The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  Amid the wreckage of the wedding night, Anna’s thoughts had found a clarity that her heart hadn’t. They needed to track down this Marie person, to tidy up and to find whoever’s job it was to clear and take away the bacchanalian mess, and then to sit down and thrash out among themselves what had actually taken place.

  For that thrashing to happen, she would need to speak to Steve, and she found she had absolutely no wish to do so right now. Her heart, her blood, their history told her he had done nothing wrong, that he never would—and yet, he had still ended up naked with the most attractive woman either of them had encountered since their relationship had begun, seven years ago. On this, the holiday she had so hoped would bring them back together.

  Out in the midmorning sunshine, Effie’s pale, sweat-beaded face reminded Anna of the night Sonny had come into the world. She had clung to Steve then as though he could stop her from passing out with the pain of it, the sensation of a drawbridge deep inside her being slowly winched open. Anna, whose medical notes declared that she had had a “normal” labor—an “easy” birth, as the doctor who had stitched her back up afterward told them (easy for whom, exactly?)—had looked into Steve’s face with every turn of the handle within, every notch of agony, and thanked a God she didn’t believe in that if she was going to die, she would do so gazing at someone she loved so much.

  Hot tears formed behind Anna’s eyes, and she breathed them away again. The very fact that Steve had upset her so much also cheered her.

  I still have feelings for him, after all.

  So Anna channeled her nervous energy—the adrenaline that was making her hands shake and her mouth dry despite constantly swallowing—into simply leaving the house and reaching the car.

  Yesterday it had been a charabanc delivering them all up for a frothy excursion like exuberant day-trippers; now Anna felt she was leading Effie to it as a policeman might a criminal to the squad car. Pale and thin, Effie looked like she might need to vomit (again) before she climbed in. Anna benchmarked her suffering against her friend’s: slight headache, potentially broken marriage, but thankfully not the sort of hangover that leaves you foaming at the mouth with every step taken.

  Small mercies.

  She was so focused on Effie’s quaking progress toward the passenger seat that she might easily have missed him, but Effie’s neck jerked so quickly at the movement she had to steady herself with one hand on the car’s roof.

  Ben jogged out from the Hall in their wake. “Let me come with you,” he panted, the exertion having propelled some of last night’s alcohol out onto his skin in boozy droplets that Anna could almost smell from where she stood. “If we’re calling Dan, perhaps it’s best I deal with him.”

  Fair enough, Anna thought as she unlocked the car.

  She had expected to enjoy the stubborn refusal of their phones to register any more than half a bar of reception. The château’s lack of Wi-Fi was so pronounced it had to have been deliberate, she supposed, to foster intense rest and relaxation among the Oratoire’s many guests. But she felt increasingly nervous of it—she was keen to check in on Sonny at home. The house’s remoteness would have been lovely had any of them felt like they were on holiday; instead, it seemed as though they were all on trial for something none of them had any memory of doing.

  15.

  Effie

  Dan’s phone was dead.

  Ben listened to the high-pitched pips at the end of the line for just as long as it took Effie to realize that she no longer had the strength to hold herself upright. As he let the phone drop from his ear, she slumped forward in the passenger seat of the car.

  “No answer,” she panted to Anna. “Let’s go back. I’ve got to drink some water.”

  “Yeah, I need to put more clothes on,” said Ben, still shivering in shorts and a T-shirt in the backseat despite the brightening sunshine. “Frozen to the bone.”

  Anna eyeballed him in the driver’s mirror.

  They had driven as far as they needed to in order for his phone to grasp enough network coverage and put the call through from golden Provence to dreary London. Next to a vineyard laid out so neatly it looked like an even-handed embroidery sampler, Anna turned the car around in a lay-by and drove them back to the Oratoire.

  Effie was not in such dire straits that she had forgotten to wonder whether her phone would suddenly burst into life with backed-up texts from James once it had found reception. The mania had lessened since she’d started seeing Ben, but she still spent too many days willing the screen to light up with his name out of habit.

  It remained stubbornly silent but for a message from her parents asking whether she had arrived safely. Effie replied promptly; she knew they worried about how chaotic her life had become, how the stable orderliness she’d once lived by had been undone overnight like a ship overturned in a gale. She just hoped nobody at work had realized that yet. Effie loved her job, adored her girls, but she had not done them justice recently.

  As Anna spun the car in a horseshoe, from one side of the road to the other, the phone in Effie’s lap gave a tardy shudder.

  James. She had deleted her ex-boyfriend’s details from her phone, but his very facial features were visible to her in the digits she knew by heart anyway.

  “Are you around for a chat? Something I need to tell you.”

  Effie knew her ex well enough to understand what this meant: the full stop at the end of a sentence that she had long hoped had just temporarily trailed off rather than been fully reconciled. As much as Effie might hope James was getting in touch to say he missed her, it seemed more likely he’d found a new girlfriend and was gearing up to break the news as gently as possible.

  Effie couldn’t speak to him there and then, not just because Ben was in the car but because Anna had driven them back into the black spot that surrounded the house for what seemed to be a two-mile radius.

  She felt winded and battle-weary, but also in that moment, as the mostly empty people-carrier bounced along the stones and potholes of the dusty and otherwise deserted trail that led up to the château, strangely wired—as though she had drunk several very strong French coffees.

  She had something to tell James too, she reflected, not without a rising feeling of triumph: she had a new boyfriend, after all.

  16.

  Eighteen Months Earlier: Lizzie

  I was single for eight hours before we met. Just long enough to fly to Bangkok to begin the process of coming home—and growing up. Walking off that beach was like shedding a skin that had never really fit me properly; I was more myself the minute I took it off.

  I had never really enjoyed traveling the way Guy did. I preferred my holidays finite, with the prospect of returning to real life at the end of them. I wanted a job and a home, a family. Guy said that was bourgeois, but I was more interested in climbing the career ladder than the rigging. People like Guy can afford to be bohemian, just like men can afford to drift along without making up their minds for significantly longer than women can.

  Guy had a filthy laugh and long, dark hair like a pirate, and although the Dark & Stormy was no Jolly Roger exactly, she exerted a pull over him as strong as any mermaid. He could hear her siren call from every mid-ranking London desk job I persuaded him to try in the name of building a future together like a normal couple. But eventually, all the plans we had to save for a deposit, maybe get married, start trying for a baby were lured onto the rocks and smashed to smithereens.

  I grew tired of turning up to everything alone with nothing to show for my relationship but a suntan and a new shell necklace. Tired of watching other people’s lives move on, with promotions and rings, mortgages and cashmere baby bonnets, while my own life sometimes fell off the GPS tracker app Guy installed on my phone—to help us feel closer, he said—for days on end.

  By the time we approached Langkawi, I’d been on the boat with Guy for a week and he’d b
een away—this time—for nearly two months. I watched through binoculars as on the sands, straight-backed hotel waiters in ironed shirts and pressed slacks set up yet another table for two in the low evening sun for dinner, drinks, and a proposal by candlelight. The couples dining at those tables would stagger back love-drunk to a room festooned with rose petals, not caring that this was—as Guy scoffed from his seat by the tiller—a standard romance-by-numbers package worth £85 and added to their bill at check-out, but reveling in the tangible prospect of each other, for ever after.

  I knew then—although I think I had always known—that the only official certificate that would ever bind me legally to Guy was the skipper qualification I’d studied for last year.

  In the end, stepping off the yacht alone and booking a flight home was the most adventurous thing I had ever done. The staff of the paradise resort Guy had dropped me at booked me a taxi to the airport while I cried in the foyer.

  I felt brimming with purpose, driven to get on with the rest of my life. I suppose that’s why everything happened so fast when I met the first man who happened to be wearing a suit rather than a pair of board shorts.

  I landed in Bangkok in midafternoon and the next London flight left in the morning, so I followed a tide of twenty-year-olds into town and booked myself into a clean-looking hostel, the only person there with a smart wheelie suitcase rather than an unwieldy but characterful rucksack and an armful of Buddha beads. The showers didn’t exactly have doors on them, but it was only a twelve-hour stay.

  I decided to go on a date. With myself. A walk around the market, to enjoy being alone rather than fearing it or resenting it.

  Women are taught from such a young age that their own company is always the second-best option, that dining alone is embarrassing, to be done furtively and quickly from behind a book or with headphones on. But I now know that women adopt these distractions not to hide the fact of their aloneness but to conceal it from those who enjoy disturbing them. Never other women—always men, who see our privacy as public property.

  I took over for Anna often enough during her maternity leave—a few hours here or there with Sonny simply so she might spend some time by herself—to see how much of a pleasure those snatched minutes of being unaccountable were for her. I realized then that time alone is as precious as gold—it just looks shinier the less you have of it.

  Once I trained myself not to cling to my phone for company in Bangkok but to look up—at the gilt on the temple roof and the gills in the fishmonger’s stall—I felt more in the moment than I had done for most of mine and Guy’s relationship. It is difficult to focus on going for a walk on Hackney Marshes when your heart and your other half are somewhere in the South China Sea.

  Alone in the market streets of Bangkok, I watched crabs climb over each other in hollow polystyrene bricks, jumped out of the way of tuk-tuks, and graciously accepted a garland of flowers over my head but declined the lurid green liquid that came with it. I breathed deep the smell of rotten eggs, petrol, and fish guts and, somehow, felt cleansed.

  After about an hour, I downloaded a dating app. I know. But I’d had a couple of beers in a rickety lean-to bar, buzzing with younger, hairier backpackers in their sociable, enviable groups. I don’t think I really meant to meet anyone; I was simply exploring the potential. Scrolling through my possibilities felt a more exotic proposition in the spicy hubbub of the Khao San Road than I knew they would from the sofa in my flat, tabbing between men who would probably ghost me and my local pizza delivery service. Besides, all these men were based in Thailand, and I’d had my fill of long-distance love.

  I just wanted to see what I might be missing out on.

  I chose a picture for my profile and carefully cropped Guy out of it. I flicked through lives like I was dealing cards, a croupier on a bamboo stool. Barely pausing for any of them, I realized that the fascination was not in the caliber but the quantity. It was like reading the phone book, but with pictures.

  “Laughter,” “fun,” “socializing”—were any of these really hobbies? Yet more dispiriting: “protein.” Things that seemed to me to be fundamental at best were touted as talents or achievements. Jobs became characteristics, personality types reduced to bare chests. “Enjoys food,” another profile said, but didn’t we all? Was this what I’d given up my pirate for—a future full of men with smiles like party tricks for whom it was enough to eat and commute? Then again: Wasn’t this exactly what I had wanted Guy to do?

  It didn’t take long for me to close the app in desolation at the dregs it offered up, and begin to reminisce over the better times I’d had with Guy. Fat tears dripped into my straw-colored lager.

  And then a little ping. A light on the screen I had just turned over in disgust. A wink across a room: a match. Or at least the offer of one.

  Tapping through to the profile, I noted bright eyes and a smile. A rare clothed torso, and a name, an age. “I came for the cocktails and stayed for the corporate lifestyle,” the tagline read. It ended with a little forehead-slapping emoji: “Doh!”

  A joke! And a funny one! Sarcasm seemed to be an endangered species among this live-laugh-love-and-eat-food cohort. I clicked back to confirm the match immediately, and he messaged me right away—a whole stream of comments, popping onto my screen like bubbles in a glass of champagne.

  -Hi! I know everyone says they don’t normally do this, but I really don’t. You seem different from the usual crowd on here though?

  -I hope that doesn’t sound creepy

  -Oh God, it does doesn’t it?

  -How about just: would you like to go for a drink?

  -(sorry)

  I laughed aloud, but everyone else around me was either arm-wrestling or doing shots or some contorted combination of the two, and my peal of delight went unnoticed.

  -Not creepy, and sure! I’m on the Khao San Road, where are you?

  There was a pause and the dots of him typing his response.

  -Oh no, you’re in literally the worst part of Bangkok. Are you new here?

  -Kind of…

  -In that case, dinner’s on me—meet me at the Banyan Tree in an hour?

  17.

  Effie

  By the time Anna, Effie, and Ben returned, Lizzie had gone upstairs to shower. In her absence, furniture was apologetically righted, chairs penitently folded and tucked away in the Hall’s cavernous and secretive corners. Flowers were carefully picked up from the floor and rescue attempts made on the displays, the dirty plates; the cake on its pedestal was whisked away to stay fresh in the fridge. The group moved slowly, the survivors of some great military push. The Hall was busy with battlefield debris, full of wedding.

  They stacked and carried, tidied and scrubbed until they heard the midmorning siren wail in the fields: the call to lunch for the laborers picking grapes or scything wheat, digging trenches or plucking fruit from the vines that snaked around the house. Effie imagined the farmhands retreating from the midday sun in aerial view, moving through their verdant lanes like Pac-Man, and she felt her still-empty stomach chomp in protest.

  She liked the sensation of being excavated from the inside: a warm churn of righteousness, the intensity settings of which she alone could control. The low hum of hunger matched the din in her head and softened it, distracted from it—when the thoughts became too loud, she simply doubled down on fasting, cranked up the stomach acid to drown them out.

  She had always done it, sought agency through her intake and by mastering her meals—or lack of them. As a teenager, Effie had realized that her emotions functioned like a microwave on whatever food she laid eyes on—able either to warm it with joy to a heartiness she could let herself take pleasure in or to nuke it, blanch it, boil it in misery until it became something she would not allow past her lips. At first, it had been more instinct than aesthetic, but when she realized the effect her moods had on her waist
line—and on the circumference of each thigh, the bony lumps on top of each shoulder—the two had become inextricably linked: happy+fat or sad+thin. As much as she tried to break the chain—Effie would have been delighted with happy+thin, for example—it seemed to have been forged from sterner stuff than she. And so her silhouette—recently, her increasingly etiolated Nosferatu shadow—had become a barometer for her baseline satisfaction, every bulge or hollow a visceral synecdoche for what was going on in her head.

  Her stomach rumbled again as she scrubbed red wine marks from the burnt-orange floor tiles in the Hall, and looking up from her crouch, Effie noticed more shards of broken porcelain beneath one of the long tables. Crawling farther in, she recovered a serving platter, smashed into little pieces.

  Clasping them to her breast, she maneuvered herself back out from under the table, and as she did so, a warm pair of hands cupped her hips and moved slowly up along her torso.

  “Can I join you in there?” Ben’s voice asked huskily, and Effie thought she might crumble like one of the shards in her hands. “I smell of booze and bleach, but don’t let that put you off.”

  She slid farther back and into his grasp, twisted to kiss him as her face reappeared from beneath the tablecloth, and worried belatedly what she might taste like.

  “We lost a night together,” he said in an undertone that wouldn’t reach Charlie and Iso, who were clearing the other table. “That bloody sun lounger wasn’t a patch on being in your bed.”

  Effie blushed and swallowed the butterflies that had replaced the hunger in her belly.

  “Five more left,” she murmured back, and he leaned into her lips once again. “But right now, I need food.”