I thought that I hadn’t chosen to get married at all but that Syl had chosen to marry me, since it was time for him to marry and I offered no threat to the way and integrity of his life and character, and that my mother had chosen to see me wed because I was good for little else.

‘On the other hand,’ added my mother hastily, as though she feared that I might take the chance to postpone the ceremony in order to accommodate the philadelphus, ‘chrysanthemums are more reliable. They don’t wilt so quickly, and those dark red ones are really very attractive against the grey stone.’

I told my mother with timid spite, hidden terror and a certain mad braggadocio that in some countries chrysanthemums were considered appropriate only for funerals.

‘This is not some countries,’ retorted my mother, perhaps wondering again whether the money she had spent so that I might learn French and a little grace had been utterly wasted, for I had learned only superstition and discontent.

‘For goodness sake go and put some lipstick on,’ she said. ‘If Syl comes he’ll think you’re dying.’

I was too meek to tell her that I wished I was. Nor would it have been true, for I greatly feared death, suspecting myself to be damned.

My mother glanced at the clock before looking at the window to ascertain that the garden was already retreating into night, and drew the curtains.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve written down the guests you want to ask?’ she remarked.

‘I’ve got a list somewhere,’ I said.

My mother, quite properly, did not believe me, but as I was now clearly an adult, even if an unsatisfactory one, she could not directly accuse me of lying. Frustrated, she went towards the kitchen and I pulled the curtains apart to watch night fall.

‘It doesn’t fit,’ I said with satisfaction.

My mother couldn’t deny it. The wedding dress hung loosely on me and I appeared to myself; reflected in the cheval mirror, gratifyingly ridiculous.

‘It looks silly,’ I said more positively.

My mother irritatedly seized two handfuls of the old brocade and dragged them behind my back.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ she observed in a tone which indicated that she could have expected nothing else of me. ‘It’ll have to be taken in at the seams.’

Already the tiny triumph had withered in me. I thought the dead whiteness of the dress made me more of a corpse than a bride but hadn’t enough energy to infuriate my mother by telling her so.

‘For goodness sake liven up,’ she said. ‘Syl will think he’s going to a funeral not a wedding.’

This was not percipience in my mother, but a belated riposte to my revelation, the day before, of the role of the chrysanthemum in foreign culture.