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straw bonnet closer around her face against the blaze of the sun.
    She has loved this little town from the moment she first saw it, its castle protected by a noisy garrison of crows, its narrow streets twisting up and down and around its hills, giving glimpses of the sea here and the mountains there, and its granite houses and cottages and garden sheds seeming to tumble one upon another so that the whole place is like a painting by a madman. She had welcomed it into her heart but it had not welcomed her, it had kept her outside of itself. But, she thinks, she is confusing the town and its centuries of history with its women here and now, the ones that still bob when she passes by, and the ones that scuttle out of sight so that they do not have to acknowledge her at all. As if I were any different from them, she had said to Lizzie German. Lizzie had replied, You are different, missus, no gettingaway from it. And inwardly, Non knew what Lizzie said was true, it had been true wherever she had lived. She had always been an outsider.
    Non walks around the sharp corner and down the hill through Tryfar. In every other house along here, she thinks, there is a woman I have helped during the War, whose intimate secrets I know. She counts them off as she passes: Nellie Evans, Lizzie Price, Gwen Morgan, Annie Jones’s daughter Betty, old Mrs Williams in the chapel house, and even here, in one of the grand houses of Bronwen Terrace, the wife of Moriah’s minister herself. You know things about them, missus, Lizzie German had told her, that no one else knows; it’s only natural they’re uncomfortable with it. And so Non stayed an outsider.
    Her mind flitters to her family, and she gives herself a mental shake. She will not allow herself to think of those close to her who have distanced themselves, not even Davey. This afternoon is for Gwydion.
    She pauses at the top of the long flight of steps down to the lower road. Voices float up to her like birds riding a thermal. She attempts to make out the figures she can see moving around the clubhouse – she wonders if Gwydion and Wil have arrived yet – but the air is too dense with heat for her to recognise anyone. She takes hold of the handrail and begins her descent.
    â€˜You’ve made Wil’s day, bringing him down to the Golf Club on the motorbike so all his friends saw him sitting on the back of it.’ Non smiles as she thinks of the expressions on the faces of Wil’s friends. She and Gwydion had left him to enjoy his moment and followed the path across the links to the beach. Now she slips and slides down the sand dune ahead of Gwydion, pulling the brim of her straw bonnet forward so that it shades more of herface from the sun. Mrs Davies will be complaining to Davey again that she looks like a gypsy if her face browns much more. Never mind that Davey used to call her his little brown wren, that he liked her brown face and her brown limbs. But that was before. Before the War, before Angela! She swallows the lump that rises in her throat. Before she recognised Osian’s shocking likeness to Davey.
    â€˜Non?’ Gwydion catches her up, shuffling his feet through the soft sand. ‘Does Wil do much caddying?’
    â€˜The salt will ruin your shoes,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you take them off? And yes, Wil comes down every Saturday, morning and afternoon if he can. It’s well-known, this golf course, you know, people come from all over to play, people with plenty of money. Wil can make more in a Saturday than he makes all week as an apprentice. He’s got an old head on his shoulders, has Wil.’
    â€˜I’m surprised he’s staying on, then, working with Davey. Couldn’t he find something more permanent with the Golf Club?’
    â€˜I don’t think he actually likes the caddying much,’ Non says. ‘Or some of the people who play here.’
    Non does not know whether Davey and Wil will have talked