Forty Uninvited Relatives on a Chartered Bus

The head count was ninety. Everything about the day was built on that number the way a bridge is built on load calculations: ninety chairs, ninety plates, ninety slices of a three-tier cake.

At six o'clock, as the starters landed, a full-size coach crunched up the venue's gravel drive. We watched through the windows the way villagers watch weather. The door hissed, and out came — in cardigans and Sunday best, bearing carrier bags of gifts and at least three home-baked cakes in tins — relatives. Forty of them. Great-aunts, second cousins, an entire branch from the northern side of the groom's family.

The father of the groom rose from table one, arms wide, entirely unsurprised, and it emerged in real time, in front of the head table, what he had done. Offended on behalf of 'the real family' by the modest guest list, he had spent a month personally telephoning the whole northern branch with the message that the invitations 'must have got lost' and the family would 'sort the details'. He had chartered the coach himself. He considered it — his actual phrase, immortal now — 'a wedding gift of people.'