It took me about four minutes to understand what a decree nisi is, on my phone, sitting on the floor of that room.
And on the twentieth of February I saw a solicitor called Ruth Pell in Ellersby and paid her two hundred and ninety pounds and she told me, in plain words, that if I went through with a ceremony on the fifteenth of March the resulting marriage would be void.
She advised me not to do it. It is in her letter, which is dated the twenty-first.
And I did it anyway.
Twenty-three days later I walked into a register office at Vaudry in a dress I had chosen in the January and I married a man I knew could not marry me, in front of about sixty people, including my mother.
Why.
I have had a year and a woman called Halla on Wednesdays, and the first six months of it was me producing reasons.
