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Slater. I thought you and Peter were divorced.’
    ‘Our marriage is being annulled but it isn’t yet. I’m waiting for him to sign and send me the papers.’
    ‘So you still use your married name?’
    ‘I moved to the Bay as Peter’s wife. He may have left me but we’re still legally married. I can’t pretend otherwise,’ she replied crisply.
    ‘He must have been mad,’ he blurted.
    ‘More like I was mad to marry him in the first place,’ she dismissed. ‘But it’s a lovely day. Do we have to talk about Peter?’
    ‘Of course not.’ He dared to look into her eyes. She smiled and he stared down at his boots.
    She saw his embarrassment and tried to ease it. ‘I know I should wait for you to ask, David, but do you want to dance?’
    ‘I’d love to.’ He offered her his arm. After glancing at her hand to make sure the greasepaint was dry, she took it just as the last cart disappeared up Bute Street and the band stopped playing.
    The vibrant echoes of Caribbean steel drums filled the air. Scores of youngsters, boys and girls, ran into the only clear area in the centre of the park, the pitch the judges had occupied. They began to leap and gyrate to the throbbing beat with an abandon David wished he could emulate. But the long weeks he had spent in hospital recuperating had stiffened his joints and sapped his self-confidence. He doubted that he could manage a waltz with his former skill, let alone his favourite Charleston. And, if this was a dance, it was wilder than anything Harry’s sisters had taught him.
    A slim, attractive girl with skin the colour of dark chocolate looped a blue silk scarf around Moody’s neck and roped him towards her. Reaching for his gold boater she placed it on her own head, and stood, legs apart, body pulsating, blowing him kisses.
    ‘Is that your baker?’ David asked Edyth.
    ‘It is,’ she confirmed. ‘I never knew he could dance like that.’
    ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
    ‘That makes two of us,’ Edyth concurred. ‘Shall we sit – or rather stand – this one out?’
    Wary of losing her in the crowd, David covered the hand Edyth had hooked into his elbow with his own. But he couldn’t stop staring at the girl with the silk scarf. She was dressed modestly in a high-necked, calf-length, button-through cotton frock, yet her movements and the expression in her eyes exuded a sensuality that sent a peculiar thrill – half excitement, half fear – down his spine.
    He had been to dozens of dances since Mary had married Harry, but had seen no one move like that girl. Edyth and her four sisters were considered good dancers but their steps were refined in comparison to the coloured girl’s. It was the difference between the Valetta and the Indian war dances he had seen in the cowboy films Harry had taken the family to see in Pontardawe.
    He noticed that the girl’s movements were gradually being adopted by the people around her, including, to his astonishment, members of the Bute Street Blues Band. Even Micah, who was the pastor of a church. But unlike the chapel minister in the Swansea Valley, Micah obviously had no qualms about making a spectacle of himself. David stepped alongside Edyth, leaned against the railings and continued to watch the dancers. The drumming proved intoxicating. The raw sexuality of the girl’s movements both embarrassed and fascinated him, engendering feelings he would have found impossible to articulate.
    Despite his misgivings, he found himself tapping his feet and swaying to the rhythm, all the while beset by the oddest feeling that the dancers were simply creations of, and extensions of, the music. When it ceased they would disappear, fading into nothingness like the early-morning mist above the reservoir in the valley below his farm.
    The drumming slowed to a languorous conclusion. The beats grew fewer and softer until he couldn’t be certain the musicians were even hitting the skins. The dancers slowed and wiped the