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side of the corridor. Vivi, shoeless, crept towards it, holding one arm across herself against the encroaching cold, not knowing why she didn’t just call out to see if they were all right. She paused, then opened it, silently, and peered round at the side of the house.
    She thought initially that the woman must have fallen down because he seemed to be supporting her, trying to prop her up against the wall. She wondered if she should offer to help. Then, her senses dulled by tiredness, or shock, she grasped in swift, successive jolts that the rhythmic sounds she had heard were emerging from these people. That the woman’s long pale legs were not limp, the useless limbs of a drunk, but wrapped tautly round him, like some kind of serpent. As Vivi’s eyes adjusted to the dark, and the distance, she recognised, with a start, the woman’s long dark hair, falling chaotically over her face, the lone, sequined slipper, upon which stray flakes of snow were settling.
    Vivi was simultaneously repulsed and transfixed, staring for several seconds before she grasped, with a flood of shame, what she had been witnessing. She stood, her back against the half-opened door, that sound echoing grotesquely in her ears, jarring against the thumping of her heart.
    She had meant to move, but the longer she stood there the more paralysed she became, stuck to the door’s roughened surface, even though her arms were mottling in the night air, and her teeth chattering. Instead of escaping, she leant against the cool of the oak door and felt her legs disappear from under her: she had understood that while the tones were those she had never heard before, this man’s voice was not. That the back of the man’s head, his pink-tinged ears, the sharp edge where his hair met his collar were familiar to her: as familiar as they had been twelve years ago, when she had first fallen in love with them.

Three
     
    She might not have made Deb of the Year (and now she was ‘respectable’ no one discussed why that might have been) but there were few observers of society who doubted that the nuptials of Athene Forster, variously described as so-called Last Deb, It Girl, or, among some of the less forgiving society matrons, something rather less complimentary, and Douglas Fairley-Hulme, son of the Suffolk farming Fairley-Hulmes, could be hailed as the Wedding of the Year.
    The guest list sported enough old money and double-barrelled names to grant it a prominent position in all the society pages, along with some rather grainy black-and-white pictures. The reception was held at one of the better gentlemen’s clubs in Piccadilly, its customary air of tobacco-scented pomp and bluster temporarily smothered by spring blooms, and swathed drapes of white silk. The bride’s father, as a result of his oft-stated belief since Mr Profumo resigned, that society was falling apart, had decided that his best line of defence against moral anarchy was to gather a rampart of respectable fellows to assert that it wasn’t. This might have made for a rather elderly and sober reception, with its scattering of statesmen, old war comrades, the odd bishop and enough references in his speech to the ‘firm upholding of standards’ to make some of the younger guests giggle. But the young people, it was agreed, had made it look rather gay. And the bride, whom some might have hoped would take this as a direct challenge and behave outrageously, merely smiled vaguely from the top table and gazed adoringly at her new husband.
    There was the groom, universally decreed to be ‘a catch’, whose serious manner, clean-cut good looks, and family fortune had left heartbroken potential mothers-in-law across several counties. Even as he stood, formal and stiff in his morning suit, the occasion weighty upon his broad shoulders, his obvious happiness kept breaking through, evident in the way he kept glancing across to locate his bride, his eyes softening as he saw her. It was also apparent in the way