And now he was sitting by himself at one of the brown varnished tables in the lounge bar of the Red Cow when his friends came in, Tom Bara and Cy Fish and Jack Midnight and Will America, all of them looking shifty and serious, and when he said to Tom Bara, ‘What is it then, Tom?’ Tom looked sideways at the others and then at his feet and said, ‘She is back.’

I have often pictured him, nineteen years old, standing there that day in the chapel: dark wavy hair greased neatly in place, neck scrubbed and pink from the bath, starched white collar; waiting. Standing there like an idiot, red-faced and sweating for an hour and a half; everyone whispering and coughing and shuffling their feet and turning their heads to see if she’d arrived yet; some people looking at each other and nodding to indicate that they’d seen it coming, a girl like that. The minister eventually touching his arm and saying, Come on then Will boy, perhaps it’s time to call it a day.

‘Where is she?’ he said now to Tom Bara. Tom shook his head and looked at his feet and then over at the door that divided the lounge bar of the Red Cow from the passage outside.

‘Tell her to bugger off, Will,’ said Tom. ‘Tell her she has come too late.’

At the house Agnes said to Tudor, ‘Go fetch your father, we are ready.’

But Tudor was fussing with the cake, and so was Emyr, both of them trying to fit the last of the candles into its metal flower.

‘You then,’ she called out from the back to Mair, still busy in the front room with her decorations. So it was Mair who ran off up the hill to the Red Cow to call him home; Mair who ran up the hill to the opaque glass door between the outside passage and the lounge bar and found a stranger in a brown hat at the threshold; her father rising slowly from his chair, all his silent friends behind him.

Mair remembers standing there, bits of crêpe paper stuck to her cardigan and her small gluey hands. She remembers that he looked at her and closed his eyes; that a breeze blew in from the passageway, lifting a few strands of his hair, which then settled in a slightly different place, lightly across his forehead. And what she also remembers – Mair who is old now, Mair whose grasp of the here-and-now is getting frailer by the day but whose memory of the past is clear and sharp and fierce and abiding – what Mair remembers is him stepping forward in the stone-still room towards the door, opening wide his arms to her and saying, ‘My lovely girl.’

Jubilee

Jubilee

STANDING NOW AT her shoulder, no longer caring much about his future, Arthur Pritt began to speak.