The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  She didn’t want coddling or fussing over, she said, just good company and a change of scene—where else to go than on the holiday she had so carefully planned every minute of for the past six months, she joked.

  The rest of the group collectively blushed and smiled, unsure how to reply but nodding as though it really was funny: a bride heading to the venue where her wedding no longer was. Effie found she suddenly felt nervous: she knew a change of surroundings could be a good thing, but she was fairly certain that the scenery involved should be new and invigorating, rather than one intended to have been the backdrop to cherished photos that would now never be taken.

  “All right, gang?” A smooth, treacly voice interrupted her thoughts: Charlie. He and Iso were standing behind her chair, smiling down at the rest of them with impossibly bleached, rich-person teeth that sang out from already-tanned skin. “Everyone, this is Iso; Iso, these are the reprobates I warned you about.”

  The woman standing next to him turned her own full-beam smile on the group and waved, directing her gaze carefully to each of them in turn as they introduced themselves.

  “Just a turmeric latte for me,” Iso said as she took a seat and Charlie went to the counter.

  A turmeric latte. Effie had been wondering whether it was too early for a gin and tonic.

  Iso, Charlie’s new—first proper—girlfriend was, not to put too fine a point on it, completely gorgeous: long, tumbling waves of dark hair, big, brown, Bambi-lashed eyes, and a café au lait tan that spoke of a regular holiday regime far away from the Home Counties, which had shaped her cut-glass vowels and consonants. Her long, tanned legs in denim cut-off shorts stretched out beyond the table and crossed delicately at the ankles.

  Effie felt exhausted just looking at her. She saw it in Anna’s reaction too—the primal slump that happens around women so ineffably beautiful that they make one feel almost evolutionarily redundant by comparison. The worst part was that Iso looked a lot like Anna used to—before the big job and the baby had taken their respective tolls.

  She seemed nice enough—friendly, quick to smile and to giggle, eager to chat, none of the standoffishness or the arrogance that so often comes of growing up attractive. And her awkwardness around Lizzie was noticeable, too: as someone so clearly in the first flush of whatever she and Charlie had going on, Iso kept looking at Lizzie as though she was a specimen, a case study in it all going wrong.

  Over another round of drinks (a beer each for the boys, peppermint tea for Effie—it was too early for gin, and she still had a slight hangover from the wine she’d drunk while packing her suitcase), Iso told them that she was an “influencer.”

  “Is that like a fixer?” asked Steve.

  “No, mate, no,” Charlie jumped in earnestly. “She doesn’t buy drugs for rock stars. An influencer is, like, someone who knows what we want before we do, and shows us how nice life could be.” He winked at Iso across the Formica table.

  “For a fee,” said Anna briskly, fiddling with one of the ties on the embroidered peasant blouse that Effie knew she had been persuaded into buying after seeing one of her competitive mum friends wearing it on Facebook.

  “That’s right,” Iso said smoothly, uncrossing and recrossing her golden haunches. “I’m a content creator who uses products and clothes to inspire my audience as they follow my adventures around the world.”

  That explained the tan, at least, thought Effie. “Wow,” she said. “How many followers do you have?”

  Iso dimpled into her yellow drink as she took a sip. “Nearly seven hundred thousand. But it’s really not about the numbers—it’s about creating a community.”

  Effie had met Anna’s eyes for less than a second, just to confirm that they were both thinking the same thing.

  A few hours later, across a narrow sea and a patchwork of asphalt and farmland, the rental car and its passengers barreled along through the French countryside. Excitement rose in each of their chests, along with a feeling of having been liberated, like actors faced with a run of scenes for which they weren’t needed onstage. This was a chance to return their bodies to a natural, unmannered state; for their minds to abandon the usual rote; to wipe their faces of all the expressions they assumed simply to get themselves through the day.

  After they had collected their bags, picked up the keys to the rental car, and clunked its doors shut behind them, there had been a collective exhalation. A Zen state of calm contentment descended, perked up now and again by the familiar landmarks of Being on Holiday: the serried ranks of vines on either side of them, automated sprinklers spinning and zapping crops with bursts of water. The roadside shrines, signs pointing visitors toward the local, bottle-lined caves de dégustation. Swimming pool showrooms and garden centers with their driveways full of birdbaths and plaster-molded seraphim.

  “Who buys all these amphoras?” Anna asked as they passed a fourth outlet replete with neoclassical patio accessories.

  “Am all phora good-looking garden,” joked Steve in a hokey French accent, and she batted lazily at the arm he wasn’t steering with as the car rumbled on.

  Lizzie was quiet, jollied along by the other passengers. Anna and Effie took care not to make eye contact too obviously whenever their friend’s words trailed off and a veil of introspection clouded her features as though she was remembering words spoken, decisions taken. In the driver’s seat, Steve set his sights firmly on the hairpin bends ahead and the mopeds that emerged suddenly from its grassy sidings as though loosed deliberately to test his reaction times.

  The sun settled into a low afternoon sky as if staked there on a picture hook, throwing yolk-yellow rays over the granite protrusions they climbed and the limy rivers they crossed. Effie felt her heart buoy—still a relatively recent occurrence after what seemed like years. Her shoulders unhunched and her neck lifted like the stems of the sunflowers they passed. She could tell, from the way the dust swirled in the light and the noise of the crickets through the windows, that the air when they stepped out of the car would be a warm embrace on her bare skin. Not that she was cold anymore: where she sat in the middle of the minivan’s backseat, she could feel the heat from both Lizzie’s and Ben’s thighs where they pressed either side of her own.

  “Plenty of fabulous scenery for Iso’s Instagram account,” Anna remarked drily as they bombed along a smooth tarmac road with medieval hilltop villages strewn to its left and right. Charlie and Iso were making their way to the château in a sexy and antisocial two-seater soft-top, while the rest of them had piled into a rather more family-focused people carrier.

  “Are we on holiday with a celebrity, then?” Steve asked from the driver’s seat.

  “No!” Effie and Anna both replied quickly, while Lizzie paused to weigh it up.

  Ben pulled out his phone and typed Iso’s name into the app’s search function, watched as her profile page and its grid of exotic destinations, tasteful bikini shots, and artfully placed succulents loaded up. “I don’t know,” he said. “She looks pretty famous to me—this cup has got three thousand likes!”

  On his screen was the turmeric latte from the airport, its bilious foam somehow rendered almost sparklingly golden against the gray marble tabletop. Except the table had just been plastic printed to look like veined stone. Nobody clicking on that photo would know that Iso hadn’t been in the sort of upmarket café that had highly polished counters and thick cotton napkins—or, Effie reflected, that she had been surrounded by a group of nobodies. Is anybody really how they seem on the internet?

  Effie saw them all through Iso’s eyes: the jilted bride, a hungover scarecrow, a pair of tired-looking, hip-once-but-slightly-past-it parents, Ben, and…Charlie. He hadn’t changed—ten years had barely touched him. Charlie was like that faux-marble table: unweathered by events. Where on earth had he found Iso?

  Effie’s own heartache had put a limit on how much joy she could feel for other pe
ople before tipping over into the sort of self-pity that razed everything in its path like a forest fire. She had been glad, after James had left, that he had waited until a little while after Lizzie had gotten engaged—that she had been able to enjoy her best friend’s happiness in a moment of sheer jubilance that was untainted by the state of her own love life.

  Although, of course, the comparison had always been there, really—at every friend’s wedding, every engagement party, every ring-finger photo, every “I said yes” group message. James hadn’t wanted to get married, said it wasn’t for him. Who needed to be given a piece of paper that told them how they felt? Over time, Effie had persuaded herself that she didn’t want that piece of paper, either. That is, until Lizzie was in line for one.

  Effie didn’t remember the engagement party very well; she had drunk too much in a way that had started out enthusiastic and become embittered. That night, when they got home, she had started a conversation with James that she expected to turn into a fight but instead had simply turned into a shrug of resignation. The next morning, he had told her they wanted different things. Shocked, with a stabbing headache and the all-too-familiar sense that she couldn’t quite remember what had happened the night before, she had tried to persuade him otherwise, had begged him to reconsider.

  But he had gone, immune to her pleas. He had closed the door behind himself, and except for a series of tragically procedural texts around moving out, and a few apologies sent in response to her late-night calls (unanswered) and rambling messages (mortifying when read back the next morning), that was that.

  Throughout the snotty cuddles, the hand-holding and the hair-stroking of those difficult first weeks, Lizzie had assured Effie that nothing had happened at the party, but Effie couldn’t deny the uncomfortable feeling that her oldest friend had seemed to be holding something back ever since.

  Now Effie looked over at Lizzie’s familiar heart-shaped, freckled face, the ghost of worry playing across it almost imperceptibly. On her other side, Ben was still gazing at his phone, still scrolling through Iso’s archive of covetable lifestyle ephemera. Effie leaned into his solid, cotton-fresh frame to better scrutinize the pictures and left Lizzie, frowning into the window next to her, to her silent reflection.

  * * *

  —

  It was what Effie’s father had always called “golden hour” by the time they arrived at the Oratoire de St. Eris. The turreted building, made of pale limestone, absorbed the warm orange of the late afternoon sun from its hilltop perch like a cat on a windowsill.

  Beyond the driveway, cut into the hillside below it, steps led down toward a shimmering rectangle of pure cyan. The pool! Effie’s heart leaped even before her eyes were drawn from its crystalline depths to the landscape beyond. She tilted her body left and then right to take in the panorama, and ran one hand through her flyaway hair as it lifted slightly in a sultry but welcome breeze.

  For the first time in months, she felt she was on neutral ground, a new place and a blank slate: somewhere that had never witnessed her in any state other than how she was right now. Her home city, her regular haunts, the school, even her flat—they all still held traces of her as she used to be, of her happy, of her in a couple. All of them were tainted by memories. Sometimes she felt she was wading against a current just walking down her local high street; already here she felt unburdened by her own sad history.

  Enough of that. Effie would leave here one half of a new couple: a fresh start with a delightfully unmapped future ahead of them.

  6.

  Lizzie

  I still couldn’t believe I’d had to cancel our wedding.

  We weren’t that kind of people; we were us. Reasonable and refined. Above the sort of brute transaction that pits terror against trust in return for silence. For cooperation.

  The first time he threatened me, I thought it was a joke. A bad one. I couldn’t believe he would ever treat me like that, but then he did.

  I couldn’t believe he had taken those photos either. Taken them, saved them, readied them to share at the click of a button with everyone I knew, and with even more I didn’t.

  I’d never seen myself asleep before. I don’t think I’ll ever look that peaceful again; I certainly don’t sleep anymore.

  I couldn’t believe that the thing that had made us so special together—the intimacy, the tangled limbs and pink cheeks, the private language of daylight on skin as the dawn interrupts—had become a weapon. Couldn’t believe a man I cared so much for—so much that my body had ached for him when he wasn’t near me—would do this to me. That was the first time I thought I was going mad, but not the last.

  He said those images would become public property if I didn’t play along, didn’t do what he asked. So I did.

  I kept him sweet. I smiled when I felt the hard pinch of fear in my gut. Laughed my way through the awkwardness and the nerves. Pretended it was normal, fine—told myself it would be. I chatted at dinner, never went to bed angry. Blurred out the reality and gave my life a gloss. From the outside, everything looked perfect.

  I could teach that stunning influencer girlfriend a thing or two about filters.

  7.

  Anna

  The countryside unspooled in every direction around her: the house overlooked the valley below it. Grids and stripes of fields crazy-paved in a spectrum of greens, red tiled roofs, and avenues of trees—all of it lay before the house like a rug in front of a fireplace, and it existed in a permanent chatty buzz of crickets and far-off, hee-hawing donkeys.

  Thank God we’re here. Anna cupped her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the low-hanging and insistent sun and surveyed the site—the venue, as they’d been referring to it for so long. Now, stripped of the wedding, it was just a place again. But what a spot! High soaring birds, their wings open like books, flew across the sky as she took in the view. An appreciative sigh caught in her throat—not only from the dusty car journey but also because, as she relaxed properly for the first time since Sonny had been born, she felt tears of relief spring to her eyes.

  I’ll be a different person by the time we leave—one who has infinite patience with her husband and can balance work and a child without feeling guilty about either.

  Sweating slightly and anticipating the moment when she’d be able to swap her clothes for swimwear, Anna strode toward the wooden front door within its Gothic archway, solid and dotted with fortifying lead pins. The metal ring handle was sun-warmed in her palm and the latch squealed as she lifted it, but the door swung open smoothly into the château’s main room—the Great Hall, a tennis court in length or more.

  “Oh my God,” Anna breathed, raising one hand to her chest as she looked around. “Effie!” She called her friend’s name without taking her eyes off the scene in front of her—and again, louder: “Effie!”

  Anna heard the scuffing of trainers and the crunching of gravel; the noise stopped as their owner came to a pause behind her. The long room in front of them was dim after the brightness of the garden, and it took a moment for Effie’s eyes to adjust. But, eventually, there was the interior, laid out like a banquet before them.

  “Ohhhh fuck.” Effie’s words were low and slow. She brought her hand to her forehead in a subconscious mirroring of Anna’s pose. “Oh dear.”

  Golden rays bounced off the glassware, cutlery, and lanterns lined up on the pair of long tables in front of the two women. On a wooden trestle near the hearth stood an impossibly white, three-tiered cake decorated with dewy yellow roses and freshly foraged curlicues of ivy.

  At the other end of the room was another sturdy medieval fireplace the height of a grown man, with a pair of crossed swords pinned on the chimney breast above it. The hammerbeam roof—a much-vaunted original feature that was mentioned countless times on the website, as Anna recalled—was made of dark timber, but light streamed in from the windows that looked out onto the courtya
rd.

  Set at the bottom of a U-shaped quad, the Hall opened out through a pair of double doors onto a lavender-edged terrace. Beyond, the vista spread itself languidly like a diva across a piano, the sky vast and empty. The terrace, however, was busy with chairs—the wooden folding sort, arranged into rows that gazed back at the house as though filled with an expectant crowd.

  Spotlit in the fiery sun hung a garlanded archway above the doorway, a trellis wreathed in lush flowers and dripping vines. And in front of that—at the top of a short flight of steps down onto the patio—was a small stand. An altar, if they were calling a spade a spade, as Anna always preferred to. On top of it lay a thick bound book with vellum pages, and on top of that were two small hoops, glinting in the afternoon sun.

  “Well, bloody hell,” said Steve as he sauntered up behind them to gaze in as well. “That’s what I call a welcome.”

  “It isn’t a sodding welcome, Steve, you idiot,” Anna spat.

  The venom that she thought she’d left at home with her barrister’s gown and childcare duties but that had apparently been bubbling away just below the surface the whole time boiled over once again. She realized she was holding the doorframe so tightly her knuckles had turned white.

  “It’s Lizzie’s wedding,” Effie said, finishing the horrified train of thought for her.

  8.

  Effie

  There was no time to hide what the Hall held as the woman who was supposed to have been the center of its attentions turned from the valley view toward the others at its doors.

  “Don’t wait for me to start exploring!” Lizzie called, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun as she strode back from the ridge’s edge to join them.