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Huw had been a bit reluctant to take on such a big financial commitment, but Alys could see the advantages of living on site rather than to-ing and fro-ing from their previous home on the other side of the village. Lately, though, she had started to wonder if she would have taken the same decision again had she appreciated quite how much stress it would bring.
    ‘Besides,’ she said, reaching across to collect plates since everyone seemed to have stopped eating, ‘it’s in our interest to keep Gethin Lewis sweet. Don’t forget that the track to the old cottage goes right past this house. You don’t know who he might sell it to. Or what they might do with it. Now, if you’ve all had enough, I’m off to the Merched y Wawr .’
    ‘Daughters of the Dawn,’ sighed Kitty, ‘Don’t you just love the way they try to make the WI sound exciting here? Like a bunch of loose women.’
    Alys shot a quick glance at Huw, but he was too busy staring at the space where his plate had been. ‘I’m glad you’re so interested, Kitty,’ she said. ‘You’re coming with me.’
    With too much jetlag keeping him awake and not enough Jack Daniels to help him sleep, Gethin put on his jacket and boots, ignored his throbbing toes and followed the narrow lane up through the snow-covered banks to where it joined a wider road. Instead of turning right towards the village, he took the left-hand fork across the land which had once been part of his father’s estate, past Penmorfa Garden Centre.
    The old farmhouse where he was born had been given a considerable makeover by Alys and Huw. What he’d privately dubbed the Amityville Horror now looked cosy and welcoming against the frozen fields. The cottage his father had retired to five years earlier, built at a later date for one of the more fortunate farm hands, lay hidden away up a steep unmade track that disappeared to the side of the main property.
    In the fifteen years since winning first prize in a national art competition, as a nineteen-year-old, the course of his life had changed dramatically, but inside the cottage time might have stood still. His father had clung on to the farm for another couple of years after his mother’s death, but gave it up in disgust when Gethin sold the work that had made him an overnight name. Contempt at the apparent ease with which Gethin had made his fortune also made him spurn financial help for as long as he was strong enough to do so.
    On the hideous mottled-brown tiled fire surround in his father’s old sitting room a porcelain shepherdess his mother had cherished, because it was a rare gift from his father, was still flirting with the porcelain shepherd a family photograph away. If she was anything like his temporary next-door neighbour, the china lovers were best kept apart. The woman had as good as broken his toe just looking at him. Those vintage clothes were a menace too, turning his thoughts too dangerously towards black satin and the siren sigh of seamed silk stockings.
    Gethin shook his head and concentrated on the black-and-white photograph in the centre of the mantelpiece. There he was, a skinny little kid with glasses, leaning into his mother, his back to her stomach, her arms crossed over his chest to protect him. His father, just apart from them, one hand on his hip, one on his wooden staff, looking at the camera as if it would cost him money to smile.
    All the helplessness of that small boy, his inability to protect his mother against his father’s dark mood swings, brought a bitter taste to his mouth. Why the hell had the old hypocrite kept the picture on display when his family meant so little to him? And the old man expected him to perpetuate the misery by bringing up his own children here! If his mother had still been alive it might have been different. How she would have loved seeing grandchildren running about the place!
    He almost left the pale shepherdess where she’d stood for Lord knows how many years, but then he took pity on