The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  More like squeezing a pimple with dirty fingers.

  After the improvised shoot, Iso took her phone back from Charlie and began busily paging around its screen, lightening, filtering, framing, composing.

  Behind them, from the mouth of the cave, Effie plunged through the crowd and out into the daylight.

  The shift into daylight took its toll on her pupils, and she staggered slightly as she met a midday sun made even brighter as it reflected off the white-gray stones of the cliffs on all sides. As her gaze adjusted—to the primary-colored tourist T-shirts, the azure blue of the sky overhead, the navy-gray asphalt of the tarmac—the people closest to her came into focus.

  “We were wondering where you’d got to!” cried Anna, breaking off from the circle and stepping toward her friend.

  “And what you and Ben might be getting up to in the dark, eh, Eff?” Charlie gave his finest imaginary mustache-twisting leer from behind expensive sunglasses.

  Effie scowled reflexively and spun around. “Where’s Ben?” she panted.

  A few yards away, Lizzie was standing just beyond Anna, laughing about something with Steve, who was pointing toward the village on the cliffs above. Her face was creased in a smile and was pretty in the sunlight, less drawn than it had been, more alive than they’d seen her for what felt like many months. Her short white dress clung to her brown thighs in the languid heat.

  Behind Effie, Bertie appeared in the cave’s empty and light-absorbing mouth.

  “You’re here,” he said, shielding his own unaccustomed eyes from the glare of daylight. “You and Ben ran off so quickly! What happened in there?”

  Anna switched off her smile and saw the rest of the group’s eyes swivel toward her friend curiously. Expectantly. “Effie? Are you okay?”

  “Errr,” she began.

  But before she could say more, she heard her name behind her, on the path from the cave’s mouth. Ben. He walked briskly toward them, eyes darting from the road below to the group and back again. When he reached them, he bent and braced his hands against his knees, drawing hot breath from the even hotter air.

  “We need to go back to the house,” he said. Smoothly, but in a way that would brook no dissent.

  “Ben…?” Effie started toward him, one hand outstretched to lay on his broad back.

  “Now,” he said, his smile fixed and tight. “I think Dan is here. I think I saw him in there.”

  Lizzie’s smirk faded. Her expression changed as abruptly as a channel on a television, zapped from life into standby. Closed, quiet, numb. Her dark eyes went black with shock.

  “Let’s go,” she said, turning and beginning a brisk march in the direction of their cars.

  None of them moved, not quite sure what was going on. The shift had been so swift, so immediate that Steve’s face was still caught in an uncertain grin.

  Striding down the driveway, a hundred yards ahead of them, Lizzie spun on her heel. Her face was streaked with tears and red with rage as she spat back a shout at them:

  “Now!”

  32.

  The Wedding Night: Lizzie

  It’s what every girl dreams of, isn’t it? A man so devoted that he’ll follow her to a foreign land to prove it and win her heart?

  What sounds romantic during the years we while away in teenage bedrooms longing for a knight to find us turns out to be something very different when you’re old enough to realize women aren’t Rapunzel, they’re Joan of Arc. And that the men who pitch up at the foot of the tower are more likely to burn you as a witch than want you for a wife.

  I realized, too late, that it wasn’t even about the wedding. The fact that this hadn’t ended when the relationship did was proof that there was a bigger axe to grind. A debt to settle beyond the bargain I thought I’d agreed to.

  I’d ended things so that everyone involved might move on, but clearly he wasn’t planning to. In some twisted way, he still wanted the wedding to go ahead, so that he could play his final, terrible card.

  It was the sounds of the first dance that woke me, even though I’d taken enough of my pills to knock out the whole party. At first, I wasn’t surprised—we’d listened to that song, me and Dan, so many times in the past six months that I practically heard it in my sleep anyway. We had been trying to perfect our moves for the evening of our big day: he focused obsessively on his footwork, and I practiced keeping a smile on my face while, inside, my pulse raced in anxiety rather than excitement.

  Those horns, that Motown beat, the high hat. “Happiness condensed to three minutes, joy transliterated on a stave.” Steve wrote that about the song in an article of his I’d found on Google. The soaring strings wormed their way into the blank space where my dreams should have been and crowbarred me back into reality. The place I least wanted to be, the place where the photographs existed.

  Then I realized groggily: they were celebrating my wedding. My friends, enjoying my wedding without me. I almost threw the tooth mug of water I had filled and put by my bed at the chimney breast opposite, but I didn’t want them to know I was awake.

  I lay up there in the dark, disinvited from my own party, simmering with silent and heartbroken resentment as they tucked into the wine I had chosen, the food I had tasted, ummed and aahed over, paid for. I had felt abused for so long now, I hadn’t thought it possible to hurt more than I already did—but there is nothing more painful than an injury inflicted by your closest friends. In their cups, their rowdy partying, they had forgotten all about me—even Effie, after everything we’d gone through. That’s what really stung as I lay upstairs listening to them like some madwoman in the attic.

  Vengeful Medea on the roof, more like. I wanted nothing more than to set light to the bonfire I’d built underneath us all—I’d already saved Effie from the flames once, though she didn’t know it, and she’d paid me back by bringing the spark to the tinderbox.

  If we’d just got married quietly at home—been clapped through the lych-gate of St. Swithun’s and trundled back to Mum and Dad’s garden for cucumber sandwiches—none of this would have happened.

  None of the setup, I mean. None of the drama. The mistake had been made—I could never go back and undo that. But what I hadn’t realized was that I’d also provided the stage for it to be unveiled to my friends like a comedy of fucking errors. Scene one, Bangkok. Scene two, a hotel room. Scene three, a bar. Scene four: France, a big house, a big wedding. The bigger the day got, the more there was to spoil. The more collateral damage.

  I had canceled every last vol-au-vent and champagne flute, as soon as I sent the email. He must have rebooked everything to torment me when he realized I was still planning to come.

  It was beautiful, all of it. Everything I’d asked for, right down to the shade of the ribbons around the flowers to match the ones I’d planned to wear in my hair. Hair I had instead taken to pulling out in desperate fistfuls as the intimidation, the threats reached their peak.

  Hearing my wedding taking place downstairs without me as Charlie popped cork after cork and Effie and Iso whooped was devastating, but what I feared most was a knock on the door behind which I was cowering.

  When the music died down and I heard the tread of feet to bedrooms along the tiles outside my room, I waited until everything in the house was still and then I got up. I didn’t know what I’d find, but I understood that the silence was the signal. My summons.

  Now that the rest of them had passed out, there was a chance to resolve things. As if I hadn’t tried that several times already.

  I walked through the debris of my wedding like a ghost bride moving backward through time. I’d give anything to go back and undo it all, rebalance my life, take control of it again—for Effie’s sake, too. I was overwhelmed by a wave of melancholy. This was really happening to me. This had been my chance at happiness. Now it was gone.

  Since the engagement party, I’
d been observing it all from a distance, as though I were floating high in the air as the circus tent collapsed beneath me. Disassociation—it’s an anxiety thing. Perhaps helped along by all the Valium I’d been taking and the wine I’d been drinking to keep everything at bay.

  And so I sat, despairing and disheveled in my long white cotton nightgown—excessively bridal and bought for this very night—at the head of the table I had expected to preside over in ivory silk.

  A noise, and my head flew up like a deer’s in the road, looking first toward the door, then to the stairs. The Oratoire creaked almost constantly with the weight of the centuries it had witnessed, but this had come from outside—beyond the double doors, left open when the others had retired in their varying states of incapacity.

  The disarrayed furniture out there looked as drunk as my friends had sounded.

  It was only a small rasp—quieter than a cough—but it caught my attention in the otherwise still and silent room.

  Then he was there, standing in the doorway, and still—despite everything, despite what he had done and the things he had said—I felt the echo of that thrill in my chest, the hardness behind my solar plexus again. I had been infatuated with him, and those feelings had been so strong. But time and terror had snuffed them out like the long-gone flames in the sconces on the château walls.

  “Finally,” he said, stepping through the doors and reaching for a switch on the decks. He put the music back on, softly this time, not loud enough to wake anybody but enough for me to hear those horns, that Motown beat, the high hat. “I’ve got you to myself.”

  Every word of those cancellation emails had felt like a knife to the heart, every keystroke a punch in the face. The first to all of our guests, the next to our nearest and dearest who we had planned to have stay with us at the château. Dan didn’t even know I was sending either of them until I’d done it; I couldn’t face his attempts to persuade me not to. I’ll never be able to forget his expression once he’d seen them.

  I knew when I arrived at the château—saw the tables, the napkins, the candles, the bouquet—that I would never be free of him. He had a psychopath’s taste for precision—either that or a bride’s.

  “Did you think you could win,” he sneered, “after you humiliated me like that? Do you know how it feels to be dumped for your best mate? Because Effie soon will.”

  It was Ben.

  The man I spent a night with in Bangkok before I came home and met Dan on a dating app.

  33.

  Effie

  “This can’t be happening, let me out!”

  As Ben climbed into the car and clunked the door shut behind him, Lizzie, previously desperate to leave the caves—and Dan—behind, began to thrash against her seatbelt, trying to undo it.

  Next to her, Effie tried to soothe the bride. “Lizbet, calm down. Let’s just get back and figure out what to do when we get there.”

  “You don’t get it—ugh!” Lizzie railed, still scrabbling for the door handle, bucking against the embrace. “None of you get it! He’s a fucking lunatic!”

  “That’s why we need to go back, Lizzie,” Anna said gently from the front seat. “It’ll be easier to sort out at the house.”

  The passion seemed to leave her as quickly as it had taken over, and Lizzie quieted. From the driver’s seat, Ben contemplated the bride in the mirror: she had one hand over her face, eyes covered as she regained her composure.

  “Are we ready now?” he asked, key in the ignition and almost impatient, like a parent dealing with a tantrum. But when he caught Effie’s eye in the reflection, they exchanged a sad, wearied smile.

  Ben eased the car back out onto the road, following the route that wound toward the Oratoire.

  It was intoxicating, Effie thought, the way he so smoothly took over. As though someone had charged Ben with the welfare of them all. Perhaps that was what a certain type of schooling provides you with, she reflected: the ability to stay cool under pressure.

  Barring a couple of student PE teachers and an ancient maths tutor, Effie’s colleagues were mainly women; she had limited experience with meeting men beyond her friendship group and James’s. Beyond the depressing handful of dates she’d recently gone on.

  Tall and rangy, with a swimmer’s triangular torso and a well-defined Head Boy chin, Ben was nothing like any of the men Effie’s apps had coyly suggested to her. Nor was he like the ones she had met from James’s office. There, masculinity was skinny and frugal, protected via a shibboleth of obscure websites and cool-related humor that was neither interesting nor funny. Where their manliness had been distributed sparingly, as though it were rationed, Ben so overflowed with it that he made even Charlie look a little smaller by comparison.

  That was what had attracted her in the first place, back when he hadn’t seemed to show any particular interest in her. Then, his quiet solidity and calm had seemed like arrogance; now, despite being shaken by the prospect of what Dan was there to do, he was no less solid, no less calm, but had moved into a staccato safety-first mode, and Effie found his natural authority reassuring.

  Charlie and Iso raced ahead in their sports car, and Ben drove the others quickly but precisely in near silence. Silence but for the former bride, now crumpled and crying softly in the backseat.

  Perhaps she wanted to tell them what exactly it was that she seemed so terrified of, reasoned Effie, who rode alongside her friend and proffered a tissue—accepted and subsequently soaked with tears into a soggy pulp.

  Perhaps Lizzie had wanted to explain why the prospect of Dan had struck such fear into her, to get it all off her chest—finally—so they might help her. Perhaps she was desperate to share it—only the racking sobs that emanated not so much from her chest as from her gut would barely let her draw breath, let alone get the words out.

  As Ben drove, Lizzie curled away, blond head pressed up against the window, the knuckles of her fists clenched white against the tanned skin on her legs.

  Now, after they pulled up to the Oratoire’s entrance, she drew back as Ben climbed out of the front and ran round to open the door for her. Pushing herself upright, Effie did the same.

  “Lizzie, I’m so sorry.” He spoke softly but sternly, and leaned into the car where she sat, still belted into her seat, as though he were a roller-coaster operative checking a safety harness before sending her off on the ride of her life. “I didn’t mean to give you such a shock.”

  Lizzie’s breathing was still ragged. Effie felt both the warmth of Ben’s care as he offered it and the stillness that had descended on Lizzie, trembling exchanged for an absolute rigid tension. Their friend was like a wild animal cornered, gaze unblinking where she met Ben’s, breath shallow as she seemed to gauge whether he was friend or foe.

  Poor Lizzie, her nerves are shot.

  Effie had once thought Ben was haughty, but she could see the strain on him now; his every sinew was taut as he carefully attempted to talk Lizzie down: “I think we know what this means.”

  Lizzie shook her head minutely. Her eyes had not left Ben’s face since he’d started talking. They lingered there still, reading him like a map, and as he formed his next words, they filled once more with tears.

  “I don’t think you have a choice. We need to go inside,” Ben said gravely. “And then we need to explain to everybody what has been going on.”

  Lizzie’s expression was one of frightened pleading. Make this not be real, please. She was still strapped into the car, as though the release button on her seatbelt was the timer on a bomb.

  No reply to our messages, no ringing even, and now…here? Is accountant Dan on the lam?

  Effie’s lips perked inappropriately in a half-smile just at the thought: the prospect of mild-mannered Dan in the ill-fitting guise of hot-blooded lover. The notion was so out of character it was comic: quiet old meat-and-two-veg Dan slipping his London life in pur
suit of love thrown off, determined to unjilt himself by sheer force of will. What would he do, rend his corduroy blazer and beat his pale, hairless chest? It would be like watching City men in expensive suits attempt an orderly fistfight at closing time.

  Effie flicked her eyes to meet Anna’s and saw that her face was drawn, her skin ashen, the tip of one white tooth visibly biting her bloodless bottom lip.

  “Come on, Lizbet,” she murmured, shifting on her feet to gaze back at the spot on the horizon at the end of the track, as though they might suddenly see him—Dan—framed at the bottom of the cypress avenue.

  Effie remembered the wedding figurines with their heads sawn off, the lucid, floating letters in the guest book. Words scrawled into the steam on the mirror, the torn page of the notebook as another message had been stabbingly etched onto the paper there. Surely they were safe, like Bertie had said?

  “Do you really think we have anything to worry about?” she started to say to Ben, doubtfully. “It’s just D—”

  But he spoke across her like a blanket smothering flames: “There’s a lot you don’t know about Dan, Effie.”

  He stood and stretched out a hand to Lizzie. Mute, the former bride finally unfastened her seatbelt, tipped herself like a ragdoll into Ben’s open arms, and let him half-lead, half-drag her into the cool of the château.

  Behind them—Bertie’s gentle face full of concern, Charlie’s a mask of confusion, Iso puzzled and curious—the others fell in and followed, just like a wedding procession.