"Try not to get it wet or it will come off," she said, adjusting the Band-Aid round the child's finger then turning to help a small boy who'd buttoned his coat all wrong.
A handful of mothers were waiting for the smallest children. They watched her with indulgent smiles, none of them rushing to help her. Perhaps they thought this was the kind of therapy she needed to cure her of widowhood.
The mothers took their kids and left, leaving Bethan with just three small pupils waiting to be collected and a strange woman standing hesitantly in the doorway, clutching one of those slim, garish packages in which prints and negatives are returned from processing.
"Mrs. Freeman," Bethan remembered. "You rang this morning. You wanted to see me."
"Hello," the woman said. She looked down at the photo envelope. "I usually do my own or take them to someone I know in London," she said half-apologetically. "I've been to one of those fast-print places in Aberystwyth. Just, you know, wanted… to see how they'd turned out."
She seemed embarrassed. Bethan couldn't think why. She smiled at the woman. "Come in," she said. "Try not to fall over Angharad, she thinks she's a sheepdog."
Buddug had left early, to Bethan's relief. In the emptying school hall, where an electric kettle was coming gently to the boil on the teacher's table, Bethan looked at the woman and the woman looked at Bethan. They were around the same age, one dark, one blonde, one Welsh, the other… well, very English. Bethan thought, but who could really say?
"I'm still rather feeling my way in the village," the blonde one said. She was dressed like a very urban explorer, in fashionably-baggy green trousers and red hiking boots. "I don't know quite how I should behave."
Good heavens, Bethan thought, they aren't usually like that, the English, when they move into Pontmeurig, joining this and organising that and introducing themselves everywhere and even buying people drinks, sometimes.
"Don't be silly," she said, pouring boiling water into a chunky earthenware pot. "Sit down. Have a cup of tea."
"Thank you," the judge's granddaughter said, lowering herself, quite gracefully under the circumstances into a tiny chair designed for a seven-year-old. "That's kind of you, Miss Sion."
"Mrs. McQueen."
"Oh. I'm terribly sorry, I was told—"
"Bethan. Call me Bethan."
"Oh. Yes. Thank you. I'm Claire Freeman, but everyone seems to know that." She laughed. "Although they all seem to call me Miss Rhys — the women in the post office and Mr. ap Siencyn, the rector. My grandfather, you see, he was—"
"I know," Bethan said. "I'm afraid I never really met him. A bit before my time. He was staying in his house most of the time, when I was here. He used to study a lot, people said. In the village. I believe, he was very much… well, revered."
This had the desired effect of pleasing Claire Freeman, who told Bethan how wonderful it had been to discover in the cottage and in the village this whole new aspect of her ancestry, long hidden, like the family treasure.
"But you said you didn't really know him," Claire said. "So you can't have been here all that long yourself."
Pouring tea into a yellow mug, Bethan told her she'd been here nearly a year, then left, then come back. No she hadn't been here all that long, when you added it up.
"But it's different for you." Claire said, "and that's what I've come about. I suppose." She'd opened the envelope and was flicking through the photographs without looking at them, still rather ill at ease, the child, Angharad, scampering around her feet.
"Milk?" said Bethan.
"Just a little."
"Sugar?"
Claire passed. "Dim siwgwr. Is that right?"
"Yes," said Bethan. smiling a little, passing her the mug of tea. "But only if you're trying to lose weight. Can I see?"
"I haven't really looked at them yet. They won't be very good. They're just snaps."
Bethan pushed back her hair and adjusted her glasses. She opened the envelope and saw clear water swirling around a bright blue shoe. It was a startling picture. She drew it out and below it saw the judge's cottage, twilit. Then she saw the village street looking very still, with deep shadows: various close-ups of the timber-framed houses — including the tiny terraced cottage where she and Robin had lived, with the setting sun floating in its upstairs front window.
Then a solitary sheep, a view of the darkening hills, of the rigidly-upright figure of the rector standing in the grass above the river, of Mair Huws outside her shop, of the church tower braced against the dying light and photographed from a steep angle that made it look as if it was falling towards you.
She felt something at once in the photograph. This woman had plucked ripened images of Y Groes out of the air like apples from a tree, and caught the glow.
"They're wonderful" Bethan said. 'They're like something out of a magazine. No, that's inadequate, that cheapens them."
"Oh dear." said Claire. "I was hoping they'd be like holiday snaps. I can't seem to take snaps anymore."
She looked so seriously disappointed that Bethan had to laugh, quite liking her now. Out of the window she saw two mothers appear at the gate, and excused herself and rounded up the remaining three children—"Dewch yma, Angharad, wuff wuff'—gently pushing them out of the door into the playground, waving to the mothers.
When she returned, Claire was thumbing rapidly through the photographs, looking puzzled.
"Anything wrong?"
"No. I — a couple seem to be missing, that's all. My own fault. I should have waited to have them done in London. That is—"
She looked embarrassed again, as if expecting Bethan to say. Oh, so our Welsh film processing isn't good enough for you. is it, Mrs. Posh Londoner?
"Well," said Bethan. "they are a bit slapdash, some of these quick-processing outfits."
Claire looked grateful. "What I've come about — I— somebody in the pub told Giles, my husband, that you were rather brilliant at teaching English children to speak Welsh, and so we wondered—"
Bethan explained that it wasn't a question of being brilliant; English children, the younger the better, picked up Welsh surprisingly quickly. By the age of seven or eight, if they attended a Welsh-medium school, they were often quite fluent. Claire said they had no children yet. but when they did have a baby she would like it to be raised in a bilingual home, and so—"It's funny really, some people in the pub told Giles there was no need to learn Welsh in Y Groes."
Bethan raised an eyebrow. "They told him that?"
"I think it was because we seem to be the only English people in the village. I think they were just being kind, probably."
"Probably," said Bethan, thinking how odd this was.
"We'd fit in, of course, with your arrangements." Claire said.
Bethan thought about it.
"I've never done it before, taught adults."
"Is it so different?"
"I don't know," Bethan said.
"They say the brain starts to atrophy or something, when you pass thirty. Isn't that what they say?"
"Well," said Bethan, pouring herself a mug of strong black tea, coming to a decision, "let's prove them wrong, I could come to your house after school for a short lime, how would that be?"
"That would be super. I mean, Giles will have to go back to London during the week, but I'll be staying here, and could bring him up to date at weekends on everything I've learned."
Bethan said slowly. "I'm… often free at the weekends too." All too free, she thought. "The thing to do is to work on it every day if you can, even if it's only for twenty minutes. I'm sure we could do that most days. And perhaps at weekends we could have a revision session, with your husband."