The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  As it was, however, she was so aware of where she was putting her feet, of how cold and hard the stone stairs looked and how much she didn’t want any of them to collide with her head, that she took the descent gingerly and cautiously. Slowly.

  Because of this, she edged her creaking joints timidly down the stairs and into the Hall. Anna’s eyes were now showing her a few shots of the scene all at once, as though she were trapped in the end of a kaleidoscope, but they caught a flicker of movement at the end of the terrace.

  The outside was dark but illuminated by both the lightening sky and the several stocky candles they had lit in glass lanterns as they’d sat by the pool earlier, working their way through bottle after bottle.

  Two figures were talking earnestly, his head bowed over hers, their bodies in a proximity only lovers would allow. Anna was struck dumb with surprise.

  What was Ben doing over there with Lizzie?

  All this time she had been worrying about an infidelity inside her head—Celia and her bloody messages—but the actual betrayal had been happening out here all along. In real life. In front of her own eyes, except she had been too dim to notice it.

  She was suddenly filled with silent fury. Anna winced with a preemptive hurt for everyone involved; the fallout from this would not be pretty at all.

  She went to dash her empty glass against the wall, but then she saw, on the table in front of her, something pure, white, and inviting. She could spoil things too.

  CONGRATULATIONS, she scrawled in unsteady block capitals. YOU DESERVE EACH OTHER.

  Anna stole clumsily back up the stairs, sick with her own naïveté, and along the landing, grateful for the fact that whoever had been in the bathroom was now not. She filled her little glass up at least seventeen times before climbing back into bed.

  This time, she put her nightie on and turned the light off, and the questions already forming in her mind were smothered by the sort of dense and insulating sleep for which Anna so often envied both her husband and her son.

  39.

  Six Months Earlier: Lizzie

  I was regaling a group of Dan’s colleagues with the story of how we met when he first introduced me to Ben at our engagement party.

  The three women crowding around me in an eager semicircle were all single, and as they listened, they each wore the anxious, strained look I’d seen most recently on Effie’s face—as though they had a train to catch but none of them knew which station it was leaving from. Perhaps that’s cruel; I know the feeling too. The sensation of seconds passing and everybody else’s glass being topped up with happiness. The notion that it might run out before the waiter got to me, my glass, at the other end of the table. Perhaps that feeling was the reason I rushed in so quickly when I got the chance.

  I was describing to the women my surprise at Dan and I having matched with such ease after my rather depressing experience of the other profiles on most dating apps—I tended to ham up this part in my telling of it, obnoxious in my own happiness, reveling in my delight at having scooped the prize—when I felt a tap on my shoulder. My fiancé.

  “Do excuse me,” I simpered to the women, and spun around to look at the face of my forever.

  Both versions of it.

  There was a moment inside me like a fuse had blown. Even thinking about it brings back the sensation, weaker now, like ripples fading but reverberating still from those few seconds of intensity—the power outage in my brain—and what had caused them.

  The lights, the music, the buzz of chatter—all dimmed, it seemed to me, for a few seconds before returning, even brighter, even louder. My whole body throbbed with it. I felt like static on a television screen; white noise coursed through me.

  Ben. That face, his slow smile. My stomach churned. I felt in those seconds the weight of every year he and Dan had known each other, every second they had spent in each other’s company, every laugh shared, every secret. Their life together—some twenty years or so—was a marriage in itself.

  Was this how I would feel every day, every time my husband mentioned his oldest friend? How would it be when Ben came round for dinner, played with our children? Would this infatuated churn be there still? Would it last another forty years?

  “Allow me to introduce you to—” Dan was talking, but I heard his voice as if he were behind several panes of glass. He was chatting as though I were still standing next to him at a party—our party—when really I was underwater, out of air and sinking fast.

  When Ben cut in and interrupted the man I was going to marry, his voice—a well-formed baritone that made my skin vibrate and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up—was as clear as a clarion, the only thing I had heard properly for hours. Days. Years. As though I had woken up from a coma and his was the first voice carried on the air to me.

  His eyes laughed at me, but warmly and with affection. In my turmoil I could hardly bear to accept their beam; I thought my every emotion must be visible on the surface, running across my flesh like a news ticker carrying the headlines. The dimples where his smile carved into his cheeks pricked the solid muscle walls of my heart like a pair of lethal arrows.

  Ben reached his hand out to me and—taking it, shaking it—I wondered whether he was simply going to whisk me out of there and into the night.

  Dan—my love and my faith, my anchor and my port in a storm—looked on merrily, delighted that the two most important parts of his life had slotted together at last.

  He wasn’t to know that we had done so before, and found that we fitted almost perfectly.

  Ben shook my hand, which was clammy with shock but also desire. His was warm and smooth.

  Another jolt of electricity and a message carried between our roving, wonder-struck eyes like a flare shooting up from a ship’s deck: Not right now.

  “Lovely to meet you, Lizzie,” he said with a grin.

  40.

  Effie

  Lizzie and Ben?

  Effie skittered on flip-flopped feet in her pajamas to the door her friend had shut herself behind and Ben had slept in front of. Inside her chest, her heart pounded with the knowledge of Anna’s words, its pulse thumping in her ears and resonating through her body.

  The door was open, the window too, the white voile curtains around the bed lifting gently in the warm breeze and stirring the currents in the empty room. More voices came from downstairs; behind her, Anna had caught up, her face twisted with worry. With pity. They took the last few strides along the landing toward the stairs together.

  The others were standing in the Great Hall, a grouping not unlike one of Brueghel’s from the cave, only Steve carried a cafetière rather than a flagon of mead. Next to him with a stack of bowls, a tub of yogurt, and a glass jug of orange juice was Bertie. In Charlie’s hands, the usual bulging bag from the boulangerie in the village—there was no crisis serious enough, apparently, to distract either from the breakfast order or the ritualistic way in which they had all begun to congregate for it, as though they had been living here together for years.

  A few paces away, Lizzie, wearing an unzipped gray hoodie over her white nightgown, pressed both palms to her forehead. Her long fingers splayed, taut and white, over her loose blond hair. Next to her, Ben reached out an arm, as if he could help stop her panicked and rushing thoughts, but she barely seemed to notice him.

  “It’s okay,” he was saying, to her but as much to the assembled group, too. “It wasn’t him.”

  His eyes flicked upward to where the two women stood. “False alarm!” he called.

  “What was a false alarm?” asked Effie, walking toward him warily.

  “Iso thought she saw Dan this morning,” Bertie explained. “She went out for a run and saw a car pull up at the house—”

  “Here?” Anna interrupted incredulously. “This morning?”

  “Sorry,” mumbled Iso. “I panicked, assumed it was hi
m.”

  “—but Ben’s just been out there, driven around a bit,” Bertie finished. “Looks like it was just somebody who’d got lost and needed directions.”

  “Not that I knew the way either!” Ben shrugged, holding his hands out at his sides: nothing to see here. Effie looked at the thickness of his forearms, the very breadth of him, and felt her stomach crease.

  Farther off, she saw Iso braced, feet wide and slightly hunched, in front of the double doors, still cooling down. She was wearing a pair of fluorescent snake-print leggings and a matching bra top that Effie recognized from a nosy, listless scroll through her Instagram feed, courtesy of the local café’s Wi-Fi the other day. Part of a paid partnership with an exercise brand keen to empower those with low confidence by enlisting very thin, very beautiful women who wore makeup even to go running.

  “You’ve never even met Dan, have you, Iso?” she said, closing the distance between them. “How would you have known it was him?”

  Iso shrugged, her thick brown ponytail slipping from one shoulder to hang down the middle of her back, and dabbed at her face with the back of one hand.

  “I wasn’t sure,” she admitted, suddenly bashful. “I suppose I’m just on edge, like everyone else.”

  Effie spun around to meet Anna’s gaze, and they rolled their eyes in sync. She looked to Lizzie, but the other woman was still standing nervously to one side, worrying a loose thread on the sleeve of her hooded top.

  Wait. Anna mouthed the word to Effie: they needed Lizzie alone before they could ask her anything about Ben. Alone, and calm.

  The group moved outside to the table on the terrace and took their seats around the morning spread, reaching for bread, picking at fruit. But Lizzie sat motionless. Her hard stare traveled into the azure distance, taking in scenery not of the local paysage but from months gone by. Action played out in the home she had shared with Dan, their kitchen, their bedroom. Scenes of love and scenes of pain.

  “Why don’t I just try calling him again?” Ben suggested.

  Whatever it was that Lizzie seemed anxiously trying to mouth wouldn’t come out properly.

  Scraping his chair back on the stone and walking toward the pool, Ben held his phone high in the morning sunshine, swiveling this way and that as a water diviner uses his rods.

  Charlie smirked and rolled his eyes. “Seriously mate, there’s no—”

  But Ben’s face lit up as the screen in his hand did. “Found it!” he called, rooted to the spot, the backdrop of the valley behind him. The others gaped; Iso rummaged excitedly in her runner’s belt for her own phone.

  “Not much, but…” Ben swiped to call. “It’s ringing!”

  They sat expectantly back in their chairs and watched him.

  “Dan, mate,” Ben said, and Lizzie gave a start. But as he talked, silhouetted against the landscape with the sun behind him, it was clear that the erstwhile best man was leaving a voicemail rather than speaking to his friend.

  “Bit worried about you, old man,” he continued. “Are you in France, mate? Thought I saw you yesterday. Just give me a text, let me know you’re okay. Always here, buddy. Bye.”

  Ben clicked the phone into darkness once more and returned to the table, where he picked up a plate and surveyed the food.

  As though the call he’d just made had been a routine inquiry with his bank.

  Effie—nursing a cup of black coffee and nothing else—knew that Bertie would strike up a conversation to take the pressure off the rather strained breakfast gathering even before he had opened his mouth.

  “You said the other night you used to work abroad, Ben,” he began. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “Oh yeah, mate, expat life’s the best,” Ben replied, dropping a napkin onto his lap and breaking the end off a baguette. “Never quite feels like real life, even when you’re working like a dog.”

  “You’re right about that,” agreed Bertie, “but I think that’s what I miss most—reality.”

  “Where were you based, Ben?” Anna asked, a table’s length away. “You’d only just come back when I first met you at the en—” At this Lizzie’s eyes flew up, but Anna stopped herself just in time. “At the party.”

  “That’s right, yeah.” Ben nodded and swallowed a swig of water. “I’d been away for a couple of years by then, but I was in Bangkok. Loved every minute.”

  In the shade of the table’s parasol and from a habit honed over a decade spent in each other’s company, Effie’s and Anna’s eyes met and they exchanged the same thought: Oh.

  When they looked to Lizzie, her eyes were already fastened, glintingly, on their faces.

  Anna stood and wrapped one hand tightly around the bride’s wrist. A little too tightly.

  “Lizzie, I think you need to come with us,” she said briskly, gesturing back toward the Hall—adding, when Ben made to move to accompany them: “Not you, thanks, not just now. Effie—come on.”

  They left the others to their croissants.

  41.

  Lizzie

  I knew as soon as they’d heard the word what they were thinking. The one-night stand in Bangkok had become the stuff of folklore between the three of us—a puerile joke involving the city’s name meant the details had lodged in the memory well enough to raise red flags in both of their heads as soon as Ben answered the question.

  I never told them the name of the man I had spent my layover with in Thailand. In fact, I actually quite regretted even furnishing my best friends with the scantest details when their first reaction had been to list the many safety precautions I’d thrown out of the window by climbing straight into bed with him.

  He could have been a murderer!

  He could have been a rapist!

  He could have been…your future husband’s oldest friend?

  Just kidding. Nobody saw that coming.

  When I’d caught my plane home from Bangkok eighteen months ago, lovestruck after that night in Ben’s company, I’d felt more desolate over the loss of him than of the boyfriend of four years I’d left behind on the yacht.

  I’d felt like mine and Ben’s future was waiting to start, for us to press Play. Instead, I’d clicked Stop and left. Waved goodbye to it as I had to him where he stood in the doorway of the hotel room we’d shared for a few hours only. He leaned on its frame, wrapped in a sheet, as I walked away down the corridor as slowly as I possibly could, turning every so often to get one last look at him. He’d stayed there smiling back until I was finally out of sight.

  After I picked up my suitcase from that wretched hostel—resenting every minute of the journey there as ones I might have spent still entwined with him—I sobbed all the way to the airport as though I were bereaved.

  My dreams on the plane were of him sailing along the sullen brown water of the Thames in Guy’s boat, straining from its prow as he tried to find me.

  As the wheels touched down on the damp tarmac in London and the familiar gray rain began to spatter on the porthole windows, I switched my phone back on and it lit up immediately with a message. Messages. Ignoring the ones from my mum, I went straight to those from the newest number in my phone, the one I’d typed in there as he’d dictated it over cocktails in the sky. Had it really only been yesterday? Did we kiss goodbye only that morning? I didn’t even know his surname.

  The flight had muddled me and shaken up my emotions like snow in a paperweight, but the sight of his name on the screen pulled me right back down to earth. I was several thousand miles away, but he was still thinking of me.

  “Missing you already,” the first one said. “Are you home yet?”

  We messaged each other for as long as it took me to collect my suitcase and get a cab home. By the time I unlocked the door to my shared house, I was even more besotted than I had been when the plane took off.

  I booked a flight back to Bangkok in three months’ tim
e to go and visit him again.

  For three weeks afterward, Ben and I called each other, and we texted like gossipy schoolgirls—on and off but regularly. I gamified the time between each communication so as to draw out the exquisite rush of having replied or having received a reply, before the lull as I waited for the next. He told me he was coming home at the end of the year. I would simply wait; I had met my man.

  I told Effie and Anna about him in abridged form. I didn’t want their cynicism to take the shine off the diamond that was mine only, to polish up with hope and longing. I knew that if I told the full story, the happy ending I was superstitiously hoping for would become make-believe.

  Both of them—Anna an anxious new mother, Effie with her school rules, rape alarms, and Take Back the Night marches—high-fived me initially but then told me how dangerous it had been to go on a date with a man I’d never met in a city I didn’t know without telling anyone where I was—even though that is precisely what those apps have been designed to facilitate. “Promise us you won’t do it again,” they said over cocktails that night.

  How right they were.

  They tried to jolly me along and on to the next, set me up on blind dates with single men they knew peripherally. These were no longer the friends of friends they had been in our twenties but now, in our thirties, the friends of friends of friends, the relatives of colleagues, the in-laws of someone they had once worked with but hadn’t spoken to for a while. Such were the tenuous tangles I found myself sitting opposite and, let me tell you, those men weren’t rendered any more interesting or attractive by the contortions people I didn’t even know had gone through to get them in front of me.

  It had been a long week at work and an even longer Friday night with some of the girls from the office when they encouraged me to set up a profile on another app. One less frisky that promised Sunday afternoons as well as Saturday nights. I gave in, I did it, figuring it couldn’t hurt just to have a look after all. Ben and I were still texting, still chatting at least once a week, but the frequency of contact—the urgency—had slowed.