The Guest Who Brought Her Own Cake Because Ours Was "Not To Her Taste"

She is my husband's aunt. She was invited because you invite aunts.

She arrived at the venue at eleven in the morning — the ceremony was at two — with a three-tier cake in the boot of a Nissan and a folding table in case ours was "the wrong height".

She told the venue coordinator, a young woman called Beth whom I have since sent a very large bottle of something, that she was "doing the cake".

Beth said, "The cake is done."

She said, "Not properly."

Beth — and this is why Beth is a professional and I am a woman who screams into pillows — said, "Let me help you find somewhere for that," and put it in the staff kitchen, and then came and found me during hair and makeup and told me quietly, so that I could decide, and gave me the choice.

I said: leave it in the kitchen. Do not tell anybody.

Our cake was cut. It was two tiers, lemon, made by my sister-in-law, who is not a baker and who practised four times and who cried when it worked.

At about ten in the evening, the aunt announced to a table of eight that there was "a proper cake in the back" and went to get it.

The staff kitchen was locked. Beth had the key. Beth was, at that moment, unavailable, in the way that professionals become unavailable.

She got the cake at midnight, when we had gone, and she took it home, and I am told — by my husband's cousin, who is a gossip and a treasure — that it sat in her kitchen for four days and then went in the bin.

She has never mentioned it again. Not once. She sends birthday cards. She is perfectly nice.

At my sister-in-law's wedding, two years later, there was no cake at all — they had a cheese tower — and I watched the aunt look at that cheese tower for a long, long time.

She said nothing. But she photographed it. And I would love, more than almost anything, to know what she wrote under that photograph, and to whom.