The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  Anna began to laugh. “She is really annoying!” Then she began to cry. “She’s always texting you!”

  Not Celia.

  “Never,” Steve solemnly told her. “I could never.”

  As they spoke, Anna began to enjoy the feelings her words seemed to drag out of her. In the early days with Steve, Anna had felt her emotions like a dusting of glitter on her skin—easily swirled, disturbed, aroused with the slightest touch, the most gentle breeze. The longer the two of them had been together, the deeper the love and intimacy had sunk in—like moisturizer or wood oil, to keep things supple. Despite those feelings having long since reached Anna’s core and become a part of her, stirring them up again seemed difficult. No: impossible.

  But as they talked in the library, Steve in soft, calming tones and she still with the irregular breathlessness of upset, the ripple effects of the wedding night could finally be felt—in anger, disappointment, and sadness, but also in tenderness and mutual need. Anna felt the wasting away and near destruction of their relationship like a horror, and her skin burned in a way it hadn’t since her son had been born. Steve’s remorse was even more urgent.

  They rejoined the others at the poolside, slaked. Never had Anna felt so strongly for her husband.

  She just wished she could forget about everything else.

  Furry bees droned on mechanically between the bobbly purple heads of lavender now swaying in a light evening breeze. The sun was a smashed egg yolk on the horizon. Up on the terrace, Anna heard the clink of cutlery and food being brought out to the table for dinner. She closed her eyes and sniffed to savor an act of domesticity that she hadn’t been required for. Perhaps she was discovering herself anew after all.

  When Anna opened her eyes, the landscape looked darker. Night was closing in—not hurriedly and impatiently as it did in London, as though evening had somewhere else to be, but languidly and louchely, an arm draped across a shoulder tentatively, a hand reached for instinctively.

  Tell them the truth.

  Anna’s deep out-breath landed in her stomach like a fistful of guilt.

  She looked down at her wedding ring, remembering the day when Steve had—with nervous, clammy hands—pushed it onto his new wife’s finger and grinned down at her.

  She looked down at her wedding ring, remembering the day—a week before Sonny’s birth—when she’d had to take it off because her pregnant hands resembled a chain of uncooked sausages. It had been six weeks before it fit again afterward—the same amount of time before she could walk without pain, and she had wondered whether there was a link. Whether as soon as they could move again, mothers needed to be identity tagged, like sheep and cattle, in case they were tempted to wander off in search of greener pastures.

  She looked down at her wedding ring, remembering the night earlier that week when she had removed it and placed it in a Nile-green color-washed pine drawer next to the bed she had ended up sleeping in alone.

  Where it still was.

  Anna’s wedding ring had the word “STEVO” engraved inside it like a secret she kept nestled against the cosseted skin underneath it.

  The one on her finger had two.

  “YOU’RE MINE.”

  Three Days After

  29.

  Effie

  “Somebody slept well!”

  It was a statement rather than a question, lobbed by Charlie across the table to Lizzie, who’d appeared among them that morning, bright and smiling, dressed in a white broderie smock to show off the intensifying brownness of her skin underneath.

  “I did!” She beamed and helped herself to a croissant from the baker’s paper bag, this time fetched from the village by Charlie.

  “I think we need to start treating this more like a holiday,” she continued, spooning apricot jam onto her plate and reaching for the cafetière, which had already powered the rest of them into conversational mode. “And less like a murder mystery.”

  Across their end of the table—the farthest from Lizzie’s—Effie and Anna briefly met each other’s eyes.

  “I’d like to go on one of the day trips we had planned for after the…as part of the guest itinerary,” Lizzie explained through a buttery mouthful. “There’s a set of caves not far from here, where they project art onto the walls. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

  “Great idea!” exclaimed Bertie. “Mum mentioned it too—I’d love to go, if anyone else is up for it?”

  He leaned back to better look around the table: a full house of nodding heads. Nobody mentioned how stifling the château had seemingly become, but they were packed into their two cars within half an hour.

  The landscape flicked past them like a showreel of greenery and bauxite, jutting cliffs and the odd crumbling tower above the canopy. They drove with the windows slightly down to take in the aroma of cypress bark warming in the sunshine. Effie almost purred.

  The day was so glorious it was easy to shake off the strangeness that had enveloped them at the house, to leave their unanswered questions behind its stolid wooden doors.

  They came to the caves—an old quarry, in fact—at the foot of a steep hill, on top of which a village perched in readiness for lunch. The gray cliff face rose impassively above the entrance to the caves, although it was the void at its base—a gaping maw with a queue snaking out—that seemed more impressive somehow: a proscenium arch of only blackness. Effie felt her insides constrict a little at the fullness of that emptiness.

  At the head of the queue, Lizzie negotiated tickets for the group, just as she and Dan would have done had things turned out differently. One by one, they filed through a narrow metal turnstile and stepped into the blackness.

  “They highlight a few different artists every month,” Lizzie declaimed, tour guide–style. “This month is”—she checked the leaflet she had been handed with her receipt—“Bosch and Brueghel.”

  “Oh, very cheery,” said Effie, a slow, cold sweep of dread washing over her in the dark. She reached for Ben’s hand, but he had shifted beyond her in the queue on a wave of other people.

  She could make out little other than the faces of her friends in the dim light of the tiny bulbs dotted along the ragged walls of the cave. They downlit a path from the entrance into the body of the deserted quarry, deep beneath the sunny hillside. Effie felt sweat spring out on her top lip, and she tried to breathe more deeply, to use all her techniques.

  Count things, be aware of sensations, list colors—but the only shade here was black, the only touch emptiness. Effie’s hands were wet with nerves, and her fingers trembled.

  The group moved almost in tortoise formation along a gritty corridor, straining their eyes at indeterminate shapes—another visitor, a bat—until they emerged into a cavern. The subterranean chamber was as tall as a cathedral’s nave and lit on every side with projections of paintings that spanned and slid across the uneven walls to a choral soundtrack every bit as atmospheric as the scenes they contained.

  Skulls, evil eyes, and devils. Writhing masses of bodies piled high by hell’s worker demons and directed by an army of the dead. Mouths pulled downward in pain and cadavers spilling putrefaction. A woman, expensively dressed in fur-trimmed gown and hennin, tried to hold back a phalanx of skeletons intent on picking her clean enough to join their number. Lurid creatures squatted and shat out sinners, whose earthly delights were followed by eternal agony.

  Effie missed her footing in the dark and turned on her ankle. The jolt and jarring pain, distracting her from the many calming techniques she had attempted to use to quell the panic, was enough to send her spiraling mentally too: her breath became short, and the paintings surrounding her, already rotating slowly around the space the visitors were standing in, began to spin as though she were trapped on a merry-go-round.

  Twisted faces of villagers and hunters, goblins and knights whizzed by, some pained and some angry. Malevolent grins
and dripping chins, sucking on devils’ teats or hoisting pitchforks full of hay. Shouting, dancing, laughing, carousing. An imp that looked like Charlie, a lady in ermine that could have been Iso. Anna and Steve arm in arm. Skeletons clashing with swords and shields; peasants toiling with the harvest; villagers skating; and Lizzie shaking. Shaking her head at someone in the dark, and jabbing a finger, her lips round with a shout and her face as pale as any of the subterranean creatures on the walls.

  Effie had had panic attacks before, but that detached and logical information never helped in the moment when she felt herself whizzing around and around, smaller and smaller, disappearing down the plughole of her existence to be flushed away on a tide of terror. There had been more of them since James had left, times when she had truly believed herself to have been constricted in the pinhole of the world ending. Times when she had tried to fight it and then finally surrendered to the horror, only to find her breathing slow once again and the world carrying on around her, despite the blood in her veins pumping at full speed around her body, hurtling through her arteries like an emergency vehicle to a crash.

  This time, however, there was Bertie. He noticed when she tripped and then crouched, so he lifted her gently to her feet, murmuring and calming her in words she could barely hear, let alone make sense of, as everything swirled around her. Gradually the whooshing stopped and the dark stabilized. Effie stabilized too, and she raised her chin weakly to Bertie in thanks. As she did so, her phone buzzed in her pocket and she pulled it out.

  A message on the screen. James: “Don’t worry—it’s nothing. Speak when you get back.”

  She thrust it away again before she could feel either disappointment or elation. Not now.

  “No wonder they call Bosch the Hangover Artist, eh?” Bertie murmured behind her, and she moved her head to swing her gaze around. The horrific visions displayed on the walls seemed to sum up exactly how Effie had felt for the past few months, give or take a few specifically medieval torments.

  “Do they really?” She was surprised at this string of empathy that linked her own travails to a fifteenth-century Dutchman who had battled through similar circumstances without even the prospect of an aspirin to ease the pain.

  “No,” laughed Bertie, apologetically. “But they should.”

  She swatted his arm and walked farther in, feeling a little sturdier already for the—rather Daddish—joke. There were benches set among the spindling natural columns that held up the ceiling of the vast chamber, and she took a seat in front of the widest wall of the cavern. On it, a thirty-foot-high dystopian Judgment Day scene faded out into Brueghel’s Fight Between Carnival and Lent.

  Effie scanned the lumpen face of the Carnival clown, drunkenly riding his barrel of mead as, in the background, village maidens danced in a circle, and wondered if his was the role she had been cast in on this trip. Then a fading and a dimming of what low light there was, as the next image—another Bosch—appeared on the rocks, in which a demon held a flagon of beer up to a man’s lips and another pinned him down forever.

  On the wall to her left, grisly phantoms peeled back a curtain to watch a pair of heedless lovers fresh from bathing in a vat of wine. What was that stupid internet phrase?

  “I feel seen,” she said simply to Bertie.

  He knew not to laugh, as Anna and Lizzie might, and Charlie definitely would have. She couldn’t have said it to Ben either, she realized: he didn’t seem to know where to put negative emotions, and instead focused only on being upbeat and positive.

  Instead Bertie nodded slowly. “I think that’s exactly how they wanted you to feel.”

  “Dirty and guilty and—”

  “And utterly, totally, downright, disgustingly, inevitably human.” Bertie turned to her in the dark, and now that Effie could see all the demons from around the room reflected in his good, wholesome—yes, a bit nerdy—eyes, they didn’t seem to be closing in on her anymore.

  “Are you okay, Effie?” he continued.

  She played with the buckle on her bag where it rested in her lap. “I don’t know.”

  Effie told Bertie about how she had woken up after the wedding night—the real, unedited version. About the dent in the pillow, the short, dark hairs, and the other glass on the nightstand. About the lost parts of her memory and her clothes on the floor, the snatches of things that might have happened: laughter, a shriek, a man’s voice, and tears. About how Charlie had behaved around her ever since, and about what she thought that might mean. About how it could ruin things with Ben, when he’d been just what she needed after James.

  The devils continued their waltz around them, peasants feasted and farmed, and the cavern began to fill up with people as the day wore on toward lunchtime. Their group—the bridal party, as Effie still thought of them—had been among the first to enter the cave, and though it was not uncomfortably full yet, there was the sense of a crowd forming. As the newcomers scrutinized the wall to fathom the deeper meanings of early modern life, nobody noticed the two figures on the bench trying to riddle out what had happened only a few days ago.

  Bertie was quick to grasp the situation and—most importantly for Effie—judgment-free. He agreed that Charlie seemed the likeliest candidate for having shared the honeymoon suite, but not Effie’s sense that it was a catastrophe if he had.

  “There might still be another explanation,” he said, awkwardly patting her shoulder.

  “Yes, you’re right,” she said, blinking dry her eyes, which had become wet with relief and gratitude during the course of their conversation. “I’ve been trying to hold on to that. It’s just, Ben and I were having such fun in London, and this has made me overthink it all….I just don’t know what I—”

  Effie’s thoughts ran out as she peered into the gloom at a painting on the other side of the vast cavern. A head, a nose, a stance that all seemed familiar. A face in a crowd, realistic and expressive like one of Brueghel’s burghers, only sleek and modern, trim and handsome. Effie closed her eyes to refresh them and squinted again, incredulous at the trick her mind was playing on her.

  Then movement. Not a part of the painted scene but standing in front of it. Looking right at her, gesturing wildly.

  What?

  Effie stood up abruptly, and Ben darted toward her from within the depths of the crowd.

  “Come now,” he said urgently. “We need to leave.”

  30.

  Lizzie

  I couldn’t let him win.

  I had done as he asked, played my part, thought that was an end to it—that was what we had agreed back in London.

  But then I realized he was making up the rules as we went along. The way he’d just turned up out of the blue and was raising the stakes, changing the script, demanding more, even though I’d already given everything I had.

  Given everything up, more like.

  So this time, I refused. Refused to go along with it, refused to let him ruin my “wedding”—if that was what he still insisted on calling this trip.

  He had pushed me so far already; I wasn’t willing to go over the edge.

  So I clung on. I was stubborn—at times, cheerful even. I didn’t want him to see what he was doing to me.

  That was a mistake: trying to beat him. It just made him even more determined that I should be the one to lose.

  31.

  Anna

  As they waited outside the cave for the others to emerge, Charlie took pictures of Iso, who had come out that morning dressed in a long blue-and-white striped kaftan embroidered with a hot pink Aztec design and strappy leather sandals with golden wings at the heels.

  She had an endless supply of the sorts of things Anna never seemed to see in the shops—not that Anna had any interest in wasting her weekends trawling round the high street. That, Anna pondered bitterly, was what people needed “content creators” for.

  She remembere
d first following Iso’s sun-drenched account by the half-light of her dimmed reading lamp during one bleary, predawn feed with baby Sonny, and her stomach clenched with bitterness. Anna would have preferred her insecurities remain within the pixels of her phone screen, rather than following her on holiday. If she hadn’t met Iso—if Iso hadn’t met her husband—would Anna have clicked through on Instagram to buy that kaftan in the hope of resembling this limby burnished girl? Anna checked with her fingertips that her permanently pink face was still slick with factor 50 sunblock. Probably. Although it would have looked like a traveling circus’s big top on her.

  Anna’s relationship with her Instagram account was a Mobius strip of envy and self-loathing. She tried not to use it—had taken it off her phone twice—but regularly found herself scrolling before dawn when she woke up airless and anxious about the day ahead. For every hundred or so posts she saw that made her feel terrible—fat, old, left out, joyless—she’d pop a shot of Sonny up there—cute in a raincoat, foamy and adorable with an oat-milk babyccino (ugh)—and bask in the warm glow of likes from people she barely knew.

  From her spot in the queue she watched Iso contort herself so she looked even thinner in the already roomy dress. Here she was leaning back against the cliff, one arm extended beyond her head, eyes closed in sunlit ecstasy; there laughingly “balancing” a distant outcrop of rock on the end of one finger. Anna knew that these shots would go up with captions like “Be true to yourself” or “So summery RN” or maybe just a little row of peace-out finger emojis.

  And then there were the posts Anna thrived on, both for their earnestness and for their ridiculousness: the most elaborately staged, waspishly-waisted, sucked-in cheekbones, and carefully angled, waifishly skinny arm-legs would be accompanied with a blurb about how insecure the influencer was feeling within herself, how thorny a subject self-esteem could be, how Instagram wasn’t real life and they should all be kinder to each other. It would be sponsored by a brand of muesli, and Anna would “like” it as though clicking the little heart was a means of expelling some of the poison that had built up inside her.