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boarding school as ‘Fat Matt’ despite being very slim and fit (answer: because no one could ever pronounce his real name, a custom his friends had praised me for overturning). And people had written rude things in our guest book, and taken mad photos of each other with disposable cameras. And I was introduced by my new mother-in-law, who was wearing nuptial black, to a distant uncle over from South Africa – and the uncle kept referring to my new husband as Matthys, but my new mother-in-law had explained that we all had to call him Matt from now on because poor Amber can’t pronounce Matthys.
    For better, for worse
.
    *
    Harry opens the door and several small children push past his legs. They thud into the three of us standing on the path. Harry blinks to attention.
    â€˜Girls, girls, girls. What a treat!’ he enthuses, his voice carrying its habitual note of irony, as if he isn’t surrounded on a daily basis by females.
    I scoop up Eloise, one of Harry’s five daughters, and balance her on my hip. Her floppy blonde hair smells of strawberries, and for a moment I turn my head slightly to inhale this scent in secret. My heart melts. She giggles and tells me I’m tickling her ear. She pulls at my face to make it face hers again. The skin at her temples is pale and delicate, nearly transparent. I marvel at the way she literally seizes what she wants from life. I want her never to lose this. I squeeze her tightly.
    Eloise leans forward to pat Louisa’s distended stomach.
    â€˜Pat gently, Ellie,’ I say. ‘Louisa has a baby in her tummy.’
    â€˜For me?’ Eloise asks. ‘I’m six,’ she adds, as if this statement provides ample justification for Louisa handing over her one remaining reason for living.
    â€˜Well, birthday girl,’ I say quickly, ‘let’s go in and see all the presents you’ve had.’
    *
    Our present table resembled something out of central casting. A dry-stone wall of boxes wrapped in shiny paper, shapes almost too perfect to contain real gifts. Frankly, I was flattered; I’d had dreams in the run-up to the wedding of walking down the aisle surrounded by empty pews.
    We decided against a wedding list: the prerogative of marrying in our thirties. I suggested this because I feared our guests would overlook it. Matt agreed, and told me he hoped to offer the absence of a wedding list as a symbol to his parents of his autonomy. Above all, such was our faith in our relationship that to ask for something as mundane as a set of kitchen steps verged on the sacrilegious.
    And yet, given the pile of presents we received, I could only conclude that guests had been wracked with guilt at the prospect of arriving empty-handed, or had felt under some compulsion to demonstrate by their well-judged gifts just what good friends they were of ours, of Matt and me, the new Bezeidenhouts. During the reception, Dylan had sent four choir boys to the church hall to collect trestle tables and erect them at the back of the marquee pitched in the vicar-cage garden.
    By the power vested in me
.
    *
    Dylan and Jenny loiter with poorly disguised intent beside the sausages on sticks; hardly surprising, since Dylan can’t cook, and Jenny can never stop eating (she says she’s too attached to the Mondrian patterns on her poncho jumpers to diet). Eloise is still joined to my hip, while Esme hits my bottom with a cushion. Serena approaches with a plate daubed with crumbs and smudges of buttercream.
    â€˜You two! I wondered who was squirrelling all the sausages away. I don’t know! The children only want to eat sweet things this year.’
    â€˜It was Jenny,’ mumbles Dylan, chewing. Jenny slaps Dylan play- fully and, during the ensuing laughter, pops another sausage into her mouth.
    â€˜I can never keep up,’ laughs Serena. ‘At Eleanor’s party it was Hula Hoops, and at Emily’s it was egg sarnies. There’s always one