In the end my mother had invited fewer than fifty people. The wedding was not going to be the one she had dreamed of. She must have realized some years before that I wasn’t headed in the direction of St Margaret’s, Westminster, but she had still intended the occasion to glitter, a bright milestone in our uneventful lives. I knew how she envisaged it—all sparkle: the glass, the cutlery, the champagne, the eyes of the bride; gleaming white napery, carnations and maidenhair fern swaddled at the stem in silver paper; fallen flakes of expensive pastry, and the smart aroma of smoked salmon and asparagus blending subtly with the scent of flowers and wine; loud voices and muted laughter; sometimes a discreet tinkle of broken glass, because at a good wedding some breakage was unavoidable, indeed desirable and evidence of an expansive generosity. The weddings I had been to had been like that, quite different from the wedding parties in the villages along the Nile: a deafening noise of drums and flutes, bright hot colours and people saying words I couldn’t understand. My mother’s hat, I thought, would have looked very out of place at one of those Nilotic feasts. Despite the time of year she intended to dress herself in mauve silk, a coat and skirt faced with regal purple and embellished with a cream lace jabot. Her hat was mauve plush with a veil. Lili had given the outfit her qualified approval. ‘Cut the jabot,’ she had advised. ‘Wear a string of pearls if you must, but cut the jabot.’

‘I need the jabot,’ my mother said, ‘to hide the crêpiness of the throat.’

‘Once you start thinking like that,’ said Lili, ‘you might as well go round dressed up like Whistler’s mother.’

Lili was going to wear a crimson redingote of stiff taffeta with dull pewter buttons all down the front, a skull cap of crimson velvet atop her rusty curls, grey gun-metal stockings and gloves, and Egyptian crimson slippers. She looked a little peculiar, but she would make everyone else look pitifully ordinary.

‘Don’t you think your grey...’ my mother would say to her, ‘or perhaps that nice beige facecloth coat-dress...’ But Lili said there were few enough times when she got the chance really to dress up and she was going to now.

The caterers had been in and out with boxes and covered trays. They were polite, professional and subservient, and reminded me irresistibly of undertakers.

My father arrived with his wife and children two days before the wedding. They had come only from Southampton where his shipping firm had now placed him, but Cynthia and the children couldn’t be expected to face the rigours of the festivities on the same day that they had driven seventy-odd miles. Cynthia preferred to endure a night under the roof of the woman she had superseded. I thought this unexpectedly brave of her until I realized that she had no sense of incongruity whatsoever and wasn’t aware that her presence might be unwelcome. She treated my mother as an older woman, not so much by deferring to her as by assuming that they had nothing at all in common, and never could have had. In one way this eased the situation, since it occluded any sense of unseemly rivalry, but it annoyed my mother.