On August 10 1934, a searing summer day without a cloud, the bells of St Martin-in-the-Fields Church rang out across Trafalgar Square. Dr H, a man whose full name I didn’t know until a few months ago, walked down the steps of the church with his young bride, the start of a marriage that would have appeared to passers-by as just another wedding, but which, nine decades later, I cannot leave alone.
My fixation started with a pair of gloves. They belonged to my grandmother Elsa and sit now on a shelf in my mother’s sitting room. Hand-sewn of the brightest emerald-green silk, they fit immaculately into a little handbag of the same silk, its clasp intricately beaded. Since they are virtually child-sized and what my daughters call “fancy”, and since these are children whose favourite Disney character is a glove-wearing woman called Elsa, it’s perhaps unsurprising that last Christmas at my mother’s house we discovered that one of the gloves was missing.
My mother, usually unsentimental about belongings, was distraught. So was I. I felt implicated in its loss, almost definitely a result of my daughters’ games. But more than that, the gloves have, in all their vibrant glamour, always seemed to encapsulate the grandmother I never met.