Was he laughing? Smiling that complacent smirk? I knew then that if the door hadn’t been between us, my inner schoolgirl would have lashed out at him: I wanted to scratch, bite, pull, kick. I wanted him to feel the same frenzy of wounds he had inflicted on me, on my life and my friends.
But I knew the real wound had already been dealt. The blow to his pride when I had chosen Dan. If that first cut really had been the deepest, then the way to deal the final blow would be to fight back. Not with fingernails and slaps, not chaotically but cautiously.
I knew then that I’d do anything not to let him get away with ruining my life, or Dan’s, or Effie’s.
But I still didn’t know the answer to the most crucial question: Would my best friend choose Ben over me?
Four Days After
37.
Effie
As Lizzie slept behind a locked door and Ben guarded the stairs, Effie and Bertie sat out on the terrace as the night made dark, hulking lumps of the mountains at the edge of the skyline, and the moon frosted over the plain below like ice. The heat of the day had dissipated but they were warm enough still, caped in blankets lifted from a chest in the Hall.
“They think of everything, our hosts,” Bertie said absentmindedly, as he wrapped himself more tightly. “Every comfort catered to.”
Effie snorted. “Rather overzealous, if you ask me—setting up a wedding that had been canceled and all that…”
“Touché. Except that it had been uncanceled, after all.” Bertie sipped his glass of red wine. “Poor Lizzie. Awful to think of anybody treating her like that.”
He paused, and Effie knew they were both thinking of the same thing in that moment. The pale sprigged curtains of Lizzie’s teenage bedroom, bleached because she had taken to keeping them closed during the day. He had sat with her for days on end when she came home from university for the final time. The aftermath had been so much longer than the incident itself.
“Thank you, by the way,” he said. “For what you did back then. I’ve never had the chance to say it to you.”
Effie had first heard Bertie’s name in connection with what had happened that summer after graduation; he knew what Effie and Lizzie had gone through together, and Effie, living back with her own parents, had been glad that Lizzie had someone she could turn to. Keeping a secret like that was hard enough, especially once it had sapped you of the strength to even get out of bed in the mornings.
Lizzie had returned home that summer, changed and chastened but even then still full of the light that seemed to have more recently gone out of her. Back then, Lizzie had been determined to do better—never to make such a demand of a loved one again, nor to forget what she owed her best friend. And to respect herself, her body: not to let a repeat carelessness happen again.
Lizzie had always been the golden child in her and Bertie’s family: blond where the rest of them were strawberry, bordering on carrot. Clever and bookish as they all were, but irrepressibly sociable where they were not; beautiful and proud of it, where her cousins all tended to hunch away from scrutiny. Lizzie had achieved the impossible at school—been both clever and cool, and Bertie’s rep (or, at least, his standing among the boys who might otherwise have tripped him and called him gay) had benefited from it immensely.
Effie knew the old story well. “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” Lizzie had said to Bertie after Sunday lunch one weekend as they hung around in her bedroom listening to music—around seventeen, they must have been. She’d gone to the optician’s the next day and become the first person in their family’s lineage of blinkers to get a pair of contact lenses.
It was only once she’d gone to Cambridge, left the village in the wold—now a golden, hay-scented sort of place in Bertie’s memory, even though it rained there as much as it did in the rest of England—that the cleverness and the cool had collided. She’d gone off the rails, to use a phrase of her mother’s. Not, of course, that Lizzie’s mum had known the half of what had gone on in those sunlit quads. Lizzie had always had secrets.
Effie stirred awkwardly at the memory. “What are friends for?” she said. “I only wish I could have been there for her this time.”
Bertie nodded. “Me too. What’s your view on Dan? I only met him once—he seemed…completely fine.”
It was hardly a ringing endorsement, but Dan had appeared completely fine to Effie, too. More than that: really quite pleasant. Mild and funny, supportive and caring—if a little on the neurotic side perhaps. But who wasn’t?
“He didn’t like being late,” she said after a few moments’ thought. “He always apologized profusely if they were ever late—which, given Lizzie’s respect for punctuality, was always. He practically dragged her out of the pub once when they were expected at some friend’s house for dinner.”
Bertie’s eyes widened. “Dragged…?”
“No, look, it wasn’t really like that,” began Effie. “I just meant…”
But maybe it was. Maybe it had been like that. It had to have been, hadn’t it, because although Lizzie had protested at various parts of the whole, sorry tale, she hadn’t denied it outright, and Ben had seemed on edge, all day. And Dan—the fact that he was here, watching them and leaving them notes. Even according to Effie’s currently rather skewed, chaotic barometer, this was not how normal people behaved.
“What do we do when he turns up?” she asked. “Anna’s convinced there’ll be a showdown. It feels…sinister, that he might be lurking about here somewhere. I’m not scared of him, but I’m scared for Lizzie. We don’t know what he might do.”
“No, we don’t. We just have to keep an eye on her,” Bertie said.
To that end, Ben had offered to move his single mattress to outside her door and sleep there overnight. Lizzie had accepted reluctantly, and they’d once again heard the turning of the key in her door when she retired to bed—early, and having barely eaten—as they’d finished clearing dinner away. Not long after Effie and Bertie had settled into a pair of chairs outside, the rest of the party had climbed the stairs, tired from the day’s events, punch-drunk at the unraveling of a story they thought they knew and one whose new ending they could not yet predict.
“I suppose,” Bertie said, “we’ll need to get the police involved once we’re home again if things don’t settle down. I don’t envy her that.” He narrowed his eyes and squinted across the valley floor before he started speaking again. “One of my lawyer friends just prosecuted a policeman who actually fined a woman who came in complaining about an ex-boyfriend who’d turned stalker. Thought she was a time-waster, apparently.”
“Oh?” Effie asked, sipping her wine, eyes searching his face even as he avoided her gaze. “What happened?”
“The guy killed her.” Bertie’s features were grim in the moonlight. “Some men can’t be trusted with love. It’s more than they can handle.”
She had no idea how to respond to Bertie’s quiet anger, so she drained her glass and ignored the urge to refill it. When, eventually, after a few minutes’ silence, she stood, a gentle smile uncreased the furrow in his brow and he wished her a good night’s sleep. Effie hurried to her room, stepping over the sleeping form of Ben where he lay like Lizzie’s guard dog in the corridor.
It would mean another night alone in a single bed, but she could hardly resent Lizzie for that.
* * *
—
What was that? That noise?
Confused with the fug and bleariness just two glasses of wine had veiled her with after a couple of nights off, Effie struggled to the surface of her thoughts, kicking her legs like a swimmer against the tide, only to find them tangled in cotton sheets.
She rolled over in the sunshine that had begun to pool on her where she lay. The first thing she saw as her eyes opened was the empty blue wooden bed frame that stood parallel to the one she was in, the bed now divested of its mattress and
the dust on its slats exposed to the air.
Had it really only been three days since we all arrived to find that wedding scene laid out?
Effie shuddered at the thought of the message in the guest book. Congratulations—you deserve each other.
After Iso’s assumption, the others had agreed that this note had been the first of Dan’s threatening messages but, for Effie, something jarred with that interpretation. Who was Dan talking about, for one thing? And for another, the writing had been different—less full of vitriol, less menacing. More benign somehow, even if the meaning could be skewed unpleasantly. Why would Dan have written that?
Effie didn’t think it had been a message for the original happy couple; she was convinced that it was, instead, intended for a new pairing, a match born, awkwardly and unwisely, in a champagne haze.
The letters had been plaintive in their simplicity, hurt almost. That was why Effie still wondered—with an intense feeling of guilt toward Ben—whether they had been written by someone who might have seen her and Charlie together. Before they had retired upstairs to the honeymoon suite. Effie grimaced; would the whole day be this bad? She hadn’t even sat up yet.
The noise came again—a soft tapping at the door, her door.
“Come in,” she gargled through her last mouthful of sleep.
Anna squeezed herself into the room, curling her body around the door’s wooden plane so as not to open it too far and risk it scraping against the tiles again, waking the others. “Morning.” She smiled, sitting down on the edge of the bed and smoothing out over her legs the light patchwork-print skirt she had on.
Effie stretched her arms over her head and thumped them down onto the bed on either side of where her narrow body lay beneath the thin sheet. She pushed herself upward and shifted the pillows behind to support her back.
“What’s the latest?” she asked Anna, rubbing her eyes. “How’s Lizzie?”
When Anna failed to answer immediately, Effie jerked to another level of awake, stirring her legs to get up. “What? What is it?”
“Shhhh,” her friend said quietly, stopping her where she had moved with a soft but firm palm against her chest. “She’s fine. Nothing has happened. I just—I need to tell you something.”
Effie raised her eyebrows.
“I saw them together—Lizzie and Ben—on the wedding night,” she said apologetically. “I think there might be more going on than they’ve told us.”
“More how?” Effie said, her gorge rising.
Anna sighed, quietly devastated for her friend and for herself, for having to be the person to deliver the bad news. “I think…I think with everything Ben helped her through last week, they might have fallen for each other.”
38.
The Wedding Night: Anna
The ungainliness and discomfort of having fallen asleep fully clothed, with the lights on and her mouth open, was something Anna hadn’t experienced since university. Moving in with Effie, Charlie, and Lizzie again, even if only temporarily, was all it had taken to fall back into old habits.
The ability to drink rapaciously, and capaciously, had returned, along with a headache that threatened to fork like lightning from her left temple right down the side of her neck and into a fully fledged migraine if she didn’t take something for it soon.
She pushed two pills out of a blister pack and picked up a glass to wash them down with. Motherhood 101: Drink water as though you have just returned from a forty-day sojourn in the desert whenever even a drop of alcohol passes your lips.
Anna had followed her own good advice to the letter before she’d passed out and had gulped several refills of water from a small glass tumbler that had, in a previous incarnation, been a little mustard jar or a Nutella pot, but the hardworking little receptacle was now empty. And her headache was getting worse.
What time was it? She could hear music below her, though not as loud as it had been when she’d taken herself off to bed. When Effie had tossed the bouquet, which she’d been using as a microphone, out onto the patio with a manic glint in her eye, Anna had known it was time to turn in: things would only get messier from here.
A stream of bubbles moved from her stomach to her chest in protest as she stretched, and she rummaged in her bag once more for the milky indigestion fix she had become semi-addicted to during her pregnancy.
I need to get some more water.
Lucky she was still wearing all her clothes. Quite practical, really.
Oh God. I am shit-faced.
The corridor beyond her room was dark, the door of the bathroom nearest to her locked; a slew of snores came in response when she knocked. Down the hallway, light from downstairs bled up to the landing along with the music. Slower now, less frantic. Almost beguiling.
Anna had cared about music once. Never quite as much as Steve, but then it was his job to know the new and the edgy, the cult classics and all the lore that came with them. He’d introduced her to so many bands to love, so many songs that spoke to her soul, just like he had when they first met.
Where was he?
Passed out somewhere probably, and she caught the habitual snarl of contempt before it spread across her lips with the memory that she too had just woken up facedown with the lights on. She hiccuped.
Did I really just wake up a few minutes ago? Or was it more like an hour?
It was late, but it might also have been early. The sky was dark, but somebody was still up, partying. Over the music she could hear voices downstairs. Which was where she supposed she’d have to go for some water now.
Don’t accept any more shots from Ben. Do not engage with Charlie.
Where is Steve?
They were good at being codependent, she and Steve; neither of them was too needy. Not like some couples, where the wife was always hectoring, the husband a frustrated sex pest.
No, their lives intertwined nicely, like two climbing plants growing around each other. Steve was the fragrant perennial, dependable and nice-looking. She was the one with thorns. And quite a thick trunk. Why was she so cross with him all the time when actually the person she was most angry with was herself?
Angry with her own anger, her own short fuse, her quick-to-temper lack of resilience at home with a toddler who didn’t want the food she had cooked, told her he loved Daddy the most, put his shoes on the wrong feet first to make her laugh but then to make her cry. Anna spent her days at work dry-eyed being bellowed at by some of the worst people in London; by night, she fought back tears and scraped mashed potato off an expensive polished concrete floor she had insisted on and then realized was utterly impractical in a home that also contained a child.
Anna had reached, on the landing, a large, deep-set window ledge that looked out over where the cars were parked outside. She jumped up onto the ledge and sat, her feet dangling in the dark. As she settled into the nook, she heard a crisp metallic scratching noise, felt something move on the stone beneath her right hand. A ring. Golden, like hers, but shinier and newer. Less tarnished.
Anna thought cringingly of the tone of voice she had used with Steve when they’d discovered the wedding all laid out. She remembered how she had instructed him to pack Sonny’s suitcase, as though he were a certified cretin, when actually he had a first-class degree in philosophy, just not from the university she, Effie, and Charlie had gone to. A cooler one, she grudgingly admitted.
She remembered trying to look through his phone in the dark for evidence that Celia had gone further than simply offering Sonny a lift to nursery school and that Steve had accepted. She laid her cheek against the cool stone wall of the window seat’s nook and cringed again.
That tone, the exasperation and suspicion, the latent scorn—these were the things that had made their own wedding rings sparkle a little less surely, taken the dazzle off how they saw each other now, snuffed out the mystique.
It wasn’t all her fault, though. He had nose hair now—soon there would be more there than on his head—and she could tell he quite often thought that she was silly and shrill, when really she was just worried about their son. The streetwise, jivey music journo words she’d thrilled to hear on his lips when they were young now had the ring of someone’s dad still trying to keep up. But Steve actually was someone’s dad! And he was by far the best-looking of the ones who also suffered to push the little waterproof bundles on the swings in the park near their home on Sunday mornings.
She thought of the way he had looked at her when he thought she’d tell them to put the wine and antipasti back where they’d found it, and the love that had then suffused onto his features when she hadn’t. This was the expression she wanted to recapture: adoration pure and simple. The thrill of surprising each other, as well as the delight in what they both already knew.
Anna twisted her own ring off her fourth finger, whimpering in pain as it seemed to pare skin and bone from around the knuckle. Anna had lost a lot of weight ahead of her and Steve’s wedding and then proceeded to pile it all back on—and more!—afterward. The ring Steve had shakily pushed onto her hand still correlated to those girlish fingers, and the throbbing, naked chipolata in front of her had a dent where it had sat and the flesh had started growing around the metal.
In its place, Anna pushed the new ring on—quite tight—and pocketed the old. She vowed to be kinder to Steve in the morning, when she was less thirsty.
Oh yes! Water!
Anna jumped back down from the ledge and continued along the landing, down the first set of stairs toward the kitchen.
If she hadn’t been quite so drunk, there was every chance she might have taken those steps and the next segment where the staircase crooked a turn two at a time to speed up what had now become an intolerably inefficient journey to refill her very small glass.
The Wedding Night Page 19