Sitting across the kitchen table, Tecwyn watched his mother as she peeled and chopped. He wondered whether to forewarn her about the sex scene before handing her the pages, but he found it difficult to talk to her about sex. He appreciated the absurdity of his reticence; didn’t he spend all his working hours talking quite comfortably about condoms, pills and other useful things with the safety-conscious sexually active? Perhaps he didn’t need to say anything. Hadn’t she surprised and shocked the critics with her last novel? The only one of the five she’d written which dealt with anything explicitly sexual, it was the story of a fifty-something widow’s aching need for the intimacy her husband’s death had stolen from her. Tecwyn remembered the unease with which he’d read of this older woman’s search to quench her sexual thirst and wondered what elements of his mother’s own story were woven into it. Unlike her heroine, who’d experienced a sexual reawakening, the flings of Arfona’s own grief had left her depressed and unsatisfied. The intensity of her feelings had been deepened by her inability to talk to anyone about them. She still felt a searing lack of intimacy in her life.

‘I’ll put the new chapter on your bed-side table,’ Tecwyn answered his mother, handing her a drink. ‘I’m going to take a shower.’

She smiled as he set the glass on the table beside the mound of peelings, saying, ‘I’m looking forward to reading it!’

Uwe folded the dough over the sun dried tomatoes and worked the sticky mess for a few minutes, adding the odd fistful of flour until all the olive oil had been incorporated, and shaping it into two loaves. He knew already, from the feel of the dough, that the bread would be good. He set the loaves on the shelf above the Aga to prove.

‘I’m having a shower now and then I’ll take a nap until later on,’ he told Arfona. ‘There’ll be time enough for everything else that we need to do.’

Uwe pushed into the steaming shower alongside Tecwyn and pulled himself against the hardness of his back, his hands exploring – stroking and touching. In all their years together, neither had tired of the delight they took in each other’s bodies. Each was free to ‘play’; they’d agreed in their first months that, given their respective histories with men, sexual fidelity would be irksome. It was a freedom they both valued, but never claimed, though neither knew it because each had agreed to spare the other the details. Tecwyn turned and they kissed deeply. And the sex they shared was good: it said ‘Ich liebe dich… Rwy’n dy garu di… I love you…’ in ways that tired words in any language no longer could.