The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  On her way along the corridor to the bathroom, Effie had tapped on Lizzie’s door—once, then twice—and tried the handle. Still locked, but with sleep-heavy breathing audible behind it. She’d left her friend to nap unmolested. Effie would question her later about Bertie’s theory.

  Dan. Quiet, unassuming Dan, with his gentle face and his gentle ways. Was he really the sort of man to turn up, uninvited, on a quest to get the girl? It all seemed so Byronesque, and Dan was…well, Dan was an accountant.

  Then again, he hadn’t seemed the sort of guy to let the girl slip through his fingers either. He had been a devoted boyfriend, excelling at everything Guy had failed at: good at remembering birthdays, making himself useful, simply being present. Effie had been thinking that he and Lizzie should get back together—the relationship had been a great fit for them both. But Dan was only making himself look scary with all these grand—or were they angry?—gestures.

  Effie shifted her weight in the milky water and bent her bony knees up, so that their knobbles pointed to the ceiling of the steamy room. Built to keep the sun out, the ancient building retained its cool from thick walls and small windows. However, the very same principles conspired to make a small Mediterranean bathroom in which someone had run an out-of-context British bath—deep and unflinchingly hot—a swirling steamy box of condensation. The thick, damp air rolled above her, and Effie let her sweat mingle with the water.

  She rested her head against the edge of the bathtub, scrolling internally through the ever-lengthening list of self-improvements she would make as soon as she got home again.

  No drinking, no carbs, no more drunk-smoking (not much), some yoga, less TV.

  She remembered how she had sometimes felt trapped in someone else’s lifestyle when she was with James—not unpleasantly so, but with the inevitable decreasing of space one took up when there was always somebody to tell when you were going to be late, always somebody whose dinner might be delayed, who might wait up, who had asked you to pick up some milk on your way home.

  Effie had tried to enjoy expanding again in the wake of his departure, but she’d all too quickly felt remote, like a helium balloon that slips a babyish hand and bobs farther and farther away into infinity. Sometimes she wondered when and how she would stop bobbing, saw her old life in retreat as though she were an astronaut blasting clear of Earth. All she was looking for—in those strangers’ arms, those backs she hadn’t recognized—was an anchor, although she knew enough about life and truisms and motivational quotes from the self-help books she couldn’t quite bring herself to make a start on to realize that she had to be her own. But then there was Ben.

  He had proved a grounding force already; still, there was something she couldn’t quite put her finger on about him. Handsome, attentive, charming…but somehow not quite on her wavelength. Their humor clashed at times, or missed the mark entirely. The references she had shared with James had ranged vastly from politics to pop music; Ben, it seemed, didn’t have much to offer in the way of culture beyond the pop-economics books he liked. My God, she thought, listen to me reasoning myself out of a perfectly good relationship with a gorgeous man who genuinely seems to enjoy my company.

  And yet, in the dripping tap, she heard: Don’t settle, don’t settle. She had gone along with so many of James’s whims; perhaps some time alone would show her that life was more comfortable when she wasn’t bending to fit someone else’s tastes.

  Effie closed her eyes and listened beyond the tap, to the cicadas outside and the fitful hum of the bathroom fan above her head. She saw in her mind a bedroom and shivered away a memory of retrieving her belongings while a man whose face she didn’t recognize pretended to sleep on until she left. She had drifted too far that time.

  And what of this time? What of two nights ago?

  I’ve never felt like this about anybody before.

  There had been a moment at the market that morning, while Iso was taking pictures of glistening seafood laid out on ice and buxom tomatoes cascading from wooden crates, when Effie had stolen silently up to Charlie’s side as he perused a trestle table full of cheeses. She wanted to ask him what was going on, but her voice failed her. “Are we okay?” sounded too much like they were a couple; “Are we good?” was something two passive-aggressive colleagues might exchange. Before she had been able to formulate anything satisfactory, Charlie had noticed her hovering.

  “That one’s got his eye on you, Eff,” he’d drawled, pointing at a particularly baleful-looking fish, its sharp teeth bared in a downward grimace, before winking at her and strolling away toward Iso.

  Since their strange, whispered interaction on the landing, Effie felt she and Charlie had orbited each other like vague acquaintances at a cocktail party, neither of whom could remember the other’s name. Embarrassed at each other’s existence because it served only to highlight their own failings, their own unreliable memories.

  Effie took a deep, calming breath and hauled herself upright in the bath, releasing the plug to drain the water as she did so. Dripping onto the already slick tiled floor, she reached for a towel from the hooks on the wall. As she leaned out of the tub and into the line of the reflection in the mirror, which hung above the sink, steam billowed loosely around her body like a diaphanous sheer gown.

  That was when she saw what was on the mirror—scanning upward from a trickle that her eyes followed like a delta to its source.

  The rectangular mirror had fogged in the warm, damp room. In the obscuring clouds, Effie could see herself in pinkish outline but no longer make out her face. Except in the rivulets that crisscrossed its surface like cracks in dry earth.

  The steam had resurfaced a message there, like a cry from the past, memories bubbling upward in the brain. The blaring capitals reminded Effie of those others they had found on Bertie’s pad, which were now etched into the heart of the group. These spoke to her every bit as directly, as though yelled into her face at close range—so much so that she let out a blurt of fright. Not quite Iso’s bloodcurdling scream the night before, but enough to draw footsteps from a group that was already on high alert.

  The others padded swiftly from nearby rooms and congregated outside the door.

  “You okay, Eff?” Anna’s voice called through its wooden panels, as loud in the small room as if she had burst right in.

  “Did you slip?” Lizzie asked anxiously. So she’s awake again.

  “I—I—I’m fine,” Effie stuttered, wrapping a towel around herself and wondering whether to wipe the mirror clean.

  As she swung the door open and two more sets of eyes alighted on the words, Effie’s heart sank to watch two more faces—Lizzie’s and then Anna’s—visibly blanch at the force of them.

  “YOU’RE MINE.”

  The letters were warped and streaked in the condensation as though they were melting.

  No, that wasn’t quite right, Effie thought: it was as though they were bleeding.

  28.

  Anna

  As she walked quickly down the hill away from the house, Anna nervously tied and retied the belt of her green jersey dress in a jerky knot. Her hands shook and her heart was still thumping from the message in the mirror, summoned in the steam like a spirit during a séance.

  Anna did not know for sure who had left it there, angry prodding fingers squeaking against the glass as they scrawled, but she had an idea.

  Anna didn’t want any of this in her head. She’d never asked for it.

  How she wished she hadn’t seen what she had on the wedding night.

  How she wished they would just admit what they had done.

  When she had walked far enough down the field to be out of sight of the rest of the house, Anna sat heavily and stared at the countryside spread out like a blanket in front of her. She felt Sonny’s absence in her empty arms and wrapped them around her knees. The almond-shaped face of her antique gold watch
told her it was six p.m. at home.

  He would be in his high chair—an ergonomic Danish variety that had come with enough promises of health benefits that she half-expected it to raise him for her. By this point in the meal, he would no doubt be covered in whatever he had nodded regal acquiescence to for dinner that night. He had this haughty expression sometimes, one that made her either laugh indulgently at the little prince she had created or want to scream, depending on her mood and his.

  Anna recognized the total confidence of the well-cared-for child—the unquestioning knowledge that whatever he wanted he would get—in some of the male partners in her office. Then she worried she was raising another of them.

  Nobody had taught her how to be a mother; Anna had simply found herself approximating one, as she had done in the playhouse her parents had given her on her sixth birthday. Back then, the power of make-believe had given her a sense of purpose: sweeping and dusting, stocking imaginary cupboards, cooking invisible meals. Now, as she did it all for real, she ran purely on fear and guilt. Fear that she was doing it wrong; guilt that she wasn’t doing enough. (These days, she outsourced the sweeping and dusting to another woman, and felt dreadful about that too.)

  Her and Steve’s fridge had gone from empty but for beer, wine, milk, and a piece of cheese to one that was filled with fresh fruit and vegetables. Their bedtime had crept forward from midnight to nine p.m. They worked, ate, and slept, and in between they absorbed Sonny’s love like essential nutrients when he was happy so that they might better bear the drudgery when he was not.

  Anna used Tupperware now. She cooked things and froze them in portions that were perfectly calibrated to line Sonny’s tiny stomach, so small they stacked in the freezer like plastic matchboxes. She had a laundry day—several actually, spread out across the week like some protracted purgatorial punishment—when she separated and folded like an old-fashioned washerwoman. She was grateful not to have had to master a mangle or a washboard or strong lye soap, but she reflected that, for those women, this had been their actual job, as opposed to something they did in their supposed leisure time.

  They didn’t have any leisure time; be more grateful.

  This last was a constant refrain. Grateful for Sonny but also for the chance—the opportunity!—to work. Grateful for her salary, two-thirds of which went to the house and the rest to childcare she was unable to provide in person while she was earning it. And grateful to Steve—always, and reminded of it constantly by her friends—for the simple fact that he helped her at all.

  Sometimes Anna felt so grateful she wanted to scream.

  She had bought a sewing kit online recently, after she found a hole in one of Sonny’s jumpers—a soft, luxurious garment bought as a present at such expense the giver could not possibly have had children of their own yet and known how swiftly and remorselessly it would be ruined. When the kit arrived, clinically arranged in neat spools and packets, it was so far from the organic mess of haberdashery that lived inside the well-used tin her own mother—who had never worked but had raised four children instead—kept in a drawer at home that it made Anna want to cry. Nobody had ever taught her to sew either.

  She darned the hole inexpertly; when she was finished, it made a lumpy scar across the flawless cashmere, as if transplanted from a pirate’s cheek. It reminded her of what she was: a Frankenmum reanimated from the corpse of who she used to be and stitched together with a barrister skin, improvising at everything because there was no one to show her how to do it. Her other friends were either childless or similarly struggling, trying to have it all without drowning in it.

  Anna had a degree and a pupilage in law; her only qualification for being a mother had been her biology and her age.

  Nobody had taught her what to say to her son or how to play with him. When they were alone together, there were sometimes great stretches of silence in which she felt Sonny’s little brain atrophying. The days she came home late and found him and Steve together, wrestling in the sitting room or lining up all his model animals on the kitchen table, she wanted to ask them what the rules were—not just for their game but for this life they were all feeling their way through.

  She rubbed a stalk of lavender between her fingers where it sprouted in the scrubby grass of the hillside. What exactly was she complaining about?

  Anna had lost track. A vague sense of being taken for granted, of being dreary with tasks and haggard with other people’s expectations. Of the sensation that life was one long to-do list and then, when she did manage to tick everything off, there was always another swing to push or story book to read. She was mourning time that was purely hers. On the rare occasions when she and Steve made it out for dinner, there was the knowledge that any wine consumed or late night embarked on—even at the weekend—they would be punished for the next morning, the inevitable headache even more pronounced now that Sonny had learned to climb into their bed and pry her eyelids open.

  How had they spent their Saturdays and Sundays before him? Mostly drunk and asleep. It had been wonderful.

  Now, though…Anna shuddered at the memory of the last night she’d spent drinking.

  After they had found the second message—the one on Bertie’s pad—Steve had followed her to the château’s library, with its book-lined walls and low beamed ceiling, the long sofas where he and Iso had spent the wedding night.

  “Are you okay?”

  It was a question they asked each other regularly, except Anna’s queries were laced with varying degrees of passive-aggressiveness. “Are you okay?” was no longer an inquiry but a signal: too sharp, too stressed, too brimming with silent fury—with work, with how tired they were, how messy and dissatisfied they felt. “Are you okay?” meant Pull yourself together or Don’t take it out on me; it meant Snap out of it and If you don’t like it, do something about it.

  When Steve said it now his face was soft, the lines either side of his mouth—deeper in the past few years—relaxed while his brow creased with care. “Are you okay?” was the question she’d been so desperate for him to ask her for so long that she didn’t know where to start with her answer, so instead she simply cried.

  “I’m so sorry, love,” her husband breathed into her hair as she snuffled against his chest. He smelled of sun cream. “It was so stupid of me, so disrespectful. But nothing happened, you know. It never would.”

  “I know,” Anna sobbed into his T-shirt—because she did. But his kindness made the secret she was keeping even more piercing, more shameful.

  She’d got herself so caught up, it was no longer hers to tell.

  But there were other truths she could share with her husband, ones that had been born with Sonny and hatched into spiky little creatures that had pecked at them ever since.

  Sonny’s nursery school still always called Anna when he was sick, despite knowing that Steve worked from home five minutes down the road. The senior partners at Anna’s firm regularly remarked on her “real job” as a mother despite her working something like sixty hours for them most weeks and regularly missing her child’s waking up and going to sleep. She didn’t often make evening plans, but on the few occasions when she managed to get home before 8 p.m., Steve would arrange to meet one of his friends for a rare pint.

  Why shouldn’t he, simply because I can’t?

  Why should his life change, just because mine has?

  Because they were supposed to be a team.

  Between Anna’s desk and her duty of care, there was little time for anything else. She saw Steve still able to visit his record shops, go to his gigs, even—for fuck’s fucking sake—play his bloody computer games, although he had recognized that to do this in front of her anymore was petrol on a fire. The things Anna did in her spare time—her so-called spare time—were yet more chores: the leg waxes, dental appointments, and haircuts that kept her feeling (and looking, she hoped, although she had begun to doubt) like
the person she used to be, rather than one growing gray hairs in neglected places.

  Some women can’t afford that; be more grateful.

  Anna had felt so betrayed by Steve’s larking around with Iso because, in her fast-paced and hectic but nevertheless very organized existence, the hurt pinpointed the very things she knew she was not on top of: her body and her husband.

  The care they used to take with each other had dulled. The pleasure they found in each other had settled into cozy jollity rather than a sharp urge. Anna had expected the wonder to abate, but not the need. She slept in a T-shirt that had come free with their house insurance in order to guard against her husband’s interest, but she’d found that his eyes, his lips, his hands no longer even bothered to frame the question.

  Celia.

  Anna subconsciously gripped the spare tire of fat around her middle, tweaked the fleshy drape under her chin. She still got a surprise every time she saw herself in photographs—bigger and looser now, recognizably her but wider, as though she’d been steamrollered. No, Steve, it isn’t a problem with the lens.

  “What are your best tips for having a family in this profession?” she’d asked one of the older women at the firm when she and Steve had started thinking about babies.

  “Get to your target weight before you get pregnant,” the brittle blonde, immaculate and trim in corporate suiting, had answered. “Or you’ll never reach it again.”

  Now, at work, she was surrounded by sinewy women in their forties whose bodies belied having ever reached puberty but had produced two or more children; Anna—early thirties, mother of one—looked like she’d had five.

  She told Steve a simplified version of this in the library that afternoon, much of which he struggled to hear through her strangle of indignation, snot, and tears.

  “Is there anything going on between you and Celia?” she asked, aiming for calm but barking the words out regardless.

  “Celia!” Steve looked baffled, and Anna’s blood pressure slowed again. “Christ, no. She’s nice enough, sure, and I do really feel for her sometimes, but she’s…well, she’s pretty annoying, really. Always texting and stuff, always needs a favor.”