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Murrays,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Good Lord deliver us.
    His prayer was answered in every line but the third: Maxtones repeatedly married Grahams. The first Maxtone Graham was James, the thirteenth Laird, who combined the names in 1860.
    The gabled old house had been knocked down and replaced by a large new gothick house in 1820. Tony’s father did not inherit the estate until his unmarried brother died in 1930, so when Joyce was introduced to the family they were living at Bilston Lodge, near Edinburgh. Spinster aunts came to tea. Tony’s mother turned out to be the great-niece of Lady Nairne, author of the Jacobite song ‘Will ye no come back again?’ The Scottishness in Joyce’s own blood came quickly to the surface. She was enchanted.
    When she and Tony danced, people stood back from the dance floor and watched. When they talked, their eyes flashed with the pleasure of finding the same things funny. They were so immersed in one another’s company that they were often the last to leave a restaurant, forced out at midnight by the sound of chairs being put up on tables.
    They started a commonplace book together, writing out their favourite poems, Joyce’s hand girlishly loopy, Tony’s Etonian and disciplined. Words, and the enjoyment of noticing how other people used them, were a source of constant amusement. They both liked rude words and dirty jokes, a taste neither had ever been able to indulge with anyone else. Being scurrilous together was a new pleasure, and made what Joyce called their ‘hanky-panky on the back stairs’ all the more uninhibited. Tony encouraged Joyce in her wittiness, and her writing now developed two strands: the brittle, amusing social-observer strand, nurtured by Tony, and the noticing-sadness-in-everyday-life strand, which was her own.
    Their parents told them they were too young to marry, which only made them all the more desperate to do so. They were married at the unfashionably early hour of half-past ten in the morning of Wednesday, 4 July 1923, at All Hallows, London Wall, Joyce draped in downward-hanging silvery 1920s clothes. The wedding was quiet, with only fifty-five guests, no bridesmaids and no reception. Officially this was because of ‘family mourning’, but the fourth Baron Sudeley had died seven months before. The true reason was that Dame Eva and Harry were not on speaking terms. Before settling in her pew the Dame was heard to whisper loudly to Tony’s father, ‘If that man comes up to speak to me, I want you to knock him down.’

    The Evening Standard’s photograph of the wedding
    Quiet though it was, the wedding was reported in no fewer than ten newspapers and magazines. The heading in the Scottish Evening Telegraph and Post of 4 July 1923 was ‘Fife Lady Married in London Today. Bridegroom Son of Perthshire Laird.’ The Pall Mall Gazette noted that Joyce ‘carried no gloves, flowers, or prayer-book.’ The London Evening Standard, searching for copy, reported that Tony wore a red flower instead of the more conventional white in his buttonhole.
    One poignant souvenir of the wedding has been preserved, a commemorative paper napkin made by an enterprising printer who hoped to sell it to the guests. It says ‘In commemoration of the marriage between Mr Anthony Maxtone Graham and Miss Joyce Anstruther at All Hallows London Wall, 4 July 1923. All Blessings and Happiness to them.’ As there was no reception and therefore no cake-encrusted fingers in need of a napkin, it has survived in pristine condition.
    â€˜Twenty-three years with the wrong woman’, Joyce was later to write about Tony – twenty-three years between that wedding day in the City, with church bells ringing out above the traffic, and the last evening they spent together, washing the dishes in Chelsea in September 1946: ‘A long road from the altar in All Hallows, London Wall to the kitchen sink