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