‘God,’ Rosie said. ‘I wish I’d had a Rhianne in my corner when I was growing up.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘I was always the butt of the family jokes,’ she told him. ‘My brother was pretty evil to me at times. I remember he nicked my favourite Barbie at one point and made it part of some Action Man war game. He staged an execution – she was court-martialled for espionage, if I remember rightly, on very thin evidence. Anyway, he beheaded her with my mum’s bread knife.’
‘That’s dark.’
‘Yeah. And when I ratted on him I got the usual “it’s just laddish larks” fob-off. I can’t remember himeverbeing held accountable for crap behaviour. If I’d taken something of his and destroyed it, there would have been hell to pay. When I look back on it we were held to wildly different standards, though I know our parents loved us both.’
‘No wonder things are a bit sticky with your family,’ Aled observed.
‘Nope,’ Rosie said. ‘No wonder at all. What are your lot like? I mean, I know Rhianne, obviously …’
It was a question she’d been burning to put to him for weeks, but something about sitting in near darkness made asking it easier. Moreover, she told herself, moving the conversation on might prove a useful distraction for him.
‘Mam is a bit like Rhi,’ he said fondly. ‘Strong, kind, honest – a little fearsome. She got pregnant with me after a summer fling. My father wanted no part in raising a baby and tried to convince her it was crazy to go through with it – as did her own parents, I think – but she wasn’t having any of it. She stuck to her guns, even though she was young.’
‘What a cool woman,’ Rosie said, shrugging off the thought of a world without Aled in it. ‘What does she do for work, your mum?’
‘She runs a guest house. Rhianne and I grew up by the sea on the north coast, so there were always tourists. I helped out with everything that didn’t involve speaking to scary strangers from the minute I was old enough.’
‘Is that how you learned to cook?’ Rosie asked.
‘Pretty much, yes. But it was only years later that I learned to make massaman curry and all the spicy stuff you like. There wasn’t a lot of call for it in Conwy County in the 1990s …’
‘Shed imprisonments aside, it sounds like a pretty nice way to grow up,’ Rosie said.
‘It was,’ Aled agreed. ‘People thought it was weird, and sometimes took the piss that I didn’t have a dad, but I never felt deprived. I suppose you don’t miss what you’ve never had, and there were enough big personalities in my family that there never seemed to be a father-shaped hole.’
‘I take it Thomas is your mum’s surname? Otherwise you’d be a Bettini.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘She said that if she was bringing a child up alone, he or she would have her family name. I always respected that, and it made me feel closer to Rhianne, too. Her dad was Mam’s brother.’
‘Did your mum never find someone else? Or get married or anything?’ Rosie asked.
‘She did, when I was about thirteen. For years she said she couldn’t be bothered with anyone male except me, until she met Mal. He wooed her like they were in some old Hollywood film, and eventually she let him get close enough that she fell for him, too. They got married a year later and Mam had the twins.’
‘Oh, wow,’ Rosie said, swallowing back the wordsso they were the kids in your photobefore they could incriminate her.
‘Yeah. Gethin and Tiegan. They’re brilliant. I stayed close to home for uni so I could see plenty of them while they were little.’
‘So what made you decide to start travelling?’ Rosie said. It was a bold question – the sort she probably wouldn’t have asked by daylight – but her urge to understand more of him made her reckless.
Aled stared into the candlelight for a moment, then turned to Rosie with a rueful smile and said, ‘The same thing that makes all homely, bookish types resort to drastic action. I had my heart broken.’
‘Oh,’ Rosie said, almost breathlessly. She was desperate to know more but unsure of her permissions. Could she really ask him to elaborate when the story she wanted to hear might cause him pain?
‘It was a long time ago,’ Aled said. ‘She was my girlfriend from our last year of school up until I finished my English degree.’
‘Crikey,’ Rosie said, ‘that’s a long time to spend with someone when you’re so young.’ Involuntarily, she remembered what Rhianne had divulged about teenage Aled:he didn’t get good-looking until we were about sixteen. She found herself wondering – without foundation and very uncharitably – if the girl in question had only deigned to notice him when he became tall and preternaturally handsome.
‘Yeah. Her name was Ceri. I was besotted with her.’ He shook his head, almost embarrassed. ‘We stuck together even though I went off to study. Mam told me I was crazy, of course – that I should have fun, throw myself into uni life, enjoy the independence of living away from home … Honestly, I think she knew Ceri better than I did.’
‘But you were in love,’ Rosie said, her heart squeezing in her chest.
‘I was. Foolishly so. And I thoughtshewas, too, until I graduated. When I was suddenly around all the time, she announced she wasn’t ready to settle down. A week later, I spotted her out on the town with – wait for it – Robbie. Of locking-me-in-the-shed fame.’
Rosie gasped in horror. ‘No way.’
