‘Ar,’ said Gomer dismally.

Through the hole-in-its-silencer roar of Eirion’s departing car came the sound of the phone. Jane danced into Mum’s grim scullery-office.

The light in here was meagre and cold, and a leafless climbing rose scraped at the small window like fingernails. But Jane was smiling, warm and light inside and, like, up there. Up there with the broken weathercock on the church steeple.

She had to sit down, a quivering in her chest. She remembered a tarot reader, called Angela, who had said to her, You will have two serious lovers before the age of twenty.

As she put out a hand for the phone, it stopped ringing. If Mum had gone out, why wasn’t the answering machine on? Where was Mum? Jane switched on the desk lamp, to reveal a paperback New Testament beside a newspaper cutting about the rural drug trade. The sermon pad had scribbles and blobs and desperate doodles. But there was no note for her.

Jane shrugged then sat at the desk and conjured up Eirion. Who wasn’t conventionally good-looking. Well, actually, he wasn’t good-looking at all, in some lights, and kind of stocky. And yet… OK, it was the smile. You could get away with a lot if you had a good smile, but it was important to ration it. Bring it out too often and it became like totally inane and after a while it stopped reaching the eyes, which showed insincerity. Jane sat and replayed Eirion’s smile in slow motion; it was a good one, it always started in the eyes.

Eirion? The name remained a problem. Basically, too much like Irene. Didn’t the Welsh have some totally stupid names for men? Dilwyn — that was another. Welsh women’s names, on the other hand, were cool: Angharad, Sian, Rhiannon.

He was certainly trying hard, though. Like, no way had he ‘just happened to be passing’ Jane’s school at chucking-out time. He’d obviously slipped away early from the Cathedral School in Hereford — through some kind of upper-sixth privilege — and raced his ancient heap nine or ten miles to Moorfield High before the buses got in. Claiming he’d had to deliver an aunt’s birthday present, and Ledwardine was on his way home. Total bullshit.