Henrietta Marsh

Henny — the elder sister's prerogative is to remember every embarrassing thing, and I am, dutifully, exercising it. The summer in Florence in 1991 when you got us both arrested at the Boboli Gardens for a reason I still don't fully understand. The Christmas in 1998 when you decided, mid-carol, that you wanted to become an Anglican priest, and then forgot about it by Boxing Day. The morning of your wedding when you stood at the back of the church and asked me, very softly, "is it definitely the right one?" and I said, "yes, Henny, it definitely is," and was, for once, absolutely right. Fifty, my darling. I did the calligraphy on the cards. I've loved you since I was four and you arrived, screaming, in the upstairs bedroom at Hampstead.

Mum — I am writing this in the Lower Library at New College on the night before I come down for the dinner. The boy at the next desk has been highlighting the same paragraph for forty-five minutes; I have not, in my life, been more grateful to be writing about you instead. You taught me to read at three. You taught me, at seven, to argue properly (the rule being: have you actually listened to them? — and, if you haven't, sit back down). You taught me, at nineteen, that it is not, in fact, weakness to ring your mother from a phone box at the bottom of Catte Street on a Tuesday in February when the term is going badly. You are the best argument for parenting I have ever encountered. Fifty, Mum. I love you a great deal.

Henrietta — eight years your agent, four published novels, one cancelled in 2019 (which we will, mercifully, not discuss tonight), and a fifth which is, as we speak, on the desk at Picador for what I estimate to be the third time this month. You are the only client I have ever had who turns in a manuscript clean and one week early. The first time it happened in 2018 I assumed it was a draft. It was not. It was the manuscript. I have, since then, recalibrated my entire view of the writing profession around you, slightly to the detriment of everyone else on my list. Fifty, my dear. The book is wonderful. Picador will say yes by Wednesday. I'd bet the firm on it.

Hen — Cheltenham Ladies' College, the Lower Fourth, September 1986. You sat next to me in French because the teacher had, alphabetically, decided we belonged together. We were eleven. I have, in the forty years since, missed precisely one of your birthdays (1994, my mother's funeral; you wrote me a letter that I still have, folded in the front of my Bible). We were thirteen at the cottage in Suffolk the first time. We were twenty-three at our weddings (mine in May, yours in September). We were thirty-six when our first daughters started prep school the same week. We are fifty now, both of us, within nine days of each other, and I shall arrive on the Saturday with the small green tin of fudge from the shop in Burford because I have, for thirty-six years, brought you fudge on your birthday. Forty years, Hen. I love you the same as I did at eleven.