The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  Cold, cold, cold from my head to my toes.

  I had spoiled the purest thing I had ever had before I’d even said, “I do.”

  47.

  Effie

  Effie felt pathetic to have pinned her hopes on him. Pathetic to have staked her happiness on another relationship. Pathetic to have handed Ben her baggage, and yet somehow relieved to know now without a doubt that he wasn’t capable of carrying it for her. She was just going to have to learn to shoulder life all by herself.

  That, Effie hoped, was how she might begin to feel comfortable in her own skin, relaxed in her own company. How she had reached her thirties and still didn’t—when everyone else seemed innately to understand that acquiring this sort of self-reliance was a large part of becoming a grown-up—she couldn’t explain. But she had the sense that Ben—and Lizzie, Effie remembered again lurchingly—had taken away her final excuse for not learning.

  Effie had attached her self-esteem to so many other people over the years that it had lost its stick; now, rather than leave it lying in the dust after Ben’s departure from her life, she’d pick it up and treasure it for herself. Nurture it like the girls she did at school, like the friends she had counseled round pub tables over the years—women so bright and full of potential she’d be shocked to find them staying in a relationship that wasn’t good enough for them just for the sake of a bit of company. For the sake of feeling wanted.

  From now on, Effie would start taking her own advice.

  Her bitterness over Ben and Lizzie’s affair had already begun to balance with the sense of having been handed a reprieve.

  Plus, there were the niggles she had felt since he had arrived among her nearest and dearest, and the air between the two of them had changed. The growing feeling that, as pleasant a distraction as Ben had been from the everyday business of heartbreak, this might be all he ever was. Beyond the pub, beyond the bedroom, Effie never quite knew what to say to him, how to act around him—as though the self she had been with Ben was one she could not also be in front of her friends.

  At least the guilt of something possibly having happened with Charlie was dissipating with every passing minute since the realization that she had meant nothing to Ben—although pain at the fact that she had meant just as little to her best friend was filling the space that guilt had vacated.

  Lizzie could have Ben if she wanted him—only, who would want a man who had slept with her best friend to make a point?

  One who had been victimized by the man she was supposed to marry.

  Effie’s anger was tempered by the revelations about Dan; that sort of constant domestic trauma—a regular pulse of fear beating out the rhythm of every single day—explained so much of her friend’s behavior over the past six months and why Ben had so doggedly lingered outside Lizzie’s closed door, in case the man who had waged his campaign of cruelty against her turned up to claim his prize. Effie shivered, despite the golden sunshine.

  The household had disintegrated, the strain on its fabric too much to bear, and the cozy if rather disquieted ambience in the château had ripped apart. The rest of them had skulked awkwardly outdoors, where the pool stretched out, still and glassy, in blue magnificence. Just the sight of it lifted Effie’s spirits; her tears had dried and sunglasses hid her inflamed red eyes, but her brain remained trained on Lizzie.

  If Dan’s treatment of his fiancée had been what brought his best man and his bride-to-be irrevocably closer than they had once been, why hadn’t Lizzie admitted it sooner? Fear? Shame? The exhilaration of secrecy? Effie had certainly experienced the potency of the latter in the last month. If things had resumed between the two of them only in the week since Lizzie had canceled the wedding, it made the deception slightly less pointed. But she still couldn’t help feeling as though something connected her and Dan: a bond of betrayal from the very closest quarters.

  People fall for their best friend’s partners all the time.

  Effie counted silently back to the last time she and Ben had spent the night together—not just under the same roof or in single beds but really together—and came up with the date she had last visited Lizzie at the flat to persuade her to come with them all to France. Five nights after the cancellation email, and two before they had caught their plane: just over a week ago. Why had neither of them told her?

  She thought guiltily about the secret she had not yet discussed with her friends—the dark hairs on the pillow, the scraps of conversation she could remember between herself and Charlie. Effie knew they must have shared something that was difficult to take back again once given—his flighty avoidance and mannered behavior since the wedding night had all but confirmed it to her. All there was left to do was finesse the details of what had actually happened between them.

  Could it really be true that Charlie, in the half-light between dawn and day, had told her that he had never felt this way before?

  Was there any scenario in which the words “Nobody else has even come close” might have left his lips where they had just about kissed the cotton pillowcase next to the one her face, its profile a symmetry, also lay on?

  What, Effie ached to know, had she said in return to snuff out Charlie’s feelings so comprehensively ever since? Her side of the partially recalled exchange was entirely missing, scrubbed from the tape like classified information. She just hoped she had been kind; a future with Charlie might have seemed one way out when drunk, but after a mostly sober week Effie knew it wasn’t what she wanted—what she had ever wanted. Or, for that matter, what was good for her.

  After this week, Effie resolved, she would concentrate simply on the latter.

  She hoped Charlie could be happy with Iso in lieu of her—though she took it as no small compliment to have been ranked over the burnished supermodel lying on a sunbed only a few strides away along the terrace. Little had Effie realized that the candle had burned undimming since university: ten long years, six of them while she had been with James. No wonder they’d never met any of Charlie’s extravagantly unserious other girlfriends: the procession that had masked his pining for the one that had got away.

  She looked over at him now, and her heart burned fiercely—the sort of love refined by moments of weakness and chinks in the armor, screams of laughter and hugs of solidarity, rather than the kind that pounces before the lights come up. It was the same way she felt about Anna, about Lizzie.

  As Effie looked toward the house, Anna stepped out onto the patio, walked across it, and came to sit on the sunbed next to hers. A little flushed, a little smug-faced. Behind her, Ben emerged into the sunlight too, and Effie’s pulse quickened—not in excitement, but in nervousness. She was grateful when he turned to sit at the other end of the pool, over by Bertie.

  “Everything sorted?” she asked Anna knowingly.

  Anna nodded and looked across the shimmering water as she spoke quietly, an answer just for the two of them.

  “I’ve thought of Steve as part of me for so long,” she said. “That’s what you’re told to look for: a soulmate. Someone who knows you better than you know yourself.”

  She swallowed thickly. Cleared her throat and adjusted her sunglasses.

  “I’m always angry with myself these days,” she continued. “And I forgot I wasn’t married to myself, but to another person who needs kindness and attention. Just like I do.”

  Anna gestured to the bottle of mineral water in the shade of Effie’s lounger and, after a nod from her friend, picked it up, took a swig. She looked more peaceful, more resolved. Happier.

  “We made a commitment to look after each other,” she finished. “We haven’t been doing enough of that recently.”

  Anna shrugged awkwardly, peroration over. “How about you, Eff? Are you okay?”

  “I will be,” she murmured.

  Effie smiled at her dear friend, but she felt something snag on her heart as she remembered th
e face that was missing. Their three had never felt complete as a two—for the odd afternoon perhaps, but no longer. When Lizzie had absconded at university, when she’d gone on those endless make-or-break boat trips with Guy, Effie and Anna had always been waiting for her to come back.

  This time, Effie thought sadly, Lizzie had gone too far.

  48.

  Lizzie

  I couldn’t lock myself in that beautiful bedroom forever. I couldn’t shut him out indefinitely. As I paced between the four-poster bed and the window, I understood that I was running out of time and places to hide. I already knew how persistent Ben could be.

  After the engagement party, weeks passed during which I didn’t see or hear from him again.

  “He’s flat-hunting now he’s back from Thailand,” Dan might mention, though I was careful rarely to ask outright. “I’m seeing him for a drink after work next week.”

  On those evenings, I’d climb the walls, alone at home with my wedding spreadsheet open and gleaming, waiting for my fiancé to come home and kiss me so I would know I was still his golden girl. That Ben hadn’t let anything slip. I organized and booked and hired and invited like an automaton, just to fill the hours. I saw Anna eyeing the new “bridezilla” me with surprise and disappointment, as though I’d let the side down, when really I was doing my utmost to remain bright and breezy.

  As the weeks went by, the clench of dread in my stomach eased and some of the nagging guilt lessened too. After all, if Dan did find out, what had I really done wrong? Nothing. Who wouldn’t have kept someone interesting in reserve until they knew Plan A would work out? Let me rephrase that: Who hasn’t?

  But it would all come flooding back when I considered the particulars. I began to wish I’d simply told Dan everything straight after I’d met Ben at the party; it would have been easier that way. I’d left it too long, and it would look weird if everything came out now. More than weird: suspicious.

  So I had to trust to Ben’s good nature—and I did. Until, suddenly, I knew I couldn’t.

  We were in the pub, the three of us—not an irregular occurrence since Ben had moved back but one that was still a fresh hobby, a new way to spend our time—when Dan got up and went to the loo. Once he had disappeared from sight, Ben gripped my wrist where it lay on the table between our three pints and a stack of the Sunday papers.

  “I can’t do this, Lizzie,” he said urgently. “You know we had something special. Please don’t throw it all away.”

  I was surprised but sympathetic and firm, drawing my hand away, pulling my sleeve down over my fingers as if to protect them, prevent them feeling him again. Just the touch of his hand had been a reminder of the electricity there had once been between us.

  “Ben—” I struggled to grasp the right words. There was no point in being cruel, but I didn’t want to soften the blow too much; I didn’t want a repeat of this conversation ever again. There could be no gray area after this.

  Just trying to form the sentence made me realize how often I hedged my words so as not to offend, how I’d tie myself in knots socially just to avoid saying no. How I went along with things I didn’t really want to, gave consent without actually meaning to. How much easier it is to simply hurt someone’s feelings and get on with it. It was a valuable lesson.

  “I’m with Dan,” I said eventually, simply. “I’m sorry. We had a great time, but I just know that Dan is the one for me. There isn’t anything else to say.”

  It sounded so bald like that that I reached out and stroked the back of his hand where it still lay on the table in front of us. I wanted him to be okay.

  “You ghosted me,” I said softly.

  Ben jumped back as though I’d pinched him, knocked one of the glasses and splashed beer on the varnished wood, across the blaring front page of the newspaper.

  “And what will Dan say when he sees all your texts?” he sneered.

  “Dan is a grown-up,” I said firmly. “He will understand that people see other people, that there’s sometimes an overlap. It isn’t exclusive until it’s exclusive. We had that chat. He was seeing other people when we met too.”

  Ben just smiled at that. “I’m not ‘other people,’ though, Lizzie. I’m his best friend. And Dan will never love you the same way when he knows that you were in love with me.”

  It felt like he’d punched me in the stomach.

  When Dan got back to the table, he found us both sitting in silence staring at a puddle of craft ale, the chic weekend supplements sopping with it. Ben was looking out the window and I stared at the cuffs of my navy wool fisherman’s jumper as though they might show me a way out of the mess I had made for myself.

  “What have you two been nattering about then?” Dan smiled as he slipped back into his seat, onto the bench between us, and draped an arm around my shoulders.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, Ben texted me and asked me to meet him after work in a bar near my office, the sort where managers take their receptionists in order to start affairs. Busy, anonymous. Not particularly pleasant.

  As soon as I saw his sandy head bent over his phone at the table in the wooden booth, I felt the ghost of an attraction now gone tug in my stomach. When I sat, he took my hand, and my heart flipped a somersault. A sharp zap of voltage ran through me.

  “Please, Lizzie,” he said. “Please. Don’t marry him. I’m in love with you.”

  The response came easily, but even at this point—even after he had scared me, threatened me—I still felt like I was dragging the words out of myself. I loved Dan, but I thought I had loved Ben too. I told myself that I had spent a whole year actively loving Dan—planning a life with him, burrowing into his personality, exploring his hinterland, conjugating a whole new language with him. I had spent one night—really, only a matter of hours—loving a version of Ben that had turned out to be a figment of my infatuation.

  “I’m sorry,” I said huskily, awkward but decisive. “I’m really sorry. I’m going to marry Dan in a few months, and I really hope that you and I can be friends. I know how much you mean to him.”

  Ben dipped his head so low that all I could see was hair and the hollow of his nape. His shoulders began to shudder, and my stomach turned again—not for love of Ben but with the realization that he would always be there to remind me of this. How could I live by Dan’s side for the rest of my life and avoid him?

  When he looked up again though, his blue eyes shone like ice rather than with tears.

  “And how much do you think you’ll mean to him when he knows you’ve been sending me pictures of your tits?”

  There had been just one picture—not long before Dan and I had met for our first date, but very much in advance, I’d believed at the time, of the thought of meeting somebody else, of me ever joining another dating app. I had been out and got home late, and drunk; the time difference meant Ben was at work. I thought it’d be funny, but I blushed when I woke up alone the next day and remembered it. Even though the picture itself had been rather chaste, it was suggestive enough.

  Now that Ben was prepared to hurl that image at me in anger, in threat, I realized I had given away my privacy as though it were any other belonging that someone might borrow and return. But there is no going back once your body, your hidden self, your sense of personal space has whooshed off to somebody else’s phone, somebody else’s memory card.

  “You wouldn’t…” My legs began to tremble beneath the sticky table, jerking like a puppet’s on strings. “If you love me…” I whispered.

  “I do love you,” he said briskly. “But you’re mine. He’s always taking what’s mine.”

  My heart went cold to hear the phrase Dan and I had chosen to be engraved inside our wedding rings come out of his mouth. Ben made it sound far more sinister than I had ever realized it might.

  I remembered then, dimly, the story of some
girl they’d both liked at the nearby girls’ school. Ben had gotten so wasted at the Christmas disco she’d come to that he passed out and woke up to find that Dan had been the one to claim a snog at the end of the night. Was I revenge for that?

  As I stood up, I thought I might vomit. I had never felt so unsafe. Not in the way of physical harm but as though I had drunk bleach, some brew that would turn me inside outside, burn my secrets to the surface, rip through the identity I had created for myself and, yes, for Dan too. Everything was at stake; I was being flayed alive in that bar, only nobody else could see. The people at the other tables around me simply went on eating their bruschetta and drinking their wine.

  I staggered out of there as if he had poisoned me.

  * * *

  —

  Ben stepped it up a notch after that. I made plans every weekend, pleaded important wedding stuff, to ensure that I wouldn’t end up in his company again, but Dan would still invite him round for dinner, or he’d stop by on the pretense of needing to collect something he’d left at our flat. I couldn’t bear the way he appraised me from head to toe, like some medical specimen, while Dan wasn’t looking.

  “Hello, beautiful,” he’d say if Dan was out of the room. Or he’d find a reason to follow me when I left a room, then push himself close and whisper in my ear.

  Ben acted as if the affair he’d threatened to tell Dan about was still going on.

  He sent me the first photo over email while I was at work, and I leaped back from my desk so fast I sent my chair clattering to the floor. I closed the window on my screen, righted the chair before anyone could come to help, then locked myself in a toilet cubicle to look at the message on my phone.