SHONA AND PARVEZ, during their three-day honeymoon in London, were able to act like a real couple for the first time. None of the secretive liaisons in the parks, waiting for a busybody to berate them or prying eyes to report them, none of the accidental encounters at the tennis club or campus library, no more engineering chance meetings with mutual acquaintances, or pretending to be somewhere other than where they really were. Shona could bask in the openness of the new arrangement, putting off the moment when she’d have to call home and explain what she had done. They held hands as they walked down Oxford Street and through Soho and kissed more often than was decorous even in bohemian London, where back-combed punks with metal studs looked with pity at these unwitting new romantics with their floppy silk shirts. They stopped for a cream tea in one of the nicer tea shops on Piccadilly, and Parvez proudly told the highly made-up waitress that it was their honeymoon.

‘But where are your rings?’ she asked, after congratulating them. On hearing that they weren’t an essential part of the ceremony in Pakistan, she raised her fashionably plucked eyebrows and told them, a touch condescendingly, ‘In this country, we wear rings when we’re married.’ She waved her hand - ‘Like this, see?’ - showing a diamond-studded band.

Furious for being treated like an ignorant Paki yokel for the second time in as many days, Parvez marched Shona down to the various jewellers on Old Bond Street.

‘I’m not having people think that we’re rednecks from the villages, and I’m not having people think that we’re not really married,’ he stormed, talking more to himself than Shona.

‘It doesn’t matter, Puppy,’ said Shona appeasingly. ‘I don’t care whether people think we’re married or not.’ She was secretly thrilled; she had been wondering whether she might get a ring, and looked hopefully at the elegant display in the window at Tiffany’s. However, both she and Parvez baulked at the prices they saw; gold didn’t cost nearly so much at home, and Parvez was determined that Shona should have no baser metal than her own namesake.

Fortunately, Bhai Hassan, who had built up a network of useful cronies during his time in London, knew ‘a-man-who-did’. Parvez resisted showing his ignorance by asking what-he-did, and was repaid by Bhai Hassan giving him the address of Dominic, a Diamond-geezer in both senses of the word, who ran a shadowy but industrious jewellery workshop above a hair salon in Hatton Garden.