Wren did not want a ceremony for her eighty-first birthday.
She wanted dinner. Everyone she cared about in one room with good food and no agenda, which was, she said, all she had ever really wanted from any occasion and the thing most occasions failed to provide.
We gave her exactly that.
The east wing dining room, which had been transformed by Delia and two packhouse staff members into something warm and entirely without formality, the long table set with actual candles rather than the formal standing lights the room usually used, the food arriving in the generous overlapping way of a meal that was meant to be lingered over rather than concluded efficiently.
Maren was there, coming in from the east wing cottage where she had been writing since before dawn and looking, for the first ti
