Through the half-sleep that came before the radio voices at five, Tecwyn’s certainty about the dinner party gave way to the misgivings Uwe had planted. Why was he being so solicitous? He had seen the seemingly endless queues of young women and girls who came to his clinics. Though their thoughtlessness and irresponsibility often made him depressed and angry, he sometimes envied their possibilities. And perhaps, deep within him, what he craved was the permission to realise such possibilities for himself. But whose permission? And he wept when he realised it was the permission he failed to grant to himself. Feeling suddenly vulnerable he pulled himself against Uwe and held him.

Arfona sank into the over-stuffed armchair in the bay window of the guest room; she liked its wallpaper and the view across the Dee and considered it her room whenever she stayed with the boys. She read the chapter her son had left on her bedside table. It irritated her that his Welsh was still not perfect. After all, he’d had the benefit of a Welsh language education – which was more than she could say for herself. She’d had to sit down and learn the grammar, making a conscious effort to use and write the language. She read with intense concentration, correcting the frequent errors but barely taking in the content of the piece. Only slowly did the awareness of Iolo Pawl’s sexual experience dawn upon her. She wasn’t shocked by what she’d read of these characters’ antics. On realising, though, that the words and actions they described were conjured up by Tecwyn’s imagination, she began to wonder if what he’d described were the kind of things he did with Uwe. It stung her that she’d begun to think about what her boys did sexually and she became uneasy. But curiosity displaced unease and she re-read the piece thinking all the time about Uwe and her son.