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