The weddings of friends had begun in my mid-twenties, peaked around the age of twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and then dwindled as the occasional acquaintance played catch-up. Marriage transformed some of my friends, particularly the ones who went early. They had been teenagers five minutes ago, it seemed to me, my fellow compatriots in the country of girls, then I blinked and they were women. I felt no envy for their transformation, only a mildly uncomfortable feeling that maybe I should think about becoming a woman too, one day. Perhaps. No hurry.

The first was Virginia, who married a city trader, Alex, I think he was called. Virginia and I had been in the school orchestra at King’s for a bit, where I played the flute very badly and she played the oboe rather well. Her parents were no better off than mine, though – she lived around the corner from me in Dogsthorpe, and was like me the offspring of working-class parents with middle-class aspirations for their child. We walked home together after orchestra practice, although in truth we didn’t have all that much to say to each other. She was quiet, mild, with mid-brown hair in indeterminate layers – a style she seemed to have been growing out for all the years I had known her. I liked her well enough but she wasn’t very cool. If I had been asked to guess her likely fate I might have said, librarian, working in a building society – council worker in the housing department, perhaps.

In economic terms, if nothing else, she married up. The wedding was a grand thing, apparently, at a chapel in the City of London, with a reception on a riverboat on the Thames, all paid for by his family. I was invited but made an excuse. I was twenty-five years old, not that long qualified and reluctantly living with my parents – a situation I had intended to last for the few months after graduation that had turned effortlessly into a few years. I could only justify the way this had infantilised me, the lassitude it had induced, by saving every penny for the deposit on my own flat. A London wedding meant a return train fare, a fancy outfit and a night in a hotel – that was before I thought of a suitably lavish present. It was out of the question.

So I only met the newly wedded Virginia and her husband a year later, at the wedding of another friend, out at Yaxley. I was waiting outside St Peter’s Church in a group when Virginia and Alex arrived in a Jaguar. Heads turned. When she got out of the car, the woman nearest to me said, disbelievingly, ‘Is that Virginia?’