Egotism and Enmity

Chapter One

Chapter One:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a good wife."

Although my full name is Elizabeth, nobody's called me that in years. As far back as my memory serves me, all my family and friends have just called me Lizzie. For today's standards, I have a large family, I guess; there's my parents, Natasha and Richard Bennett, and much to my father's occasional horror, me and my four other sisters. Jane is the oldest at twenty six (although she doesn't look a day older than twenty-one), then I came along two years later and then in quick succession, Marie, Kat and Lydia. Although he would never say it, I know that my father was secretly hoping for a son somewhere along the lines. I'm basically the nearest he got – I'm by no means a tomboy, but I can appreciate a good game of football and I insisted on not wearing pink from the ages of eight to thirteen. That was close enough for him and meant that I was the subject of a considerable amount of 'Daddy's Girl' teasing from the rest of the Bennett clan for many years. My mother, on the other hand, is a lot less impressed with my carefree attitudes when it comes to feminine sensibilities. She is, for want of better words, absolutely desperate to marry me off. Don't get me wrong, I love her with all my heart, but sometimes I do seriously have to question her sanity.

Ever since we were young children, she was obsessed with setting up me and my sisters with her friends' sons and playing matchmaker with us all. When we were ten, it could pass (just) as being kind of cute, but the older we got, it got freakier and freakier. The only one of us who doesn't actually mind the constant nagging about dating is Lydia, but that's only because she's just turned eighteen and is absolutely boy mad. The others have managed to put up with it, even Marie, whose protestations that she is a lesbian has still not deterred Mum from trying to make her go out with boys. I, however, could not stand it at the beginning, and still couldn't take it now.

I was a bit of a late bloomer in the romance and hormones department. The whole idea of dating didn't really occur to me until about the age of seventeen, so by then, I had already basically earned myself the title of prude (and not even in a cruel way) and even frigid at one point (although that accusation was made by Greasy Gavin, so it hadn't meant much). I decided that it would be easier for me to stay away from the male population for the foreseeable future until they had proved that they weren't more trouble than they are worth. They still haven't, in my opinion, and at the age of twenty-four, I'm half ashamed and half proud to say that I've never been in a relationship.

Being an English teacher at a secondary school meant that I had absolutely wonderful holidays. The summer months came with a deliciously long time off work in the form of a much needed eight week long break (trust me, I needed time away from my Year 8 class). However, as was the case of the start of every summer holiday, the feeling of freedom was slightly marred by the event of my mother's birthday. This year, however, to celebrate her 55th birthday, she had planned a party, which required me to go back to my parent's house for a 'long weekend' and being surrounded by distant relatives and long forgotten family friends who I hadn't seen in about ten years. No doubt there would be questions about my wonderfully un-ambitious career choices and my disappointingly absent love life. There would then follow some crass suggestion along the lines of me joining a dating website, because apparently 1 in 10 marriages start by couples meeting online nowadays (or is it 1 in 5?).

Regardless, I was not particularly excited for the weekend. All I really wanted to be doing was enjoying one too many glasses of cheap white wine in the sunshine in the hammock that my sister and I had set up in the back garden of the house that we shared in central London. Unlike me, Jane was going places. She had recently taken up a job as the assistant to a very well-respected CEO of some publishing company. She (and they) had high ambitions for her career, unlike me, who was perfectly happy reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Othello' for the rest of my life. However, if there was one thing that I had that Jane didn't, it was punctuality.