Andrew and Emily walked together down the aisle, past all three rows of seats, on the thick blue carpet dotted with yellow flowers, to the sound of a string quartet on a portable CD player operated by Gary.

In the twenty or so seconds between Gary turning the CD on and off again I managed to open my phone and shazam the track: ‘Beethoven, No. 12 in E-Flat Major—’ ‘Be quiet,’ said Sophie, when I whispered this to her, showing her my phone screen. She slapped my wrist. Put it away. She was, instinctually, a good girl, a model student, who achieved her rebelliousness with the same diligent work with which she had achieved her double first. She was protective of her father as well as critical; it was not OK for me to point out what remained of the gauche young man, the Leonard Bast who had risen from the provinces, the mistakes of style his daughter would not inherit. The secular wedding was a great temptation towards such mistakes, with its invocation to pick your significant songs and poems, as long as they didn’t mention God. It was too close to the projection of a carefully created social media profile. For those of us who once believed in God, the problem with atheism, that reasonable position, is exactly its reasonableness, its marriage officials, its humanist funeral people. This special occasion. This very special day that means a great deal. They are so breezy, so chirpy, so comfortable with sentiment; they smile too much, they seem to like their job, and people, and saying the word ‘human’; do they think humans are a good thing? Have they not learned how to suffer? That there is a style to it?

‘You’re all very quiet in here,’ she boomed. She had the flat South London accent of the recently resigned England football manager.

I raised my eyebrows at Sophie, who looked away from me.

‘Are you all all right?’ she bellowed.

We nodded back at her.

‘Well,’ she said, and then pointed out the fire exits and told us to turn off our mobile phones. ‘What a happy day for Andrew and Emily,’ she said, and explained what a civil ceremony was and the role we had to play in it. Minimal, in theory, except I had in my pocket two sealed envelopes containing cards I had bought on the Kings Road, elegant cards in thick cream envelopes, addressed individually to Emily and Andrew.