I did not stand up during the speeches. I did not hand anybody anything. I did not say one word to Ondine Marr all day.
Here is what I did do.
I said yes to the photographer.
Thornhallow uses a company that puts every image into an online gallery for the guests, and I gave my email address like everybody else, and eleven days later I had four hundred and sixty photographs.
Including the one taken at twenty past
four in the orangery: nineteen men, arranged in three rows, under a board with the Yardley Rowe logo on it.
Four of those men had each stated, in writing, to different people, that they had never met the others.
I also kept the seating plan, which was printed and framed and which somebody had left on a side table at the end of the night, and which had two hundred and eleven names on it against table numbers.
