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