I can’t help wondering if Saint Paula was one of the bloodcurdling, death-celebrating lefties who downloaded “Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead” onto their iPods after Margaret Thatcher ascended to the great cabinet in the sky last week. I’d bet my mortgage-free Hicksville House that she was, and I challenge her to deny it.

CHAPTER 8

Thursday, July 4, 2013

“I LOVE THIS ONE. It’s the only one out of about a hundred that shows us as we really are. The others were all ridiculously glamorous, and that’s so not us.” Paula Riddiough took the framed wedding photograph from the mantelpiece in her living room and placed it in Simon’s hands, which weren’t ready. Why did he need to hold it when he’d had a perfectly decent view from where he was standing? He couldn’t allow himself to worry about dropping it or else he would.

“Fergus looks so bemused,” said Paula fondly. “As if he’s thinking, ‘What’s happening? Who are you, and why are you pointing a camera at me?’” She laughed.

“What I was actually thinking, after the four hundredth photograph, was, ‘Any minute now this protracted smile will ossify on my face and I’ll need a chisel to get it off,’” said Fergus Preece, who stood immediately behind Paula and Simon. He’d been sitting down, but had leaped up at the mention of the words “wedding photo,” keen to take part in the viewing of an object that lived in his house and that he could presumably look at every day if he wanted to.

Odd. Though Simon had to admit that his own attitude to wedding pictures would be regarded as odder by most people. He and Charlie had only a couple of photographs of their wedding, which Chris Gibbs had taken. Neither had ever been framed. In one of them, Charlie was yawning and laughing at the same time. Simon had no idea where the pictures had ended up. His best guess was the drawer in the kitchen where the phone chargers lived, and the snarled plastic wrap that had been there for years and was completely unusable. Every time Charlie tried to throw it away, Simon fished it out of the trash, rinsed it under the tap and replaced it in the drawer, determined one day to find a straight edge that would enable him to detach useful lengths of film from the roll. Not that he and Charlie ever generated leftovers that needed to be covered up; the idea that cooking might involve more than putting something in the microwave was one that neither of them was prepared to entertain.

“Photographers—a strange breed,” said Fergus Preece. He was a short man with a tanned face, white hair and a large stomach that created portholes between the buttons of his shirt. Simon knew that Paula was thirty-nine, and guessed that Fergus was fifteen years older, perhaps more.