It couldn’t be a bid to please his mother. Kathleen Waterhouse rarely left the house, apart from to go to church and to the care home for the elderly where she worked part-time. It had taken Simon weeks to persuade her to come tonight, and even when she’d agreed it had been with the proviso that she would only stay for an hour. Would she really leave on the dot of nine? She’d arrived at exactly eight, as Simon had predicted she would, clutching her husband Michael’s arm, white-faced, saying, ‘Oh, dear, we’re not the first, are we?’ Simon and Charlie had enthused about how nice it was to see them, but they hadn’t responded in kind. Nor had they brought a gift. Charlie had waited for them to say, ‘Congratulations’, but all Kathleen had said to her, shrinking against her husband as if she wanted to dissolve into him, was, ‘Do you know we’re only staying for an hour, dear? Did Simon tell you? I don’t like to be where people are drinking and getting rowdy.’ Her eyes had widened in horror as they took in the array of bottles and cans on the table at the entrance to the room. At the moment, Charlie thought, I’m not linked by marriage to a rabidly devout teetotaller, but all that’s about to change.

Something shiny appeared beside her arm as she rummaged under the table. She turned and saw a silver shoe with a heel so high it bent the foot it was supposed to support into a right angle, and, above it, an expanse of spray-tanned ankle. ‘Hiding, are you?’ DC Colin Sellers’ wife Stacey nudged Charlie’s shoulder with her leg, nearly making her lose her balance. ‘Yum!’ she said. ‘Lovely jubbly bubbly. You’re going to love the prezzie me and Colin got you.’

Charlie doubted it. Stacey had a sticker on her car saying ‘Honk if you’re horny’. Her taste in most things was poor. Husbands especially; Colin Sellers had been screwing a singer called Suki Kitson for as long as Charlie had known him. Everyone knew but his thick-as-a-brick wife.

Charlie waited until Stacey had moved away before coming out from under the table. She looked at her watch. Quarter to nine. Only fifteen minutes left of Kathleen’s hour. If Simon’s parents left promptly, as promised, the volume could go up again. As it was, Charlie could barely hear the Limited Sympathy CD that was playing in the background. Kathleen had asked for it to be turned down, claiming loud music gave her a migraine.

Charlie looked round the room, through the gaps in the clusters of sweaty bodies that surrounded her on all sides, trying to catch a glimpse of her future mother-in-law. Ugh, what a thought. Her next one was even worse, and made her eyes prickle with tears: It won’t happen. Simon doesn’t really want to marry me. He’ll pull out, when it’s almost but not quite too late.

Did she want it to be too late? she asked herself, not for the first time. Did she want to see Simon trapped, by his own foolishness and lack of self-knowledge, in a marriage that she wanted and he didn’t? She dug her nails into the palms of her hands to put a stop to the nonsense in her head. It was nonsense; of course it was. The one thing about Simon that was beyond dispute was his intelligence. Clever people didn’t propose marriage over and over again to people they didn’t want to marry. Did they?