‘Oh you,’ said Mrs Raffald. ‘Philosopher, you are. You should see what’s going on down at The Oaks. Three-ring circus down there. Telephone calls, and wedding dresses, and Lili leaving her stuff all over the place.’

I found it interesting but not surprising that Mrs Raffald should refer to Lili by her Christian name. She would not in a million years have done the same by Monica. ‘Weddings are always a nuisance,’ I said.

‘I prefer a funeral,’ said Mrs Raffald. ‘Unless it’s somebody close,’ she added. ‘The food’s generally better.’

‘I suppose that’s true,’ I said, ‘and they don’t hand you fizzy drinks. Champagne gives me indigestion these days, and I hate those little nibbles that fill you up but don’t stop you feeling hungry.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Raffald with the brevity of the connoisseur. Her own family and friends were always getting married, being christened or dying, and she was also frequently called upon to help when my neighbours found themselves in the midst of these traumatic events.

‘Is the dress finished yet?’ I asked. Monica had been extremely boring about the dress.

‘Dunno,’ said Mrs Raffald, sweeping the ashes from the grate. ‘Margaret moons about all day like a dying duck in a thunder storm. S’pose she must be in love.’

She said this with such an airy lack of conviction that I was taken aback. I had somehow assumed that Margaret must be in love with Syl, and thought no more about it. Plenty of women had been. Why not Margaret? But now I remembered other things I had once taken for granted: the illness of one of my uncles which had killed him before we could, any of us, accept even that he was ailing. Nothing could have saved him, but we should have been better prepared.

‘Have you seen her in it?’ I asked.

‘In what?’ said Mrs Raffald, dusting the iron bars.

‘The dress,’ I said patiently, perhaps thinking that if I could hear how she wore her wedding dress I would know how she felt about her wedding.

‘No,’ said Mrs Raffald. ‘Her mum just goes on about it all the time. Dress this, dress that. Too long, too short. Don’t know why she doesn’t just chuck it out and get a new one.’

‘She wore it at her own wedding,’ I reminded Mrs Raffald. ‘Didn’t she tell you?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Raffald. ‘She told me all right. You’d think she’d want to forget about it, being divorced all this time—not make the poor kid wear it.’

I reflected that Monica would die on the spot if she could hear us: the mother of the groom discussing the bride’s family with the charwoman.

‘Monica doesn’t think a great deal,’ I said, out of an obscure sense of vengefulness. I had too often been bored or irritated by her.

‘Oh, she’s all right really,’ said Mrs Raffald generously. ‘She just got a bit spoilt having all those servants out East. There’s quite a few like that round here.’