Читать книгу The Wish List - Sophia Money-Coutts - Страница 12

‘TWO, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT, ten …’ I muttered, taking the steps two at a time. Shit. Eleven steps. An odd number meant that dinner was going to be bad.

That absurd evening at Claridge’s was where it started. That was how the list came about. As the quietest member of my loud, combative family, I often dreaded dinner with them. But I suspected this evening would be especially painful, which was why I counted the steps from the Hyde Park underpass into the evening sunlight. It was a game I called Consequences. If there’d been an even number of steps, the dinner would be all right. It would pass without drama and prove my family could behave normally. But no, eleven bastard steps. That dinner was always going to be tricky.

Technically, it was a celebratory evening because Mia had become engaged to Hugo. My half-sister had agreed to marry a man with all the intelligence and sensitivity of a spatula and everyone was meant to be excited. Patricia, my stepmother, had almost spontaneously combusted with joy at the idea of her daughter marrying a man who wore a signet ring, drove a Mercedes, belonged to a Surrey golf club and earned over £200,000 a year working for an insurance firm called Wolf & Partners.

I was less excited. I knew why Mia had said yes. Everyone seemed to say yes these days. They said yes in private, on a beach or up a mountain, then rushed to tell their 652 closest friends on Instagram that they’d said yes, sometimes with the hashtag #ISaidYes to underline the point. A lunatic hashtag since nobody was ever going to put up a photo above the hashtag #ISaidNo, were they?

Mia had posted her picture from the terrace of an expensive Italian restaurant a week ago. The shot was mostly of her left hand in front of her chest so we could all see the diamond as big as an eyeball on her finger. Her nails were fuchsia, her blonde bob was brushed and her face was smooth with make-up designed to look natural but had, in fact, taken Mia over an hour to put on that morning – she’d found the engagement ring a month earlier in Hugo’s boxer shorts’ drawer and realized he was about to propose.

You could just see Hugo behind Mia in this picture, as if he was trying to photobomb his own engagement shot. Underneath, Mia hadn’t just written #ISaidYes, but also #sparkly, #dreamscometrue, #heputaringonit, #shinebrightlikeadiamond, #happytears, #togetherforever and, finally, just #love. I’d spent a good deal of time scowling at this picture, trying to decide which hashtag was the worst. Was referencing both Beyoncé and Rihanna in a social-media post designed to alert the world to your engagement something you had to do now? I was thirty-two, but nonsense like this made me feel 900 years old.

I shook my head again at the thought of those hashtags. My half-sisters and I were different. I’d always known that. Mia and Ruby had confidence, hair that did what it was told and an intricate understanding of which Kardashian sister was which. I had none of those things. Still, we’d grown up together and remained living together in our narrow childhood house in south London. They were closer to one another than they were to me, almost their own separate little gang of two. I minded this some days, when I heard them laughing in one another’s bedroom, or when they draped their legs over one another on our sofa in front of the TV while I always sat in a separate armchair. On better days, I told myself this was just biology. They were full sisters, I couldn’t compete with that. But, while it might not have been fully reciprocated, I loved them as if they were my full sisters and figured it was better to co-exist with their bad habits (wiping mascara on the towels, never putting a mug in the dishwasher, eating my yoghurt) rather than move somewhere else and risk flatmates that were even worse.

I never thought one of them could be so different that she’d decide to marry the most boring man in Britain. And yet here we were, all off to Claridge’s to say ‘Cheers!’ because Mia had declared that was where she wanted the wedding in less than four months’ time. It seemed quick, as if she wanted to lock Hugo down as fast as possible, but Mia said winter weddings were more ‘chic’ than summer weddings. She would have berries in her flower arrangement and mulled wine at the reception. Her head was full of these intricate details. She’d also already decided that Ruby and I would be her bridesmaids so I gloomily anticipated wearing something the colour of sick.

All of us were going to Claridge’s that night, apart from my father, that is, since he was the British ambassador to Argentina and for the past six years had lived in an Edwardian mansion in Buenos Aires. He couldn’t fly home for the dinner, he’d apologetically emailed me to explain, because he had a meeting with one of Argentina’s biggest soybean exporters.

If Dad was back, I’d be rolling along the pavement with a bounce. Although we emailed every couple of weeks (I’d update him on new history books; he’d send me back brief updates, mostly about the weather), I missed his physical presence and wished he was closer, more in my life. However, the soybean magnate took precedence and so, gathered that night would be me, the happy couple, Patricia and Ruby. So long as she showed up. Ruby – blessed with the cheekbones of Kate Moss and breasts of a Barbie doll – was a model. Or trying to be a model. She’d been signed to an agent for a few years but had only been cast in magazine adverts for washing powder and toothpaste. Recently she’d been asked by Senokot, the constipation brand, to star in a series of posters for the Tube but turned them down. ‘You’d never catch Kylie Jenner doing that, Flo,’ she’d declared in the kitchen at home.

Still, she thought of herself as a ‘creative artist’, which meant she seemed to operate on a different timescale to the rest of us, as if time was a bourgeois construct she didn’t need to bother with.

One Christmas, Ruby didn’t come home until long after we’d finished the turkey, by which point Patricia was halfway down a bottle of Bailey’s and demanding that Dad use one of his government contacts to find out where she was. This far-fetched idea was forgotten when Ruby waltzed through the door sometime after five, claiming that her phone battery had died, the buses weren’t working and her credit card had been stopped which, in turn, meant that her Uber account was frozen. ‘Oh my poor darling,’ Patricia had slurred, clasping Ruby to her chest. ‘We must get you another credit card. Henry? HENRY! Can you order Ruby another card?’

I shook my head again. Patricia would almost certainly overdo it that night, ordering bottle after bottle of champagne, and the only topic of conversation would be the wedding. At home in Kennington, there’d been little discussion of anything else since Mia returned from Puglia, flicking her engagement ring about the kitchen like a knuckle-duster. It was ‘the wedding’ this and ‘the wedding’ that, as if there’d never been a wedding in history before, nor would be after it. Should Ruby or I ever choose to get married ourselves, I imagined that Mia’s wedding would still be referred to as ‘the wedding’ in our family. Not that this was likely, I reminded myself.

Because although I was thirty-two and had two arms, two legs and a face with its features in vaguely the right places (I hated my thin upper lip), I’d never had a boyfriend. Never been in love. True, there’d been a five-week fling at Edinburgh when I’d fallen for a second-year history student called Rich. But I’d ruined this by being too keen. I’d assumed after our first night together that he was my boyfriend, not realizing that Rich thought otherwise. He kept sneaking into my halls at 2, 3 and 4 a.m. during those brief first weeks when I’d found myself bewitched by a man for the first time, but there was a Thursday evening not long afterwards when my friend Sarah said she’d seen him snogging another girl in the Three Witches. I plucked up the courage to text him about it and Rich replied ‘What are you, my wife?’ The pain was so intense and sharp I felt like a small child who’d stuck their finger into a flame. That was the end of Rich.

I’d had precisely three very short flings since, one-night stands really, although I didn’t realize they were one-night stands at the time. You don’t, do you? I thought each one might be the start of something. Perhaps this one would finally be my boyfriend? Or the next one? Or the one after that? But they never morphed into boyfriends and I never fell in love because, after sleeping with me, they never texted or called me back. I’d tried to pretend I didn’t care after that.

No point in boyfriends, I told myself, when newspapers and magazines were full of women grumbling about relationships. ‘Dear Suzy, my boyfriend wants me to talk dirty every time we have sex and I’ve run out of vocabulary. What do you advise?’ Or ‘Dear Suzy, my husband always puts the empty milk carton back into the fridge instead of the bin. Should I divorce him?’ If I ever wrote a letter like this, I would ask ‘Dear Suzy, I’m thirty-two and I’ve never been in love but I’m pretty happy with life, although I still live with my sisters and I have a couple of weird habits. Sometimes I think not having a boyfriend by my age makes me strange, but can you ever tell in advance if someone’s going to hurt you?’

I stopped on the pavement and looked up at the façade of Claridge’s for a quick pep talk. Listen up, Florence Fairfax, this is going to be a cheerful evening and you will smile throughout. You will not look as sombre as if you’re at your own funeral because your sister is marrying a man who judges others by their golf handicap. You will sound convincing when everyone clinks glasses. You will not count every mouthful. Get it together.

I glanced at my feet and realized I’d forgotten the heels I’d carried into work that morning in a plastic Boots bag and I’d have to wear my work shoes instead. Black, with velcro straps and a thick rubber sole, they were the sort of shoes you see advertised for elderly men in the back of Sunday supplements. I wore them because I spent all day on my feet working in a Chelsea bookshop. Who cared if I looked like an escapee from a retirement home? I was mostly behind the till or a table piled with hardbacks. Except now I had to attend Mia’s celebratory dinner at Claridge’s looking like someone who’d had a recent bunion operation and been issued a pair of orthopaedic shoes.

Hopefully nobody would notice. I smiled at the doorman standing beside the hotel entrance in his top hat and pushed through the revolving door into the lobby.

‘Florence darling, what on earth have you got on your feet?’ Patricia asked, loudly enough for several other tables to hear. Mia and Hugo were already there.

‘Sorry,’ I muttered, leaning down to kiss my stepmother on the cheek. ‘Left my other shoes in the shop.’

‘Well sit down quickly and nobody will see them,’ Patricia carried on, nodding at an empty chair. ‘I’ve ordered some champagne.’ She was a woman with birdlike features – hooked nose, beady eyes – who minded about the wrong shoes and the right champagne very much. Twenty-five years earlier, she’d joined the civil service as a secretary called Pat and observed that those who progressed quickest seemed to be in a secret club. They wore the same suits and had the same accents. They talked about tennis as if it was a religion, not just a sport. She very much wanted to be part of that club, so she saved up to buy a suit from Caroline Charles, upgraded from ‘Pat’ to ‘Patricia’ and stopped saying toilet. She clocked my father as a target. He was a grieving widower whose wife had recently been killed in a car crash and was talked of as a rising star in the department. Patricia moved in quickly. Marrying someone from this club would guarantee entry into it.

Within a year, Dad had proposed and she was living in our Kennington house. I was three and seemed to have observed these changes in my life in bewildered silence. Mia came along another year on, which meant I was bumped from my first-floor bedroom up a flight into a new room which overlooked the street. Ruby was born the year after that, and I ascended into the attic.

‘Hi, guys,’ I said, standing over Mia and Hugo. Their heads were both bent to the table; Mia was reading a brochure, Hugo was tapping at his phone.

‘Oh, I don’t know. We could have it in the French saloon but it can only seat 120 people. Hi, Flo,’ said Mia, glancing up and waving a hand in the air as if swatting a fly before looking back to her brochure.

I’d never liked ‘Flo’. It made me think of Tampax. I’d been christened Florence after my maternal grandmother, a thin, energetic Frenchwoman who lived in an old farmhouse outside Bordeaux surrounded by village cats and apricot trees. I’d spent long stretches of my summer holidays there when I was younger, bribed to pick up fallen fruit. If I collected several baskets a day, Grandmère poured me a glass of watered-down wine that evening. It had been our secret and I adored her for it, for treating me like a grown-up when nobody else seemed to, when nobody else would talk to me about Mum and I was scared that I’d forget her. If anyone had dared called Grandmère ‘Flo’, she would have sworn at them in French. She’d died when I was fifteen and I’d clung to my proper name ever since, as if it still linked me to those summers, although I’d long since given up correcting my sisters.

‘Hugo, say hello to Flo,’ added Mia.

‘Hullo, Flo,’ said Hugo, raising his head from his phone and smiling weakly before lowering his gaze to his screen again. Honestly, I’d met more interesting skirting boards. If he was physically attractive I might have understood, but he looked like a pencil in a suit: tall and gangly, with an overly gelled hairline that had started receding, carving out the shape of a large ‘M’ on his forehead.

I looked from Hugo’s head to the table before sitting down. Five place settings, two candlesticks and one fishbowl of white roses equalled eight, which was fine because that was an even number.

‘Where’s Ruby?’ I asked as a waiter appeared with a bottle of champagne and held it in front of Patricia.

Patricia nodded at him. ‘Very good. On her way from a casting, didn’t you say, Mia?’

‘She said she might be late but we should go ahead.’ Mia held up her champagne flute and watched as the waiter poured, then held it up for a toast.

‘Everyone ready?’ she said. ‘Here’s to me. And Hugo,’ she added quickly. ‘Here’s to us, and to the best wedding ever.’ She squealed and scrunched her face as if on the verge of ecstasy at the thought of herself in a white dress.

‘Darling, I couldn’t be prouder,’ said Patricia.

‘So exciting!’ I lied as we clinked glasses.

Hugo winced and patted his chest – he had weirdly thin fingers too – as he put his glass down on the table. ‘Mia, have you brought any Rennie with you? You know champagne always gives me heartburn.’

Ruby arrived an hour later when we were halfway through the main courses. ‘Sorry, they kept us all waiting,’ she said, interrupting a debate which had been running for fifteen minutes about whether Mia and Hugo should have a wedding cake made of cheese or a Sicilian lemon sponge by the East End baker who’d designed Prince Harry and Meghan’s cake.

‘Hi, guys, hi, Flo, hi, Mum,’ she added, dutifully circling the table and kissing each of us on the head before throwing herself in the seat next to me. ‘I could murder a drink.’

‘We were just discussing my cake,’ said Mia, a forkful of fish paused in the air.

‘Our cake,’ corrected Hugo.

‘Catch me up, what have I missed?’

‘What was your casting for?’ asked Patricia, who dreamed of Ruby modelling on the cover of Vogue so she could boast to her friends at bridge club.

‘A new campaign for cold sore cream.’ Ruby glanced up at a hovering waiter. ‘Could I have a vodka and tonic please? Slimline tonic.’ She turned back to the table. ‘And it was crap. I’m not doing it even if they ask me.’

Ruby never seemed to mind missing out on jobs. Castings came and went every week and she shrugged them off, convinced that her big cover moment would come along one day. It helped that she was twenty-six and still had a credit card bankrolled by our father.

‘Oh well,’ said Patricia. ‘What do you want to eat?’

‘Er…’ Ruby looked at our plates. Hugo was chewing a rib-eye; after a debate of several minutes over whether the fish was cooked in butter or oil, Patricia and Mia had opted for the sea bass with the thyme cream on the side; I was having chicken but had swapped the truffled mash for chips because I thought truffle smelled like the crotch of my gym leggings and why anyone would want to eat that was beyond me. Plus, I could count the chips as I ate them. I couldn’t handle very small food like peas or grains of rice because they were too fiddly to count. Chips were fine.

‘Whatever Florence is having please,’ said Ruby. ‘I’m desperate for a fag but…’ She gazed around the room, as if anyone else would be smoking.

‘Can we get back to the wedding?’ demanded Mia.

Ruby sat back in her chair. ‘Yes, sorry. What’s the plan?’

‘We’re having it here but I’m worried about numbers. Are you bringing anyone?’ Mia narrowed her eyes. ‘Do you want to bring Jasper?’

Jasper Montgomery was Ruby’s latest boyfriend, a rakish playboy and the son of a duke who was to inherit a castle in Yorkshire and thousands of acres. Patricia was thrilled; Mia had become less pleased about our sister’s posh new relationship as the weeks wore on because Jasper kept turning up at home unannounced, late and pissed, leaning on the doorbell until someone answered it, usually Mia, whereupon Jasper would tumble into our hallway.

‘How on earth do I know?’ Ruby replied. ‘The wedding’s not until Christmas. That’s…’ she counted by tapping her fingers on the table, ‘four months from now. I can’t predict where we’ll be then.’ She was as relaxed about relationships as she was about timing. And this nonchalance, combined with her freckles and long, chestnut-coloured curls (she’d once been told she resembled a ‘young Julia Roberts’ in her headshots), meant that men fell about her like skittles.

‘Flo, what about you?’ said Mia.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Are you bringing anyone?’

‘To your wedding?’

‘Yes, obviously to my wedding. What else would we be talking about?’

‘Our wedding,’ said Hugo.

The question made me defensive. ‘Well I mean, no… I didn’t… I don’t… I can’t imagine who that would be, so…’

‘Florence, sweetheart, I’ve been thinking about this,’ interrupted Patricia, and my jaw froze, mid-chew. Patricia’s tone had become wheedling, the widow spider seducing her prey before the kill. ‘I think it’s high time you considered your love life. You’re thirty-two, darling. You really should have had a boyfriend by now. What will people think otherwise? Time waits for no man. Or woman, in this case.’

I swallowed. ‘Perhaps they’ll think I’m a lesbian, Patricia.’

‘Gracious me. Are you a les…? Are you one of those?’

I picked up a chip and dunked it in the silver pot of ketchup beside my plate. ‘No, sadly.’

Even though I’d spent years pretending I didn’t care that I’d never had a boyfriend, years telling myself it wasn’t very feminist to worry about such things, privately I did mind. Was it my flat chest? My size eight feet? My pale colouring, or the mole on my forehead that I tried to hide with my hair? Could men tell that I was so inexperienced? Did I emit an off-putting, sexless smell?

Deep down, of course I wanted to fall in love. Doesn’t everyone? I’d spent my teenage years ripping through romantic novels and dreamed of being as alluring as Scarlett O’Hara, with the sassy intelligence of Jo March and the porcelain delicacy of Daisy Buchanan. In reality, I was starting to feel more like Miss Havisham. But although I allowed myself to brood about this on dark Sunday nights, I never admitted as much out loud and I didn’t want to discuss it with my family. Especially when my sisters’ allure was so much greater than my own.

We’d lived as a trio for years. Dad was posted to Pakistan when I was eighteen. Five years later, the Foreign Office moved him to Argentina. That was when Patricia moved into a flat in South Kensington. She’d never liked our house in Kennington because she didn’t think the postcode was fashionable enough, so she persuaded Dad to take out another mortgage and buy her one somewhere else. Patricia insisted it was to allow Ruby, Mia and me to remain living at home but the truth was Patricia felt she deserved to live in a posh flat with thick carpets, expensive floral wallpaper and an SW7 postcode. She was the wife of an ambassador, after all, even if she spent most of her time in London. She visited Buenos Aires every couple of months and Dad flew back for the odd meeting, but they spent such long stretches of time apart I used to wonder how their relationship was a success. Over the years, I’d realized it thrived precisely because of the long periods away. If they lived together full-time, one of them would have murdered the other. Patricia was the highly strung neurotic who made everyone take their shoes off when visiting her flat; Dad was the stable rudder. She wanted a husband who could afford her weekly haircuts and dinners in expensive restaurants; he needed a woman willing to be the diplomatic wife when she did visit. Patricia never minded cutting the ribbon at the opening of a new textile factory or chatting up the wife of the soybean magnate. The South Kensington flat was stuffed with official photographs taken at these events.

Anyway, ever since Patricia moved out, boyfriends had arrived at our house more often than the postman. They were mostly Ruby’s but, before Hugo, Mia’s hit rate had also been high and I’d often come downstairs in the morning to find men called Rupert or Jeremy hunting for tea bags in the kitchen. The only man who made it into my room was ginger, had four legs and was called Marmalade – my 17-year-old cat.

‘But we do worry about you,’ breezed on Patricia, ‘so what I’ve decided is that you should go and see this woman I read about in the hairdresser in Posh! magazine – she’s got a funny name. Gwendolyn something. A love coach. Or guru. Can’t remember which. But apparently she’s brilliant.’

I squinted across the table. ‘A love coach? What do you mean?’

‘There’s no need to be embarrassed, darling. Think of her like a therapist but for relationships. You go along, talk to her about your situation and what you’re looking for, and she helps you work out all your funny little issues.’

‘What. Do. You. Mean?’ I repeated slowly, enunciating each word.

‘I just think it must be a bit lonely at your age, still being on your own when your sisters are getting married. Sort of… unnatural.’

‘Mum, hang on,’ interjected Ruby. ‘I’m not getting marr—’

Patricia held a hand up in the air, signalling that she wasn’t finished. ‘Don’t you want to meet someone, darling?’ she said, leaning towards me. ‘Don’t you want to find a lovely chap like Hugo and settle down?’

I looked at Hugo, who was repeatedly running his index finger across his plate to mop up his steak juice, then sticking it in his mouth.

‘Patricia,’ I started, ‘it’s the twenty-first century. Single women aren’t illegal. We can drive cars, we can vote. We can own property. We can play in premiership football teams and…’ I paused, trying to think of more, ‘we can do whatever we like with our own body hair. We can dress how we like. And we can have sex with ourselves, if we like, no man necessary—’

‘Goodness, Florence, let’s not descend to vulgarities,’ replied Patricia, puckering her lips as if she’d just sucked a battery.

But I was building to a crescendo and enjoying myself: ‘—basically, we can do whatever the hell we like and we certainly don’t have to have a boyfriend just because other people say so.’

I leant back in my chair and glared defiantly at her, but Patricia was like a whack-a-mole you couldn’t kill.

‘Darling,’ she replied, cocking her head to one side. ‘Always so resistant. What if this lady can help you?’

‘I don’t need help!’ I replied, although I sounded squeakier than intended, so I swallowed and started again. ‘What I mean is that I’m happy as things are and I don’t need to see a mad old bat with a pack of tarot cards.’

‘It all sounds very above board. She has an office on Harley Street.’

‘Oh, Harley Street! That settles it. She’s got to be legit if she’s on Harley Street.’

‘Florence, come on, you’re being very silly about this. All I was offering was a session with someone who might be able to help you think about things in a different way.’ Patricia paused and reached for her wine glass. ‘Your father thinks it’s a good idea. He does so worry about you.’

I wasn’t sure what was more humiliating: being told to go and see a love coach or the thought of Dad discussing my relationship status with Patricia.

I dropped my head and muttered into my chest.

‘What’s that?’ asked Patricia.

‘Nothing,’ I replied, snapping my head up. ‘Fine, if you and Dad think it’s a good idea then I will go along for a session. One session, so long as we never have to talk about my relationship status in this family ever again. Deal?’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said my stepmother, one of her claws reaching across the table to pat my hand. ‘I’ll fix up an appointment. My treat. It’ll make your father so happy.’

‘I think it’s a good idea,’ added Mia. ‘Come on, Flo, surely you don’t want to be on your own for ever?’

‘She might be helpful,’ echoed Ruby, looking at me sympathetically. It was the way you’d look at someone who’d just been told they had a terminal disease and three days to live.

Hugo was still mopping steak juice with his finger.

God, my family.

‘Fine,’ I repeated, picking up another chip and jabbing it in the air at them like a knife. ‘But if I go, you all have to remember what I said tonight – we’re never ever discussing my love life as a group activity again.’

‘All right, all right, Germaine Greer,’ said Mia, ‘keep your hair on. Now, can we chat dates for wedding dress shopping? Since you two are bridesmaids, I want you in the same thing. I was thinking coral?’

So I was right about the bridesmaid dress being sick-coloured.

It was bright the next morning, the sun already warming the attic, so I got out of bed and stood in front of my full-length mirror, naked apart from my pants, to gauge how fat I was feeling. I knew I wasn’t really fat. Not fat fat. But I examined my stomach in the mirror every morning anyway. Bloated? Not bloated? I poked my belly with a finger and slumped so it bulged out beneath my tummy button, then straightened again. I cast my eyes down over my thighs (I wished they were smaller), upwards towards my chest (I wished it was bigger) and then ran a hand through my hair which hung in no discernible style to just below my shoulders. I had to straighten it every time I washed it, otherwise it frizzed out, making me look like a spaniel.

I showered and returned to my bedroom. From the hanging cupboard, I retrieved one of four pairs of identical navy trousers from Uniqlo. From my tops drawer, I took out and unfolded a navy T-shirt. I laid them on my bed and returned to my chest of drawers for a pair of ironed and folded black knickers, peeled from a neat row, plus a bra. I dressed, tied my hair up in its usual ponytail and made my bed.

‘Let’s go, pal,’ I said to Marmalade, scooping him up and counting the stairs in my head as we went down – two, four, six, eight, ten, two, four, six, eight, nine, ten, two, four, six, eight, ten.

I put two slices of bread in the toaster for breakfast: toast with honey, one cup of coffee. After that, I’d make lunch. This, too, was always the same: a cheese and tomato sandwich with butter and pickle, which had always gone pleasantly soggy by 1 p.m., and a piece of flapjack from a batch I made every Sunday afternoon.

I was bad with change. Didn’t like it. So I wore the same outfit and ate the same lunch every day because it made me feel safe. It was a form of control; if my daily life remained unvarying, constant, then nothing calamitous could go wrong. I liked uniform days which ended with me lying on the sofa, reading, while a cookery show played on TV. Ideally one with Mary Berry in it. I liked Mary because she was neat and orderly.

Occasionally I worried such a quiet, unambitious life meant I’d be alone for ever, never brave enough to fall in love or go abroad. The furthest I’d ever travelled was to my grandmother’s in France, which was ironic considering my parents were keen explorers who met in India. Mum had been an idealistic 23-year-old who taught English at a school in a Mumbai suburb, and lived in a small apartment nearby where she was woken in the morning by monkeys shrieking on her balcony. I’d always held on to the idea of those noisy monkeys, one of the only stories I could remember her telling me.

Dad was living in the city at the same time, a student writing his dissertation on dynastic Indian politics. This topic had apparently acted as an aphrodisiac on Mum, who’d met him one evening when he was invited over to dinner by her flatmate. That was that. They became inseparable, until the car crash in London eight years later. The crash that rocketed into our lives like a comet and changed everything. That was when I realized change was bad. So, the same clothes; the same lunch; every Monday, by and large, the same as the previous Monday, and the Monday before that. If life stayed the same, life was safe.

That morning, I ate my toast while listening to the radio – a Cabinet minister had been forced to apologize for making a joke about vegans – and ushered Marmalade into the garden.

Mia left for work first. She worked for a fashion PR company, quite senior now, and was responsible for telling women that they should wear crochet and tartan this season and that animal print was out. She’d given up on me because I refused to wear anything other than my self-imposed navy uniform to the shop. Ruby would generally lie in bed until midday, depending on whether she had a casting, then leave a trail of mugs and milky cereal bowls around the house which I put in the dishwasher every evening since, by then, she was always out.

I slid lunch into my rucksack, a waterproof navy job bought several years ago from Millets for its many compartments. It fitted my purse, my lip balm, my house keys, a spare hair tie, a packet of paracetamol, my phone, my sandwich, my flapjack and whatever book I was reading. I didn’t understand women who left the house with a handbag the size of a matchbox. How could they go about their day looking so self-assured when all they had on them was a debit card and a lipstick? What if they got a headache?

I reached under the hall table for my hideous work shoes, fastened them and set off on foot for the shop. A distance of exactly 2.6 miles, much of it along the Thames.

I walked to most places playing Consequences, another form of control. It had started when I was four, the year after Mum died. That was when I started totting up the number of classmates every morning to make sure they were all there. Only when I reached fourteen could I relax. Everyone present. Some days, it was only thirteen, which would make me anxious until Mrs Garber said it was all right, the absentee’s mother had called to say they had a stomach bug and they’d be back in tomorrow.

After my classmates, I counted the chairs in our classroom to make sure there were enough. Then the pencils in my pencil case to check I hadn’t lost any; the paintings on the walls; the carrot batons on my plate at lunchtime; the books in my rucksack on the way home again. I counted the stairs when I got back and tried not to let the flight between the bathroom and Mia’s room bother me – Mia was just a baby then – because it was an odd number. Only nine stairs on that flight and I preferred even numbers. They felt more secure, more stable. No number was left out because they all had partners. To my 4-year-old brain, not being left out was important.

My obsessive counting slackened its grip as I grew older but it still remained a habit. Dad and Patricia had despatched me to various specialists over the years, but a succession of armchair experts, asking how angry I felt on a scale of 1 to 10, had done little to cure me. I knew the number of keys on the grubby work keyboard (104) and the number of biscuits in the various packets we ate at work for tea (Jaffa Cakes: 10; chocolate Hobnobs: 14; orange Clubs: 8). I knew the number of steps downstairs to the shop basement (13), the number upstairs to the travel section (12) and the number of caffeine-stained mugs that hung from the wooden tree in the office kitchen (7).

Time had been the only real help. That, and the fact that I’d become better at hiding my habit. I wore an old-school watch with little hands so I never had to see an unsettling digital time like 11:11. If I was watching television at home, the volume had to be set at an even number by the remote control. Every other week, I went to an anxiety support group called NOMAD (No More Anxiety Disorders. Blame the founder, Stephen, for its unfortunate name, although luckily most members saw the funny side). But these days, the meetings were more to catch up with my friend Jaz than to actively participate.

This morning, I played Consequences by counting the number of cars I passed. Often, while doing this, a little voice whispered that if a blue car followed a bus then it would be a bad day, but if it was a white car, something good would happen. Logically, I knew this was rubbish and that I was making up rules for myself. But I couldn’t help it. If a blue car, or a green car, or a yellow car, or whatever colour car my brain decided was bad that day did follow the bus, I’d feel panicked, alarmed at what might happen. It was relentless, my brain’s constant paranoia, but counting gave me a sense of order. I felt guilty if I didn’t count things in the same way that others did if they didn’t go to the gym.

At first glance, Frisbee Books wouldn’t strike anyone as a suitable office for a maniac obsessed with neatness and numbers. Tucked away off a busy Chelsea shopping street, it looked like it belonged on the set of a Dickens film. Its wooden front was painted dark green, with ‘Frisbee Books Ltd’ in white lettering. Underneath that was a big window with two rows of books on display, lined up for passing shoppers.

Stepping inside was like falling into the library of an extremely untidy recluse. The walls were covered in shelves that supported thousands of books pressing up against one another. Just over 43,000 books. The shop floor was strewn with tables of different sizes loaded with books in bar-graph piles. Military hardbacks on one table (we sold a lot of those in Chelsea); memoirs stacked high on another; cookery books on a table beside that. Fiction and non-fiction was separated in two halves of the shop – non-fiction as you walked in through the door, fiction off to the right.

Norris, my boss, had inherited the shop from his uncle. It had opened in 1967 when London was swinging, but Uncle Dale thought his bookshop should stand as a cultural sandbag against the likes of Jimi Hendrix and the miniskirt. Norris took over the shop in the early Nineties when Uncle Dale had a hip replacement and could no longer stand all day. Two years on, he died in his sleep leaving Norris the bookshop in his will.

Frisbee Books hadn’t changed much since. There was a 12-year-old computer in the basement that Norris used for accounting and ordering. Otherwise the shop ran as it always had done. Loyal customers dropped in to order a new biography of Churchill that they’d read about in The Spectator. Middle-aged women browsed for birthday presents. American tourists stood outside in shorts and wraparound sunglasses, taking pictures of the ‘cute bookstore’ they’d found for friends back in Arkansas.

I’d asked nine independent bookshops across London for a job when I graduated from uni. In my letter, I explained that I fell in love with A Little Princess when I was eight, had barely looked up from a book since, and all I wanted to do now was help other people find stories they could lose themselves in. In my last week at Edinburgh, fellow English Literature graduates boasted of internships at publishing houses or acceptance into law school, but I suspected that working in a corporate office would mean making presentations in boardrooms and bitching about your colleagues. Not for me.

I got four replies to my letter; five were ignored. Two replies asked me to get in touch via the official application form on their website, and one said they only accepted employees with retail experience. Norris was my life raft, sending me a postcard suggesting I come along to the shop for a cup of tea.

He was a human bear with tufts of grey hair protruding from both his head and his ears, as if he’d recently stuck his fingers into a plug socket. He didn’t ask anything about my retail experience. While giving me a tour of the shop, he simply wanted to know what I was reading (I’d pulled an old Agatha Christie from my bag) and demanded to know whether I owned a Kindle. Norris growled the word ‘Kindle’ with suspicion and I’d admitted that I used to have one until I dropped it in the bath.

I instantly regretted the bath comment because Norris paused by the ‘F’ shelf and his eyebrows leapt several inches in surprise. But then he moved on to the authors beginning with ‘G’ and asked whether I was a morning person because he wasn’t much good before he’d finished his thermos of coffee and would I be all right to open the shop. Our chat took fifteen minutes, after which Norris said he’d see me the following Monday.

I’d arrived nervously that first morning, stammering when customers asked where they might find the latest Ian McEwan or if we had an obscure political book by a Scandinavian writer in stock. The first time I ran a transaction through the till I was so afraid of fluffing it that I spoke robotically, like a Dalek: ‘That. Will. Be. £12.99. Please,’ and had to be prompted for one of our paper bags. But I soon settled into the routine.

Today, it was my turn to unlock, so I arrived just after nine, turned on the computer behind the till and ran a Stanley knife across the boxes from the distributors. New stock to be put out. Although it might not have looked like it, there was an order to the shop that I understood. If a customer came in and asked for a Virginia Woolf or a travel guide to the Galapagos, I could point them to exactly the right spot. I knew the shop as well as I knew my home. Or better, perhaps, since I rarely went into Ruby and Mia’s bedrooms (too messy, used cotton pads everywhere).

I knew the customers who came in every day to browse but actually lived on their own and just wanted some company. I recognized the punters who were time-wasters, loitering between appointments, who would finger multiple books before sliding them back into the wrong shelf. And in quiet moments, it also allowed me time to work on my own book, a children’s book about a counting-obsessed caterpillar called Curtis who had fifty feet and was late for school every day because it took so long to put on all his shoes. I’d also come to see Norris as a sort of mad uncle and could tolerate his daily habits – sitting on the downstairs loo for twenty minutes after his coffee, ignoring the phone so I always had to pick it up, leaving indecipherable Post-it notes on the counter about customer orders that were often lost.

Then there was my colleague Eugene. He was a middle-aged actor who’d worked at the shop for the past decade to pay his rent since he was rarely cast in anything. He had a bald head that shone like a bed knob, wore a bow tie every day and made me rehearse lines with him behind the counter, which often startled customers. Recently, there’d been a dramatic death scene when Eugene, rehearsing for a minor role in King Lear, had ended up lying across the shop floor.

Either he or I opened up before Norris arrived late every morning, his shirt fastened by the wrong buttons, thermos in hand; this was special coffee he ground at home and made in a cafetière before decanting it and solemnly carrying it into work in his satchel. I’d made the mistake of asking what was so wrong with Nescafé not long after I started work there and the cloud that passed his face was so dark I’d wondered if I’d be fired.

Anyway, he’d arrive and there was always grumbling about the traffic or the weather before he went downstairs into his office to drink this coffee from his favourite mug – ‘To drink or not to drink?’ it said on the outside. Half an hour later, he would reappear on the shop floor in cheerier humour and ask whether any customers had been in yet.

But that morning, I was still standing behind boxes of new stock when Norris arrived early and rapped on the glass.

‘You all right?’ I asked, unlocking the door to let him in. He looked more dishevelled than usual, shirt and trousers both crumpled, and he was panting, as if 73-year-old Norris had decided to run into work that morning from his house in Wimbledon.

‘Let me go downstairs for my mug and I’ll be up to explain.’ He strode towards the stairs and disappeared. I returned to the boxes and wondered if he’d tried to get on the Tube using his Tesco Clubcard again.

He thumped back up the wooden stairs not long afterwards and put his coffee on the counter with a sigh.

‘What?’ I asked, frowning. ‘What’s up?’

‘Rent hike.’

‘Another one?’

Norris nodded and wiped his fingers across his forehead. There’d been a rent rise last year but we’d expected that. Uncle Dale had had a long lease on generous terms and it had been up for renewal. Also, Chelsea had changed since he died. What was always a wealthy area of the city had become even more saturated with money: oligarchs from the East, American banking dollars from the West, along with the odd African despot who wanted his children to go to British boarding school. This meant the shops changed. Gone were the boutiques and coffee shops. In came curious replacements selling £150 gym leggings and cellulite cures made from gold leaf – shops for oligarchs’ wives. But although Norris had grumbled about the new lease for several weeks, he’d said it was fine and I’d believed him. It remained business as usual.

But this was different. Norris was panicked.

‘Is it manageable?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a lot,’ he replied, his voice uneven. ‘I’m going to ring the accountant later to discuss it but I wanted to let you know now. Just in case… Well, we’ll see. I’ll let you know.’ Then, as if he couldn’t bear to discuss it any longer, he changed topic. ‘Any post this morning?’

‘Not really. A few orders overnight but I’ll deal with those.’

‘All right, I’m going back downstairs. Shout if you need me.’

‘OK,’ I said, before looking around the shop, trying to imagine it as luxury flats with underfloor heating, marble floors and those hi-tech loos with nozzles that wash and dry your bottom. It was an absurd idea. It couldn’t happen. Not on my watch.

When I got home that night, I found Hugo and Mia bickering at the kitchen table. He’d moved in about six months before, a temporary measure while they did up a house in Herne Hill (‘the new Brixton’, Hugo pompously told anyone who asked).

I had mixed feelings about their house being finished. On the one hand, this meant Mia would move out and, for the first time in a decade, she, Ruby and I would be separated. And although my sisters were closer to one another than they were to me, Mia’s departure would mean change and I’d miss her. On the other hand, it would also mean that Hugo stopped creeping upstairs to my bathroom to do a poo when I wasn’t there. He denied this but I knew he was lying; he left traces on the porcelain and I’d once found a copy of Golfing Monthly lying on the floor.

That evening, they were squabbling over their wedding list and Hugo, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, was stabbing at the list with one of his weird fingers.

‘Hi, guys,’ I said, making my way to the fridge.

‘I’m sorry you don’t like him,’ went on Hugo, in a high-pitched voice, ‘but he’s my boss and it’s imperative that he’s invited. I’m sure he didn’t mean to graze your bottom. It was probably an accident.’

Mia sighed and leant back from the table. ‘Well he did and we’ve already got half your office. Anyone else you need? The receptionist? The window cleaner? Someone from your IT department?’

‘Actually, Kevin has always been very helpful with my computer.’

I opened the fridge and stared into it as I wondered, for the ninety billionth time, why Mia had said yes to him. Was a house in Herne Hill with an island in the kitchen, underfloor heating in the bathrooms and Farrow & Ball-coloured walls worth it?

She sighed again behind me. ‘Fine. Your boss can come. But that means we still need to lose…’ she went quiet for a few seconds, tapping her pen down the list, ‘about twenty people.’

I closed the fridge. It would have to be eggs on toast. I didn’t have the energy for anything complicated. After Norris’s announcement that morning, he’d stayed downstairs for most of the afternoon, leaving Eugene and me on the shop floor.

I’d leant on the counter, writing a list of ways I could try and help. A petition was my first thought. People always seemed to be launching petitions online. Sign this petition if you think our prime minister should be in prison! Sign this petition to make sugar illegal! Sign this petition to make the earthworm a protected species! I could set up a Facebook page for the shop and launch the petition on there, with a hard copy of it by the till for our less computer-friendly customers. I liked the idea of a cause, imagining myself as a modern-day Emmeline Pankhurst. Perhaps I could wear a sash? Or that might be taking it too far. But a petition, anyway. That was the first thing to organize.

The shop needed an Instagram account, too. Norris still refused to have a mobile phone and insisted that Frisbee could do without social media. I’d long protested, saying that it wasn’t the 1990s, but it had fallen on Norris’s deaf, hairy ears. So, a petition and an Instagram account. Plus, a new website. That was a start.

‘How was your day, Flo?’ asked Mia.

‘Fine. I’m making scrambled eggs. Anyone want some?’

‘No thanks. Wed-shred starts now.’

‘Eggs do terrible things to my stomach,’ added Hugo, but luckily none of us could dwell on this because Mia’s phone rang.

‘Hi, Mum,’ she said, picking it up.

I cracked two eggs into a mug and reached for a fork.

‘Yep, yep, no, I know, yep, we’re doing it now, yep, no, yep…’ she went on while I whisked.

‘Yep, she’s here, hang on,’ said Mia, holding her phone in the air without standing up so I had to cross the kitchen.

I put the mobile to my ear with a sense of dread. ‘Hi, Patricia.’

My stepmother went straight in. ‘I’ve spoken to this woman’s office and she can see you on Tuesday afternoon at five.’

‘Which woman?’

‘The love coach. She’s called Gwendolyn Glossop. Does five on Tuesday work for you?’

‘The shop doesn’t close until six, so—’

‘Florence, darling, you’re selling books, not giving blood transfusions. I’m sure they can spare you for an hour. I’ve told your father and—’

‘All right all right all right. I’ll be there.’

‘Right, have you got a pen? Here’s her address, it’s—’

‘Hang on,’ I said, hunting for a pen on the sideboard. No pens. Why were there never any pens?

‘Floor 4, 117 Harley Street,’ carried on Patricia.

‘OK, I’ll just remember it.’

‘I’m so glad, darling, I do hope she helps. Now can I have Mia back again, I need to talk to her about vicars.’

I handed Mia her phone just as the toast popped up. Black on both sides, a bit like my mood, I thought, sliding them both into the bin.

While Eugene dusted shelves the following morning, I told him about this appointment. He was more enthusiastic than me.

‘Darling, how thrilling,’ he said, his back to me as he swished the pink feathers back and forth like a windscreen wiper. ‘Do you think she’ll have a crystal ball? I saw a palm reader after Angus left and she told me that I’d soon meet the third great love of my life.’

‘And did you?’

‘No.’ He lowered the duster and held his palm close to his nose, inspecting it. ‘It’s this line that runs from your little finger.’ He looked up. ‘But perhaps I just haven’t met him yet? I expect he’ll be along any second, waiting for me on the 345 bus.’

I wasn’t sure about that. I’d never seen anyone who looked like a great love on the 345, so I merely nodded and Eugene returned to his dusting.

Angus was Eugene’s ex-boyfriend, the second great love of his life after Shakespeare, he always said. They’d met while studying drama at university and had been together for twenty years, but not long after I started working at Frisbee, Angus moved to New York to direct a performance of Evita and they’d separated. He’d remained there since and was now considered one of Broadway’s top musical directors while, back in London, Eugene constantly auditioned for roles he never got.

Barely a day went by when he didn’t mention Angus, as if a proud parent watching his offspring blossom from afar. He kept up with his shows, read his New York Times reviews out loud to me in the shop and occasionally emailed him to say congratulations. I was never sure if Angus replied to these, I didn’t like to ask. Still, Eugene was one of life’s sunbeams, a positive person who remained admirably upbeat in the face of these disappointments, so his enthusiasm towards Gwendolyn Glossop didn’t surprise me.

‘So you think I should definitely go and see this woman? It isn’t a bit… tragic? Or mad?’

Eugene tutted. ‘Absolutely not. What have you got to lose?’ He turned back to me and held the duster high in the air. ‘Boldness be my friend.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Cymbeline, act one. And I think you should look upon this as an exciting opportunity.’ He spun to face me again. ‘Because without meaning one jot of offence, angel, I think my mother gets more action than you.’

‘Doesn’t your mother live in a retirement home?’

‘In Bournemouth, exactly my point.’

I was about to object but heard Norris’s heavy footsteps on the stairs.

He glanced from Eugene to me, tufty eyebrows raised. ‘You two all right up here?’

‘We are indeed,’ said Eugene. ‘I’m just advising our young colleague on matters of the heart.’

Norris had been married decades ago to a lady called Shirley but now lived alone. On quiet days in the shop, Eugene and I sometimes speculated about his private life. Had Shirley run off with the postman, driven away by Norris’s gruffness? Had waking up beside that amount of ear hair become too much to bear? Had Shirley given up life in an untidy Wimbledon flat for a dashing younger man on the Costa Del Sol? Eugene’s dramatic nature meant he tended to get quite carried away with these speculations but we remained none the wiser. Norris wasn’t the sort to discuss anything emotional.

‘I don’t want to know,’ he said, waving his hands in the air as if protesting. ‘I just came up for the post.’

I handed it over to him and mouthed ‘Shhhh!’ at Eugene. The fewer people who knew about my appointment with Gwendolyn, the better.

The following Tuesday, I arrived at 117 Harley Street and was told by a receptionist to take the lift to the fourth floor.

‘Are there any stairs?’ I hated the jerkiness of lifts in old London buildings like this, clanking and creaking like a dodgy fairground ride.

‘Take the fire exit next to the lift,’ instructed the receptionist, not looking up from her magazine.

I played Consequences as I walked up. If the steps were even, it would be a helpful hour, which made me feel less freakish for never having had a boyfriend. But what would it be if the stairs were odd? What was the worst outcome of this session? If they were odd numbers, I’d never have a relationship and I’d become one of those little old ladies you see shopping by themselves in the supermarket, hunched over a wheelie trolley and buying tins of fish paste for their solo suppers.

The first flight had thirteen stairs and I felt a spasm of panic. The next two had eleven and the last nine. Disaster.

I walked along a corridor which smelt of instant coffee and stopped at the door with a small sign that said ‘Gwendolyn Glossop, MS, Love Coach and Energy Healer.’

I knocked.

‘Come i-hin!’ came a high-pitched voice.

I pushed it open to find a salmon-pink room. Salmon-pink walls, salmon-pink curtains, salmon-pink sofa and armchair. On the sofa were four cushions – two shaped like red hearts and one which had the letters ‘LO’ on it beside another that said ‘VE’. Grim.

Decorating a wooden dresser behind this sofa were several statues of naked women. My eyes slid along them. Nineteen in total, with rounded bottoms and pert breasts. Wooden statues, bronze statues, statues carved from stone, even a purple wax statue, although that one had started melting and was headless. On the opposite wall was a mural of clouds and classical figures in togas. It was as if I’d stumbled through the back of a wardrobe, from the clinical starkness of Harley Street into a deranged computer game.

‘Welcome, Florence,’ said Gwendolyn, pushing herself up from the armchair. She was a large woman wearing purple dungarees that fastened with buttons shaped like daisies. Silver earrings dangled from her ears and she had the sort of cropped haircut you get when you join the army. The tips of her eyelashes were coated with blue mascara and the look was completed with a pair of green Crocs.

She pointed at a woman in the mural, a brunette whose toga had slipped off one bosom but not the other. ‘That’s Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual pleasure. Are you familiar with her?’

‘No, I don’t know her, er, work.’

‘Ah, never mind.’ We shook hands, a row of bangles dancing up and down Gwendolyn’s forearm, and she gestured at the sofa. ‘Please have a seat.’

She reached for a pad of paper and a pen from a coffee table while I leant back against the cushions and tried to relax. All the pink made me feel like I was sitting in someone’s intestines.

‘And how are we today?’ Gwendolyn asked, glancing up from her pad with a smile.

‘All right.’

‘Not nervous?’

‘No,’ I fibbed. This was mad. This room was mad. This woman was mad. Patricia was mad. I pretended to scratch my wrist so I could push up the cuff of my jumper and look at my watch: fifty-eight minutes to go.

‘I’m going to ask a few preliminary questions before we get stuck into the real work,’ said Gwendolyn, raising her chin and cackling before dropping it and becoming serious again. ‘Can you tell me why you’re here?’

‘Because I have a socially ambitious stepmother who thought it would be helpful, so I said I’d try this out so long as she never interrogated me about my love life again,’ I replied. I might as well be honest.

Gwendolyn cackled again and scribbled a note. ‘And can you tell me about your relationship history?’

‘Not much to tell. There was someone briefly at university ten years ago. Very briefly. But that’s pretty much it.’

‘Nobody else?’ said Gwendolyn, her forehead rippling with concern.

I picked at a scrap of cuticle on my thumb then met her gaze. ‘A few one-night things. But nothing more than that. I’d like to fall in love,’ I said, trying to sound casual, as if I’d just said I’d like a cup of tea. ‘Course I would. But the right person hasn’t come along.’

‘Mmm,’ murmured Gwendolyn, looking from me to her pad. She shifted in her armchair and crossed her right ankle over her left knee so a Croc dangled from her foot. She looked up and squinted, as if she was trying to see inside me, then back at the list. ‘Mmm, yes, what I think we need to do is clear your love blocks out. I can sense them. Your subconscious is very powerful. You’re stuck. Hurting. Lonely. Do you want to stay lonely, Florence?’

But before I had a chance to reply and say I wasn’t lonely and, actually, I quite liked going to bed at whatever time I wanted, Gwendolyn ordered me to lie back on the sofa and close my eyes.

‘Across the whole thing?’

‘Yes, yes, stick your legs over the end. That’s it. Put a cushion under your head. There we go.’

Resting my head on a heart-shaped cushion, I noticed a cherub painted on the ceiling. I closed my eyes to banish it, wondering how many minutes were left now.

‘I’ll light a candle to dispel the forces of darkness and then we’ll get going,’ she said. ‘Eyes closed.’

I shut them as she started asking questions in a velvety voice. ‘What grievances are you hanging on to, Florence? What can you let go?’

I thought about replying ‘trapped wind’ but suspected Gwendolyn wouldn’t find this funny. Then I smelt herbs so opened one eye again; she was circling her hands around my face without touching it, as if my head was a crystal ball.

‘What’s that smell?’

‘It’s sage and frankincense oil for emotional healing. But forget the herbs. Close your eyes and think, who are you holding on to in your heart? Can you let them go?’

The questions continued while Gwendolyn wafted her oily fingers above my face.

‘Set an intention for your healing. Ask yourself: what do I need right now to open my heart to the love I deserve?’

I wondered what to have for supper when I got home. I was starving. Soup? The thought of ending a day with soup was depressing.

‘We need to break down the wall around your heart,’ she went on. ‘Imagine a bulldozer smashing that wall, Florence, opening the path to true intimacy.’

A baked potato? No, it would take too long and I hated it when they weren’t cooked in the middle.

‘Now open your eyes and sit up, and we can make a start,’ said Gwendolyn. ‘I’ve cleared those blocks and you should be feeling clearer and calmer. Less defensive.’

I opened my eyes feeling exactly as I had nine minutes earlier.

Wiping her hands with a tissue, Gwendolyn explained that she wanted me to write a list.

‘A list? Like a shopping list?’

Gwendolyn nodded, the silver teardrops swinging in her earlobes. ‘Exactly, my precious. Like a shopping list, except for what you want from a man, not Asda. Ha ha!’ Her mouth opened wide at her own joke before she was serious again. ‘What do you want in a man, Florence?’

‘Er…’

‘Because you need to ask the universe for it,’ she said solemnly. ‘These things don’t just fall into our laps. You need to manifest your desires and attract the right vibrations into your life, summon them to you.’ Gwendolyn stretched her arms in front of her and pulled them back as if playing a tug of war with these vibrations.

‘OK,’ I replied. I was going to play along with this mad hippie. Play along for the session then leave and tell Patricia that she was never, ever to interfere with my love life again.

Gwendolyn tore a piece of paper from her pad and handed it to me. ‘Use a book to lean on.’

I reached underneath the glass table for the nearest book, which had a silhouette of a cat on the front. The Power of the Pussy: How To Tame Your Man, said the title. I covered it quickly with my piece of paper. The power of the pussy indeed. Marmalade would be horrified.

‘Help yourself to a pen,’ went on Gwendolyn, ‘and I want you to write down the characteristics that are important to you so the universe can recognize them and deliver what you’re looking for.’

‘How many characteristics does the universe need?’

‘As many as you like, poppet,’ she replied, flourishing a hand in the air like a flamenco dancer. ‘But the more specific the better. Don’t just say “handsome”. The universe needs clear instructions. Write down “has all his own hair”. Don’t say “athletic”. Say “goes to the gym once or twice a week”. Remember, it’s your list. Your wish list for the universe to answer.’

I wished she’d stop talking about the universe. I went quiet and blinked at my piece of paper. What to write? I couldn’t possibly take this seriously, but on the other hand, I had to write something to convince this nutter that I’d at least thought about it.

After twenty minutes of sighing, chewing the biro, nearly swallowing the little blue stopper at the end of the biro, laughing to myself, closing my eyes and shaking my head before sighing again, I’d come up with a few suggestions. I totted them up and felt uneasy. That was fifteen. I needed one more to make it even. I gnawed the end of the biro once more and thought of a final addition.

THE LIST

 – LIKES CATS.

 – INTERESTING JOB. NOT GOLF-PLAYING INSURANCE BORE LIKE HUGO.

 – BOTTOM AND SEXUAL ATHLETICISM OF JAMES BOND.

 – NICE MOTHER.

 – NO POINTY SHOES.

 – NO HAWAIIAN SHIRTS.

 – NO UMBRELLAS.

 – READS BOOKS. NOT JUST SPORTS BIOGRAPHIES.

 – NO REVOLTING BATHROOM HABITS. E.G. SKID MARKS.

 – AMBITIOUS.

 – ADVENTUROUS.

 – GOOD MANNERS. E.G. SAYS THANK YOU IF SOMEONE HOLDS THE DOOR OPEN FOR HIM.

 – ISN’T OBSESSED WITH INSTAGRAM OR HIS PHONE.

 – FUNNY.

 – ACTUALLY TEXTS ME BACK.

 – DOESN’T MIND ABOUT MY COUNTING.

I handed the piece of paper to Gwendolyn who inspected it while I checked my watch. In twelve minutes, I could go home for supper, whatever it was. Eggs again? Could one overdose on eggs?

‘Well,’ said Gwendolyn, looking up. ‘You clearly listened to what I said about being specific. This line about James Bond, for instance…’

I spread my hands in mock innocence. ‘You said it was a wish list. So I thought, why not? If I can truly put down any bottom I wanted, why not go for his?’

The corners of Gwendolyn’s mouth tightened as she glanced back at the list. ‘What’s wrong with umbrellas?’

‘Not very manly,’ I said. I had a thing about this. Hugo never left the house without his umbrella. It seemed fussy and faint-hearted; you’d never catch Mr Rochester or Rhett Butler faffing about with an umbrella.

‘And you want someone who’s both ambitious and adventurous?’

I nodded. Ambition was to guard against the sort of man whose dreams stopped at ‘golf club membership’ and someone with a spirit of adventure might encourage me to be braver, to venture further afield than south London.

‘Fine,’ she went on, ‘but you could jot down a few more personality characteristics. What about kindness, or generosity? And does he want children?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, because I didn’t know. I had to find a boyfriend first and that seemed hard enough.

‘And what’s this about your counting?’

‘Nothing,’ I said quickly. ‘Just a… weird thing I do. Like a tick. I count things. In my head.’

‘Hmmmm,’ mused Gwendolyn, narrowing her eyes at me as if I was the oddball in the room. ‘Well, what I’d like you to do is some deeper work over the next week or so. Really think about this list and finesse it.’ She held the piece of paper back out.

‘All right,’ I replied, taking it from her. ‘And then what? Do I need to find some sort of cauldron and burn it?’

‘You are naughty!’ said Gwendolyn, grinning and clapping her hands to her thighs. ‘No, darling, just leave it somewhere safe so you can come back to it at our next appointment.’

‘What next appointment?’

‘Your stepmother booked a package. Did she not tell you? We have another three to go.’

I exhaled. Three more sessions in this Pepto-Bismol room. Three more interrogations with this giant fairy. But how to reply? I could hardly say, ‘Absolutely not, I’d rather skip naked through the streets of London.’

She reached into her dungaree pocket and pulled out her phone. ‘Let’s see… I always think it best to allow at least a week between the first and second appointment, to allow you enough time to think about your list. So what about two weeks’ today? Same time? There’s a new moon that night so it’s wonderful timing.’

I smiled back, my lips pressed in a straight line because otherwise I thought I might scream.

And then, once I was standing back on the Harley Street pavement, I folded the list and slid it into the side pocket of my rucksack. The manifesting power of the universe indeed. What a load of absolute, Grade-A nonsense.