The others were casting around for tasks and, finding none left to do in the Hall, also began to mutter about eating—but as Effie pulled herself upright, there came a screech and the banging of a door from the upstairs landing, in the direction of the bedrooms.
Whatever it was Lizzie held in her shaking hand when she appeared, ashen, at the top of the stairs was too small to see at a distance, even though the former bride held it out away from her in disgusted horror.
“This is fucking sick,” she called, her voice trembling as much as her outstretched fist. “Sick! What the fuck did I do to deserve this?”
As Effie skittered closer and reached out an arm to guide Lizzie, her teary eyes making her steps unsteady, down the stone staircase, she peered into the other woman’s palm.
The bride figurine from the top of the three-tiered cake, in her sculpted ivory crinoline, and the groom in his black tie.
There was little about Lizzie’s wedding that was bridal in the frilly sense; she had an allergy to anything remotely naff, so even the traditional elements had been streamlined and modernized according to her stringently clean-lines tastes. But the cake decorations had been Lizzie’s one piece of kitsch: she’d found a website that promised to 3D-print the bride and groom’s faces onto a pair of tiny statuettes, using their passport photos. Gleefully, Lizzie had scanned in hers and Dan’s mug shots—“he looks like a murderer in his!” she trilled over the phone to Effie—and she cackled uproariously when the tiny imitations came through and, predictably enough, looked nothing like either of them. She regaled everyone with the story, and even made a photo of the little “Dan” face, with its vacant expression and painted-on beard; it became the one that flashed up whenever her fiancé called her.
Now, though, Effie had to agree that the figures in Lizzie’s hand looked nothing like her and Dan, but that was mainly because they had been—quite carefully and ruthlessly, it seemed—decapitated.
“They were on my pillow.” Lizzie’s voice quavered as she shrugged Effie’s arm off her shoulders and stepped away. “Left on my fucking pillow.”
Effie looked again at the statuettes, their heads so neatly struck—sawn?—from their bodies like doomed Tudor queens. It had been done too precisely on each of them for it to have been anything other than expressly intended.
Effie shuddered: she knew angry drunk people were capable of horrible things, and they had all been very drunk.
But who had been this angry?
18.
Anna
Anna felt a chill in the bottom of her stomach when she heard the scream. Scrambling from the kitchen into the Hall, she saw Lizzie’s anxious, blotched face, the headless figurines held in one palm out in front of her. Anna reached an arm to her, but she found she didn’t have the words to soothe this woman she loved so well and felt she now understood so little. The woman who had made the biggest decision of her life—to cancel her wedding—without telling her two best friends first. Without even warning them it was about to happen.
“God, how horrible.” Behind Anna, Steve stepped into the room—ever kind, ever mindful of everybody else’s feelings—from where he had been rinsing dishes at the kitchen sink. “I’m so sorry, Lizzie. For what it’s worth, this would have been an amazing wedding. You must have worked so hard on it.”
Anna’s heart clenched to a tiny dried-out raisin.
The only thing you cared about at ours was whether we had the right audio cables for the DJ.
Which font on the invites? Which flowers? Which tablecloths, which napkins? Which blackboard for the seating plan? Which cousin is it your Auntie Joan can’t stand? Anna had simply stopped asking Steve in the end, so that she wouldn’t have to see him shrug. He didn’t know a ranunculus from a hydrangea, and he didn’t care. The fact that she didn’t either hadn’t seemed to matter after a while: one of them had to, so the wedding became her job, just the way the supermarket shopping, the Christmas cards, and the thinking three steps ahead for Sonny would eventually, too.
If her marriage were a contract she was looking over for a client, she would tell them to run for the hills.
None of it mattered on the day, of course. Anna had barely thought of the hours she had put in, stenciling chalk foliage, stamping placement cards and calligraphing menus; barely thought of the spreadsheet, the to-do list, and the invoices to pay as they and their guests enjoyed the eye-wateringly marked-up fruits of her unpaid labor. It was only as she’d read Sonny his fairy tales recently, then stayed up half the night working on his nursery school Book Day costume, which they had all forgotten about, that she’d realized who in her and Steve’s relationship was the elves and who the shoemaker.
That Steve had managed to run Celia down to the fancy dress shop in the car that afternoon to get supplies for Olwen’s costume and still not thought to do Sonny’s led to a full-blown row. But he was reviewing a gig for work that night, so Anna had glued the tinfoil sword together after she’d put their son to bed, Anna had attached feathers to the makeshift Robin Hood hat after she’d finished reading up on her latest case at work, and Anna had felt utterly taken for granted all the while.
She brushed yet more scattered petals from the kitchen table now and remembered the surprise of the confetti on her wedding day: that such a moment could feel like such an onslaught. And that was even before she’d encountered her divorced cousin standing at the end of the human walkway deliberately throwing sharp grains of easy-cook rice right into her face.
As the photo-op debris had drifted to her feet, encased under her skirts in a pair of icicle-gray satin ballet slippers (the closest she’d come to “something blue”—it hadn’t matched her color scheme), Anna’s bridesmaids had struggled to pull the petals, grains, foil hearts, and paper Cupids free of the carefully tonged tendrils of curly hair in which they had nested, to brush them from where they had pebble-dashed the gauzy sleeves of her elegant gown, and to surreptitiously excavate them from the line of her cleavage before they showed up in the photos like a lewd joke.
Anna had felt a welter of emotions that day, but the confetti shower left her shaken with its vague hint of aggression and the niggling feeling that, had the guests been holding buckets of slops, they might have emptied those over her and Steve too. Perhaps she had imagined it, but somewhere just beneath the goodwill and drunken euphoria of their guests had lurked the subtlest note of resentment at their happiness. Anna struggled to pinpoint its provenance, but had registered it anxiously nonetheless.
She looked at her husband as he returned to the suds and the dirty plates in the sink. She wasn’t ready to let him back into her heart yet—not until he had explained to her what on earth had happened for him and Iso to have been so thoroughly divested of their clothes at the same time and in the same place. Anna picked up a serving dish of tapenade from the side and plastic-wrapped it vengefully, before carrying it across the stone room to the larder.
“You can’t seriously think I would do that to you?” Steve followed her into the coolness of the little pantry, and pleaded with her. They were surrounded by white shelves neatly stacked with dry goods as bystanders to watch them question the vows they had made.
“I’m not the one not being serious,” Anna sighed. “You showed up semi-naked this morning, not me. What on earth am I supposed to think you were doing with her in that state?”
At this, Steve was forced to admit that he had no idea what he had been doing, what had happened. “But what about trust, Anna?”
“What about it?” she said, thrusting the greasy bowl of tapenade at him. The wine-like fumes from it brought acid to the back of his teeth, and by the time he swallowed it away again, she had pushed past him and returned to cleaning-up.
It hadn’t exactly been easy for him, she reasoned, adjusting to life—and wife—after a baby. Steve prided himself on sidestepping the usual pitfalls of modern masculinity that Anna’s friends r
ailed against in her all-female group chats; she knew that as the two of them sat together on the couch, he read the messages as they came in, peering over her shoulder, his eyes slid right over in his skull until they watered and felt like he’d stretched them out on their stalks.
The other mums in her toddler group complained about their husbands’ socks everywhere, about their sleeping in, their pawing at them as much as the little children did. Of requiring far more attention than even the most grisly teething baby.
Steve didn’t do that. He waited passively—often in vain—until Anna showed him physical affection, and he tried to take his cues from her. He woke up and washed up, did nursery runs so she could get into the City early, before the crowds she so hated sharing trains with. He wrote his articles at home so he could also cook and clean, to make up for the travel he sometimes had to agree to for work. She knew that he loved her, simply but doggedly.
Still it never seemed to be what Anna wanted, and she wondered—with a regularity that made her angry with herself—whether in fact she’d prefer him to be a dick, a bore, an ungrateful, unheeding brute to her, just so she’d have something real to rail against. Instead, Steve seemed happy to be a punching bag when Anna needed him to be—he could see what her job did to her head and what Sonny had to her body (a body he nevertheless considered with near-religious awe when he thought she wasn’t looking). He wanted to make it up to her, and he wanted to be her friend, at least sometimes, too.
Anna could see that the fact that she had all too readily assumed the very worst about him and Iso although those kitschy purple towels had hidden the details of it had made Steve indignant. She found that reassuring: irritation was better than guiltily accepting his wrongdoing. Less reassuring was the fact that Steve clearly didn’t remember the full story.
Iso was attractive; that was not in doubt. What an attractive woman could do to even a comatose man was a question for the biologists. It wasn’t like he was used to that area being regularly disturbed.
Ha! Not for months.
Anna had sensed in her husband, in the years since his small son had been born, the horror of temptation—at a bare shoulder here, a glossy lip there, Celia’s laugh and the way she tucked her hair behind her ear. If they walked past a beautiful woman in the park, he would look at the ground like a medieval friar while Anna held herself so straight she felt brittle in the wind. Other people’s sexiness hung in the air between them like a reproach, a veil they had to communicate through. Even hours later, Steve’s guilty adrenaline coursed in waves like an aftershock around the body he had promised in eternity to his wife—the very same flesh he offered forlornly to share with her every so often, and was consistently rebuffed.
Shaking the thoughts from her mind, Anna laid out a lunch consisting of the same platters they had spent the morning clearing away. Given the toxins still coursing through them all—now topped up with the nervy unease the violently dismembered cake couple had sown among the group—nobody felt particularly excited to see the food again, but a few hours’ work had fostered appetites in even the most unsettled stomachs.
Rustic olive-painted plates were piled high or low, depending on how weak their owners still felt, then taken back through to the tables in the Hall. The wedding party, as Anna had come to think of them all, sat along each side of one wooden table on benches recently straightened and picked at dried-out crudités—as much a victim of the previous night’s excesses as they were—in silence.
As the sun rose and, with it, the heat of the day, the crickets outside the pale house increased their volume to an earsplitting pitch, until the surly diners could no longer hear their own thoughts. It was a reprieve of sorts.
As they chewed their food and mopped it up from their plates, scooped the dregs of the wedding spread into their mouths, the recognition of another noise dawned on each of them slowly, like moonlight over a hilltop. They looked askance at one another as if to check they were correct, as if their senses had become as tricksy as their memories had over the past day or so. As if they could no more trust their own instincts than they could the other people in the room.
The rumbling came from outside, a low grumble peppered with cracks and bangs every so often, like scratches on a record or the looping pops of one left to rotate long after its tracks have played out. It became louder and more regular, until it crescendoed near the door at the far end of the Hall—where the rental cars were parked.
The pops had been the stones on the dusty drive crunching under the weight of wheels, the rumble an engine as a vehicle—a new one—pulled up once more outside the Oratoire.
“Are you expecting anyone?” Anna asked pointedly of Lizzie, her gray eyes boring into the woman whose canceled life event had brought them all here and had now cast aspersions—and a fair share of doom and gloom—over each of them.
“I don’t know, Anna,” she replied tetchily. “I don’t know what’s going on. It isn’t my wedding anymore. I’m not the one inviting surprise guests.”
Lizzie looked at Ben briefly, then testily at Effie, and Anna sensed from her friend’s expression that lunch had begun to coagulate guiltily in the bottom of Effie’s stomach.
“Maybe it’s Marie,” Effie offered, with groggy enthusiasm at the potential arrival of someone who might seem to be in charge.
“Maybe she’s come to collect all this stuff,” ventured Steve.
Once the wedding’s architecture was gone, Anna thought, the shadow it had cast over the holiday might lift, too. Her nightly circuit of their house to stuff Sonny’s cuddly animals and pull-along toys into their storage boxes, to reunite his pens with their caps and each shoe with the other, often acted like calming yogi breaths on her mood.
Steve stood, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and softly burped some of the hungover indigestion away from where it had bubbled up, listening as the noise appeared again in reverse: from loud to quieter, a regular purr to one pitted with the fits and starts of the loose shale on the driveway. The car—or whatever it had been—was leaving again.
They continued to watch the front door, all turned toward its blank and pocked medieval panels as though they were a television screen—or, at least, a window that might give some clue as to what was going on beyond it. As the only person to have fought off the postprandial stupor—which was technically also a preprandial stupor—and to have successfully launched himself upright, Steve made his way from the table toward the door in the archway.
“Might as well see if we can tell who it was,” he said as the noise receded further.
But as he drew closer to the dark wood, there came a shrieking noise as the rusty metal ring of a handle was lifted on the exterior and turned—with some reluctance, it sounded like, from the wail of complaining iron. A chink of light appeared on the stone flags beneath, an acute angle of white on gray that grew longer and larger across the floor, before slanting toward the rows of expectant faces still seated at the table as surely as a needle on a compass.
The door to the Great Hall swung open and revealed a figure within its Gothic frame.
Bracketed by the bright lunchtime sunshine behind, the figure’s face and hair color were hidden in shadow.
In his seat at the near end of the table, Charlie addressed the newcomer.
“Hello?” he asked.
19.
Effie
Lizzie sat very still. Her arms framed her body, clamped to it and rigid; she was anchored by hands that gripped the wooden bench as tightly as claws.
Her eyes were fearful, but as they adjusted to the light, the scenario, the incoming visitor, the strain between them that had caused her delicate brow to rumple into a solitary vertical wrinkle relaxed. Her forehead was ironed smooth once more.
Lizzie breathed out, brought her hands to her chest in a gesture of relief.
“Bertie!” she giggled, and the sound was the first
unforced laugh—the first easy, uncomplicated cheeriness—they had heard all day.
Lizzie climbed delicately out from behind the table and made her way toward the rosy-cheeked, ginger-haired man in the doorway. His shirtsleeves were rolled up his forearms; he had a sun hat in one hand, a useless iPhone and a paper map in the other. A small silver suitcase stood by his side.
“What are you doing here?” Lizzie smiled, approached him swift and fleet. She dropped a kiss on each of his cheeks, reached her arms up his solid torso to the height of those wide shoulders and folded the new arrival into a hug.
“Congratulations!” he boomed, his voice a male equivalent of hers—soft but strong, wealthy and well-to-do, but rounded by life. Friendly and guileless.
At first Effie felt a tug of confusion, and she tried, through her hangover, to fathom who he might be speaking to, who he might be congratulating.
When nobody replied, his expectant face fell slightly. “Lizzie, I’m so sorry I’m late,” he offered earnestly. “My plane was delayed….Some kind of bloody electrical storm. I can’t believe I missed it. I’m so so sorry.”
Almost immediately, the truth dawned: he had come for the wedding, the one that was supposed to have happened yesterday—Lizzie’s. And Dan’s.
“You didn’t get the email,” Lizzie gasped. “Oh my God, Bertie, you didn’t get the email!”
There was a pitch of hysteria to her—her throat cracked with emotion and her shoulders began to shake—but it became rapidly obvious, as she leaned on the newly arrived Bertie for support and tried to gasp her next breath, that she was laughing rather than crying.
Effie saw across the table that Charlie’s features had brightened in mischief at the mistake, too; she found her own mouth tugging upward at the unfolding awkward but delicious gaffe that had given them some light relief from their own problems.
The Wedding Night Page 9