From a hundred and nine people.
Sixty of whom, it turned out, were on that wedding guest list.
What I actually did at the wedding.
Everybody wants this to be a scene. It was not a scene.
I went to Thornhallow House on the fourteenth of November with my daughter, five weeks old, in a sling. I wore a green dress that did not fit me. I was on table eleven, which is what he thought of me, and which I have been grateful for ever since, because table eleven is by the door.
I did not stand up during the speeches. I did not hand anybody anything. I did not say one word to Ondine Marr all day.
Here is what I did do.
I said yes to the photographer.
Thornhallow uses a company that puts every image into an online gallery for the guests, and I gave my email address like everybody else, and eleven days later I had four hundred and sixty photographs.
Including the one taken at twenty past four in the orangery: nineteen men, arranged in three rows, under a board with the Yardley Rowe logo on it.
Four of those men had each stated, in writing, to different people, that they had never met the others.
