The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  34.

  Anna

  Inside, Ben led Lizzie through the Hall and back out to one of the sunbeds around the pool, where the rest of the group gathered.

  If Slim Aarons did sob stories. Anna tutted herself for the sarcasm; she had never seen Lizzie like this.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about Dan,” Ben repeated, after he’d helped the former bride—as creased and pale as her white dress—to a lounger. There was something almost triumphant in his demeanor as he played hero of the hour; Anna realized he was reveling in it slightly.

  “He’s…a great guy,” he continued, and Lizzie bit her lip. “I’ve known him since boarding school, and he’s always been a really loyal friend. Someone you knew would always look out for you, always stand up for you. It’s a kind of code-of-honor thing with him, you know?”

  At this, Lizzie snarled a half-laugh.

  “Let me tell them, Lizzie,” Ben said quietly. He turned to face the others. “But recently he’s become, well, more than protective of Lizzie. More like her keeper, really.” He paused and wiped a hand over his face. “Look, I didn’t know any of this until Lizzie told me—last week, when she canceled the wedding.”

  A ripple moved through the people assembled as the wind sent a flurry across the surface of the pool: the reveal.

  “She called me last week,” he said. “Dan had taken her purse with all her cards—she had no money, couldn’t leave the flat. So she asked me over, and told me what had been going on. I couldn’t…when I got there, I couldn’t believe how scared she was.”

  Anna watched as her friend’s eyes rolled back in her pale face and she let Ben do the talking: Lizzie was the last woman Anna had expected to let a man narrate her life like this for her.

  “It started with comments about her staying out too late, drinking too much,” Ben said. “Hanging out with her friends when she could have been with Dan, him worrying when she didn’t tell him what time she’d be home.”

  Anna knew immediately how welcome those comments, that clucking, must have at first seemed to Lizzie, more used to Guy’s remote apathy and laissez-faire style of boyfriending. She watched helplessly, with a stomachful of foreboding, as her friend’s head sank forward to her knees, bent in front of her on the sunbed.

  Ben continued: “That was when she began to find Dan a bit intense.”

  “It was intense—we’d just moved in together,” Lizzie broke in with a weak moan, barely lifting her head up. “You go out way less, you stay in together….Everyone does! It was nice!”

  “That’s right.” Ben’s voice was kindly, but he seemed irked by Lizzie’s lingering instinct to excuse her former fiancé. “But then he wanted to know where she was all the time, so he could ‘keep her safe,’ he told her. And then Dan started putting you down, didn’t he? Saying you were stupid, weak, confused. He told Lizzie she was pathetic—that she’d done well to snare him, that her life was empty beyond him. Even though it was his campaign that had shut down her social life.”

  Anna thought of those sad six months between the engagement party and the week planned for the wedding when she had known—instinctively, like language—that there was something Lizzie wasn’t telling her. She felt ashamed for not trying harder; she had been so wrapped up in her own busy life that she hadn’t even noticed her friend walking wounded beside her.

  Anna was outraged on Lizzie’s behalf, but something in Ben’s demeanor stopped her from speaking out—there was more. He was managing the story just as he’d managed Lizzie by the car. Even though the bride had hardly been in the same room as him since they’d all arrived at the château, there was a bond between the two of them. Anna looked across to Effie, who was—as ever—hanging on Ben’s every word, and she felt a stab of worry for this friend too. For how she now suspected Effie’s hopes with Ben might end.

  “Dan read your phone, didn’t he, Lizzie?” Ben said. “He had the password to your emails?”

  “That was just once,” Lizzie said bleakly. “Because he was worried—”

  “So worried he began to insist on collecting you from work every night too,” Ben added, finishing the sentence, and it was Effie’s turn to moan. Poor, poor Lizzie—trapped in her life, trapped in plain sight, and the rest of them cheering her on to get married to the man who had boxed her in.

  “Who bought the dress you wore to the engagement party?” Ben asked Lizzie carefully, and she burst into fresh tears.

  “It was a gift! He knew I liked it! He was doing something nice!” she cried.

  “He chose every outfit after that, didn’t he?”

  Lizzie’s shaking shoulders seemed to nod an affirmative, even as she shook her head miserably.

  “Oh, Lizzie!” Anna cried, her own voice rent with emotion, and Ben met her appalled eyes with the saddest expression in his own.

  “I just wish I’d known sooner,” he said quietly. “I told her I thought she should cancel the wedding.” He spread his palms at his sides. “What else was there to do? Lizzie didn’t want to go to the police, so I helped her get Dan out of her life. We changed the locks, began boxing up his stuff.”

  “Lizbet?” Effie, stirred from her horror, rushed to share the sunbed her friend lay supine on as the events of her life washed over them all. But Lizzie could only sob and splutter, heaving in one breath and then another, her grief assaulting her again and again.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Effie looked up at Ben, her voice cracking as she asked him the inevitable question. The question Anna had been waiting for.

  This man Effie had been so close with had understood, for the past week at least, what their friend had been suffering and not told her. Anna wondered why exactly that might be and felt her heart begin to race.

  “I hoped that canceling the wedding would be the end of it,” Ben answered, hanging his head and setting his mouth in an apologetic line of self-recrimination—or was it a failed attempt to hide a smirk? “I guess I didn’t want you to think of Dan that way. I’m sorry. I said he could move in with me while he sorts himself out….He doesn’t know my role in helping Lizzie, of course.”

  Lizzie sniffed and wiped her streaked face with the palm of one hand. “Yet,” she said emphatically. “Doesn’t know yet.”

  Ben cleared his throat purposefully. “It took me too long to find out what Dan was capable of. When I didn’t hear from him for a few days, I thought he was just angry with me, annoyed that I was siding too much with Lizzie. But his phone’s been dead for so long now, I’m wondering whether he’s actually changed his number. And if he has, why?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, and it bristled upward where it was damp with sweat.

  “We know Dan ordered the wedding to be set up again,” offered Bertie. He was sitting a few yards away in a deck chair, his usual warmth swapped for sadness like a portrait covered in mourning.

  “And the messages,” Iso said. “Sneaking in and leaving us those messages—and the one in the book the morning after the wedding! That must have been him too!”

  You deserve each other. Anna couldn’t fault Iso’s logic.

  “The wedding stuff I thought was an honest mistake,” Ben acknowledged, nodding, “but then Bertie found out from Marie….Then the pad, the mirror. And then, this morning, in the caves—that’s when I knew for sure.”

  He paused, clenched a fist, and banged it against his knee as if to flagellate himself. “Dan’s not going to let Lizzie go.”

  35.

  Effie

  She watched as Ben pulled one strong hand over his face as if rearranging his features might lift his mood. As if, when he took his hand away, the scene would somehow have changed to one of happiness.

  “Oh, mate,” he said sorrowfully to himself. “What have you done?”

  “I’m not marrying him,” Lizzie said to Ben tersely from the sunbed. “Shouldn’t this be
over now?”

  Effie felt she was following the proceedings from under a thick glass dome. Every line Ben spoke seemed distorted: This monster we were talking about was Dan. And his victim was Lizzie. Our Lizzie.

  Since James had left, Effie hadn’t watched any of the scary movies her ex-boyfriend had so enjoyed—clicking the light on in the middle of the night to discover that she was still alone matched any dread the supernatural could offer. But she felt like a character from one now. In those films, the least credulous were always the first to go. Even though Effie knew there was no such thing as ghosts, she would find herself urging the on-screen skeptics to wake up to the fact of them so they might escape in time. She felt herself doing something similar now: there is a new Dan to believe in, and you must believe in him before he comes for Lizzie and it’s too late.

  But why hadn’t Lizzie told her? Even more bizarrely, Ben—whom Effie had spent the past month languidly enjoying, moving with hungrily, claiming ecstasy—had not thought to mention the sad story he had just shared. She felt somehow embarrassed at having been left out, faintly—pathetically—jealous of the secret bond that had developed between him and her best friend.

  “So Dan has been here since the wedding night?” Effie asked slowly.

  “I think there’s every chance he has been,” Bertie replied.

  As she staggered to the kitchen to get…something that might take the edge off the revelations, Effie felt sick, but vindicated.

  She had long had the smallest shred of niggle in her mind—after a throwaway comment Ben had made at his best friend’s engagement party all those months ago. It had seeded and bloomed in that time, as they’d watched Lizzie grow pale and stop communicating with those closest to her—and it had now been proved correct.

  The comment had been muttered in a silky undertone onto her earlobe, one eyebrow cocked for the punch line, as Effie hooted along in merriment to a twisting story of teenage misdemeanors and boarding school ribbing—as James stood back, looking grumpy—of how the two men had become such firm friends.

  “Then again,” Ben had laughed beerily, “Dan’s always been the possessive one.”

  Gazing at the happy couple across the dance floor, where they were attempting a shimmy to some obscure seventies disco track—despite Anna’s plea to Steve to play only things people knew the words to—Effie had shivered off the words that gave a different color to the hand on Lizzie’s waist, the palm cupping her ecstatic face. As the sequins of light from the glitterball faded from blue to pink, so Effie chose to see what she wanted to, not what Ben had implied.

  Now that she knew the whole of it, Effie was devastated not only for Lizzie but by her own failure to examine the pulsing of instinct in her own heart. A cup of tea and a snuggly quilt wouldn’t cut it in eighty-five-degree heat, so she reached instead for yet another cool green bottle from one of the scullery’s bottomless fridges and arranged enough glasses on a tray for the whole group to swig from as they sat around Lizzie in watchful pity until a time when she wanted to speak to them of it.

  A campaign, Ben had said. A campaign. Effie thought first of all of the very billboards and TV spots that Lizzie herself dealt in at work: the strategically planned, guided, and gradual doling out of selective information until such a point when those lapping it up were indisputably hooked, loyal, willing consumers. But as Ben talked, her mind had turned to the military sort—to the pushes, the clashes, the falling backs, and the sieges. The wearing down of defenses and cutting off of resources until the stronger party could set a flag in this newly won territory, declaring that it now belonged, wholly and entirely, to them. It had been that sort of campaign.

  She reappeared on the terrace with the tray of glasses and a chrome cooler but missed a step as she began descending to the poolside—as her foot landed awkwardly, one of the stems wobbled and fell, then smashed on the pale flagstones.

  “Mind your bare feet!” she called out as Bertie and Charlie flew to recover the bigger shards and Steve scanned for the tinier, more insistent pieces, which could lie in wait and pierce unexpectedly, long after the accident had been forgotten.

  “Are you okay?” Effie asked, lowering the tray onto one of the side tables and sitting on an adjacent sunbed next to her tear-stained friend.

  Quieter now, Lizzie sniffed and smiled gratefully when, from her other side, Iso passed a tissue from within her pretty wicker basket bag. Effie put a hand on the nearest part of her friend she could find—despite beginning its freckling of new suntan, Lizzie’s foot felt like a block of ice. She looked at the toes crooked in her palm, their nails painted in the bridal blush of a shade called Sweetness & Light. Though Effie had been there like a good best friend when Lizzie chose it at the nail bar, she had not been a good enough one to know that life behind the facade had been anything but.

  “Did he…hurt you?” Anna asked, hardly believing the Dan they knew to be capable of it. Lizzie had joked often that it was she, not he, who stamped a foot, raised a voice. Dan had always seemed so easygoing, so passive. Clearly there had been a strong current under those still waters.

  “No, never.” Lizzie shook her head vehemently, still protective of his reputation, like a doting captive.

  “Well, that’s something,” said Ben, standing and clearing his throat. “I know it came close a few times—”

  “I can’t do this anymore, I need to go and lie down, I’m sorry.” Lizzie got to her feet and swayed a little, pale-faced beneath her tan.

  Effie stood and made to support her at the elbow. “Let me come with you, Lizbet.”

  But Lizzie insisted: she would go inside alone. She needed space. Time to think about what to do next, but also to sleep. The grief and worry that had clung to her like an illness these past months had made her weak, like an invalid.

  “But we still don’t know where Dan is.” Anna’s angst was palpable. “Someone should be with you.”

  “I’ll go,” Ben said, smiling at Lizzie reassuringly. Kindly, brotherly. “I feel like this is all my fault. If only I’d known what he was really like, I might have stopped all this.”

  Lizzie hung her head in acquiescence. Then to nobody in particular, but to all of them—to Charlie, who was pouring himself a glass of wine, and Steve, still sweeping up the broken glass; to Iso and Effie on the loungers; to Bertie, Anna, and Ben, who were closest to her—and with the weary look of someone who has had to do it before: “I’ll lock my door.”

  36.

  Lizzie

  Prickled skin, big eyes, a jumping heartbeat—they have the same effect on your body, love and fear. I tried to defend Dan against what Ben was telling them, but I couldn’t: I was too afraid. My body trembled with it—with fear and with outrage. I didn’t have the new script he seemed to be working from; in my draft, the story ended back in London.

  I’d asked him to leave while we were in the caves—the only place I could talk to him bluntly without anybody else overhearing. Despite the sensation of him breathing down my neck every second I was under the same roof as him, in reality we had shared very little air, barely exchanged any words directly, since arriving at the château. In the dark, with all those hellscapes whizzing round us on the walls, I told him I’d done everything he’d asked; now it was his turn to follow the rules of the game he’d set up. If he didn’t, I’d have to reveal the truth to everybody—my final, desperate out.

  That was what made him switch to this new tack, this Dan angle. He was incensed that I’d tried to fight back and he wanted to show me who was in charge.

  I’d learned over the past months how slippery Ben was, how persuasive, how insistent. Like a tide that starts by filling up your shoe, then chases you up the beach, intent on covering the top of your head, too.

  I felt myself drowning now—not only in his lies but in my own fury. Here I was, cooped up in my bedroom, with my jailor pretending to be my guardian, my close
st friends steps away but unable to help. It was all I could do not to rip the curtains down from where they festooned the four-poster bed or smash the place up; I was crying still but the tears were now of hot and stupid, frustrated rage rather than sorrow. My whole chest burned with it, and my fingers became fists.

  When I’d slammed the door and breathed out properly for what felt like the first time in the past hour, I’d sounded more like a snarling dog than a person. And when I looked at myself in the vast glass that hung on one wall—having briefly contemplated hurling a chair into it to relieve some of the tension—I saw a mask of pure hatred staring back.

  I’d had to just sit there as I’d watched it dawn on each person’s face—each beloved face of someone I’d known my entire adult life—that the man they thought I had once been in love with was a monster. The loveliest, kindest man I’d ever met, who accepted me and adored me for all my flaws, twisted beyond all recognition. Dan told me he had always been in awe of Ben at school for his confidence and his cheekiness—his ability to grapple with life where meek teenage Dan had allowed events to wash over him—but Ben’s destructive streak was as vast and infinite as Dan’s capacity for love. Just how much hurt, how much pain, would be enough for him? Was his plan to ruin Dan’s life—Dan’s reputation—as well as mine?

  Now that he was changing the rules again, I was scared Ben wouldn’t stop until he had destroyed something even more sacred: my friendship with Effie. What if he persuaded her that he and I had been seeing each other behind her back, the way he’d planned to persuade Dan? Or worse, what if he made her believe that we had enlisted her in some kind of bizarre game to take the heat off us around the time of my wedding? Would she see through it?

  I leaned my head back on the door I had just locked against him, shuddering at the fact he was right there on the other side of it.