“And yet you’re his best man. Why?” He huffs. “I wouldn’t have given the wanker the pickings off my nose.”

I look at him curiously, wondering where this passion is coming from. Youth, I suppose. Although I can’t remember being like that. My idealism left me a long time ago to be replaced by resolve. I envy him.

“Listen, Patrick is who he is. He doesn’t pretend to be anything less or anything more. He’s selfish and arrogant and charming. It’s a slightly dangerous combination. But at one point he was my friend. I haven’t got enough of those to cast one aside just because we didn’t work out romantically.”

“Do friends cheat on one another?”

I shake my head. “Lovers do it all the time,” I say cynically. He opens his mouth, and I talk quickly because his youth hurts me somewhere in a tiny spot in my chest. “He asked. He caught me at a weak moment, and I said yes.” I wonder whether he’ll ask what that moment was, but to my relief he doesn’t. I don’t think he’d like the answer.

Instead he says calmly, “Okay, tell me about the rest of the cast.”

“Frances is Patrick’s fiancée. She’s twenty-three, I think. The only child of very rich parents. She’s charming and spoilt, but a good hostess. Her mother and father are Charles and Oona. I believe he’s something big in the city.”

“What does that even mean?” he grumbles. “People always say that and it conjures up an image of Godzilla shimmying up the Shard.”

He surprises a laugh out of me, and I listen to it with disbelief. “It’s how he describes himself. He’s not known for modesty,” I say wryly. “They have a huge home in St John’s Wood and a cottage in the Cotswolds where they rub shoulders with the Camerons.”

“Kevin and Louise?”

I laugh. “No, you pleb. David and Samantha, of course.”

“Is that where we’re staying?”

I shake my head. “No, we’re at a country house hotel just outside Stow-on-the-Wold. It’s huge and they’ve booked the whole place for a few days. Then in a month we’ll have to go to the wedding and the party in London.”

“No quick trip to the registry office, then?”

“Not for Frances. What she wants, she gets.”

“Like your ex?”

I nod. “Just like him.”

He nudges me gently with his elbow. “Not sure it’s a prize she’s got,” he says softly, and I smile awkwardly.

He must sense the awkwardness. He seems to have a fine-tuned sense of what people are feeling and thinking. I’ve seen him turn many potentially unpleasant situations around with just a few words and a smile so the glaring people end up laughing and smiling and utterly charmed.

“So, do they know about you and Patrick?”