It’s too late now, I said in my thoughts. Please forgive me, Angus.

‘Are you all right?’ Mr Hughes whispered. I saw Douglas glance anxiously at me.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Thank you.’

I began singing again: ‘Here might I stay and sing, no story so divine . . .’

Yet suddenly I had an ominous feeling that ours was not a marriage made in heaven.

Chapter 20

After our reception at a modest hotel, we travelled by train to Malvern, having decided that mid-January was no time to head for the coast. I had changed into a new wool dress in a soft mulberry colour and packed warm clothes, imagining wind sweeping the pointed hills and log fires in the hotel. The railway carriage still had its wartime feel of dinginess and lack of attention, and stank of stale smoke. My seat cover was torn and the floor was dirty. By late afternoon a fine rain had begun to fall, obscuring the first, uplifting sight of the Malvern Hills and leaving outside little to see but a grey murk.

Instead of the new relaxation into certainty I had expected once the nerves of the ceremony were over and the marriage an irrevocable thing, I found my mind jittering around, alive with troubling images.

My mother’s ambivalent expression as I finally said goodbye to her: was that simply a mother’s mixed feelings at her daughter’s wedding? Or was she thinking of her own marriage, or of my father’s death, his absence at this occasion? I knew she would never explain such a commotion of feelings to me, but I felt a perplexed need to understand.

When I managed to banish these thoughts from my mind, Olivia slid into it instead. Trotting out after William in the vivid blue shantung dress from a side corridor of the hotel, he walking with urgent speed, slipping between other guests as if trying to throw her off. She wore a tense, fixed smile. There was the exaggerated way she embraced Douglas, throwing her body close against his until he protested, ‘Steady on, old girl – I’m not as firm on my feet as I might be, you know.’ Even when standing still, performing in ordinary conversation, I noticed the way she held her body in the close-fitting dress. She looked posed, self-conscious, like someone fearful of being startled by a camera at any time.

From her, my mind flitted to Douglas’s parents. Having no alternative, he had introduced them to Mummy and me as we arrived at the reception on the Hagley Road. Mummy, I have to say, rose to the occasion and was charming, conveying just the right balance of warmth, welcome and regret at their not having made each other’s acquaintance before. In a quiet moment afterwards she murmured to me, with a subtle nod in the Cravens’ direction, ‘What a very odd couple. I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

When I met her properly, Douglas’s cameo of his mother as a ‘plaster saint’ did not seem quite so wild after all. Close up, the age difference between the two of them was hugely evident. Bernard Craven must have been at least twenty years his wife’s senior. His hair, once presumably black like his eyebrows, was storm-cloud grey, his face lined, eyes deep-set behind the thick glasses and his manner unapproachable.