwen’s gimmal ring in your fingers. When Dylan comes to you, you slip it onto his little finger and swim with him in the dawn.

A Particular Passion

A Particular Passion

Over lunch, which they ate in the spring sunshine outside the Education Authority training centre, Ben Pasgen and his two colleagues wondered if either of the workshop facilitators had ever stood in front of a class of fourteen-year-olds; the theories they expounded seemed so untouched by practice.