‘It means he’s talking to other women all day,’ I said.

‘Can I tell you my secret?’ Claire said.

‘Yes,’ Lola enthused.

‘You’ve got to show him what he’s missing.’ She left a dramatic pause. ‘That’s the key – he’s got to always be aware of what he could be missing.’

‘How do I do that?’ Lola asked, leaning across the table.

‘Number of ways. Men just have to be reminded of how lucky they are all the time.’

‘What, do you do that even now?’ Lola asked reverently. All at once I realized she was prime for a cult.

‘Every day,’ Claire replied.

‘Grim,’ I said under my breath, pouring more wine in my glass.

Dinner continued with both themes – unappetizing catering from Franny in small portions and unappetizing advice from married women in large portions. Lucy made an hour-long speech in which she went around listing everything she loved about each hen-do attendee – she did a gallant job by managing ‘a great sense of humour’ when it came to me. Franny pretended we’d run out of wine allocated for that day and instead suggested we help ourselves to the gin-flavoured chocolate truffles. We all took turns to do some karaoke around a machine plugged into the TV, then everyone was upstairs in their rooms before eleven.

‘I think Claire is right about showing him what he’s missing,’ Lola said as we changed into our pyjamas. ‘I might get you to take a really flattering photo of me tomorrow morning when the light’s good so I can post it on Instagram. Andreas is always on Instagram.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not having any of this. Women shouldn’t have to trick men into keeping their attention.’

‘I know you’re right.’ She got into bed and unlocked her phone, her blank expression lit up by the white glare of the screen. She shoved another gin chocolate into her mouth in one.

‘And if he has to be reminded of what he’s “missing”, then he’s not the man for you. Now please put down your phone or I will have to confiscate it.’

Lola gave a defeated smile and put it on the floor next to her. I turned off our bedside light and we lay silently in the dark.

‘Problem is, it does work,’ Lola said. ‘Posting a hot photo on Instagram. I’ve done it before, and it always gets their attention.’

‘Do you really want that from these men? Their attention?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘What do you want?’

‘Their love.’

Lola and I left the next morning after breakfast of undercooked sausages, with the lie of respective family events in the afternoon. Lucy was gracious about it – if anything she seemed a little relieved – and Franny didn’t give us much grief but for a few passive-aggressive comments about making sure they had an even-numbered group for the ‘rap battle in the paddock’ later.

‘I don’t want anything like that when I get married,’ Lola said as we sat opposite each other on the train and looked out on the nondescript fields of Home Counties England. ‘You’ll be organizing it all, so just to let you know I don’t want anything like that.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Glad you cleared that up.’

‘I want something very casual, very me,’ she continued. ‘Not a weekend away anywhere, just a weekend in London.’

‘Weekend in London?’

‘Yeah, so like, a Friday night just my bridesmaids, maybe a dinner you can host at your flat or my flat, with all my favourite dishes. Then you can give me my something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue and a sixpence for my shoe.’ I couldn’t be bothered to ask for the translation of this. ‘Then Saturday-morning brunch somewhere. Then afternoon activities with all the other hens, then a dinner, then a night out, then a Sunday with everyone at a spa. And we should include family members for the Sunday – my mum, my mother-in-law and sisters and sisters-in-law, if I have any.’

I always forgot that, despite her occasional company in the stalls of cynicism – watching the show with one eye as we made wry observations to each other – Lola wanted a part in it. She wanted the whole production – the full regalia. She wanted the attention, the gift registry, the hymns, the hen do, the marquee, the multi-tiered cake of fruit, coffee, lemon and chocolate sponges. She wanted a man to ask her dad for permission to pass her over to him. She wanted to discard her surname in favour of one that proved someone had chosen her. When my friends first started getting married, Dad used to tell me, ‘You never know someone’s true politics until you go to their wedding.’ How right and wise he was. Lola – a girl so outwardly preoccupied with wokeness; who only read overhyped memoirs written by women under thirty having feeble epiphanies about themselves; who had ‘she/her’ written in all her social media bios despite very clearly never being in danger of being misgendered – well, all she really wanted was to walk down an aisle wearing a ￡2,000 dress and a sixpence in her shoe.

‘I’ve got something for the Schadenfreude Shelf,’ she said.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I need it.’

‘So my cousin’s best friend, Anne, had always wanted to fall in love and get married. She was a bit like me, never had a boyfriend, thought she’d be alone for ever.’

‘Right.’

‘Until one day when she’s in her late thirties she meets this man on a dating app and they have an amazing first date. He’s a lawyer, really kind, really lovely man. After about six months they move in together – it’s a bit whirlwind, but it’s like we always say: as you get older things move faster because when you know, you know.’

‘Sure.’

‘After two years of being together, they got married.’

‘Yes.’

‘And now she’s dead.’

‘What?’

‘Completely dead.’

‘Oh my God, how did she die?’

‘Pancreatic cancer.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So those two elements of the story aren’t related.’

‘Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren’t.’

‘That’s a slightly false crescendo to the anecdote, I think.’

‘All I’m saying is, she thought all she wanted was a marriage, she got married and then she got ill and died.’

‘We need to work on what stories are eligible for the Schadenfreude Shelf,’ I said. ‘We need to reassess the vetting process. That hasn’t made me feel better about anything.’

‘Really? Oh, it has me,’ she said, gazing out at the approaching brown bricks of Guildford. ‘Poor Anne, I think about her often.’

That night, grateful for an evening at home rather than the ‘indoor rounders with inflatable bats and balls’ as listed on the hen-do itinerary, the noise began again. It started at exactly seven o’clock – the same roar at the same volume that made it impossible to do anything but listen to it through the floor. It was the first time it had happened since the night I had called noise patrol before Christmas and Angelo had lingered menacingly outside my door. I opened my laptop, brought up the number for the council and waited for the eleven o’clock curfew. I tried to distract myself, but my eyes were fixated on the slow-moving hands of the clock.

Then, at exactly 10.59, the music stopped. At first, I thought his speakers must have cut out or that he was changing music. But a minute later, there was nothing – not a sound, not even his footsteps.

And I realized: 10.59 was not a coincidental time for Angelo to stop making a noise that he knew I hated. He must have read the rules of antisocial neighbourhood behaviour online like I had. As long as he was quiet at eleven p.m., he wasn’t eligible for any reprimanding. There was nothing I could say to him – there was no one I could call. This was a torture game of egos. This was a non-verbal proposal of warfare.

At 11.01 I realized I was sitting in a noise that was harder to ignore than anything I had heard all night. Silence.

12

‘Pervert,’ Dad announced. ‘But a ruddy talented one.’

We were standing at the centre of a Picasso exhibition, in front of his 1932 portrait Nude Woman in a Red Armchair. Dad had loved Picasso since he was a student, and I thought that seeing some of his works in the flesh might stimulate the part of his mind that made him feel knowledgeable and confident. My hunch was right – the art seemed to be able to penetrate through the increasing thick clouds that passed through his brain. It seemed as though he and the works were in a conversation I didn’t understand that he could explain to me, rather than the other way around. While Dad was housed in the mind of a cubist – where there were no rules for reality; where the morphing and merging and reversing of structure was beautiful and celebrated – he was right at home.

‘They met at an art gallery,’ he said. ‘He and Marie-Thérèse. She was seventeen and he was married.’

‘How many portraits did he paint of her?’

‘Over a dozen. Some of his best.’

‘Did he leave his wife?’

‘No. But he moved Marie-Thérèse on to the same road as his family home. He got far more from the relationship than she did. She arguably revived his career.’

‘How awful.’