As soon as I saw Gwenda, though, and heard her say, ‘Mike’, I realized along with the rest of the congregation that Sir Michael Hutton must have taken an outside ride’ with Gwenda at some point more than two decades ago, most likely when both their horses became separated from the field, a parting that the lusty pair must have consummated with a quick knee-trembler against the sweat-stained, twitching flanks of Sir Michael’s splendid stallion, Nelson. Sir Michael must have thought – as he clutched at his shoulder, racked with sudden pain – that Gwenda had come to signal, if not to announce, his paternity, on this occasion of their son’s marriage.

I looked at the bridal couple, and it was hard not to smile inwardly. One only had to look at Colin Watts to see by whose noble, leaping loins he had sprung.

The white ambulance in the forecourt conveys a gritty touch of both inner and Holby city to the upper-crust society scene, a memento mori, a reminder of the funerals amid the weddings. It has already had to execute a sixteen-point turn in the narrow lane leading to the church, a lane blocked with the Bentleys and women clutching their hats to their expensively blow-dried locks and the order of service booklet bearing the words, ‘Serena’ and ‘Colin’, and ‘St Mary of All Angels, Honeyborne’, and the date, in expensive bumpy black writing, before disgorging Lady Elizabeth from its back doors. Then it drives off, siren blaring.

Ralph and I finally totter up to Cath, me almost fainting from the combination of tight skirt, a complete lack of Champagne, high heels… and so on. Cath has her welcome smile applied as carefully as maquillage to her face. I smile back, and stretch out my arms to give her an especially meaningful hug and a kiss in a this-is-simply-too-beautiful-for-mere-words way.

But then something weird happens, even weirder than Gwenda showing up in church in a killer designer outfit, and even weirder than Sir Michael having what his wife stoutly calls ‘a gripper’ after just one of the many dark secrets of Honeyborne being exposed after decades of grave-like silence.

Cath Cobb appears to trip, and fall.

In alarm, I reach out an arm to steady her. ‘Help!’ I cry. The awfulness of the mother of the bride collapsing on her daughter’s wedding day, the stress, the whole Colin Watts debacle, I think to myself – not even Cath Cobb can cope, I can see that in a flash. But then, slightly too late, I realize that Cath has not collapsed like a pricked inflatable. Cath has dropped into a deep curtsey.

For a flitting millisecond, I am puzzled, and my whole Dorset life seems to flash before my eyes. Why is Cath Cobb – i.e. not even an English subject but a citizen of the US – curtseying to me?