Do you, Samantha Jane Nixon, take this woman, Nicola Foster Hayle, to be your lawfully wedded wife?

Sonorous am-dram voice the man had. Sam shortening their names in the responses. Obstreperous woman. Which was to be applauded, of course.

The gulls, the light, the almost-tears. Was it happening again?

She had looked up at the stained glass and wondered what it must have been like in the seventeenth century, to come in here on a winter morning having seen nothing all week but a woodblock print on a ballad sheet, then witness the low sun blaze through the marriage at Cana, the empty tomb, Jonah and the Whale. How could you not believe in the existence of some better place? Great beams of multicoloured light leaned across the nave like straightened rainbows.

Nikki had been led down the aisle by her father. It was the first time she had shared a room with Philip in three years and she still felt small in his presence. The politeness against which her unspoken animosity seemed petty. That top-to-toe scan meaning, What are you wearing, Carol? A speech of which she heard only the presumption that the room belonged to him and the easy laughter of people who felt comfortable in his hands. She watched him hugging Nikki and didn’t know which possibility was worse, that it was a performance or that it was genuine.

A long, red carpet had been laid diagonally across the field between the church and the hotel garden, a scarlet bridge over green water, leading to a marquee where everything was white except for the floral arrangements in the centre of the eleven circular tables, lilies on this one, roses on that one, carnations on a third. Waiters hovered and darted below a ceiling thick with fairy lights.

Duck and ham-hock terrine with damson chutney. Corn-fed chicken breast with wild mushroom and thyme risotto. Almond and pear tart with brandy cream.

Joe, Nikki’s older brother, had flown in from Melbourne via Singapore, minus Tracey who was in her third trimester after two miscarriages. She’d talked to him briefly about lab work but he’d only landed that morning and he was scratchy and jet-lagged. Sam’s brother Ray, of whom she’d heard only hair-raising stories, was sporting a fauxhican and a tattooed cobra which peered over his shirt collar like a reclusive pet. The girl cousins were fascinated, begging him to remove his shirt and show them the creature in its entirety, then shrieking with mock horror when he complied. Her own sister Karen had expanded even further, becoming so like their mother that on several occasions she scanned the room and was briefly convinced that she was in trouble for some as-yet-unexplained reason. Toya, Nikki’s friend from college, had gone from crutches to an electric wheelchair in less than a year.

She’d been seated beside Sam’s father at the top table. He’d lost a hand in a firefight in Umm Qasr and now ran a boarding kennels outside Gloucester with Sam’s mother. They’d met once, for a couple of prickly hours the previous Easter. His face froze while unseen cogs turned for a whole second before he reacted to anything – a joke, a question, a casual remark. She never did work out whether it was a tactic or some kind of mental defect. Towards the end of the second prickly hour, however, they had stumbled serendipitously on shared memories of childhood holidays in poorly insulated caravans on the north Norfolk coast. Crabbing with orange twine and butchers’ fatty offcuts, bathtub canoes and seal trips to Blakeney Point. Suddenly they were members of their own little Freemasonry.