WEDDING DISASTERS

A FEW summers ago, we visited the West Country. Friends had offered their lavender-bowered Dorset cottage in exchange for feeding and walking their dogs.

It turned out neither my husband nor sons were that interested in the dog-walking bit of the transaction. The former had qualms about picking up dogs’ issue, which was rather the point of us being there.

The latter were little and liable suddenly to decide they didn’t want to be on a walk at all about a third of the way into one. I, however, love a yomp, and those solitary, purposeful hikes alongside ripening wheat fields, through bosky bowers and towards the Jurassic coast are among my cherished memories of an indifferent summer.

The nearest coastal spot to our friends’ cottage was Chesil Beach, which, before I encountered it physically, I knew from Ian McEwan’s quietly devastating short novel. Even on a high summer’s day this lonely stretch of shingle feels a forlorn spot. It is an inspired setting for On Chesil Beach, in which young earlySixties newlyweds Edward and Florence arrive at the shore of marriage, brimming with hopes — but also nagging fears.

‘They were young, educated, and virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy.’ Here, it shipwrecks them.

There are many terrible wedding nights in fiction. ‘More washing for her to do,’ thinks Maria, the protagonist of Elise Valmorbida’s recent The Madonna Of The Mountains, following the awkward consummation of her marriage to Achille, a man she barely knows.

And think of poor Jane Eyre, swapping her wedding dress for her old ‘stuff gown’, following the revelation that her groom has a wife in the attic. Instead of leaving Thornfield Hall as its new honeymooning mistress, she steals away at dawn.

As we enter wedding season, there feels like there’s a lot to be said for the modern practice of couples knowing each other intimately before marriage celebrates that union.