Ellis saw us at about five. He came over with a glass in his hand and looked at the top of that baby’s head, and I watched a man do arithmetic in roughly four seconds.
And he said: “Is that why you came?”
And I said no, and it was true, and he did not believe me, and he went
back to his wedding.
And the speeches, which I sat through with a baby on me.
Ellis spoke for nine minutes. He said the word family eleven times. I counted, because I needed something to do with my head.
And at about minute six he did the thing that I think, in the end, is the most accurate portrait of that man that exists.
He thanked, by name, in front of two hundred and eleven people: his mother, Ondine’s parents, his best man, the venue — and Piers Yardley, “without whom none of this would have been possible.”
