At this, he stood up, wanting to make an impromptu speech before he and the assembled company were so stunned by the arrival of the fruit compotes, the apple charlottes and the rhubarb syllabubs that they lost all comprehension of where they were and on what glass of wine they were now embarked. He held up his hands, like a conductor readying his orchestra for the first note of a symphony. When the noise had diminished to a level at which Sir William could hear his own thoughts, he said, ‘I will not keep you long from our great assortment of puddings, for I know that a pudding may be a much more marvellous thing than the sentimental words of an old man.’

To this there were cries of ‘no, no!’ and ‘not true, Sir Will!’ He heard Clorinda’s laughter beside him and the thought that he would hear this in his house to his dying day put a choke into his heart and his next words were spoken with the kind of tremble in his voice which he always did his very best to subdue when talking to his patients.

‘You all know,’ he said, ‘how long I have led a solitary life. Until last year, I believed that I would never love again. But then I heard a story. It was the story of a girl taken to stay with her grandfather, who lived in a lonely place, facing out to the ocean. She helped him gather sea-pinks for his table and samphire for his supper and she ran barefoot over the dunes and slept in a wooden cot with a doll made of rags.

‘Can any of us say for certain what is going to move us, or what is going to leave us cold? I do not know why or how the story of the barefoot girl entered my heart, but it did. And then I looked at the face of the woman who told me the story and realised that it moved me too – moved me to feelings of love.

‘And here is what this old man wants to say today: that he is overwhelmed with gratitude towards his bride, for revealing to him that love and happiness may be found towards the last turnings in the road of life and for agreeing to become the wife of someone who is so very out of practice at being a husband.

‘All of you assembled here owe a debt to Clorinda Morrissey, for giving our city a beautiful little island of refuge and delight, and let me reassure you that I will not make so many demands on her time that the tea room cannot continue to exist. For it is the place where we come not only to savour a slice of Clorinda’s fabled Victoria Sponge, but to pause in the onward rush of our lives, to sip the fragrant Assam and to ponder where we are going and what we have seen. The debt that I owe her is of profound significance and I want to thank her from the depths of my heart.’