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round to the idea of marriage. He owed it to me. He owed it to Alice, who would be exquisite as a bridesmaid.
    Matt, like me, had an unconventional background. He had never said much to me about his parents. Although, as far as he knew, they were both still alive, he had not spoken to either of them for fourteen years. He did not like to talk about what had caused the rift between them and him, but he had told me that he had vowed long ago that he would never get married, both because of their disastrous union and because he would hate his absolute lack of a family to be as apparent as it would have been, at the ceremony. He had always told me that we did not need a piece of paper when we had each other, and that Alice was far more of a bond than a marriage certificate could ever be.
    I knew that was true. Nonetheless, my family was unconventional as well, and I knew that he had enough friends to fill a few seats at a registry office. I had suggested a tiny ceremony with witnesses off the street, but he had turned me down.
    Our strange family situations had bonded us in the first place, when we met in Brighton. We had recognised something in each other. Matt had never told me exactly what had happened between him and his parents and I had never told him more than the barest details about my mother.
    ‘Have you phoned Christa?’ he asked suddenly. ‘She’ll be frantic if you haven’t.’
    ‘She won’t be frantic.’
    ‘Ring her. She’ll blame me if you don’t.’
    ‘OK.’ I looked at him and smiled. ‘I’ll tell her it’s brilliant.’

Chapter Three
    Hugh tried to work out exactly when he had started hating himself, and when he had stopped. With reflection, he could pinpoint the precise moment when it had started. Just over three years ago, two women had sat him down, separately, within the space of six weeks, and each one had told him that she was pregnant with his child. Both of them had been delighted. Both had looked at him expectantly, watching eagerly for his reaction. Both times he had composed himself quickly, made his mouth smile a little. Each time he had said the same thing:
    ‘But I thought we said we weren’t thinking about children yet?’
    The first time it had been a terrible shock. He had hoped it might be a joke; then, when it wasn’t, he had prayed for a miscarriage. If Emma’s pregnancy had ended naturally, he would have taken the divine hint and sorted his life out. That had not happened. The second time had been worse. He had been psyching himself up to leave Jo, to regularise his affairs and settle down to his new responsibilities. When Jo had made her announcement, he had hoped that perhaps she might have been lying, testing him. Jo liked games. But she wasn’t. Eight months later, his son had been born.
    He had hated himself for a year or so. He had called himself weak, pathetic, unkind, unfair. He had known he was a bastard. His brother had been so horrified that he almost admired him. Nobody else knew. He acknowledged he was going to be found out one day, but after a year of waiting for it to happen, he had decided, unilaterally, to forgive himself. This was the way his life had turned out, and so, while it lasted, he was going to play along with it. He knew he was a coward, but he had told himself so many times that this was the only way to keep everybody happy that he almost believed he was doing the right thing.
    There had been several scares. A few times he had been so close to being found out that he could still barely believe he was getting away with it. Once he had been walking on Hampstead Heath with two-month-old Olly in the sling when he had spotted Emma’s battleaxe of an aunt out walking with her moronic husband. He had ducked out of the way and, astonishingly, they hadn’t seen him. At least, he assumed they hadn’t. Several times Jo had offered to meet him ‘at the airport’, when, in fact, he had only come up from Brighton. A couple of times he had got off the