before answering. ‘She just said he was looking for a wife. She basically implied that’s all he wanted, and that it could have been anyone, but that I was docile enough to fit the bill.’
‘Oh goodness me, Florence, what’s wrong with that?’ Gwendolyn looked at me with wide-eyed astonishment. ‘Don’t you want to get married?’
‘Yes. But no, not like that. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to marry Rory, not yet. Why do I have to know now? And why is everyone so frigging obsessed with getting married? What is so bad about not being married?’
‘Florence…’
But I ignored her and carried on. ‘I mean, we’ve invented driverless cars and vegan cheese but the marker of civilization is still putting on a white dress and staggering twenty metres down an aisle. What canapés to have. What cake to have. A fishtail dress or halterneck? Roses or lilies? DJ or a band? Should our invitations be white or blue? What should our wedding hashtag be? Jesus Christ, a wedding hashtag! That’s when you need more going on in your life, if you’re busy worrying about your wedding hashtag.’
‘Florence, have you quite finished?’
I leant back against the sofa. ‘Yes.’
‘Well I think there’s only one thing for it,’ she said. ‘We need to do a sage ritual with you too.’
‘Why?’ I asked wearily, but she was already leaning forward to pick up the small bundle of twigs from the bowl.
‘Because it will balance you out. Help clear all this toxic negativity. Now sit there and hold this.’
‘Hold what?’
Gwendolyn stood, opened a drawer of the dresser behind her and turned back to me with a pale grey feather. ‘This. It’s from a very rare type of white-bellied forest owl found only in the Ural Mountains.’
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’
‘Just wave it slowly in front of you while I perform the smudging ceremony.’
‘The what?’
‘Florence, no more questions, close your eyes.’
I wriggled myself further back on the sofa, dragged the feather back and forth in front of me as if it was a sparkler and listened to Gwendolyn light the bundle of sage.
Inevitably, there was also a mad prayer.
‘May your hands be cleansed, that they create beautiful things,’ she said, as the first pungent whiff of smoke caught my nostrils. ‘And may your feet be cleansed, that they might take you where you most need to be.’
She continued for several minutes, listing pretty much each and every body part. Even my reproductive organs got a shout-out. And the smell! The smell made me want to retch.
‘May this person be washed clean by the smoke of this fragrant plant. And may that same smoke carry these prayers, spiralling, to the heavens,’ she said finally, before telling me to open my eyes and hand back the feather. ‘There, I expect you’ll sleep very well tonight. You can report back in our next session.’
One more to go, I thought, as I left her room a few minutes later and headed back downstairs to Harley Street. While strolling home through St James’s Park, I glanced down and saw a feather which looked suspiciously like that of the white-bellied forest owl. I picked it up as I heard a cooing above my head in a tree. It was a pigeon, so I’m not entirely convinced that Gwendolyn’s feather was from a rare owl at all.
When I got back to Kennington, an unexpected situation was unfolding in the kitchen: Mia, Hugo and Rory were all sitting at the kitchen table wearing sleep masks over their eyes while Ruby poured red wine into glasses in front of them. Mia had a pink silky sleep mask on; Rory’s was lilac and Hugo’s was white and fluffy, shaped like a unicorn with closed eyes on the front of it and a small horn protruding from the middle. The table was covered with further wine bottles and used glasses, and from the speaker behind the sink came the sound of aggressive hip-hop. Ruby loved hip-hop.
‘Hello,’ I said, dropping my rucksack on the floor. ‘Rory, how come you’re here so early?’
He lifted up one end of his mask and then stood and came round the table to kiss me. ‘I finished work before I thought I would. Where’ve you been? Did you not see my message?’
‘No, sorry.’ I’d been too busy contemplating pigeon feathers and the effects of sage to look at my phone on the walk home. ‘I was working late on my petition,’ I added quickly, before Mia