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place, which should take care of everything.’ He swallowed, and breathed deeply. And then he looked at me.
    ‘Look, Minty. It just wasn’t going to work out. I think if you were honest, you’d admit that yourself.’ And then he began to walk away from me, down the aisle, with a verydetermined air. And as he picked up speed he almost skidded on the highly polished floor, and I actually shouted after him, ‘Careful, Dom! Don’t slip!’ But he didn’t. He carried on walking until he reached the door, his shoes snapping smartly, almost brightly, across the gleaming tiles.
    I don’t really remember what happened in the minutes immediately after that. I think it’s been erased from my mind, as one erases unwanted footage from an old video. I do remember trying to recall some comforting or possibly even useful phrases from Nearly Wed , but couldn’t think of a single one, except for the chapter heading: ‘How to Survive the Happiest Day of Your Life’. Apart from that, I think I simply stood there, immobile, clutching my Order of Service. I didn’t have a clue what to do. I just hoped that the camcorder had been switched off. Charlie had run after Dominic, but had come back, three minutes later, alone.
    ‘He got on a bus,’ he whispered to me, and to Dad and Helen, who had now stepped forward in a protective pincer movement around me. And I found this piece of news very odd, because Dominic loathes public transport.
    ‘Couldn’t you have chased after him?’ suggested Dad.
    ‘No, it was a number 11, it was going pretty fast.’
    ‘I see,’ said Dad seriously. We looked vainly at the vicar but he didn’t seem to know what to do.
    ‘This has never, ever happened during my ministry,’ he said, a piece of information which did little to cheer me up.
    By now, people were whispering loudly in their pews, and many looked distraught. Amber was opening and closing her mouth like an outraged carp.
    ‘What the hell’s that plonker playing at?’ she demanded in her over-bearing, Cheltenham Ladies way. ‘What a bastard!’ she added, as she clambered out of her pew. ‘What a sh—’
    ‘Shhhh! Madam,’ said the vicar, ‘this is a house of God.’
    ‘I don’t care if it’s the house of bloody Bernarda Alba!’ she flung back. ‘That man’s just jilted my cousin!’
    Jilted! It cut through me like a knife. Jilted. That was it:I’d been jilted. Amber was right. And it wasn’t a moment’s aberration, because the minutes were now ticking by, and Dominic still hadn’t reappeared. And I could hear another wedding party gathering outside, so I didn’t see how Dom and I were going to have time to make our vows even if he did come back, which by now I very much doubted. And anyway, if there’s one thing I know about Dominic, more than anything else, one constant, immutable characteristic, it’s the fact that once he’s made up his mind to do something, he will never, ever go back.
    Dad sat down, and put his head in his hands. Mum and Helen looked equally distraught. And then I looked down the pews, scanning the faces of those who had witnessed my shame. There was Jack, not knowing where to look, and his step-daughters, who were stifling giggles; next to them was Melinda, her podgy hand clapped to her mouth in a melodramatic tableau of shock; and Wesley was tut-tutting away to Deirdre and shaking his head, and Auntie Flo was crying, and no one knew what to say or where to look. But they were all trying hard not to look at me, in the way that nice people avert their eyes when passing the scene of some dreadful crash. And that’s what I felt like. A corpse, lying on the road. Hit and run. I hadn’t been cut. I didn’t have a scratch, but my blood had been spilled for all to see.
    By now Charlie and the vicar were conferring agitatedly. Someone would have to decide what to do, I realised vaguely. Charlie took charge. He came up to me, and laid his hand on my arm in a reassuring way.
    ‘Shall we go to the