When the bridal couple were seated, waiters scampered round, wearing white gloves, ladling out punch, opening and pouring the wine, offering a first course of brawn with shallots and cucumber, upon which Sir William doted, and the guests fell upon the food. The sun was so bright, it glittered upon the aspic and made the glassware scintillate like diamonds. The chinking of cutlery was so noisily musical it almost drowned out the quartet, who were now attempting to aid the collective digestion by playing a little Mozart.

From the further ends of Camden Street, strangers began assembling to stare at the colossal sight of the street banquet, its like never before seen in Bath, and to wonder, if so many had been invited, why they had been excluded. They longed to join in. The waiters hurried them away, informing them that this was not a public gala, but a private wedding feast. Still, a few could not resist creeping back, not to try to steal food or even a tot of wine, but only to marvel at the miles of fluttering bunting, at the whiteness of the table linen, at the silver champagne-coolers and, most particularly, at the person (whoever he or she might be) whose mind had conjured such a piece of pure theatre, spreading out from the decorated shopfronts across the wide pavement and onto the newly polished cobbles of the road.

This mind was, of course, Clorinda’s. She had dreamed of it first. She saw the sunlit day. She saw the street where her tea room quietly waited. And like an artist creating a beautiful picture, she set out the snowy tables under the blue sky and hung flags and garlands above them. Then, in her dream, two hundred golden chairs floated down from the chimney tops and arranged themselves, as obediently as infantrymen, along the tables. Music began playing: the old Irish songs she had heard in County Clare when the fiddle band came to her village when she was a child and all the men and women began twirling and hopping, trying to dance in their clogs and setting up such a pounding on the old earthen floors that the houses seemed to shiver and the babies and the cats began caterwauling like monkeys from some distant land.

When she woke from the dream, she said to Sir William that this was how and where she wanted their wedding feast: in the public street, with all her clientele invited and more food piled on the tables than was ever seen at the official galas that were the pride of the city. If Sir William demurred for a moment at the probable cost of realising this great vision, he also saw that it would be the last great wonder of his life and that it had about it something touchingly unique, something that only Clorinda could have imagined.

So here they were. Sir William turned to Clorinda and asked her, as he surveyed the guests intent upon a fine demolishment of a great side of beef, a mountain of veal cutlets, a gratin of potatoes in dishes the size of tea-trays, if she was content with her day, if it lived up to what she had seen in her mind. And she said to him, ‘Can’t you see it on my face, William? As long as I live, I will never forget such joy.’