The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  She didn’t want to speak to her ex. They had met up for a coffee six weeks or so ago, and even that contact had cost Effie in regression. Her frail, feigned nonchalance had spattered up the walls of her flat along with the muffin they had shared after she’d spent the subsequent three hours of the afternoon in a bar, trying to drink away the very sight of him.

  She decided to text him: “I’m on holiday. What do you need to say?”

  Effie clicked Send and watched for the ticks to turn blue. When they didn’t immediately, she put her phone facedown on the table. Then she lifted it, unlocked it, and checked again. Still gray. She thrust it deep into the straw bag she had brought out with her.

  “Did anyone get through to this Marie woman about collecting all the wedding furniture?” asked Bertie, and Lizzie shook her head quickly, almost violently.

  “I’ll text Dan,” said Ben. “See if he knows anything about it.”

  Effie saw Anna’s attention snap back from observing the scene around them. “Let us know what he says,” she said, simply, from across the table.

  Effie watched as, next to her, Ben tapped out a message to his oldest friend: “Mate, some of the wedding stuff arrived after all. Thought everything canceled? Give us a ring when you can.”

  Effie noticed the awkward phrasing as soon as he wrote it. Dan had given Lizzie a ring six months ago and—Effie saw it now, still sparkling on her friend’s finger across the table—she had yet to give it back. There were two more that had gone astray in the château up the hill behind them, too.

  Ben ended his message with a single telephone emoji—the black Bakelite handset of an obsolete desk phone—and clicked his screen dark again.

  Why do we still think of phones that way when they’ve looked totally different for more than a decade?

  She reached into her bag and flipped the smooth, thin brick of her iPhone over in her hand: a lifeless slab to be stabbed at clinically in bird’s-eye view rather than caressed close up or laughed into. Effie’s contained within its hard drive a hotline to the most intimate details of her existence—diary, several dating apps, even a period tracker and fertility monitor—but she couldn’t remember the last time she had used it to listen to another person’s voice.

  Instead, Effie messaged friends and family almost constantly on her phone, and refreshed the headlines on it several times a day to stay in the loop. But the immediacy the device offered—the connections and relationships it fostered—was a thing apart from the warm-blooded reality of living. Rather than joining people up as the old ones had—stringing love and friendship between homes like bunting, along the lines that still hung in near obsolescence from poles on each side of the square they were sitting in—these new phones had untethered them from their surroundings and the people they existed alongside. She and James had spent so much time scrolling through theirs on the sofa next to each other, she hadn’t noticed what should have been obvious: that they shared a flat but not a future.

  What else had she missed?

  Thinking again of the cartoon phone, Effie let her mind unfurl itself further. Why did they, the oldest friends she had, all still think of one another—their dynamic and what drove each of them—in exactly the same terms as they had at university when, clearly, they were all so different now? They had experienced that change alongside one another, but how much had they ever really acknowledged it?

  Anna had always been the responsible one—that had crystallized into her being a reliable sort of fixer, her former brilliant steadfastness morphed into a mundane alarm clock–like dependency. Lizzie, at times impulsive but always considerate, still hadn’t even told them why she had taken the most important decision of her life. What had happened between her and Dan, why they were all here. Not even in private to Effie, as though the secret they had held close between the two of them for so long counted for nothing.

  Effie had once been lively and witty—the silly one—but she had felt her brand of humor wither to sarcasm these past months. Any vivacity she had was turning to bitterness as she stewed and steeped herself in sadness. And Charlie. Louche, caddish Charlie, despite his puppyish affection for them, was flighty with the many other women who had flitted through his life in the years they’d known him. It had been easy to laugh at his clownishness, because the hearts being broken were not theirs.

  Effie’s own felt a little heavier in her chest again. Once Ben had closed their bedroom door last night, he had yawned and stretched extravagantly, climbed into the tiny bed opposite hers, and turned his back on her. If it had come as a surprise, her reaction had even more so: Effie had realized she was quite relieved. She’d been so flustered by it that she had forgotten Charlie’s attempt to prune back whatever might have budded between them on the wedding night.

  She had always wondered—dispassionately, really—whether the way they had tessellated in their first year—so perfectly matched in both interests and intellect that they could have passed for an old married couple—could ever rear its head again between them. Now, as she remembered the heat of him next to her, and the gruffness of his voice in her ear during those grasped moments on the landing, Effie felt less objective about the possibility. In fact, she felt rather wistful.

  Stop it. This is exactly what he does. What he has always done. You used to laugh at the girls who fell for it; don’t become one of them.

  Effie had no physical evidence of something happening between her and Charlie. She knew from having pored over her goose-pimpled skin under the bare bulb of one of the house’s bathrooms that the fading bruises that dappled her legs had all been self-inflicted during collisions of a more tangible nature—with her coffee table, say, or her wooden bed frame.

  “I’ve never felt like this about anybody before.”

  She heard his voice from the deep well of her memory.

  Had he really said those words, or was she simply spinning what she wanted to hear? Charlie had apologized to her on the landing, but for what? Effie felt herself anxiously disassociating from the scene as her mind whirred on. The thinking part of her brain levitated like a drone high above the slatted table they were gathered around.

  It’s just Charlie.

  There he was, sitting two people along, spinning beer mats with Bertie as if they were a pair of teenagers, the low-key aggression he had displayed toward the other man yesterday as he had tried to reconstruct the wedding night now apparently neutered.

  Stop being so silly.

  A warm hand on the side of her neck brought Effie back to the square, the laughing of children playing near the plashing droplets from the fountain. She refocused her eyes from reverie to short distance and turned to look at Ben’s warm and smiling face, the hint of a golden tan already collecting on his strong cheekbones. His pink lips hovered near hers, and she leaned in to brush them.

  He had been Lizzie’s best man. But he was hers now.

  * * *

  —

  They crisscrossed their way back through the tents of the market to the cars, which they had parked in a dappled grove in front of a squat-towered medieval church.

  “Shall we take a look inside?” asked Bertie.

  Its heavy, studded doors—not unlike those of the Oratoire—swung open noiselessly when he pushed before anyone had time to dissent. Inside, sunlight scored the darkness with dusty shafts across the aisle and between the rows of plain wooden pews. The faintest trace of incense still hung in the air, left over from that morning’s service like motes of prayer.

  In the old days, Effie thought, Charlie would have petulantly sparked up a cigarette and sat outside to deliberately avoid anything vaguely educational, but he had mellowed in recent years—and given up smoking, just like the rest of them. What a cliché we all are. She watched the curve of his dark, already tanned neck as he bent his head to read one of the information boards detailing the age of the bell tower, the provena
nce of the stones, the names of the saints who decked each pillar.

  People came here to search the divine countenance, but as Bertie slid into a pew on the far side of the nave, it was clear he was looking for somewhere to sit and make a phone call. Leaving Ben to look at a marble effigy—a reclining knight no doubt versed in chivalry and ladies fair—Effie stole across the aisle and sat down next to Bertie, a question on her lips.

  He mimed to shush her, then showed her as he tapped the foreign mobile number of Marie the wedding planner, scavenged from the dog-eared and now void invitation he had packed in his suitcase, into his screen.

  She answered on the third ring. “Oui, allô?”

  “Bonjour, Marie!” Bertie attempted in French, before stalling and diverting to his mother tongue. His hushed tones joined the general murmur of the others as they bent to look at the baptismal font, meandered through the side chapels. Effie always felt that old churches echoed with centuries’ worth of whispers even when empty.

  He continued: “I’m calling on behalf of Lizzie Berkeley, whose wedding was supposed to happen on Saturday at the Oratoire?”

  He waited while the woman within his phone pulled up the details, and he crooked the phone out away from his face so Effie could hear her voice.

  “Ah yes!” Marie trilled. “How could I forget? On, off, on—the course of true love is never straight, am I right?”

  Bertie made a general noise in agreement. “Err yes, perhaps,” he said. “But it was in fact supposed to be off, just plain off. The bride thought she had canceled everything. Then the setup, when we arrived was, er…on?”

  “Oui,” singsonged the tinny voice in his ear. “That’s right. She canceled my services just over a week ago. Oh là! I told her it was too late to get most of the money back, far too late.”

  Bertie tutted appreciatively.

  “But then,” the voice continued. “Then—and I was delighted, you know, because they seemed such a lovely couple—the groom emailed me to say they had changed their minds.”

  “Aha,” said Bertie. He turned slightly to make eye contact with Effie, and she felt her insides plummeting with the knowledge that it wasn’t simply the administrative error they had all hoped for. The thought of having to break this news to Lizzie made her stomach contract with dread. “I see.”

  “They had changed their minds,” Marie continued apace, “but wanted it smaller, more private. So just set up and go. Et voilà—I do!”

  Bertie was silently contemplative.

  “There is a problem?” Marie said tetchily down the line.

  “No, no, nothing that you can help with, Marie,” Bertie replied quickly. “Just checking you’ll be picking up the furniture…”

  “At the end of the week, as arranged, oui. Anything else?”

  “No, thank you, Marie. Goodbye.”

  Bertie braced himself with one palm on the cool wood of the pew in front of him. He had begun this trail of clues with all the enthusiasm of an amateur orienteer, but Effie could see that his disappointment welled not so much at the search being over but at what it might cost his cousin when she found out. He had wanted to be able to soothe some of the anxiety he had recognized in her—as Effie knew he had done all those years ago—but the news that Lizzie’s spurned groom had reinstated the ceremony she had canceled would hardly be easy for her to take.

  “I think we have to tell her,” Effie muttered to Bertie’s contorted expression, noting how his cheeks were mottled with angst. He nodded sadly.

  As Bertie explained the call to Lizzie, with her braced in the car’s middle seat between him and Effie, the former bride’s face closed in on itself.

  “I see,” she said brusquely, as though hearing bad news from the office. “Well, as long as they’re coming to collect it all, I suppose.”

  “I just wish I could get through to him.” Behind Effie, having dutifully taken his turn in one of the car’s cramped rear seats, Ben’s voice was flat. He removed his hand from her shoulder, where he had been gently tickling her neck, to anxiously rake it through his short hair, seemingly the most stunned of them all.

  The text he had sent Dan had still not been delivered. “I’ve never known him like this,” he said, his eyebrows slanted with worry. “I just hope…”

  “What?” asked Effie, staring up into his face anxiously.

  Ben breathed out, an “Eeeesh” of air escaping through his teeth. “Dan can be a bit…sensitive about stuff not going his way, that’s all.”

  25.

  Anna

  As the chunky rental car crested the stony driveway, the figures of Charlie and Iso were visible outside the Oratoire, but their expressions of confusion—no, worry?—came into focus only as Steve parked up by the open front door, around which they loitered.

  “There’s someone inside,” said Iso, as Ben unfolded his tall frame from the back of the car.

  “Great!” he exclaimed, and Anna heard a wobbling bravado in his usually smooth voice. “Let’s go and ask them what’s going on.”

  Rounding the dark corner of the Hall after him, Effie and Anna heard the banging of pots and scraping of chairs in the kitchen. Whoever was in there was taking no pains to hide his or her presence, and this punctured some of their fears. Holiday homes, especially big houses, always had several sets of keys distributed between several sets of people, a cast of thousands who roved like the staff of some great estate in eras gone by. There were cleaners and pool boys, gardeners and maintenance men. Whoever it was might even have more information about the wedding setup.

  Beyond the door to the kitchen, an elderly woman was attempting to navigate the remaining detritus of the Big Day. Short and kindly-looking, she had wrapped her doughty physique in a floral tabard that made Effie think of the faded wallpaper in her mother’s sitting room. The woman looked at them all with dark, inquisitive eyes that peered like currants out of a bun.

  “How am I supposed to clean with all this in the way?” she lamented.

  Her southern, agricultural dialect was one that Anna could barely understand, let alone reply to the way she had to the clear, bourgeois voices that had floated out of Madame Wynn’s giant cassette player at school. The housekeeper fumed esoterically in words Anna wasn’t meant to know, and Anna attempted, with British awkwardness, to calm her down.

  She hadn’t been expecting the wedding to take place either, they gleaned from her exasperated demeanor and extensive repertoire of mime. Clearly, they were not the first visitors not to be able to chat away with her in the vernacular. Non, her orders had simply been to check that all was well with the Oratoire’s guests this week.

  Anna used her thumb and little finger to make telephone gestures at the housekeeper as she removed her apron, finished with her rounds for the day. “Marie?” she asked, nodding hopefully.

  “Non, non,” the old woman tutted, mirroring the gesture. “Matthieu. I tell.”

  She picked up a string bag of peaches from the kitchen table and shuffled on thick legs out of the Hall, back into the sunshine.

  As they watched her leave, Charlie’s voice rang across the stone floor toward them, high and with the slightest tremor to it. Anna, Effie, and Lizzie all jerked to attention when they heard it—noticeable for the fact that it betrayed something they had never heard from him before: shock. Iso seemed surprised too.

  Charlie was as unflappable as he was unembarrassable, but it was clear that something had penetrated that world-weary facade.

  “Guys!” he shouted back to them.

  Please, not another dead animal. Anna felt sick in advance.

  “Come and see this!” Not a cry but a bark. From someone who didn’t want to deal with something alone.

  But when they reached the terrace, Charlie wasn’t alone—Ben stood with him. Despairing of the monoglot dumb show in the kitchen, they must have opened the doors o
nto the terrace with the intention of hurling themselves, in dusty clothes, straight into the pool to freshen up.

  As Anna bounded across the terrace toward the two men, she lifted her head to see the table, still with the scattering of crumbs they had left after breakfast, and next to it Bertie’s notepad—that bloody thing again—with its pages fluttering slightly in the very lazy breeze.

  But it was not as they had left it.

  Iso ran out to Charlie first, worried by the expressions she had seen on the other women’s faces. They weren’t far behind her. Then Bertie and Steve. They made an unconscious semicircle behind Charlie and Ben, taking in the open notepad like a group of student doctors taking instructions from a consultant.

  The top page—where the night before Bertie had detailed their memories—had been ripped off. Quickly and savagely, leaving a jagged overhang onto the page below. It wilted, upside down, in the sun-bleached grass a few paces away, where, every so often, the warm, lazy air stirred it slightly. Several more pages had been torn out too, as if in a sort of frenzy, and had scattered in the slow air around the terrace and lawn.

  The next fresh page of the pad had been written on. With the same black marker pen that Bertie had used but in bigger, bolder letters and with more force. The paper had ripped in places under the pressure of the angry scrawl; the scratchy block capitals—different from the ones in the wedding book—looked as violent as they felt to read.

  When the huddle around the pad digested the message, each person felt it had been left there for them.