‘Oh, good. I just wondered if I should offer some help… but no need.’

‘No,’ agreed Richard.

This was certainly not the tree-hugging, spirit-of-earth’s-sanctity persona to which Nathan and I subscribed. Richard added, ‘I’ll be starting the job in a couple of weeks.’

Usually so good on his feet, Nathan only managed, ‘Where?’

‘Arthur Andersen. Have you heard of them?’

‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ Nathan hissed at me as soon we could exchange a private word. ‘He’s got it all sorted, and there’s no need for the heavy-father act.’

‘Shush.’ I touched his arm. ‘The guests are arriving.’

The waitresses moved into place and poured champagne with a soft hiss. The massed candles glowed. In the middle of the room, Poppy swirled round and round, gripping Richard’s arm, and I caught my breath at the beauty and colour.

Nathan was collared by Clive Berry, one of his cousins who lived in Lincolnshire. They launched into the route conversation.

‘You came by the A12?’ Nathan was surprised. ‘Didn’t you barrel through Boston and Eye?’

‘Hallo, Clive.’ We had known each other a long time, and I gave him a kiss. From having been perfectly at ease Clive tensed, for he was not sure how to handle the situation. Taking pity, I tried to defuse it: ‘Have you seen the bride?’

At that point, Poppy grabbed me, ‘Oh, hallo, Clive. Nice to see you. Speak later, I must just have a word with Mum,’ and dragged me over to the comparative privacy of the catering area. ‘Mum,’ she said furiously, ‘who said that woman could come?’

‘Which woman?’

‘Dad’s woman. She’s here. How could she?’ Poppy’s mouth was pale and set. ‘I so wanted it to be just us. I don’t want people noticing and talking.’

‘Minty? Are you quite sure?’ I stroked Poppy’s cheek to calm her. ‘Of course she wasn’t invited. If she’s here, I’ll get rid of her.’

Rubbing at the tattoo on her finger had become a habit with Poppy and I put my hand over hers. ‘I wanted it to be as if you and Dad hadn’t split up and we could pretend we were a family. I don’t like everyone seeing that he’s an old goat.’

‘Rose… and the lovely bride.’ Sally Curry hove into view, trailing in her wake a husband who worked with Nathan on the paper. ‘Your dress is wonderful, Poppy, and it’s such a smart setting. How did you do it?’

‘It’s easier than arranging a full-scale wedding.’ My disloyal daughter pulled her hand free and faded expertly away leaving Sally, who rattled with gold jewellery, to focus on me.

‘But given everything…’ she said sympathetically. Sally’s husband nudged his wife but she ploughed on: ‘Miles and I are sorry we haven’t been in touch but Miles says,’ she glanced at the appalled Miles, ‘Miles says that, in these cases, one has to choose. You can’t be friends with both and since Miles…’

I did not blame Sally Curry. Loyalty to the side that provides the bread and butter is, perhaps, not the best loyalty but it is sensible. All the same, I took a small revenge. As we weren’t really friends, Sally, that’s perfectly all right. It is useful to know where one stands…’

They drifted off, leaving me to reflect on the blasted heath of my social life. Sam glanced up from the group centring on Alice, who looked superb in bright red, and came over. I drew him aside. ‘Sam, Poppy thinks Minty’s here. Have you seen her?’

Sam tucked a supportive hand under my elbow. ‘Poppy’s probably fantasizing. She wants even more of scene than she’s getting. Don’t worry, Dad wouldn’t do that.’

‘I’ve just been rude to Sally Curry because she told me that Dad is more useful to her as a friend than I am. She’s right.’

‘That’s fine, then.’ His gaze lingered on Alice, who was now chatting up Nathan’s assistant, a handsome, spin-doctor type. The latter reached over and touched her shoulder. Sam flinched and I took action.

‘You haven’t seen Jilly for ages, have you? Not since she got back from New Zealand. I warn you, the ugly duckling is now a swan.’

I dragged Sam off and collared Jilly, who turned a countenance on Sam so radiant with pleasure and admiration that I blinked. ‘Sam,’ she said, in her light rapid voice, ‘I’ve been longing to see you.’ There was a tender, questing quality about Jilly that was difficult to describe, but quite specific in its effect. Her blonde hair brushed her bare brown shoulders, and she looked young and fresh and avid for the next turn of events.

Sam’s expression lightened. I left them to it and went in search of Minty. As I saw it, I had two options: one was to kill myself; the other was to devise on the spot an etiquette for dealing with a gate-crashing husband-pincher.

I did not have to search for long.

At the other end of the conservatory, framed by one of the illuminated arches, Minty was talking to Clive. She was wearing enormously high heels, which pitched her forward, and a sleeveless black dress. It was the outfit of the Good Wife – but she had got it all wrong: it was too short, too tight and too low-cut. She looked both terrible and wonderful, and Clive was hanging on her every word.

At the sight of her my anger, against which I had struggled, sprang to the surface. She had gone too far, presumed too much. As I pushed my way towards her, Minty turned her head and saw me. The dark, slanting eyes widened with… what?

I would find out.

Clive was well launched into the science of the wind turbine, his speciality. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’ I planted myself in front of them. ‘Minty, could I have a word?’

Clive merely glanced at me and continued in full flow, blotting me out. In doing that, he caught me savagely on the raw. In that shadowy moment of erasure, I felt the wing-tips of my grief brush my spirit, and the rush of hard, bitter hatred, which I hoped I had discarded.

‘New technology, ‘Clive said.’Regional rejuvenation…’

I opened my mouth to spit out bile and anger, but just then Minty sent me one of her cool, complicit looks, a smile hovering at the back of her eyes. It took me back to the office – the glance exchanged between friends and colleagues. What a bore, it said. Pity me.

Now that I was close up, I could catalogue changes. Small, tense lines had been drawn round Minty’s mouth by a light pencil. A suggestion of disappointment? There was a hint of defiance, rancour even, in the way she was holding herself. But, most of all, determination to see through what she had begun.

Minty had no idea of the indescribable pain she had caused – or perhaps she had, and those lines were the result. Even so, I surprised myself by regretting the change to the pretty, greedy face on which shadows had settled.

Again, I cut across the history of the wind turbine. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, Minty’

Clive was arrested mid-flow. He was about to take the coward’s option of slithering away when Minty laid a hand on his arm. She had always possessed excellent fighting instincts. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Shall I catch up with you in a moment, Rose?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Now.’

Clive seized his chance and bolted. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what are you doing gatecrashing Poppy’s wedding?’

Minty licked her glossed lips. ‘Pots and kettles,’ she said.

‘And what does that mean?’

But I knew.

I wore white at my wedding to which, in a manner of speaking, Hal came, and for which Nathan’s parents paid – tactfully, of course. Thus, I was not married from Pankhurst Parade – no loss there – but in an alien Sussex village with a picturesque church.

I longed to be at Yelland where, at that time of year, the straw would have been baled in the fields. If I closed my eyes, I could see pictures: the wash of soft colours, the umbers, burnt yellows, tired greens and the grey-blue sky. Up there, the air would be cool and pure and everything so much simpler. But maybe I was remembering it wrongly, through a childish filter, and I kept my feelings private.

If Nathan was the groom, Hal was the knight who kept vigil through the violet summer night. Somehow he discovered where the wedding was being held. Perhaps Mazarine told him. If she did, she never admitted it.

Hal was the spectre at the feast, the beautiful, rackety, solid flesh of love’s witchery, the personification of the poet’s sweet madness and disordered senses. Nathan was collected, rational, sure and loving. He was the rock that Hal would never be.

I remembered his sureness particularly.

Syringa and lilies perfumed the Saxon church. In the beamed village hall, a cake drowsed in three white boxes of graduated sizes. Covered by a protective sheet, my dress hung on the wardrobe in the hotel bedroom. I laid out tissues, lipstick, scent on the dressing-table. The last thing I did before getting into bed was to replace my engagement ring in its leather box.

It was dawn, and someone had moved across the gravel in front of the hotel. Confident and practised. The tread of a person who was used to darkness and tough terrain. In a second I knew who it was.

I slid out of bed, parted the curtains and saw Hal outlined in the milky grey light. I saw him so clearly. I saw right through him even, with the X-ray vision of my put-aside love and desire.

I pulled on my clothes and slipped down the staircase, which smelt of occupancy and cheap pot-pourri, and let myself out into the hush where every sound was magnified.

I had loved Hal so much that I couldn’t stand it. I knew this love was too ferocious and demanding to have a long life, and I did not trust it. It would burn for those moments when, my feet leaving black smudges on the dewy lawn, I fled towards him on the morning of my wedding and we held each other. Flesh chilled and damp, breath on each other’s cheek. Then burning love would consume itself, and the darkness would be the blacker for it.