The Reverend

The wedding went on without me, which is what weddings are for.

By nine the ballroom had reached the part of the evening when a room stops being an event and becomes a party. Catriona had given her shoes to Ross to mind, and he was standing by the service door holding them in one enormous hand like a pair of kittens. Fergus’s band had been joined by a second fiddle and was playing faster than anyone could dance, and people were dancing anyway.

I stood in the service doorway for an hour, because the condition was the rehearsal to the last taxi, and because it was the first wedding I had watched from start to finish in ten years without once working out what it had cost.

That is not true. I worked out what it had cost. I did it at seven, in the first five minutes, from…