The time seemed to be flying past now. It suddenly struck Sophie that no one had mentioned the grandmother who was supposed to be driving here with the château-shaped wedding cake.

‘Come on now, Suzi.’ Jackie had stayed on with her friend after the latest Ladies’ Club luncheon had finished, and was trying to work out whether a cognac or a large glass of water would be of more help in the circumstances. ‘You’ll get through this. We’re all here for you, remember?’ She decided on the cognac, and signalled to Guillaume to bring two.

‘I know it’s a shitty situation, but face it,’ Jackie soothed. ‘Is it David you’re missing? Or just having a man about the place?’

Suzi raised a face on which emotion and mascara had worked together to produce deep runnels of rejection. Echoing those great tragic heroines Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, she finally spoke: ‘What the fuck does it matter? He’s still gone.’

‘Yes,’ replied Jackie, ‘but if it’s just a man you’re missing, there are ways of finding one.’

‘At my age?’

‘I’m sure Steve could help. He knows everyone.’

The thought of Steve, whose sensibility ranged from football to beer with an occasional foray into sudoku, finding her a suitable life partner made Suzi want to cry again.

And besides, all this speculation didn’t solve the other part of the challenge Jackie had set herself. She might have helped detach Suzi from David, but how the hell was she going to get David and Stephanie back together?

Jackie would have been most alarmed had she known that David was, at that precise moment, sitting in his hotel room trying to decide whether to cut his losses in France and simply go home. It was only his acceptance of the invitation to Nicky’s wedding that was keeping him here.

When he’d seen Steph standing in front of him in the hotel garden with a look of genuine regret on her face, a barrage of emotions had flooded into his mind. Relief that he hadn’t screwed up his life after all; love and tenderness towards the woman with whom he’d spent so much of his life; even a spurt of hope that they could go back and make their venture here work again. And what had it all been about? An ant infestation! Exactly the same as before. She wanted him only because he was useful to her, and even then she wouldn’t thank him or give him any credit for how much she relied on his quiet dependability.