The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  “Lizbet, it, er, looks like they might not have got the message,” Anna called, attempting a warning before Lizzie reached them, but it only served to increase the other woman’s curiosity—and her pace.

  Lizzie’s manner since climbing out of the car had been what Effie had silently registered as contemplative. Her face was clouded with the poignancy of arriving at the venue she would have left as a wife, but Lizzie’s features had, like everyone’s, lit up as the beauty of the estate—its harmonious setting, ancien régime charm, and easy balance of the rustic and the elegant—had dawned on them. Now, as she saw her friends gathered at the entrance of the Hall, uncertainty settled into the crease of her brow again and a question formed on her lips.

  Before she could ask it, there came the purr of an engine from the direction of the road and another car joined theirs on the gravel. As they watched, Charlie and Iso climbed out and emptied its trunk, the former carrying a businessman’s hard-cased silver carry-on in one hand and an expensive Scotch-grain holdall in chocolate-brown leather in the other.

  The perfect couple right down to their luggage: complementary rather than matchy-matchy,

  Effie’s keen sense of tragedy focused on the fact that they looked so at ease as a pair. She wondered whether Ben would carry her bag up the stairs for her later without her asking him to; currently he was taking in the view of the valley below them, and she was glad to see that he seemed as enchanted by the place as she was. Effie worried sometimes that he seemed more worldly than her, more used to the sort of luxury they were now surrounded by and therefore less easily impressed than she was.

  Lizzie turned to greet Charlie and Iso where she stood, a few yards away from the doorway and still out of range to survey the scene inside the Hall.

  “Not bad, huh?” She smiled, hamming up with a tragic expression the sadness Effie knew she was feeling, as Charlie reached her side and Iso stepped along neatly behind him. The younger woman had one hand securing a knowingly picture-perfect straw sun hat atop her dark waves as she turned to look at the vista, and the valley, behind her.

  “You can say that again.” Charlie set down the bags and put a friendly arm around Lizzie. “Have you fought over who gets the best bedroom yet?”

  “Not exactly,” Anna said. “You see, there’s been a—”

  But as she spoke, Lizzie pivoted, walked over to a small window in the thick wall, framed by a pair of cornflower blue wooden shutters, and peered in. Effie and Anna saw her suddenly grow rigid and still as she took in the Hall. “No—”

  The exclamation came quickly: a sharply exhaled breath, as though she were winded by the sight of what was inside. Of the decorations, the sparkle, the promised conviviality. Of the setup, a carefully stage-managed scene, waiting for a troupe of players to arrive. The cast had returned from their coffee breaks, but they had suddenly been assigned different roles. Now none of them knew their lines, nor where they were supposed to be standing at curtain up.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” Lizzie cried as she crossed to where the others had gathered at the doors and jostled them aside. “How could this happen?”

  She stood in the center of the archway, her shadow long across the cool flagstones she might have danced on.

  Lizzie’s wedding breakfast had been laid out in scrupulous, immaculate, tasteful—so tasteful—detail. The former bride was silent for a moment before the tears came, and when they did, they were the ugly, guttural sobs Effie knew so well. Yet when Effie stepped forward to offer some comfort, Lizzie shrugged her off. Her sadness was tinged with what looked like a sort of fury, her blindsided shock a wellspring of emotion.

  “We canceled this!” she shrieked, sobbing even harder. As she lifted her hands to her face, as if to veil herself from the view, Effie noticed that Lizzie was still wearing her engagement ring. “We canceled all of it!”

  She looked hard at Ben, and Effie shifted uneasily on her feet next to him with the thought that, between them—distracted by each other as they had been—they might have left some crucial element of the day un-revoked, un-refunded. Un-canceled.

  Stemming tears and providing a soft cushion for spiky indignation was now as much a habit for Anna as arguing a case in court; she offered her embrace to Lizzie so instinctively that the tear-smudged woman accepted it before her temper could get the better of her.

  “Go and get her stuff from the car, Steve,” Anna asked her husband softly, her earlier flintiness with him worn down by the damp emotion seeping into her cheesecloth blouse.

  Charlie had the good grace to back off and take Iso with him, giving Lizzie the space to cry it out and calm down. Together the two of them wandered to the edge of the bank that led down to the pool.

  Effie and Anna helped their friend inside. Sniffing now, and juddering softly with the hiccuping coughs of pain’s aftermath, Lizzie cast her eyes over the unwanted splendor as they passed through it on the way to the stone staircase that led to the bedrooms.

  “I canceled this,” she whispered again, Effie and Anna on either side of her, as they wove through the choreography of a party as yet un-thrown.

  The centuries-old stairs were worn smooth and bowed in the middle. In another life, Lizzie would have appeared at the top of them alongside Dan before dinner, one hand looped through his arm, a posy of meadow flowers in the other, wearing her ivory gown and a serene smile.

  As salt from Lizzie’s cheeks dripped onto the treads as they climbed, Effie reflected that she did not have much advice to give. What had she learned in the past six months to keep the sadness at bay, other than to ensure that any wine bottle in the vicinity was as empty as she felt?

  It gets easier? It doesn’t.

  Time is the best healer? But the most bitter medicine.

  You’ll meet someone else? But also, maybe not?

  Effie wondered guiltily whether Ben would manage downstairs in her absence, then caught herself: he would be fine; he was a confident, well-mannered grown-up—the very opposite of James.

  At the top of the stairs, the three women emerged into a long, terra-cotta-tiled corridor of bedrooms with whitewashed walls and small mullioned windows. Pushing at the first wooden door they came to, they were greeted by a scene worthy of a brochure: all soft white drapes and Carrara marble, complete with four-poster bed and a scattered welcoming of red rose petals across the pristine coverlet. Effie had unwittingly led them into the bridal suite, fully prepped for the happy couple’s first night as husband and wife.

  “Oh Christ,” muttered Anna, and Lizzie breathed raggedly out, jaw set, her neck tense and veined, her body rigid, like that of an animal sensing the crosshairs trained on it. Anna redoubled the support around Lizzie’s waist and continued their progress along the hallway.

  On the bride’s other side, Effie braced her portion of Lizzie’s weight and, with it, something like guilt. Guilt for having been so pleased to arrive here with Dan’s best man, guilt at not having told Lizzie about him sooner. But Lizzie hadn’t been angry with her, Effie told herself, she’d just been surprised—and, now, was drained by the shock of the setup in the Hall. Effie remembered her own bittersweet feeling when she had heard the news that Charlie had finally found love—it was hard to celebrate someone else’s happiness from the depths of despair.

  The second door they reached yielded a smaller double bedroom, with a carved wooden bed that was still canopied but less ritualistically dressed than the last. Provençal ocher and ceramic blue danced in wreaths along its curtains; a spindled chair sat against one wall next to a simple wooden wardrobe. It was a lovely room, Effie noted almost dispassionately as they entered: sympathetically refurbished, sophisticated but not too flashy. Authentically local-feeling, a replica in soft furnishings of the entire holiday pretense—a rustic make-believe with AC units and electric cooktops—of living like early modern villagers in these parts for a week.

  She
wondered how long it had been since these old walls had contained as much anguish.

  “This will do,” Lizzie managed, and unfolded herself from their care. She went to the window, a tall oblong set in foot-thick ancient stone, opened it, and unlatched the external shutters, then quickly creaked them closed against the warm sunshine outside. The transition in the room to total darkness was so sudden Effie had to grope along the rough wall for the main light switch.

  By the time she found it and pooled the room in yellow glow once more, Lizzie had moved back toward them.

  “Lizzie…?” Effie began nervously.

  But Lizzie only rummaged in her handbag where it lay on the chair, addressing them both without looking up.

  “I’m just going to go to bed,” she said wearily. A metallic crackle announced that she had found a blister pack of pills. Popping two out, Lizzie turned her apologetic face, blotched with unhappiness and drawn with fatigue, to the two other women. “These will see me through until morning, and I’ll deal with it all then.”

  When neither Effie nor Anna moved, she spoke again, quietly and more firmly, but her manner was also less jagged: “Please. I’m fine. I just need to sleep now.”

  Effie remembered another time, years ago, when she had left Lizzie to rest, after stroking the hair from her feverish forehead as she settled, her heart tugging at the pain contorting her friend’s lovely young face.

  There was little for it but to leave her once again to the warm tide of the tablets she had taken. One foot numb, then the other, followed by a cozy sensation of being beyond caring anymore. An attitude that would rise up through the torso like a blanket tucked in by a watchful mother, soothe the ache in her chest like a longed-for embrace. Effie had also taken comfort in it; the gradual slowing of the whirring cogs in her mind, whether with a few drinks or a couple of heavy-duty painkillers left over from a nasty ankle sprain the year before, had been a highlight of most days for her until recently.

  Halfway down the stairs, at around the point Lizzie and her father might have stopped to pose for the photographer, Effie heard the click, not of a camera shutter but of the bedroom light switch, as their friend retreated into the darkness.

  9.

  Anna

  Outside, the late afternoon sun still twinkled jauntily—insistently, like a drunk friend who didn’t know when to leave—on the perfectly arrayed scene below.

  “Any idea who we ring to sort this out?” Anna asked as she trailed after Effie through the trappings of the phantom wedding breakfast.

  “Not really,” Effie replied, eyeing the lavish settings with regret. “Lizzie’s right—we already canceled it all once. I suppose we could try Dan? Bad enough that she has to deal with it—I don’t really want to bother him as well…”

  It wouldn’t be an easy call, Anna thought, as she pulled her mobile from her pocket and stepped over the threshold, outside into the sun. No signal. However they fixed the mess, it wouldn’t be by phone—not from here, at least.

  The two women walked the wrong way down the aisle and crossed the terrace toward the steps to the pool where Charlie, Iso, Ben, and Steve occupied four of the sun loungers that lined one edge of the lapping azure water. As Effie drew close, Ben stood up, then hesitated, still a little awkward about how to greet her in front of her friends. She headed for the point where his chest melted into one of his strong arms, and when she reached it, he crooked it around her in response.

  On the slatted square table between Charlie and Iso’s recliners stood an open bottle of champagne, green glass beading with condensation in the sunshine, its contents already carefully shared out between six crystal flutes sourced from the placements inside.

  “Seemed a shame not to put it to good use,” Charlie called to them as they approached.

  He and Iso had scoped out the kitchen that lay to the back of the Great Hall and come across an anteroom piled high with box upon box of supplies for the wedding: bottles of the grape and grain variety, great bales of party food, one fridge stocked as though a hungry army were scheduled to pass through, another full of chilling bottles, their round, green bottoms facing out in uniform rows.

  From the ground by the side of his sunbed, Charlie lifted a plate of cold meats in greeting. The local earthenware was hand-painted with bucolic dancing figures and fruits in stages from lusciously ripe to deliquescent, its surface fanned with slices of saucisson, crudo ham, and varieties of cheese so hyperlocal they practically counted as next-door neighbors.

  Anna felt a familiar swell of authoritarianism rise within her and, with it, an annoyance that even without her child, it was still as much a part of her daily routine as brushing her hair. She ground her teeth—of course it would fall to her to explain to them that this really was not on. That the setup had been in error and was therefore not to be abused as a freebie. That the best-laid plans had been carefully undone with tears and regret, emails sent in sad resignation, the alcohol budget refunded and reallocated. That the food and drink indoors—enough for five times their number—were not to pass their lips but to be handed dutifully back to whoever had provided it in error for a wedding that was no longer happening. Of course she would have to be the party pooper once again.

  Anna had noticed, since she had become the only mother among her university friends, that she had taken on, along with the unasked-for and often uncomfortable mantle of Responsible Adult, the role of a sort of bellwether for bad behavior in her friends—rare though it was that she was out late enough to witness it these days. On Sunday afternoons, the gauge for whether a second pint would be replaced with a third. At the end of a dinner party, whether the dessert forks would be swapped for taxis home or for rolled notes. If the latter, as the night descended with Anna having neither partaken nor scolded those who had, she would invariably become the subject of ever more anxious and apologetic, placatory looks cast in her direction.

  It was as though she were an elderly relative or some kind of religious icon whose beatific visage might crack at the merest suggestion of sin.

  “It’s because you’re a lawyer!” Steve would prod her when she complained about always having to be the sensible one.

  “No,” she always replied, shortly, her jaw set in irritation at being rendered everybody else’s Plimsoll line for squareness. “It’s because I’m a mother.”

  And he would do his sacred martyr impression at her—the same one he did when she sighed too loudly over the washing up: hands mock-clasped in prayer, eyes lifted to the heavens—until she cracked a smile. Which seemed to take longer and longer these days.

  Anna looked at her husband now, eyes closed on the next sunbed along, his fingers laced across the stomach beneath his faded rock band T-shirt—softer now than in years before, like hers—and his skinny legs crossed in front of him. Steve could fall asleep anywhere. He regularly did so on the floor of the nursery while gently shushing a chatty Sonny back to drowsiness in the middle of the night, to the effect that Anna usually had to step over—and take over from—his inert form.

  Anna stayed resolutely silent. Her noiselessness prompted Steve to open one eye, as if in expectation of chilly disapproval.

  On the sunbed next door to his, Iso—already accessorized with a fizzing glass, round John Lennon sunglasses, and a lazy smile—had managed to change into a bikini with impressive alacrity. It wasn’t, as Anna had assumed it might be, the sort of swimwear earned in the gym and woven from dental floss, but a sophisticated black two-piece, high of knicker in a retro Bettie Page style, with a plain bandeau top knotted into a twist at the front.

  Not as tarty as I thought it’d be. Just as stunning as I expected though.

  “Do you really think we should be…?” It was Effie who said it in the end, and Anna’s heart leaped: a rare chance to play good cop in her designated role as one half of the fun police.

  But Effie’s concern was not for the invoic
es as yet unsigned nor the deposits that might be unreturnable in the event of their indulgence, Anna realized. Her worries were for Lizzie, dosed into docility indoors.

  “I mean, isn’t it a bit harsh? To be glugging the stuff we were supposed to be cheers-ing her with?” she finished hesitantly, wringing her hands in an effort, Anna thought, not to grab the nearest flute and swiftly drain it.

  Guilt flitted across Iso’s features like the shadows of the clouds across the valley floor below them, and she looked at the glass in her hand as though it were tainted, then glanced at Charlie for reassurance.

  Charlie sat up and removed his own sunglasses. “I wasn’t about to suggest a toast!” He looked pained. “But there’s absolutely stacks of it in there. They aren’t going to miss a couple of bottles. And besides, it’s our holiday too.”

  The blunt narcissism of the self-righteous was weapon enough to cudgel Anna’s misgivings into silence. She had been waiting long enough for this break, and how often was it—after all—that the mother of a toddler found herself next to a pool, totally unencumbered, with an endless supply of free champagne at her disposal? She could excuse practically anything on those grounds. Was she really prepared to reason herself out of enjoying her holiday, just because her better judgment told her to? Anna spent the greater part of her working days listening to the old men of the judiciary hand down their reasoned opinions—surely she was allowed to disregard the spinning arrow of her moral compass on holiday.

  “That food’ll only go off in the heat if we leave it,” Steve volunteered, sipping from his own flute and winking at his wife.

  He has a point.

  Anna and Effie looked at each other, one stern-faced but her severity melting away like the droplets coursing down the side of the green bottle in front of them, the other already shrugging a half-apology for what she knew she was about to do.