Her mum, it was fair to say, seemed a whole lot more agitated about the day, the timings and the detail than Merrin was herself. Not that she’d say it out loud, but she’d have been just as happy to have eloped, to have stood on a beach or in a register office or even a little plastic chapel with an Elvis lookalike officiating. How they became man and wife didn’t really matter to her, all that mattered was that they be joined in matrimony, in sickness and in health. She loved Digby Mortimer to the point of obsession, fascinated by every aspect of him: the way he looked, the way he sounded, his small unconscious movements, the way he pushed his hair back over his forehead, the flat square of smooth skin at the base of his wrist . . . Just the thought of these jigsaw pieces that made up the whole of him was enough to send a bolt of longing right through to her very core. This feeling was as intoxicating as any liquor.

She reaffirmed her decision to take the day in her stride and not get flustered: confident and unharried in the way that being truly happy had made her. The truth was, no matter the enormous expectation placed on this, her special day, it felt like no more than the final hurdle, and one she and Digby would sail over. After all the calm resistance, questioning, wide-eyed tuts of disapproval and the rationalising of objections raised by both sets of parents –‘You need to live a little first!’ ‘You’re from very different worlds!’ – how hard was it going to be to put on the fanciest frock she had ever worn and waltz up the aisle on the arm of her dad?

‘Don’t you worry. I’ve no intention of being late, Ma.’

She reached for the hot mug of tea nestling on top of the Raeburn. Who it belonged to didn’t matter. Tea, like most things inside the cramped cottage, was communally shared. ‘Lord above! You’re heating all of bloody Cornwall!’ her gran, Ellen Kellow, was fond of yelling every time she nipped in from her home at number two Kellow Cottages next door, tapping on the door frame with her walking stick and hefting the door shut with her ample bottom.

Pulling her towelling dressing gown around her, Merrin gripped the tea in her palm and took her place at the rickety pine table that had also, for as long as she could recall, lived on the rag rug in the middle of the room. The bathroom, from where her dad now whistled, was at the back of the cottage, once ‘outdoors’, now ‘indoors’ by virtue of the lean-to her Grandpa Arthur had put up in the nineteen sixties. The two bedrooms could be found at the top of the steep, wooden stairs.