We got married quickly and without fuss at the registry office in Marylebone, because actually, since I was small and skinny, I showed quite soon. Mum came, rather quiet, and Roger, but not Belinda, who was ill, apparently. Roger beamed and was sweet and said how delighted he was. Etta was her usual silent, enigmatic self, but Shona was all I needed on the girlfriend front, and she was there. Tommy, too. And just before the service, as we waited for the registrar to arrive, I walked in on the two of them in the little back office behind the room where the ceremony was to take place, Hugo and Tommy. They were sitting at the registrar's desk, talking in hushed, urgent tones. Tommy's face was the most serious I'd ever seen it, his eyes fierce and intent on Hugo's face, which had gone white. I stopped in the doorway. Tommy stared at me. Then he got up so abruptly his chair fell over. As he brushed roughly past me in the doorway he said bitterly, ‘so you got him in the end.’

Roger set us up in a little apartment in Fulham, near the river, and Peter was born that summer. And, actually, because the weather was so beautiful and Hugo was so busy and London so hot, I popped down to Cornwall quite a lot. Hardly a pop, admittedly, but I managed it. In fact, we managed everything quite well for the next couple of years. We were happy if not ecstatic. But then coping with a small baby and scraping a living together in London is not always blissful, is it? Vicky, who also had a baby by now, would tell me it was the happiest she'd ever been.

I think it took every ounce of courage for Hugo to tell me the truth about that which I already knew. That he didn't love me. Not like that, anyway. Hadn't for some time. That he was incredibly fond of me, but felt about me as he would a sister. No real surprises there — after all, we hadn't slept together for months and certainly we'd waited ages after Peter was born. But that's not unusual following a reasonably tricky birth, although again, Vicky would disagree. She said Martin, her husband, could barely make it to the six-week check-up.

When Hugo said he was leaving me I was completely and utterly devastated. I have been ever since, but equally, I put up no resistance. I didn't feel I could. My heart was breaking, but deep down, I felt responsible. I should have made him examine his feelings more. I felt huge guilt and shame. And when he married Christina two summers later, at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington, in a riot of orange blossom and confetti, and with a champagne reception afterwards at her parents’ house in Holland Park, I was not in the least bit surprised.

Chapter 7