And I married him four weeks later and kept it in a box for seven months.
I did not discover a bombshell at my husband’s birthday. I detonated one that I had been carrying since before the ceremony, and I chose a night with fourteen witnesses, and I had the copies made on the sixth of October, five days in advance.
The twenty-three days between Ruth Pell’s letter and the register office, which I have had to go through properly because I have been describing them as a blur.
They were not a blur. I have a diary.
The twenty-second of February: I rang the florist about an extra buttonhole.
The twenty-eighth: final fitting. My mother came. There is a photograph of the two of us and I am laughing in it.
The fourth of March: I paid the balance on the room at the Thistle Row place. Eleven hundred pounds, from my own account.
