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that, despite the presence of his family, his best friends and a hundred others, all of whom wanted to pass on their warmest wishes and congratulations, it was patently obvious that he would rather they had been alone.
    And then there was the bride, whose dewy eyes and bias-cut silk dress, which skimmed a figure that might easily have seemed too thin, had led even her more fervent detractors to note that whatever else she was (and there was no shortage of opinions in that department), she was certainly a great beauty. Her hair, more usually seen cascading down her back in a kind of wilderness, had been glossed and tamed, and sat regally on the crown of her head, pinned down by a tiara of real diamonds. Other girls’ skin might have been greyed by the white of the silk, but hers reflected its marble smoothness. Her eyes, a pale aquamarine, had been professionally outlined and shimmered under a layer of silver. Her mouth formed a small, secretive smile that revealed none of her teeth, except when she turned to her husband and it broke into a wide, uninhibited grin, or occasionally locked surreptitiously on to his in a suggestion of some private, desperate passion, making those around them laugh nervously and look away.
    If her mother’s face, when guests remarked that it really was ‘a lovely day, a wonderful occasion’, expressed a little more than the usual level of relief, then nobody said anything. It would have been unseemly to remember on such a day that several months previously her daughter had been widely considered ‘unmarriageable’. And if anyone wondered why such a huge wedding had been planned in such haste – just four months after the couple’s first meeting – when the bride was evidently not suffering from the kind of condition that usually prompted such things, then most of the men chose to nudge each other and remark that if the only way to get certain pleasures legitimately was to marry, and the bride appeared a more than delightful prospect, then why bother to wait?
    Justine Forster now sat smiling out gamely from the top table. Having tried to ignore that her already habitually choleric husband was still cross that the date of the wedding had interrupted his annual veteran-soldiers’ trip to Ypres (as if this were her fault!) and had mentioned it on no fewer than three occasions already (once during the speech!), she was now trying to ignore her daughter, who, two seats away, appeared to be giving her own husband a verbatim account of the ‘girl-to-girl’ chat she had unwisely embarked upon the previous evening.
    ‘She thinks the Pill is immoral, darling,’ Athene was whispering, snorting with laughter. ‘Says that if we head off to old Dr Harcourt to get a prescription, there’ll be a shrieking hot line to the new Pope before we know it, and we’ll be cast into flaming damnation.’
    Douglas, who was still unused to such frank discussion of bedroom matters, was doing his best to appear composed while fighting off a now familiar wave of longing for the woman beside him.
    ‘I told her I thought the Pope might be a bit busy to worry about little old me swallowing birth-control bonbons but, apparently, no. Like God, Paul VI – or VIII or whatever he is – knows everything , if we’re thinking impure thoughts, if we’re considering copulation purely for pleasure, if we’re not putting enough in the collection plate.’ She leant towards her husband and said, in a whisper just loud enough for her mother to hear: ‘Douglas, darling, he probably even knows where you’ve got your hand right now.’
    There was a sudden spluttering from Douglas’s left, and he tried, but failed, to silence his wife, then asked his new mother-in-law whether he might get her some water, both hands clearly visible.
    As it was not terribly heartfelt, Douglas’s embarrassment did not last long: he had swiftly decided that he loved Athene’s irrepressibility, her lack of concern for the social mores and