Passing the lake, just minutes west of Bala, Seth remembers a day spent walking in the hills around Llyn Tegid with the Liverpool University Ramblers’ Club. He hadn’t known Jude well then, but they’d both talked a lot that day; mostly about Jude’s interest in uncovering the story of a whole branch of his family that was gassed and burnt in the ovens at Auschwitz. He’d been fascinated by Jude, but had found him frightening too. Three years older, he’d talked about how learning of the fate of his family in that Polish death camp had woken him up to the Nazi persecution of gays during the years of the Third Reich, and how this forgotten history had become the focus of his doctoral thesis. That had been in ’86 or ’87, before Seth had woken up to himself. His sense of identity then had lacked honesty or integrity, and he’d found such talk painful.

Jude hadn’t been invited to Seth’s sister Naomi’s wedding. Seth cast his mind back to their breakfast, earlier that Friday morning.

‘You can’t disappoint your sister, Seth,’ he’d urged. ‘You can’t just decide not to go.’

The arguments around why Jude was being excluded had been almost exhausted over the past weeks. Seth had hated being the messenger, especially when that had involved reminding Jude of his mother Ceinwen’s particular animosity.

‘‘A traditional family wedding in the countryside, at the Welsh heartland; that’s no place for the two of you to be seen together,’’ Seth had mimicked Ceinwen’s rising pitch. ‘‘And it’s not right anyway that a man should keep such close company with another man! People in the village will talk! Not to mention that this other man is a Jew…’’ They’d both been able to laugh at Ceinwen’s histrionics. ‘But then she always backtracks too,’ Seth went on, ‘pretending she’s got your interests at heart and worrying that you’d feel left out with everyone speaking Welsh!’

‘That’s a joke!’ Jude had exploded. ‘Has she forgotten that Chris – the groom, for God’s sake – is a Bristol man who talks like he’s got Victoria plums in his mouth?’

But their roles had been cast, and over their coffee that morning the hurt, but understanding lover had persuaded Seth that he should attend the wedding alone.