distancing.’
Gloria thought how, with her mum, it was nigh on impossible to distance yourself. If she’d been faced with dinner in a room like this, her nervous energy would reach out to fill every corner, charging the atmosphere and putting everyone immediately on alert.
Intrigued she nodded to the elegant setting. ‘Your mum really goes for pulling out all the stops, does she?’
‘Oh, like you wouldn’t believe,’ Emma revealed without one note of embarrassment. ‘With her, “high-end” isn’t so much a look as an attitude. I think she thinks that if you act like you have everything, you just might get everything. Anyway, enough about Mother or I’ll get indigestion before I get to the lamb. Did I mention its shoulder of lamb for the main? Only you said you could eat anything.’
‘To be honest I was expecting some weird, tasteless bridezilla-wedding-dress-diet offering.’
Emma immediately looked at her reflection in the only wall hanging in the room, a small Art Deco fan shaped mirror.
Shit.
‘Not that you need to diet,’ Gloria hastily insisted. ‘In. Any. Way.’ Great start, Glor. Really terrific. ‘Sorry. Cue nervous laughter.’ Closing her eyes she prayed for some sort of social-skill upload as the room remained starkly bereft of any kind of laughter. ‘Lamb sounds yummy,’ she murmured determinedly.
‘Good.’ Emma smiled and nodded to the centrepiece in the table. ‘I got the flowers from the garden. What do you think?’
I think at least I’ll have something pretty to look at when you tell me I’m no longer your bridesmaid. Out loud she said, ‘Gorgeous,’ and stared at the crystal rose-bowl stuffed full of plush velvet-petalled deep pink roses and waxy white magnolia grandiflora blossoms.
‘Please,’ Emma said, ‘sit anywhere. I’ll go and grab the starters.’
‘So formal,’ Seth muttered, frowning hard at his brother while he took a seat opposite Gloria and proceeded to count his cutlery. ‘Three courses? This is a celebration.’
‘I’m probably being fattened for the slaughter,’ Gloria whispered as Jake got up to get the wine.
She folded her hands in her lap and waited as Emma fussed with bringing in the food. It was so quiet she found herself thinking about the whole if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest-but-you’re-not-there-does-it-make-a-sound thing, which led to philosophising why getting sacked in Knightley Hall but no one from the village being here to witness it, wouldn’t be the same at all. Somehow the news would be heard before she reached home.
She tried to curb the disappointment taking up space in her belly because it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been the talk of the village before and survived.
A surreptitious look at Seth showed him relaxed and comfortable while she sat at the table vowing not to stoop to talking about the weather but damn if she could think of a single conversational thing to say. Did she tell them about how Persephone had become obsessed with ballet again? Definitely not, she decided. People without kids hated having to hear about people who did. Or was that a myth?
Perhaps she was over-thinking and it was only her finding the silence uncomfortable as hell. This is what happened when you went out for the first time in … Mother Hubbard! No wonder Perse had been so happy to hear she was off out for the evening because if you discounted popping over to Old Man Isaac’s for afternoon tea it had been months since she’d been invited somewhere.
Well if that realisation didn’t just add to her sense of social ineptitude.
The trouble was, part of her being less crap at pissing people off was to keep practising and the only way she got to practise was if she got out and saw people.
It was like that phenomenon where if you studied something for x number of hours you automatically became an expert.
Her shoulders slumped. She had the feeling x = four-thousand hours.
Oh, who needed a social life anyway? They were completely overrated. Just ask young adults who preferred to stay in and interact online instead.
And that thought wasn’t at all depressing.
Perhaps she should declare her man-ban over and go out on a few dates.
Except the dates had made her worse at interacting; not better.
Because when it had come to sex … she’d …
Book Club!
She brought her hand up to slap against her forehead as the thought registered.
Book Club was a social thing she went to.
God, she was going to have to keep going to Book Club.
And then she went as red as the beetroot salad with homemade walnut bread that Emma was passing her, as she realised everyone was staring nervously at the socially awkward woman who had just slapped herself at the dinner table.
Gloria
‘So you completely missed the deadline for finishing the courtyard garden at the clock house,’ she told Jake, once they all had their starters in front of them.
As the first thing that came out of her mouth it could have been ruder.
Or not.
Emma looked at her, shock on her face.
Jake looked at her, a frown on his face.
Seth looked at her, a massive grin spreading across his face.
If this was an outer-body experience she’d literally be looking down at the scene from between her fingers.
Poor Emma had probably spent a restless couple of nights worrying exactly how to tell her she was no longer part of the bridal party and it felt like even the walls were on tenterhooks waiting for her to kick-off.
Working hard to make it a little easier on them all she tried a self-deprecating, ‘It’s hard to believe I don’t get those After Dinner Speaker gigs, right?’
‘Jury’s still out on that one considering we haven’t even had dinner yet,’ Seth said.
Gloria pursed her lips. She thought Seth was supposed to be putting in a good word for her, not highlighting how rubbish she was at all this. ‘I’m sorry, Jake. What I meant was—’
‘I know what you meant,’ Jake said with a grim smile. ‘And yes it’s annoying to be so late with the project but the ironwork had to be specially welded and took longer than anyone anticipated. I’ll be working extra to keep the delay to a minimum.’
‘Great.’ She picked up her knife and fork, promptly dropped her knife, swore, and after a furtive sweep of her hand under the table, during which she may or may not have patted down Seth’s leg, she reappeared, saying, ‘It’s going to look spectacular when it’s finished.’
‘Thank you. Red or white,’ Jake asked, holding up a bottle of each wine.
‘Definitely,’ she answered, swearing under her breath again as she saw Seth’s grin stretch wider so that his dimples made an appearance too.
Those bloody dimples.
And the cleft chin.
I mean, who had a cleft in their chin these days? Hadn’t men metrosexualised that right on out of their DNA? How typical of the Knightley brood to remain old school, walking around like Disney princes, all four of them. Even their two sisters looked