‘Good luck, darling,’ Livy whispered, smoothing the shoulders of my dress before I stepped into the church on William’s arm. How I missed Daddy then! And I found my legs shaking unexpectedly. But I was collected enough to be able to take in whose faces were turned to watch me arrive. My mother in sky blue with white flowers on her hat, peering anxiously along the aisle at me; Lisa holding Daisy up to get a better view, the little girl’s hair scraped up into tiny bunches, and Don’s freckled face beside them. Just as I was taking in how smart Douglas looked waiting at the front of the church, I noticed the couple standing opposite Mummy, and realized with a shock that they must be Douglas’s parents.

I had felt very uneasy in the weeks before the wedding about the fact that we hadn’t been down to visit them, partly because it seemed so odd but also because I was afraid of offending them and of their having a bad opinion of me. Now, though, I felt a new sense of foreboding. If the sight of Douglas’s parents was so strange and puzzling, what did this say about how much I knew of Douglas and where he came from?

His description of his mother as a plaster saint could not have been more inaccurate. I assumed this had been his ironic sense of humour. Julia Craven was a small, very curvaceous woman, dressed today in a suit of shimmering candyfloss-coloured silk. Her hair was a more vivid blond than Douglas’s, and I could see from where he had inherited his eyes, his full lips and high cheekbones. She was extraordinary rather than beautiful. As I passed her, her gaze fixed frankly on me. I noticed a pungently perfumed smell.

The incongruity of her husband beside her almost made me turn my head to stare back at them. He towered over her, hugely tall and bony with wide, stooped shoulders giving him the look of a bird of prey. He fitted the part of a crusty schoolmaster: the chalky-skinned, lined face, heavy spectacles, the dull tweed suit. His mouth had a bitter slant to it and I felt immediately that I should find him hard to like.

We were married standing as it was difficult for Douglas to kneel. For the first hymn we had chosen ‘My Song is Love Unknown’. Singing the beautiful melody I tried to calm my mind. The sight of Douglas’s people had really thrown me. I panicked, suddenly breathless, and had to stop singing. I was glad to be facing the front so that no one except Mr Hughes could see my face as my mind raced through a whole assortment of questions.

Who was this man beside me, and what did I really feel for him? Were those feelings strong enough to bind myself to him for the rest of my life?

‘Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be,’ they sang behind me. The words pierced me. Was it pity after all that I felt for Douglas? A powerful combination of pity and desire? What about the kind of love I had felt for Angus, a steadiness between friendship and passion. That knowledge that I could not conceive of the future spent without him. Yet this was precisely what I had been forced to face up to. And now I was giving that future to Douglas.