I watched Will drain two glasses of Pimm’s and was secretly glad.

Lunch was served at 4pm. I thought that was a pretty odd time to serve lunch but, as Will pointed out, it was a wedding. Time seemed to have stretched and become meaningless, anyway, its passage blurred by endless drinks and meandering conversations. I don’t know if it was the heat, or the atmosphere, but by the time we arrived at our table I felt almost drunk. When I found myself babbling incoherently to the elderly man on my left, I realized it was actually a possibility.

‘Is there any alcohol in that Pimm’s stuff?’ I said to Will, after I had managed to tip the contents of the salt cellar into my lap.

‘About the same as a glass of wine. In each one.’

I stared at him in horror. Both of him. ‘You’re kidding. It had fruit in it! I thought that meant it was alcohol free. How am I going to drive you home?’

‘Some carer you are,’ he said. He raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s it worth for me not to tell my mother?’

I was stunned by Will’s reaction to the whole day. I had thought I was going to get Taciturn Will, Sarcastic Will. At the very least, Silent Will. But he had been charming to everybody. Even the arrival of soup at lunch didn’t faze him. He just asked politely whether anybody would like to swap his soup for their bread, and the two girls on the far side of the table – who professed themselves ‘wheat intolerant’ – nearly threw their rolls at him.

The more anxious I grew about how I was going to sober up, the more upbeat and carefree Will became. The elderly woman on his right turned out to be a former MP who had campaigned on the rights of the disabled, and she was one of the few people I had seen talk to Will without the slightest discomfort. At one point I watched her feed him a slice of roulade. When she briefly got up to leave the table, he muttered that she had once climbed Kilimanjaro. ‘I love old birds like that,’ he said. ‘I could just picture her with a mule and a pack of sandwiches. Tough as old boots.’

I was less fortunate with the man on my left. He took about four minutes – the briefest of quizzes about who I was, where I lived, who I knew there – to work out that there was nothing I had to say that might be of interest to him. He turned back to the woman on his left, leaving me to plough silently through what remained of my lunch. At one point, when I started to feel properly awkward, I felt Will’s arm slide off the chair beside me, and his hand landed on my arm. I glanced up and he winked at me. I took his hand and squeezed it, grateful that he could see it. And then he moved his chair back six inches, and brought me into the conversation with Mary Rawlinson.

‘So Will tells me you’re in charge of him,’ she said. She had piercing blue eyes, and wrinkles that told of a life impervious to skincare routines.

‘I try,’ I said, glancing at him.

‘And have you always worked in this field?’

‘No. I used to … work in a cafe.’ I’m not sure I would have told anybody else at this wedding that fact, but Mary Rawlinson nodded approvingly.

‘I always thought that might be rather an interesting job. If you like people, and are rather nosy, which I am.’ She beamed.

Will moved his arm back on to his chair. ‘I’m trying to encourage Louisa to do something else, to widen her horizons a bit.’

‘What did you have in mind?’ she asked me.

‘She doesn’t know,’ Will said. ‘Louisa is one of the smartest people I know, but I can’t make her see her own possibilities.’

Mary Rawlinson gave him a sharp look. ‘Don’t patronize her, dear. She’s quite capable of answering for herself.’