Trying not to let my second wind ebb away before lunchtime, I did something against his shoulder that definitely wasn’t snuggling. “Are we going to go poking around?”

“Might be a bit rude at a wedding.”

We pulled up across the road from the cathedral and Rhys ordered us all out onto the pavement. Once we’d disembused ourselves, I realised how utterly incongruous the CRAPPers’ green minibus looked in the convoy of wedding vehicles. There it squatted amongst the gleaming column of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and Daimlers, like a brick that had crashed through a jeweller’s window and was now gleefully displacing diamond rings and strings of pearls.

As the crowds gathered and began flowing into the cathedral, we didn’t exactly stop standing out. I’d thought we scrubbed up okay. Rhys had his shabby chic thing going on, Ana with one n looked fabulous, and even Barbra Clench had turned out nicely in a rather natty blue dress with floral sleeves. But none of us had outfits that cost as much as a small family home or were wearing a hat wider than our shoulders or those grey pinstripe trousers which were fucking awful but which posh men were apparently obliged to put on for formal occasions.

And actually obligation seemed to be the order of the day. I’d been low-key expecting something to go catastrophically wrong with Alex’s wedding because something going catastrophically wrong was the background music of his life. But it seemed like I’d reckoned without the vast institutional inertia of the upper classes. Sure, Alex could spill tea over donor lists, double-book our only meeting room, and get his tie caught in a filing cabinet he didn’t even have any files in. And sure, his peers and the members of his immediate social circle could preside over the collapse of the country’s economy and the accelerating deterioration of its social safety nets. But this was a society event, and come hell or high water, it would run smoothly and decorously, or the whole system would be for nothing.

We let the crowd carry us in. We’d been seated miles from the actual service, presumably so we didn’t accidentally get middle-classness on the happy couple. And once everyone was in place—which took a while because “everyone” was basically every landowner in the Home Counties, plus us—Alex made his entrance. He looked… Somehow he looked like he always looked. There was something about Alex that meant even dressed as he now was, in a three-piece suit, electric-blue cravat, and silk top hat, his essential Alexness shone through. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe on some level Alex was always wearing an electric-blue cravat and a silk top hat.