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Sarah and her parents had driven over from Birmingham to help with various tasks before the wedding, although really there was little left to do according to the schedule on the kitchen wall downstairs. She moved to the bedroom window. The Colchesters' house was famous for its views. Standing on the brow of the hill at the edge of the village, the house with its gracious symmetry looked out over miles of fields and the intermittent shine of the Dove River, the wind stirring the trees into constant motion.

Behind the house was the bulwark of the medieval church. On Sunday mornings there was an incredible noise from the bells, like hammers in a foundry. The Colchesters seemed surprised when Sarah mentioned the din booming through the house.

She closed her eyes against the sun. They felt itchy and sore. For the past few nights she'd been afraid to fall asleep; lately sleep dragged her back into days she thought she'd forgotten, dredging them up again in dreams. She would wake in the dark, soaked in sweat, casting around for the light switch. In the morning it was gone, the room filled with the clear summer light. Nothing to do but let the memory fade.

She'd almost told Nicky once, tried to explain to him what had happened. What she'd done. But the words didn't exist. She leaned her forehead against the window glass.

Down in the garden she could see the marquee and the men who'd spent all day raising it. In just over two days' time she'd be married. Her stomach did a little flip again. She saw herself walking down the aisle of the village church. Heads turning, faces smiling. The insistent smell of freesias.

The evening before, the vicar at Nicky's village church had been taken ill. Impossible to find a replacement at such short notice, Alice
had said in dismay. But as a fellow man of the cloth Dad had been able to trawl through the Crockford's directory and had come up with a solution, an old friend called Cyril.

‘You remember him, don't you?' Dad said, as he came into breakfast with the news that morning. ‘Canon Cyril now. Haven't seen him for years.'

She'd nodded her head. Smiled at the good news. Then she'd realised that the milk in her coffee tasted oddly sour. A lingering smell of burned bacon fat in the room. She'd stood up to take the cup out to the sink, pour the coffee away discreetly, but halfway across the kitchen she'd heard a crash. She saw the cup in pieces on the floor, yellow coffee stains splashed across the hem of her jeans. She'd forgotten to keep holding it. She'd knelt down to clear up and had to let her head drop, feeling suddenly faint.

A few moments later, and it had cleared. The cup swept up, the floor wiped. The day slotted back into gear and moved on.

Now the men down in the garden were packing up for the day. She watched them slamming the van doors and driving away towards the village.

She slipped down the stairs and went out into the garden. The flagstones around the house were warm through her sandals. The hems of her jeans brushed the lawn as she went to peer inside the marquee.

Somebody else's wedding. There were stacks of boards piled up on the crushed grass, ready to go down as the dance floor. And there was Nicky's mum at the far end, talking to Alan, the caterer. Too late now to step back outside and remain unseen.

‘Sarah, darling.' Alice waved her over. ‘Just in time. We have to make a decision.' She opened the brochure at a photo of circular tables and gold chairs, a sea of flowers and gleaming glassware. ‘Do we think it's too much to have the gold chairs after all? Alan says there's a problem
with the white. We're going to be short. Do you think it's too much? I think it will look rather smart.' An anxious frown on Alice's petite face, the fair perm and neat lipstick.

‘Yes.'

‘Too much, or you think it will work?'

A slight pause. The Colchesters spoke English, but it was a different English, the words weighted and given different values. No serviettes at the wedding. Napkins. The wrong answer could be tricky. In a way it was easier to simply think of all this stuff as belonging to Nicky's mum, nothing to do with the real wedding, not really.

‘It will work.'

‘Marvellous. There's your answer then, Alan. Sarah would like the gold chairs.' She folded the brochure against her chest, smiling.

‘It's you, Sarah dear, who matters. This wedding is your big day. We want everything to be right.' Alice patted Sarah's arm ruefully.

‘Of course, it's our fault entirely for having so many guests to seat,' she continued.

‘Two hundred and fifty,' said Alan, nodding. ‘It is a big wedding.'

Sarah left the marquee and its sad odour of crushed grass. At the edge of the lawn was an old apple tree, grey bark with green moss on the weather side, luminous in the evening sun. A climbing rose had grown up and spread through the branches, simple and beautiful. A few weeks ago she had sat out here late in the evening with Nicky, a huge butter moon resting on the horizon, a white owl crossing the garden silent as a moth, Nicky's arm solid round her shoulders. It had seemed impossible to be any happier; Nicky and his kisses the only thing that mattered as they sat alone, whispering in the dark. She longed to see his tall shape now, loping across the lawn towards her, that wide grin that made everything turn out right.

She walked over to the tree and took one of the blooms in her hand and sniffed in the sugary smell. A petal cool as skin.

What Sarah had wanted was to get up early on the morning of the wedding and pick a bunch of roses and orange blossom and lady's mantle from the summer garden. Alice had smiled; actually she had laughed. She thought it was more suitable to order a proper bouquet from the florist's, the kind of stiff and pointless floral arrangement that Sarah hated. To keep the peace she'd gone to the florist's and picked out peach roses and cream freesias and baby's breath.

They'd be left behind when she and Nicky left.

Mum had said Alice was right about the bouquet. Sarah could see that Mum and Dad felt, if anything, even less comfortable than she did about being here. But Fourwinds was so much more practical for a wedding, plenty of room for a marquee, as Alice had said, quashing any objections.

It was so kind of Alice. Her energy was limitless. None of this would have been possible if they'd tried to do it on Dad's salary. It would have been a much smaller affair – sandwiches in the church hall.

And there was something else, something that wasn't being explained to Sarah, an uncomfortable undercurrent to do with how her dad had known Alice Colchester in the past. Turned out that he'd been evacuated to Alice's parents' house briefly during the war. That was as much as Sarah knew. She would have liked to ask more, a lot more, but no opening was offered. But then anything to do with the war years and her parents' childhood was only ever mentioned in snippets of information. It was maudlin to want to go back over those years. Asking for more might dredge up a fact here and there, but never resulted in a cohesive whole that you could really grasp and understand.

Sarah carefully detached a rose stem from the main shoot, leaving a trailing thread of bark. She picked another couple of pale roses, and then she broke off a few sprays of the orange blossom. The combined smell was delicate and clear. She began to walk back to the house. These would be the flowers that she would carry at another wedding,
the one that she would hold in her head, just her and Nicky there, and everything else blanked out – even as he asked her to repeat the words. Thinking about that moment, her hands were sticky with sweat, the rose stems slipping and turning sideways, the thorns pricking. She put the flowers down on the bank at the side of the drive.

Ages before tea. Not tea, supper; that's what it was called here.

She looked at the large house, the shadow of someone behind a window, a flickering shape that reappeared and then was gone. She turned away, taking instead the path round the back of the garage with the shingle roof. She headed towards the gate in the yew hedge and went through to the churchyard.

Here at the boundary with the fields someone had been burning old bouquets of flowers cleared from the graves. The ashes still smoked and a faded spray of silk blooms stuck out of the debris, the petals darkened with soot.

She carried on along the gravel path. In front of the church she paused. She slipped into the porch, pushed on the heavy oak door. The warmth of the afternoon had not registered in here, the air cool on her arms. She sat down in a pew at the back and tried to let the calm of the thick-walled building spread into her body, let the silence absorb and still the odd spinning feeling inside.

If anything, here in the church, she felt the worry rising. She took a laboured breath.

She should say something. That's what she ought to do. She tried to imagine forming the words.

Sitting in the silent church she could feel a pain in her throat. Alarmed, she rubbed at the tight ache. The muscles felt constricted, her breathing shallow and short. She tried to make a noise, form a word in the air. Only a breathy sound came out.

But it was years since she'd had that trouble, all those months and months when she couldn't say a thing, the panic of a painfully closing
throat each time she'd tried to speak – afraid that her breathing would shut down completely. She'd spent a week in the children's hospital, which had made it worse. The doctor gave her sedatives; she'd slept a lot. Then they'd gone away on a family camping holiday. The warm sun, the freedom to curl up and read, and when they came back they'd moved to a different place. The problem faded.

She stood up, her hand clutching the tightness in her throat. It simply couldn't happen now. But all this past week she'd woken up, trapped in a slippage of time, the past raw and inescapable all over again, hot with guilt, dizzy with fear and relief that it was over.

And now this.

If she could just carry on walking along the lane, walking towards the wood, out in the open where there was less pressure.

Sarah's father, Peter Donoghue, listened as the grandfather clock in the hallway sounded ten o'clock. He had been outside, called her in, looked everywhere in the Colchesters' darkening garden and then walked up through the village, but there was no sign of her.

He and his wife Patricia had been more dismayed than worried. Sarah was known for her long, solitary walks; she would disappear for hours and come back red-cheeked and satisfied. But now supper had been eaten in embarrassed silence and cleared away. They had helped the Colchesters wash up, and still no sign of Sarah.

So he had taken the car out and driven around the surrounding lanes to see if he could spot her. Now they were standing in the kitchen, discussing whether they should phone the police – the awful moment when all imagined things begin to tip over into reality – when they heard the sound of the back door opening.

Sarah was slipping off her sandals among the wellingtons and boots lined up in the back porch. She looked shocked as they all
crowded in through the door. There were two high points of colour on her cheeks.

‘Really, Sarah,' began Patricia. ‘We waited for you. We were worried. And poor Alice who's gone to so much trouble.'

‘Perhaps a small sorry would do it,' said Alice. ‘One doesn't like to see food wasted.'

Sarah's lips moved, but she didn't speak. Her eyes fixed on her father. He took her arm and studied her face.

‘Sarah, what's the matter?'

‘Lost her voice,' said Alice with a little laugh.

Tears began to run down Sarah's cheeks.

‘Oh no,' said Patricia. ‘Sarah, is it that? Your voice? But it went on for weeks last time. Listen, darling, you can write things down, can't you? Till it gets better. That's all right to do, isn't it, when you're getting married?'

‘This has happened before?' asked Alice.

‘But it was years ago. When she was small. Never since.'

They steered Sarah back into the sitting room. A scent of cold wood ash from the fireplace. Ralph unstoppered a bottle of whisky. Poured a dram and gave it to Sarah, but she shook her head and pushed it gently back towards him.

‘Never mind, old thing. I expect by tomorrow you'll be your old self, singing at the top of your lungs.'

‘How long did you say it went on the last time it happened?' murmured Alice.

‘It was several weeks. Then it just disappeared of its own accord, didn't it? Oh Sarah, it's probably just nerves, dear.'

Alice fetched paper and a biro from the writing desk. ‘There we go,' her tone cheerful and calming. ‘Now you can tell us whatever you'd like us to do, dear. It's not the end of the world after all. Just one of those things. Too much happening.'

She nodded encouragingly as Sarah wrote on the paper in swift block capitals.

Alice took the paper, paused. Her mouth slack, she checked the words over a couple of times.

‘No wedding. It says “no wedding”.'

‘Sarah . . .' Patricia moved to fold Sarah in her arms, but Sarah brushed her off and stood up. She began pulling at her left hand. With a small, hollow clatter she let the ring drop onto the desk: three brilliant cut diamonds, cold under the electric light.