“TELL THEM THE TRUTH.”
26.
Six Months Earlier: Lizzie
When I think about the woman who got ready for her engagement party and the one who returned home from it, I can hardly believe we are the same person.
The first one—blond hair freshly blow-dried in a salon that was deliberately slightly too expensive for my pay packet, with green plants trailing beadlike leaves from the ceiling—didn’t have a scintilla of doubt in her mind. She applied her makeup with a showgirl’s rigor around a beaming smile so broad it was difficult to even blot her lipstick.
The other one, anxious and uncertain, cried it all off once her fiancé had fallen asleep.
Dan had bought me a dress for the party, one that I absolutely loved. I have it still, an albatross in a designer garment bag hanging at the back of my wardrobe. It breaks my heart to look at that dress now, because my fiancé zipped me into a straitjacket when he fastened it that evening and dropped a kiss on the back of my neck where I held my hair out of the way of the metal teeth.
When I took it off again at the end of the night, I half-wondered whether there would be bruises underneath. There weren’t, of course—not on the surface.
The dress was black with a swirling gold pattern, short and frilly, but with a high collar and long sleeves that ended in a spray of ruffles. I felt like a Christmas cracker. There was frost on the pavement outside our flat when we left and twinkling lights in the shops by then, so I fit right in. Comfort and joy: that was what my future with Dan looked like.
We still couldn’t believe we’d found each other. Who meets their soulmate on a dating app? Plenty of people, as it happens, but we were still reveling in the fortuitousness, the serendipity, the kismet of having both logged on at just the right moment. We were pinching ourselves; it had felt right from the get-go, and we knew how lucky that made us.
We skittered, head-to-toe wobbly with anticipation—me in velvet platforms, him in a pair of tan leather brogues his father had bought him to break in ahead of the wedding day—into the bar Dan had hired to hold our nearest and our dearest in celebration of the much bigger party yet to come.
May. That was all we had decided so far, but I’d just that morning booked us flights to visit a couple of venues in the south of France. After all those years crossing the globe following Guy around on that bloody boat, I could hardly believe I was drawing up my own itinerary, on my own terms, for the pursuit of happily ever after. It felt wonderful.
I hadn’t expected so many people to be there. They had balloons and streamers for us when we arrived, party tooters and glitter strewn across the tabletops between the cocktails—all gold, to match me. I was a gleaming statuette, Dan’s prize, and proud of it.
I saw Effie and Anna leap from the edge of a crowd that roared its appreciation as we walked in; they bundled me into a hug with congratulations all of their own. A constant at the center of a busy, changeable world—and, often, near a dance floor: my two best women, and the ones who knew me through and through.
We popped corks and clinked glasses, we smiled until it felt like our cheeks were spasming. I had more conversations that night about lace than I’ve had before or since, more questions about flowers, more unsolicited opinions on matters that were really nobody else’s business. A friend of Dan’s mother’s pressed me on the subject of birth control; from behind the table he was deejaying at, Steve wanted me to name our first dance, our favorite song. These are the stitches that make up the tapestry of every wedding—the dress, the guests, and the photos are just the yarn.
Steve played smoochy songs and stylish songs, some for the oldies and some for the girls; we went to the bar when the air guitars came out. Tottering slightly in my heels, I lurched around my clutch bag—gold, of course—with Effie and Anna the way we had done five nights a week at university, and perhaps now did only five times a year.
It was the way we had celebrated success when we triumphed, the way we lifted each other’s spirits whenever one of us needed it. It was on one of those nights out that I had met the man who could have been the father of my child—blood on water—but I wasn’t going to dwell on that at my engagement party.
Ten years on, we howled along to the greats like wolves baying at the moon, with more girth and gray hairs now but more strength, more power, more self-knowledge too. Or so I thought.
Effie was a little glitchier than Anna and me—we couldn’t keep up with her at the bar, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Wedding stuff was tough on her, given James’s resistance to it but, she assured us, it wasn’t a commitment issue; he just wasn’t into paperwork. She was right about that: he spent all night watching us from the bar, his face as joyless as an in-tray on a Monday morning.
He could have at least pretended to be happy for me.
Anna, meanwhile, was positively effervescent. A night out, her first in some time since Sonny had commandeered the space previously occupied by indulgent and hungover lie-ins. I worried for her head the next morning, but she didn’t seem that drunk—just hopped up on life. And love, I suppose. There was so much of it in that room.
I took a breather at one point: didn’t want my makeup sliding too far down my face, and I needed some water. My throat was parched from the heat of the disco lights and accepting everybody’s expressions of goodwill. From the great surprise that Dan had orchestrated.
If only it could have lasted. Sometimes I wish I’d never left the dance floor and my best friends, never let myself be cornered like that—kept the memories of that night purely light and joyous, rather than sullying them in the dark.
My marriage was finished even before the engagement party was.
27.
Effie
“But who…?” Steve was the first to speak as the loose pages from Bertie’s pad billowed lazily around their ankles, like seaweed caught in the shallows.
Next to him, Effie’s brain was connecting the frozen look of fear on Lizzie’s face with the invasion of the château’s centuries-old serenity—not just this morning but the day they had arrived—and the re-installing of a wedding canceled, a relationship broken off.
“It has to be Dan, doesn’t it?” Anna murmured quietly next to her.
“Ach, guys…” Ben rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, swung the other in a limp fist through the air beside him in an arc. A loose punch with no target, but it was charged with exasperation and emotion. “I hoped it wouldn’t come to this…”
To his right, Lizzie simply closed her eyes.
“But I’m worried he’s gone off the deep end, yeah,” he finished, his hand now coming to rest across Effie’s shoulders, drawing her to him.
Before he could finish speaking, Lizzie turned silently and walked back into the house. Effie followed her up the stairs to her bedroom, desperate to comfort her, but the door was locked and she couldn’t even make her voice heard above the noisy sobs coming from the other side of its oak panels.
Suspicious and shaken after taking in the angry message, the group scattered to various corners of the house and its grounds. Like characters in a murder mystery, they found themselves suddenly mistrustful of their holiday companions, as though there might be strychnine in the tea, a revolver behind the shower curtain. A muffled thump and one fewer in the party by morning.
Don’t be stupid.
Anna, too, had looked pained and taken herself to the cool of the library; Steve went after her. Charlie and Iso retreated upstairs to exchange their own truth—one of very few things that girl wouldn’t put on social media, Effie thought spitefully. As Iso had moaned to them several times, the lack of Wi-Fi was severely compromising her output.
Effie retired to a lounger by the pool, where Bertie lay dozing nearby. Next to her, Ben read a magazine—a political one that asked big questions—and laced his fingers into hers as they held hands between the two sunbed
s.
Despite the atmosphere, she had to admit the scene was perfect: he had reached for her almost unconsciously as soon as she had sat down, whereas she had practically had to chase James down for the briefest of embraces toward the end. But Ben’s apparent contentedness only served to increase Effie’s anxiety that she had somehow compromised what they had together: her mind continued guiltily to whirr over the events of their first night at the château and the possibilities it still contained.
Laughter. A shriek. A man’s voice.
Whispers and tears.
And then a blackness so empty Effie worried she would collapse in on herself if she got too close to it. She was scared of atomizing in the great void of her memory; there was simply nothing there at all. Nothing, until there had been whiteness again. Whiteness and that bed. Those petals.
Effie scrolled through the grainy footage in her head. So much for all her plans to luxuriate in the sun and zone out from her fears, to allow the lapping of water nearby to lay the internal ghosts to rest. Her mind was working in overdrive, and the flapping, guzzling filters in the swimming pool provided an infernal drumbeat as her thoughts spun over and over.
What did I do? (Thunk.)
What did I say? (Thunk.)
Who was I with? (Thunk.)
What the fuck happened? (Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.)
The thought Effie had not yet allowed herself to approach directly but that kept creeping into her head, uninvited, was at which point all of her clothes had been removed.
“You’re ready to be happy again.”
Had he really said that?
She flinched involuntarily at the sound of Charlie’s voice inside her head and gave a short, cringing moan that made Ben lift his head to look at her. Still not ready to dwell on that one.
This was all she had within her to build a picture of that night, those lost hours. What had she given away during the darkness? No more than she had willingly—drunkenly—offered too many others in recent months: her loneliness and her dignity.
Hooking up was supposed to be fun, wasn’t it?
It hadn’t been at university, but back then Effie assumed she’d been too green, too inexperienced. Too full of self-loathing to make it work for her, this universally acknowledged fun thing that some young people (men) liked to do and other young people (women) pretended to. At nineteen, she was not well versed enough in her own body to find pleasure in other people throwing it around for her.
Now a grown-up—she had a career and a mortgage; what more would it take to convince her she was one?—Effie was too self-possessed to find much pleasure in giving it away either. That was what had been such a revelation with Ben: the confidence she had found being with someone so enthusiastic for her; the way he touched her like a precious jewel rather than flipping her like a steak on a barbecue; his presence, eyes tracking hers rather than scrunched closed to make it go quicker. Such dedication to being in the moment, in fact, that he wanted to linger over it, to remember, to record for posterity….Effie had never felt herself so hungrily pored over as she did with Ben, and she found that it thrilled her.
Before they’d met, she had downloaded several dating apps to make sure she didn’t end up on the shelf, but they had instead brought her, several times, to an uncomfortable precipice with men she had barely begun to get to know, nor was sure she really wanted to.
Drinking was supposed to be fun too, wasn’t it?
She noticed how the younger teachers at school had a steely grip on their vices, how they matched late nights in the pubs with early mornings at the gym. How, when they could be persuaded to swap their evening Mandarin or pottery classes for the sticky crush at the bar, they drip-fed themselves wine interspersed with plenty of water, while Effie drained glass after honeyed glass.
Where, she often wondered, had they learned this restraint? Effie found it suspicious and vaguely censorious. Didn’t they need to cut loose? Didn’t they find their tongue, their spark, their chutzpah in the easy confidence bestowed by the second-cheapest option on the wine list? There was only one explanation: they were bores, these kids. Moralistic losers saving for a house deposit. And watching them nurse their wine spritzers, Effie would order herself another sauv blanc out of sheer exasperation.
She had come of age during a time when your personality was but the slice of lemon to whatever was in the glass you were holding, had bolstered herself by knocking back whatever at hand was least warm and least bitter. They all had—at university, where friendships were formed through weights and measures, optics and ring pulls, reinforced by each “Cheers” and “Bottoms up.” Salty hands and citrus grimaces. This was how she, Anna, Lizzie, and Charlie had socialized, not exercise or ceramics! Their favorite story was how they had once found Charlie asleep in a phone box; Iso’s generation didn’t even know what one was.
And hadn’t it been fun? Hadn’t drinking helped Effie forget her every care? The shyness, the awkwardness, the clanging sense of her own imperfections and devastating lack of things to say—all alleviated with the warm flush and sugary finish, the red faces and shouty slurred words. What was the worst that could happen? They’d stumble home, wake up in time for lunch, and do it again the next night, awarding each other different badges of honor each time. They continued to do it once they had jobs too, adjusting their hours slightly around the office.
Effie hadn’t felt a moment of regret until her late twenties, when hangovers began to announce themselves in nausea and a dread so existential it deserved an -ism all of its own.
More recently, however, she had realized that she did in fact have some regrets during that time. The fact of having hurt feelings, of saying rather more than was politic, of not being taken seriously. The fact of having shared her body with people that, in the cold light of day, she’d rather not have done. Effie had always thought of these facts as things that could be shrugged off, like the sluggishness that followed any night on the sauce, but when she watched the junior teachers she worked with, she understood that they were things that could have been avoided instead.
She had been careless with herself for most of her life, careless of her friends, careless of James. Now she had been so careless that she literally didn’t know what she had done or who she was anymore.
Effie thought again of the message in the notepad. She didn’t know her own story, let alone whatever truth it was she had to tell. How could she when so many of the details in her life remained beyond her reach?
Beside her, Ben stirred and put his magazine down. “I’m going to try calling Dan,” he said with a resigned expression, and set off some way down the drive, phone aloft in one hand—as if that might help locate his friend, the man they were all coming to suspect was behind the strange campaign of terror in the château.
“Do you think he’s here?” Effie asked Bertie, simply, after a few minutes. Lizzie’s cousin was the only other person by the pool with her while Ben roamed the perimeter.
Lizzie’s cousin hadn’t tried to insert himself into her thoughts the way most men did. Effie found herself enjoying both the proximity and the distance he so instinctively seemed to gauge. Bertie tucked a corner of the page of the book he was reading down into a point to save his place.
“He seems to be,” he said carefully. “But I think we’re safe. This…intrusion is unsettling, but we haven’t been threatened. There’s no sign of forced entry or violence.”
Effie raised her eyebrows over her sunglasses.
“None of us know what happened between Lizzie and Dan,” Bertie continued. “The most likely explanation is that the person trying to unnerve us is the groom. The groom who un-canceled the wedding and isn’t picking up his phone.”
“But the note,” she pressed. “Do you think he’s coming for her?” Effie felt her gaze mist over at the ballsy Hollywood gesture. She had always liked Dan. Then came clarity as her defaul
t cynicism restored: “Isn’t it all a bit creepy?”
“The intersection between romantic and creepy has always been a difficult line for some men to tread,” answered Bertie. “Especially now that women have realized that they’re often one and the same.”
Effie laughed and looked out over the turquoise pool, her spirits lifting once more with some mental space from her own problems. How inviting it looked was directly proportional to her mood, and she began rummaging in her bag for sun cream.
* * *
—
She was climbing out of the bath when she noticed it—just a trickle at first.
Effie had retreated to the bath when her skin had begun to feel tight with sun exposure and the rime of lotion and salty sweat on it had hardened into a gritty layer. She, Ben, and Bertie had spent all afternoon by the pool, exchanging a few words now and then but otherwise simply enjoying the mutually comfortable silence that came from reading and staring out across the plain beneath them.
She and Ben had regained some of the ease that had eluded them the previous night; some awkwardness, she rationalized, was only to be expected, given the strange atmosphere at the house, the fact that he didn’t really know anyone other than Lizzie. The fact that he and Effie had only really been together for, what was it, a month? She didn’t think of herself as schoolmarmish, but she was certainly not the type of person to go on holiday with someone after only four weeks. Then again, did this rather fraught trip still count as a holiday?
Gradually they’d been joined around the water by some of the others: Charlie, who had left Iso sleeping; Steve, recruiting for a game of cards that Bertie and Ben signed up for; Anna too, eventually, blinking the guilty day-sleep of a child-free woman out of her eyes with a self-conscious grin. Spirits, it seemed, had improved—although Lizzie remained behind her closed door.
The Wedding Night Page 14