As alienating as I’d found the service, even I had to admit that there was something endearing about watching Alex bumble his way through his groom’s speech. Thankfully, he didn’t try to do any jokes, although given the audience, the summus gag would probably have gone down like “Who’s on First.” After Alex was his brother Cornelius, who everybody called Connie, and he did do jokes—or at least I assumed they were jokes because people laughed. But they were the kind of jokes that were only funny if you went to Eton or, in extreme cases, one specific polo match ten years ago.

If this had been a normal wedding, the speeches would have been followed by dancing of the school disco variety, music provided by a jobbing DJ with a bad haircut or—increasingly—by somebody’s Spotify playlist piped through a laptop. Since this was not a normal wedding, there was no dancing, just mingling, and the music was both live and classical. Apparently, Oliver had been right about the string quartet, and in retrospect, I was glad they hadn’t watched me fuck. One of them had creepy eyebrows for a start.

As it turned out, an all-nighter followed by a long church service followed by a massive meal was an ideal recipe for unconsciousness. So when I felt myself leaning into Oliver like an amateur stripper who had overestimated their skill with a pole, I made a concerted effort to stiffen my lip, gird my loins, stand up, and be sociable. Reacting slower than he usually did—he was also dead on his feet—Oliver got up to join me and we made a round of the hall saying polite hellos to polite strangers who had no interest in us whatsoever.

As usual, Oliver was way better at this shit than I was, even managing to make a few sentences of small talk with some of the more accessible poshos before we moved on.

“I don’t know how you interact with these people,” I told him as we walked away from a short conversation with a Tory MP and her investment banker husband. “We have nothing in common with them.”

Oliver gave a tired shrug. He was doing that thing that people who were good in crowds did where he was really peppy and extroverted whenever somebody was looking and drooping to conserve energy the moment we got out of sight. “They’re just people, Lucien.”

I sagged in the shadow of a pillar to shelter from the crowd of aristocrats who I was kinda sorta slagging off. “I know. It’s…I don’t know. It almost feels like you prefer this sack of arseholes to the crowd at Miles’s wedding.”