‘SYLVIE!’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Sweetheart, darling, are you okay?’

Dexter tears off his blindfold to see that Sylvie has somehow been transported to the far side of the room, slumped over in the fireplace like a marionette with all her strings cut. Her eyes are blinking wide and her hand is cupped to her face, but it’s already possible to see the dark rivulet of blood as it trickles down beneath her nose. She is moaning quietly to herself.

‘Oh my God, I am so sorry!’ he exclaims, horrified. Immediately he crosses towards her, but the family has already closed in.

‘Good God, Dexter, what the hell were you thinking?’ barks red-faced Lionel, drawing himself up to his full height.

‘YOU DIDN’T EVEN ASK IF SHE WAS THEREMORIARTY!’ shrieks her mother.

‘Didn’t I? Sorry—’

‘No, you just lashed out crazily!’

‘Like a madman—’

‘Sorry. Sorry, I forgot. I was—’

‘— Drunk!’ says Sam. The accusation hangs in the air. ‘You’re drunk, man. You’re completely pissed!’

They all turn and glare.

‘It really was an accident. I just caught your face at an odd angle.’

Sylvie tugs on Helen’s sleeve. ‘How does it look?’ she asks in a tearful voice as she discreetly removes her cupped hand from her nose. It’s as if she’s holding a fistful of strawberry sorbet.

‘It’s really not too bad,’ gasps Helen, her hand clasped to her mouth in horror and Sylvie’s face crumples further into tears. ‘Let me see, let me see! The bathroom!’ she whimpers, and the family haul her to her feet.

‘It really was just some kind of flukey accident. .’ Holding her mother’s arm, Sylvie hurries past him, eyes fixed straight ahead. ‘Do you want me to come with you? Sylvie? Sylv?’ There is no reply and he watches in misery, as her mother escorts her into the hall and up the stairs to the bathroom.

He listens to the footsteps fade.

And now it’s just Dexter and the Cope menfolk. A primal scene, they glare and glare. Instinctively he feels his hand tighten around his weapon, the tightly rolled-up copy of today’s Daily Telegraph, and says the only thing that he can think of to say.

‘Ouch!’

‘So — do you think I made a good impression?’

Dexter and Sylvie lie in the guest room’s large soft double bed. Sylvie turns to look at him, her face unmoving, the small fine nose throbbing accusingly. She sniffs but says nothing.

‘Do you want me to say I’m sorry again?’

‘Dexter, it’s fine.’

‘You forgive me?’

‘I forgive you,’ she snaps.

‘And you think they think I’m alright, they don’t think I’m some sort of violent psychopath or something?’

‘I think they think you’re fine. Let’s forget it shall we?’ She turns onto her side, away from him, and turns out her light.

A moment passes. Like a shamed schoolboy, he feels as if he won’t sleep, unless he gets some further reassurance. ‘Sorry for. . fucking up,’ he pouts. ‘ Again!’ She turns once more, and lays one hand fondly on his cheek.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You were doing fine until you hit me. They really, really liked you.’

‘And what about you?’ he says, still fishing.

She sighs and smiles. ‘I think you’re okay too.’

‘Any chance of a kiss then?’

‘I can’t. I’ll start bleeding. I’ll make up for it tomorrow.’ She turns away again. Satisfied now, he sinks lower and puts his hands behind his head. The bed is immense and soft and smells of freshly washed linen, and the windows open out onto a still summer night. Stripped of quilts and blankets, they lie beneath a single white cotton sheet, and he can see the wonderful line of her legs and narrow hips, the curve of her long smooth back. Tonight’s sexual potential evaporated with the moment of impact and the possibility of concussion, but still he turns to her and places one hand beneath the sheet and onto her thigh. The skin is cool and smooth.

‘Long drive tomorrow,’ she mumbles. ‘Let’s go to sleep.’

He continues to look at the back of her head, where the long fine hair falls away from the nape of her neck, revealing the darker whorls beneath. You could take a photograph of that, he thinks, it is so beautiful. Call it ‘Texture’. He wonders if he still might tell her that he loves her or, more tentatively, that he ‘thinks he might be in love with her’, which is both more touching and easier to back out of. But clearly this is not the time, not now with the plug of bloody tissue still on her bedside table.

He feels he ought to say something though. Inspired, he kisses her shoulder, and whispers. ‘Well you know what they say—’ He pauses for effect. ‘You always hurt the one you love!’

This is pretty clever, pretty adorable he thinks, and there’s a silence while he waits, eyebrows raised expectantly, for the implication to sink in.

‘Let’s get some sleep, shall we?’ she says.

Defeated, he lies back and listens to the gentle hum of the A259. Somewhere in the house right now her parents are tearing him to pieces and he realises, appallingly, that he has a sudden desire to laugh. He starts to giggle, then laugh outright, struggling to maintain the silence as his body starts to shake, making the mattress shudder.

‘Are you laughing?’ murmurs Sylvie into her pillow.

‘No!’ says Dexter, screwing his face tight to keep it in, but the laughter’s coming in waves now and he feels another surge of hysterics starting to build in his stomach. There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote, and he can see the potential for a story here. It’s the kind of story that he would like to tell Emma Morley. But he doesn’t know where Emma Morley is, or what she’s doing, hasn’t seen her for more than two years now.

He’ll just have to remember the story. Tell her some other day.

He starts to laugh again.

THURSDAY 15 JULY 1999

Somerset

They have started to arrive. An endless cascade of luxuriously quilted envelopes, thumping onto the doormat. The wedding invitations.

This wasn’t the first wave of weddings. Some of their contemporaries had even got married at University, but in that self-consciously wacky, rag-week way, a let’s-pretend parody of a wedding, like the jokey student ‘dinner parties’ where everyone wore evening dress to eat tuna pasta bake. Student wedding receptions were picnics in the local park, the guests in Oxfam suits and secondhand ballgowns, then onto the pub. In the wedding photos the bride and groom might be seen raising pint glasses to the camera, a fag dangling from the bride’s rouged mouth, and wedding gifts were modest: a really cool compilation tape; a clip-framed photo-montage; a box of candles. Getting married at University was an amusing stunt, an act of benign rebellion, like a tiny tattoo that no-one ever sees or shaving your head for charity.

The second wave, the mid-twenties weddings, still retained a little of that tongue-in-cheek, home-made quality. The receptions took place in community centres and parents’ gardens, vows were self-composed and rigorously secular, and someone always seemed to read that poem about the rain having such small hands. But a cold, hard edge of professionalism had started to creep in. The idea of the ‘wedding list’ had begun to rear its head.

At some point in the future a fourth wave is expected — the Second Marriages: bittersweet, faintly apologetic affairs that are over by 9.30 on account of all the kids. ‘It’s not a big deal,’ they will say ‘just an excuse for a party.’ But for the moment this year is the year of the third wave, and it is the third wave that is proving the most powerful, the most spectacular, the most devastating. These are the weddings of people in their early-to-mid-thirties, and no-one is laughing anymore.