Almost the entire Foster family understood the importance of today. Vivian’s two younger sisters Susan and Barbara (the latter known to all as Babe, as Mrs Foster’s way of signalling to Mr Foster that there would be no more babies) were obligingly awestruck. They sat on Vivian’s bed, mouths slightly ajar, eyes glazed with excitement, as she wafted around her room, opening the wardrobe door, fingering the tin of talcum powder, playing with the ribbons on her dresses, until she sent them back to the nursery with an imperious wave of the arm. Of course they were impressed. Vivian was older than them (by two and six years respectively) and had been attending balls whilst they were tucked up in bed, a fact that was too compelling for them to ever consider contradicting her. Her brother Toby, four years her junior, was nonplussed. His gender gave him a strong sense of superiority that, somewhat annoyingly, overrode the age discrepancy.

It was absolutely true to say that since coming out eight months ago, Vivian had been waiting for this exact day, and there wasn’t a huge difference in her imagination between eight months and forever, because before she came out, she was more or less nothing.

She was simply waiting.

A schoolgirl who could be bossed and directed by almost anyone: parents, close and distant relatives, Nanny, the governess, neighbours, the vicar and anyone Mrs Foster had ever been intimate with, who still might be found in the drawing room on Thursday ‘at homes’. Providing a person was old and wealthy enough to have opinions, it was accepted that they could foist them upon young girls, who had to receive them (however ridiculous) in silence. That was why Vivian believed today to be so important. Everything changed.

Sometimes it had seemed as though this day would never come around; irrationally she’d feared that longing for it so ardently might lead to a catastrophic, logic-defying interruption to the passage of time, but time had ultimately surrendered and the day had arrived.

Nathaniel Thorpe.

The big, athletic sort, over six feet tall, straight white teeth, blond hair, lashes a woman might envy and a chin a man might lose an eye on. He was always ruddy and muddy from the games he played: football and rugby, cricket in the summer. He was forever shooting or hunting or riding. The things people said of him. Vigorous. Handsome. Dashing. Eminently marriageable. Evidently desirable. He left her feeling tremulous.

She’d known of him for years, although they’d only been able to speak once she came out. He was her aunt’s neighbour and the sole reason a month in the country every summer, since she was thirteen years old, had been bearable. His family owned hundreds and hundreds of acres of land, perhaps thousands, all around her aunt’s village, as far as the eye could see. She’d often watched from the upstairs windows, longing for that rare occasion when he was home from Eton and she might catch him, his cousins and friends discharging their guns and making their horses sweat as they galloped across the adjacent fields chasing something or other: a fox, a hare, good times. She had wondered how rich he was exactly. There seemed to be no limit as to what he could afford. It was hard to imagine. He’d finished at Oxford. Or maybe it had finished with him; it wasn’t clear if he’d been sent down or had even gone up. Even though they were friendly now, it was not the sort of thing she could ask. She didn’t want to bother or nag. Her mother no doubt had made enquiries. Discreetly. She’d have wanted to know if there were debts or prospects, scandals or intentions. She couldn’t have heard anything too awful or off-putting, as Vivian had been allowed to pursue him. Gently, appropriately, unobtrusively. There was a way to do these things.