The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  “Perhaps you’re right, Anna,” said Bertie, putting his pen down. “Unless you remember seeing them, Effie? Where did you end up last night?”

  Thickly and painfully, Effie swallowed the morsel she had been chewing for what felt like hours. It was as big as a cannonball against the rawness of a throat that had been stripped by digestive acid for much of the morning. She flicked a glance at Charlie, but his gaze was resolutely on the glistening remnants of the meal cooling on the serving plate in the middle of the table.

  “Me?” Effie tried to sound insouciant, as if the next part was oh-so-casual. As if she’d planned it “for banter,” as the sports teachers at Coral Hill so often claimed of their lame practical jokes. She considered using the phrase now, and decided against it. “Oh I, err…woke up in the honeymoon suite.”

  Wish I had a glass of wine to wash that down with, she thought, but she managed to stay her hand from reaching toward the bottle.

  The table was silent, its length framed by two rows of intrigued faces staring back at her like jurors along the bench, and Bertie at its head, desperately trying to arrange his face into something more neutral than the curiosity that had briefly trespassed across it.

  “Really?” said Ben, almost admiringly.

  “The honeymoon suite?” Anna cried. “What on earth took you up there?”

  What—or who?

  In the seat to Bertie’s left, Lizzie tried to conceal her hurt at that white, future-filled sanctum having been defiled. She gulped another mouthful of wine, and when she eventually spoke, her voice was low and sad. “Fuck’s sake, Eff. Did you have to?”

  Effie glanced up from her shame just in time to see Ben’s eyes shift to her face from Lizzie’s.

  “Okay, never mind!” Bertie cut in, and Effie was grateful to him for at least the third time that day. “The rings will definitely be around here somewhere, like Anna says.”

  At the foot of the table, Charlie raised his eyes slowly and meaningfully, in that way that he had. The way that Lizzie, Anna, and Effie all remembered admiring during the brief window in which they had fancied him when their paths first crossed his at university. That window had closed after a matter of weeks—first when he had taken up with Effie—and then been sealed afterward, by which time they were more like sisters, and he had proceeded to parade a steady stream of more attractive women back and forth along the corridor they all shared.

  The look had always suggested that he had something much more important to be getting on with. Charlie had done it over bars and books at them, across board games and birthday cakes, for as long as they had known him. In the olden days, it had been accompanied by a smoke ring, perhaps, or a wink, but this time it seemed uncharacteristically serious. One second passed, then two—then finally the right-hand corner of Charlie’s mouth ticked up as though attached to a puppeteer’s string.

  He gave a wry half-laugh. “Well, I woke up in one of the back bedrooms all by myself. No memory of even going upstairs. Christ, I was obliterated.”

  He returned his gaze to his plate, mopping at it with a hunk of baguette. Iso continued to look at him long after he had finished speaking.

  “Just to say,” she began quietly, then cleared her throat. “Just to say, my clothes weren’t actually in the room with me and Steve.” The rest of the table looked at her, a perfectly symmetrical face floating in the dark among the glasses on the table, the flickering night-lights reflected in the dark pools of her eyes.

  She’s so beautiful. Effie’s heart pinched for Anna, and she felt a dim nausea that was unconnected to the hangover she had gradually shrugged off over the course of the day.

  “My stuff was all out here, on the table near the pool,” Iso continued. “I went for a swim—I know that was stupid of me, late at night and under the influence…”

  Here she held both palms up. “I’d forgotten about it, but once I charged my phone this morning, I saw on the camera that I got Steve and Ben to take some pictures for me.”

  Effie’s stomach slid to her feet. Of course Ben had been enlisted to take those photos: with his looks, he was far better suited to Iso than to Effie. She tried to smile brightly as he awkwardly attempted a neutral expression, but the home truth sank into her skin like butter on hot toast—even as his hand continued to lie warmly on her leg. Under the table, he began to trace circles on her thigh; despite herself, Effie felt the hairs on her neck stand on end in response.

  “Pictures?” Anna squawked. “Of you naked?”

  “No!” Iso replied quickly. “Well, yes, but not so you can see. Just me in the pool, nothing that would break the rules on Instagram, you know.”

  “You can’t show nipples,” Charlie offered darkly.

  “But they’re all really blurry because they were both so drunk. So I got out and Steve and I fell asleep on the sofas. Separate sofas. Nothing more.”

  Steve looked hopefully at his wife, and she offered in return a cold contempt that was even more unsettling than her earlier anger.

  “Well,” Bertie said, and then: “Well. You’re all still recovering. Not feeling quite—”

  “Average to low, is what I’m feeling,” Lizzie interrupted him. “So, on that note, I’m going up to bed.”

  As she pushed back her chair and carried her plate inside, Effie wondered whether she should go after her friend, to apologize for sleeping in that misused, petal-strewn four-poster. But what would she say to Lizzie’s inevitable line of questioning? She still didn’t know the answers herself.

  Effie also considered chasing after her to apologize for bringing her ex-fiancé’s best friend on a holiday that was supposed to be about moving on. She had noticed the two of them, Lizzie and Ben, orbiting each other as though they were repellent ends of magnets: never quite coming together, politely avoiding any interactions beyond the most phatic, staying carefully out of the way or folding themselves closed should they have to pass one another. Effie felt suddenly slightly ashamed at the prospect of sharing her room with Ben that night.

  Later, with the dishes washed and the kitchen wiped down, the group began to disperse for the night as the moon rose, large, white, and looming over the ancient building and the valley below. The terrace looked as cold and hard in silver by night as it did warm and golden under daytime’s touch.

  As Effie crossed the Hall and climbed the stairs to bed, she was overwhelmed by the weariness she had thus far staved off. This natural tiredness had eluded her for as long as she had been determined to turn in to bed half-cut and booze-wired, and she reveled in the warm heaviness that had been earned as surely as the hangover it was replacing, rather than induced by a gulp of pills.

  Earlier in the day, Effie had selected a more suitable room for the rest of her stay, one toward the back of the house that was furnished with two twin beds, given that the double rooms were all taken. The one Charlie must have slept in last night. She hoped furiously that he had been telling the truth, but the hairs on the pillow next to her….

  Sleeping in either single bed would be a depressingly solitary experience, but a less loaded, less incriminating one than last night’s choice. The door to the honeymoon suite had remained firmly closed ever since she had scurried in and straightened the sheets—beat the clefts out of each of the pillows—earlier that afternoon.

  Now, at the top of the stairs that led back into the Hall, Effie glanced up to see Charlie in the corridor, bed-ready in T-shirt and boxer shorts, rumpled and weary. There was a new dash of salt and pepper in his hair, she noticed, but he looked as boyish as ever. When he saw her appear, he beamed and strode toward her.

  “Effie—” He took her arm just below the elbow and bent his dark head to look deep into her eyes.

  A swirling of memories dormant for so long. For years. Silt in water stirred up again. But rather than dredging up any sort of romantic feelings for Charlie, Effie simply felt a throb
of guilt and fear course through her. Guilt that she might have ruined what she had with Ben; fear that he might find out.

  “Effie.” Charlie’s voice was hoarse, an urgent whisper, and she suddenly knew how it would have played the previous night between two people so drunk it seemed the right thing to do. Guilt-edged desire, all the more charged and less rational for its secrecy, its swiftness. Its unexpectedness.

  Charlie’s breath was warm on her cheek, and she cringed from his closeness, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “Sorry I was so drunk last night,” he said hurriedly, checking the corridor anxiously in case anybody else appeared. “Hardly my usual suave self, eh? Thanks for a fun time though, Eff. G’night.”

  He walked away from her before she had time to even open her eyes again, and closed the door to his room—his and Iso’s room—before she could even register what he meant. Disappeared before she knew quite what had happened. Again.

  The scream was so short and so sudden Effie wondered whether it had come from her.

  Immediately, Charlie was replaced in the corridor by another shape. Steve in a dressing gown, ejected from a nearby room on the left as forcefully as if he had been shoved out from someone on the other side of its door. When he was joined by Anna seconds later, Effie realized he had been.

  His expression was stricken, his wife’s eyes wide with fear.

  The scream had come from the kitchen. Suddenly the landing was full of people again.

  By the time Effie—rooted in place—had hurtled down the stairs and reached the others, they had done the gruesome work of discovery for her. She looked at the scene in the scullery through eyes that had deliberately lost their focus, sparing her the details of it. Ben pulled her to him as she entered the room.

  “I—I—I was just looking for some ice,” Iso stammered.

  Charlie wrapped her in his arms, eyes fixed in wide consternation on the spot in front of them, the open freezer chest. Next to them, Steve reeled backward when he saw what was inside it.

  Some way off, Anna pressed her fingers over her mouth. Her eyes made an inquiry of her husband. Effie tiptoed forward.

  Inside the freezer, the pale pink of flesh, wrinkles of skin.

  “What the f—” Charlie swallowed the contents of an unbidden gag.

  Two cloudy, lifeless eyes looked back at them from the head lying on a pillow of ice. A gaping mouth and teeth bared in a limp, dark, silent scream, matched by a savage slit and empty cavity in the abdomen.

  The body was eerily bloodless, drained of its life force before it had been dumped.

  Delivered, Effie corrected herself, not dumped.

  Bertie staggered in to join them, and then Lizzie pushed wildly through the crowd they had formed, a specter in a white nightgown with a blanched, frightened complexion to match.

  “Oh,” she said in a dull monotone, her fear turning to a tired grimace. “The hog roast did turn up.”

  Two Days After

  23.

  Anna

  “Shall we go out today?” Lizzie asked that morning, spacey despite having woken up well after the rest of them. Sleeping pills again. She dug her hand into the brown paper bag of croissants Steve had brought back from the village for their breakfast.

  They had assembled slowly at the outdoor table again, fetching china and cutlery, glasses of orange juice and pastry crumbs now scattered where they had sat over dinner only twelve hours before. Steve sipped from a short mug of black coffee, standing on the lip of the hill overlooking the plain below. Iso, freshly showered after having gone for a run when she woke up, had wet hair and an enviable sheen.

  “Only half a croissant for me,” she protested, loading up a bowl with berries and freshly cut peaches.

  Effie seemed distracted, if less twitchy; she and Ben had come down to breakfast together—sheepish but quite sweet, Anna thought.

  Charlie arrived downstairs still bleary with sleep; Bertie had been the second to last to join them, rumpled but nevertheless in smart chinos and shirtsleeves, pleading jet lag; but Anna felt alert. After the night’s adrenaline shot, she had lain awake into the small hours trying to riddle out what she had seen on the wedding night.

  Who she had seen.

  She was also trying to reason with her emotions, to figure out how she felt about the man asleep next to her. Deep, deep resentment matched by an equally profound and fierce sense that they were two parts of the same person, she and Steve. Pushing him away felt like pressing a hand on her own chest and heaving herself out of the frame too. This was why she had come away and left Sonny behind: to remember who she was in her own right.

  Anna felt in her bones that what Steve had told her—that nothing had happened with Iso—was true, and she believed the other woman’s explanation. She thought briefly of Celia, of the hours Steve spent at home during the day while Anna was in court, at the office, meeting clients, and she wondered whether he had in fact ever spent them as she had feared: groping their Welsh neighbor’s staggeringly svelte post-toddler body. Or was it all in her imagination?

  If it was, that made their situation even harder to face up to honestly: the fault for the fissure between them would lie squarely with Anna herself. With her stress, her job, her inability to govern their unruly son. She had turned onto her side and pushed her left hand—and its ring finger—under the pillow, and had fallen asleep just as light began to crack around the edges of the wooden panel shutters.

  “Should we try calling the wedding-planner woman again?” Iso asked across the breakfast table.

  “I wonder whether we really need to,” mused Ben. “We’ve cleared most of it away—as long as you and Dan don’t get charged for anything, Lizzie. But you can sort that out when you get back, I’m sure. No need to stress over it now.”

  Lizzie set her lips together in a line, and left her croissant uneaten. They were so buttery and fresh, nobody else had managed to resist one.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were in the town nearest to the Oratoire, back to what they had begun, in their state of slightly nervy isolation at the château, to think of as civilization. It was a three-horse sort of place at best, although there were enough artisan bakeries to sustain an entire team. With sidewalks had also come phone reception, at least—around the table, a semicircle of heads bent over work emails and text messages.

  Behind the cat eyes of her sunglasses, Anna stared across the town square, beyond the squirting arcs of the fountain at its center to the ornately carved neoclassical buildings on the other side. They wibbled in the heat as the spray danced in front of them.

  A scientist—an old one Anna remembered learning about at school—had once tried burning things and bottling the wibbling vapor they gave off before attempting to reconstitute them from the contents of his flasks. From cold wibble. Anna felt like she and Steve were repairing their marriage from much the same. The heat given off during their passionate years, whether in adoration or in anger, had turned out to be an insubstantial ether they seemed doomed to chase for the rest of their days. Perhaps that was just what marriage was after a while.

  She sipped her Perrier Menthe through a striped straw that no one had demanded from her when the drink had arrived on its silver platter, that nobody had slurped on or chewed to a blocked pulp, that had caused no arguments, brought forth no tears. Anna missed her little boy with a piercing sharpness.

  She ground the soles of her sandals into the grit under the table in her resolve not to check her own in-box. She had received—and pored over—a few pictures of Sonny sent by Steve’s mother: wearing a crown and waving a piece of paper around; watching television (television!) with his sippy cup; head back and laughing on the swings near their house. She needed no more contact from the world beyond the plane trees that lined the pétanque pitch they were sitting by. That Steve was spending his time in the bright sunshine reading reviews of gigs in dingy
London basements on his magazine’s website had begun to prickle her skin in irritation, so Anna cast her gaze around for something to distract from it.

  People-watching—that was what these tables on the square were for. So why does it feel like so many of them are watching us?

  As the group had walked around the tents and canopies of the market that morning, Iso had nodded in greeting to a teenage girl who had stopped in her tracks at the mere sight of them, as though the brunette in a ribbed crop top and high-waisted shorts in their midst was some kind of celebrity. The girl immediately raised her phone to Iso and snapped a picture: a follower.

  They made a spectacle here, this huddle of long-limbed folk on their phones, pale bodies unlocked from starchy tailoring for a week, ill at ease (except for Iso) in clothes that showed so much skin. The locals pecked around them like birds, edging closer to take a look but fluttering back again whenever any of them shifted in their seats.

  Across the square, standing behind the fountain, a man in wraparound sunglasses was staring at them. Strong brows and a Roman nose.

  Dan?

  Anna sat up quickly and angled her head to better make him out between the plumes of water. He had the same build as Lizzie’s former fiancé, the same coloring, even.

  But the man moved off too quickly for Anna to get a good look; he was probably, she figured, just another local out for a morning stroll. Whoever he was, he had been scanning the group at the table from left to right with some intent—though then again, Anna noticed, so too was the little old lady on one of the wooden chairs next to them.

  24.

  Effie

  Effie was oblivious to it all as she composed a reply to James’s message. There had been nothing more from him since the last salvo, and she could hold out no longer against responding.

  A room—but not a bed—shared with Ben had thrown her already jumbled thoughts and feelings for her ex back into play, tumbled her regrets about the past and her hopes for the future together like a salad. They had slept chastely in their twin beds, too exhausted, in the end, after a day’s hangover and the fuss over the freezer before lights-out to even push the frames together, let alone try anything more vigorous. Waking at such a polite distance from the man she had spent so many nights entwined with had left Effie jittery with all the many unknowns in her life.