The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

“Oh Christ,” said the man Lizzie, now writhing in giggles, was leaning on. “What have I missed?”

  He set his belongings down, took a seat at the head of the table, and listened while they explained to him. The fact of the wedding—the textured Provençal invitation had dropped promptly into the chrome mailbox at his apartment block a few months ago—then the undoing of it: an email sent a week ago that he had not received. Their arrival at the Oratoire and what it had contained. The parts they could remember and those they couldn’t. The situation they had found themselves in this morning and the one he had just arrived to, fresh and unburdened.

  Effie found that usually, with even the very worst hangover, the fact of relating the events that had led up to it—of spreading the pain, diffusing the shame—could ease some of the next-day anxiety. But explaining the scene to Bertie assuaged none of the nagging culpability she felt.

  As they described to him what they had awoken to, Bertie’s face performed an entire routine in mime, from disappointment and suspicion to shock—then sympathy. Simple, earnest worry, and pity, for the woman at the heart of it: Lizzie, his favorite cousin, who he hadn’t seen in a year or more.

  “We were so close,” Lizzie said, as if to him but for the benefit of the group once he had been introduced to all of them, in turn, around the table. “But then he got this bloody job so far away, and we never see each other anymore.”

  Bertie cleared his throat. “Well, ah, that actually is about to change,” he said with a modest grin. “Because I’m moving back at the end of the summer.”

  “Where from?” Anna asked from farther along the table, as though he were one of her witnesses. Effie saw that she was making a character sketch, deciding how useful he might be for the task ahead.

  “Shanghai,” he offered. “Seconded there by my firm. Privacy law. That’s why I didn’t know the wedding was off—I didn’t get the email.” He spread his hands and turned to his cousin. “I can’t access that account over there, Liz—the Chinese have got this giant firewall, so I use a different one. Didn’t Mum tell you?”

  Lizzie’s exasperated expression told them all they needed to know about how au fait Bertie’s mother was with the tech legislation of the country in which her son worked.

  “She only ever shows me your postcards,” she said with a smile, then studied her hands in her lap, morose again.

  “I’m so sorry you had to call it off, Lizbet,” he murmured, and reached out to hold one of them.

  “We call her that too!” Effie exclaimed. It was the first time she had spoken since Bertie had arrived.

  He was looking at her along the table with the sort of friendly compassion she had missed lately. Anna and Lizzie had been so busy these past six months; Effie didn’t blame them for it—it was a fact of thirty-something life. They had done what they could—a couple of nights each with her every week for the first month or so after James had gone. But then, back to their own lives again.

  Effie had heard about Bertie for years but never met him. Lizzie’s bright, slightly fusty, but unwaveringly loyal cousin was the only other person who knew about what had happened at university. He had done as much for Lizzie over the holidays that summer as Effie had in the turbulent weeks that led up to it. Meeting him finally was like finding a missing bookend of a pair: together they had held up the bride before, and they could do so again.

  She noticed the effect that fresh masculinity in the group had had on Ben. He seemed stirred by Bertie’s presence in a way that smacked of jealousy. Effie doubted her instincts at first, but then he shifted closer to her on the bench, laid a hand over hers on the tabletop, then draped an arm around her shoulders as though they were high school boyfriend and girlfriend. He was marking his territory, and the realization made Effie pathetically grateful. The attention made her feel more alive than she had since James had left.

  Not that Ben had anything to worry about: Bertie was dressed much like Effie’s dad did on holidays. Chinos!

  Effie reached one hand up to her hair, wiry and straggling where she had dragged it into a ponytail without washing it that morning, and from there traced the dry skin of her nose, the flakes of last night’s makeup still on her cheeks. Of course Bertie seemed sympathetic: she looked like a vagrant.

  “I should shower,” she said, to nobody in particular.

  “We all should,” Anna replied. “We’ll feel a bit more human after that. Then we can figure out what to do with all this…stuff.” She gestured around the hall at the trestles and stacked flatware.

  “Before we do, has anybody seen the rings?” Lizzie’s voice piped urgently. “Only they cost an absolute bomb. They were on the”—here, she swallowed thickly and grimaced—“altar yesterday, right? I really need that refund.”

  “They were,” Effie said. “I saw them there. But not this morning.”

  “I’m sure they’ll turn up,” Anna said quickly, reassuringly. “They have to be in the house somewhere.”

  “Well, look, I can help with all that,” Bertie offered. “Fresh pair of eyes and all that. Fresher than some.” He met Charlie’s bloodshot gaze and took in his burgeoning five o’clock shadow. “But I’ll need some food first. Is there anything here, or do we need to go to the shops?”

  The prospect of facing the platters once more was too much for Iso, who groaned and heaved her light frame from the bench, then skipped through the doorway behind the table, into the utility room and lavatory behind it—from where the delicate sounds of the wedding breakfast’s third reappearance echoed through to them.

  Bertie directed a mock grimace in Effie’s direction; she sensed again in him a kindness and human interest her life had been sorely lacking. Ben had brought the heat back into her life, but Bertie reminded her of the importance of warmth. They were different things, she realized with a start.

  Given the tremulous state she had woken up in, and the blur and rising dread of what she might have done the previous night, Effie needed another friend—a friend less mired in their own problems—almost as much as she felt a pressing urgency to be away from the house and the various men she’d arrived with.

  Lizzie shook her head in answer to Bertie’s question. “No proper food here,” she muttered. “If only the hog roast had turned up. Though I suppose we should be grateful that it didn’t—one less thing to try and get rid of.”

  “And we’ll need more than party bits to see us through the week,” Effie conceded. “Le supermarché it is.”

  “You’re a saint,” Ben said before she could suggest that he accompany them. “I can’t face it, I’m afraid, but I’m sure you don’t need me tagging along.”

  It wasn’t quite the perfect boyfriend reaction she had hoped for, but she smiled the niggle away; as intoxicating an effect as he had on her, Effie needed some space.

  “Come on,” she said to Bertie. “I’ll drive.”

  * * *

  —

  Effie worried, as she stepped out into the sunshine on foal-like legs, that the offer to shop had been an act of hubris she wouldn’t actually be able to carry out. That the alcohol still coursing round her body would bring her out in a cold sweat, persuade the digestive juices back into her mouth once more, and frustrate her goal of getting out of the beautiful holiday home that had begun to feel a bit like a tomb.

  The warm, golden air slapped her like a heavy-duty duvet being thrown over her head, cozy but stifling, and she was glad when the car’s efficient air-conditioning kicked in to temper it. Effie found that the act of driving—something she hated and habitually avoided wherever possible—distracted her from the tides of nausea deep within and the ebb and flow of remorse crashing away on top. As they left the château and the bars of reception ticked up on her phone screen, she wondered briefly whether James might have been in touch again.

  “So,” Bertie said, stretching his khaki-clad legs out in front of hi
m once Effie had found her way off the tracks and winding narrow lanes near the house to what constituted the closest main road into the neighboring town. “Heavy night, was it?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” she replied neatly, nudging the car up a gear as the road flattened out in front of them. She had so far avoided mentioning to anybody where she had woken up, or the suggestion that—for some of the night, at least—there had been somebody lying beside her.

  It wasn’t just Charlie’s request to her in the kitchen that had persuaded her not to air the general outline of what she suspected had taken place between them; it was the disappointed, judgmental look she knew she’d receive from Anna if she did. Anna, who couldn’t remember what being single felt like. Who had forgotten how to appreciate the luxury of sleeping next to someone—the same someone!—every night. Who had met Steve so long ago she’d never used a dating app, never even opened one up, let alone had her flaws clinically assessed by men of indistinguishable age who sent uninvited pictures of their shriveled cocks. Anna, who clearly disapproved of Effie’s being with Ben because of his link to Dan, but who had the luxury of no longer needing to market herself like a secondhand car surrounded by models fresh off the lot.

  “What a place!” Bertie breathed as they drove through the countryside. “What perfect scenery.”

  How at odds with their environment the seven pale and rueful faces must have looked when he walked in, staring back at him from where they huddled in the dark around the table like creatures of the deep, when there was glorious French sunshine to bask in only yards away behind the door. Effie began to laugh at the image, and when she explained it, Bertie did too.

  “I’d sort of forgotten what British drinking culture is like,” he said. “There are plenty of other expats in Shanghai, but I realized pretty soon that I didn’t like most of them.”

  They had exported their native need to get regularly and destructively sloshed with them, he explained, just as they had shipped their grand pianos and artworks to their new homes.

  “I like a couple of beers of an evening—perhaps a few more on very special occasions,” he told Effie, and she squirmed with internal shame. “But, ugh, none of those sticky shots.”

  Effie felt him contemplating her as she sat at the wheel, wondering perhaps what it was this nervous, skinny woman was so keen to get away from—and whether she realized she’d never be able to leave her own thoughts behind.

  With the car parked and a coin found to activate a shopping cart of proportions usually reserved for the Christmas haul, they stood at the entrance to the supermarket. Even the discounts looked exotic.

  For Effie, French supermarkets were a happy place. They reminded her of childhood holidays spent exploring the aisles, the new tastes and aromas they promised. Oregano and citronella. Sea-creature floats she and her brother would take to the beach once and puncture immediately. Pristine, perfect stationery she’d beg her parents for so she could keep a holiday journal, but that she’d invariably ruin with the first clumsy strokes of her juvenile handwriting.

  Now she was fascinated by the gadgets—a salad spinner, a twist-in lemon juicer—that here were considered fundamental to human existence but that at home would be puzzled over and prodded like something washed ashore. Effie loved the newness of foreign brands, trusted the generosity of packaging she had never seen before over the crabbed, penny-pinching labels she recognized from England. There was a sense of bounty to shops in France: the brimming bins of plump and plentiful produce here were quite different from the insipid, uniform groceries available from the shop at the end of her road in London, where gray commuters fumbled even grayer fruit and veg into polyethylene bags under blinking strip lights.

  Effie felt her headache begin to recede from simply being in the presence of so many antioxidants.

  The picking of fruit, the counting of portions, the meal planning, the meat selecting, the demi-fluent translation of cooking instructions and serving suggestions made for an easy and companionable hour or so, and Effie almost forgot the circumstances that had thrown Bertie and her together, the confusion that awaited them back at the house.

  “What made her do it?” Bertie asked Effie somewhere between the cheese and an admirably comprehensive zone devoted entirely to breadsticks. “Why did she call things off?”

  Effie looked up from the packet she was reading. “She hasn’t said. Nothing specific, at least—just says they had their doubts.” She unhooked three baguettes from where they stood in a sort of baker’s umbrella stand and added them to the trolley. “There’s something, though. Something happened. Lizzie was different after the engagement party, but she won’t talk about it. Not to me, at least.”

  “Then I won’t press her on it either,” Bertie replied. “But that reminds me…”

  He looked left and right. They had finally—after at least three tunnels of wine, along which Effie had felt her lymph nodes begin to shrivel—reached the no-man’s-land end of the supermarket’s hangar, where children’s clothing and sports equipment jostled for space on the shelves with televisions and smaller white goods. Bertie craned his neck to see to the end of the next aisle, then pulled the now-cumbersome and willfully wheeled cart with him down a dark aisle decorated at one end with a spray of cheap gardening gloves.

  “Here we go!” Bertie selected a large ring-bound notepad from a display. From a nearby shelf he picked up a pack of indelible marker pens, which Effie knew, even through their plastic wrap, would smell of her office back at the school.

  She frowned at him. “Are we going to start taking a roll call every day?”

  “This”—he smiled, tossing the pad onto the mountain of food that would feed their number for the next week—“is how we work out where those wedding rings have gone. Who saw them last, where, and when. Helps me think better. We’ll build a timeline that will tell us everything you drunken sots have forgotten!”

  He beamed at her, arms spread wide and pleased with himself, and Effie had to concentrate on not bursting into tears, just as she had practiced every day at her desk these past six months.

  Bertie’s enthusiasm was so wholesome—his entire personality so sensible—that he reminded Effie of the shame she had felt on waking that morning. She had yet to tell anybody what she remembered of last night, and the fact of it made her feel dirty and soiled all over again. All the self-loathing of the morning and the anxiety—of the half-year she had spent living under that feeling as though pinned to the spot by it—washed over her once more. The desolation, the sadness, the drinks, and the regrettable, sordid dealings they had led to.

  It was all Effie could do not to cling to Bertie as if he were a life buoy, a kindly flotation device in the shape of a grown-up.

  They paid for and bagged up their shopping, then drove back to the Oratoire, in silence.

  20.

  Anna

  Anna was spying on Iso when she first noticed Lizzie’s behavior. Watching, waiting. The former bride was frozen like an animal caught in the open, stock-still until the moment of threat has passed.

  After taking a deliberate time-out from suffering stonily alongside the others to go and sit on the bed she had slept in—alone—the previous night and cry in a quiet and businesslike way, Anna dried her eyes and moved over to the window, from where she could look down at the scene by the pool from a distance.

  Her husband was asleep on one of the loungers, wearing his faded paisley swimming trunks with yet another grotty old band T-shirt, one flip-flop hanging off his left big toe over the edge of the sunbed. He had tried to talk to her again after lunch, after Effie had left with the cousin.

  She had brushed Steve off again, hadn’t wanted to discuss it until she knew she would be able to speak to him without a torrent of unrelated resentments shooting forth and knocking him off his feet. It didn’t seem fair to pelt him with the issues she thought she’d left at ho
me with her little boy. Then again, what had last night crystallized but her well-developed sense of losing him to another woman? Had whatever happened last night happened because he was full of his own complaints too?

  Anna looked down at Ben, handsome but slack-mouthed in sleep on another lounger. She had seen the way Effie opened like a flower in sunshine when he looked at her, how his company and attention had given her friend back the warm coat of confidence she had been lacking in the months since her breakup. Anna hoped he wouldn’t let her down.

  She shifted her gaze to Charlie, sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling in the water. He had managed to soak up the ambience like bread in oil; his olive skin was already a shade darker, and his chocolatey crop of hair seemed almost jet black, just like one of the locals. A beautiful man, but a flighty one. Anna smiled affectionately as he slipped under the water, part athlete, part clown.

  Then she regarded Iso, splashing serenely nearby, lying on a hot pink inflatable she had brought with her in her suitcase—“a great prop for photos,” she had explained before persuading Charlie to blow it up for her.

  How he hadn’t brought up a lung—or yet more of the half-digested wedding breakfast, given the state he was in—while doing so had been a mystery to every onlooker. Yet more curious to them, though, was how this woman, the one who had woken up naked with somebody else’s husband, had managed to charm her still-devoted boyfriend into doing her this favor. Their relationship seemed—so far—unpunctured by recent events, much like the inflatable; although Anna knew from a brief and testy sojourn at a holiday camp with Sonny and her parents last summer (while her three sisters had been abroad with their spouses) that those things never stayed intact for long.

  She had gone with Sonny’s grandparents to Oakwood Lake Cottages because Steve had been away covering yet another music festival—one that, before Sonny, they had been in the habit of going to together but that he now “reported from” alone. As if he were on the front line with a notebook and pen rather than crowd-surfing and bar-hopping. Holidaying with her parents rather than her husband had felt like a teenage regression—Anna had spoken to them in much the same appalling tones as she had during those difficult years, and she had been mortified by her behavior by the time the holiday was over. But it had been necessary to go: sheer survival tactics in the face of a week of solo childcare.