Me, on a bed. A bed surrounded by the brushed steel fixtures and fittings that denote five-star accommodations. I was asleep and naked in a funny pink half-light that I eventually realized was dawn. The sun rises in Bangkok, another woman makes an error of judgment with a man she barely knows.
“I have more,” the accompanying message said. “And they are worse. Do you want Dan to see them? Do you want the world to?”
I went home from work early that day and lay on my and Dan’s bed—squashy, soft, and comforting, unlike the clinical starched and pressed sheets on the one in the picture—until Dan arrived home. I resolved to tell him everything and beg his forgiveness. When I heard the front door open, I rushed along the corridor in my pajamas, frenzied for the relief that the truth would bring—and found he’d brought Ben with him.
“Thought I’d make a curry,” my fiancé said, kissing me on the cheek and hanging his coat up on a hook in our hallway, crowded as always with his bike and my shoes.
“A nice hot one please,” Ben said, mocking me with his eyes, and using the squeeze of the space as an excuse to press against me as he walked past. “Just like in Bangkok.”
I told them I was ill and lay in our back bedroom with the lights off as they cooked together, ate, and drank wine, reminiscing about their school days. Their laughs erupted only a few yards away as silent tears soaked into my pillow. Even after Ben went home, the jolt I had felt at seeing him on my doorstep—inside my home—left me too sick and scared, too intimidated, to tell Dan the truth.
Ben began emailing every day, pleas and then threats. He said I was running out of time to see sense, that soon he would have no choice but to put the photos online. Dan was his friend, after all; he couldn’t let him marry a woman like me.
It was Ben who began to turn up outside my office, not Dan. Lurking in a side street until I appeared, like some sneaky after-dark animal—the sort that goes through your bins while you sleep and leaves your own rubbish strewn around your garden, making a display of the things you thought you’d discarded for everybody to see.
He’d scoop me up by the crook of my arm and steer me into pubs or bars down quiet side streets, where he’d lay siege to my confidence and assault my defenses over drinks I either could hardly force down or drank far too much of to try to drown him out. When that tack didn’t work, Ben launched a lunchtime campaign to bring me round to him and to being with him, showing up outside my favorite sandwich shop near the office. I loathed him more every time I saw him.
I began to change my routes to and from my workplace, and arrived home exhausted with looking over my shoulder, with trying to reason with him, with the endlessness of it. The remorseless pursuit. I could see Dan’s giant heart trying to puzzle out whether he’d done anything wrong.
Ben would show me fragments of the other pictures, cropped and indistinct: the curve of a waist here, a bare thigh there. How drunk had I been that this man had arranged me like flowers in a vase and snap-snap-snapped my life away as I slept? I barely remember closing my eyes that night in Bangkok, but I must have been out for a while, because he seemed to have at least a hundred shots.
“There are more,” he’d always say. “Do you want your family to see them?”
That was what had stopped me from taking a stand against him. The shame. The eyes. The pixels and the pupils of other people gazing at them—at me. Their screen-lit faces and shocked curiosity. But the more I thought about it, the less guilt I felt—if Ben shared those pictures, he would be the one at fault, not me. I would be the victim. And once they were out there, perhaps I would be free.
It would be mortifying, of course—at no point did I particularly relish the idea of my family, friends, and colleagues ever seeing them. But my parents were pretty liberal, my friends were hardly prudes—and my colleagues…I worked in a boozy, licentious ad agency, where hands roamed free and extramarital slipups were common. Nude photos of me might provoke some comments, but they’d hardly start a moral panic.
So I called him on it. One night when he cornered me as I left to get the tube. I had decided to take the direct way home, rather than skulking through backstreets and choosing roundabout bus routes to avoid him.
“Leave me alone,” I said, trying to steady my wobbling voice. “If you don’t, I’m going to tell Dan everything. You can do your worst—I don’t care anymore.”
He laughed at me, tried to style it out. He tried to mask the surprise in his eyes with mockery, but I saw what lay beneath it: failure. He had banked on me being too afraid, and now his plan had hit a wall. I mentally scrubbed his name off my guest list, my seating plan, my future. On the way home, I felt so light that I smiled at other Londoners on the train, and they looked at me as though I were mad. Perhaps I had been.
That was the evening Ben got in touch with Effie.
That was why there had to be no more useless crying now. No more cowering, knowing he was listening to my sobs from the other side of my door. I had to wrest something back, find some kind of justice before it was too late.
49.
Anna
The bride appeared at the top of the stairs that evening, pale and wan. Even though Ben was standing right behind her, Lizzie had never looked so solitary.
The others ferried plates, serving spoons, and glassware from the kitchen to the table and laid it beneath the evening’s first glimmers of stars. The lavender tang that had infused their stay was at its most heightened at this time of day, and the note crept inside the Hall like an extra guest.
Anna wondered whether she would ever be able to smell it again without thinking back to this moment: their final night of the holiday and the one when a friendship had come to an end.
Ben hadn’t even attempted to talk to Effie since the conversation in the library. Instead, by the time she had finished crying on Anna’s shoulder—not just over him, Anna understood, but for all the other bodies she’d tried to find solace in among the rubble of her self-confidence—the door to Lizzie’s room was shut once more and he was nowhere else to be found around the château. What more was there to say?
As Ben appeared now with Lizzie on the stairs, one hand on the small of her back as she descended, he didn’t even appear embarrassed—although, Anna noted spitefully, Lizzie didn’t look as happy as she should, given how things had worked out.
Would they be going on Lizzie and Dan’s paid-for honeymoon next week too?
“There you are!” Charlie’s bright face appeared below from the kitchen doorway, but his smiled slipped when he noticed the body language between the couple on the stairs—and Effie watching them balefully from just beyond the double doors. “We’re, um, nearly ready with the food.”
He ducked back through the archway, quickly replaced by Iso, whose watchful dark eyes followed Lizzie and Ben across the Hall. Anna tugged on Effie’s arm and brought her back out to the bench on which she and Bertie had been folding napkins and polishing smudges from wineglasses, so she wouldn’t have to see. Lizzie’s cousin was sipping from a small, lurid goblet in front of him on the table.
Under her hand, Anna felt Effie’s tremor of sadness at the scene, as if taken from a parallel version of this trip where happiness and camaraderie might have dominated, rather than isolation and menace. Every one of the Oratoire’s inhabitants wore a now-constant expression of expectant worry—as they all had since the wedding night, as though it had been smuggled into their suitcases along with their bathing suits.
“Pastis!” Anna cried, but she refused Bertie’s offer to pour her one with a mock shudder. “Too strong for me, but let’s have a sniff.”
The licorice scent rose from the glass he offered like fumes, and she breathed in its deceptively sweet vapor like a fin de siècle lush. Once, she might have inhaled far more of it than that, but this trip had turned out to be a lesson in moderation as well as self-discovery.
The renewal Anna had hoped for had c
ome not, as she had supposed, in nightly boisterousness and the retreading of old drunken jokes but in her capacity to say no to all that. To enjoy the days without rushing headlong into the nights, savoring the mornings as much as the evenings. The rejuvenation she had been looking for was not to exhume her younger self but to replenish the woman she was now.
That Anna had also been sipping from a chilled glass of white wine in the kitchen ever since she’d left Effie to freshen up and help her husband cook had no doubt gone some way toward making her mellow and sentimental, but she was anticipating tomorrow’s trip home with the same excitement she had left it, rather than dread at returning to reality. She couldn’t wait to leave this place and the callousness and resentment it had fostered in them all.
Tomorrow Anna would see her son again. Her life’s meaning was to be found in the hollow crease of his neck and behind the downy lobes of his ears, not at the bottom of a wineglass. That said, she had also enjoyed the spiritual refreshment that four mornings of waking up at her own leisure, rather than her three-year-old’s, had bestowed, so perhaps the meaning of life was somewhere between the two.
There were grateful murmurs now as Steve and Charlie carried the lamb, oozing juices on a broad wooden board, out to the table. Lizzie sat at one end, next to Ben like a little doting doll—blank-looking somehow—and Anna wondered whether she’d downed a Valium or two to take the edge off this final evening. Not a bad idea, she thought, switching her glance to Effie, who sat at the other end, looking resolutely at the cutlery in front of her and worrying at the napkin in her lap.
“Our last supper!” said Charlie, raising his glass with a nervous smile that was already askew.
We won’t get through dinner without a fight.
Anna wasn’t sure what they were toasting other than the sheer fact of the week being over and the opportunity to return to normality. Although a version of normal in which her two best friends were no longer on speaking terms was hard to imagine.
Oh, Lizzie, what have you done?
Opposite, Iso offered her glass to clink, and Anna obliged.
It was hardly Iso’s fault that her every dimpled smile reminded Anna of nighttimes spent leaking milk and smelling like a goat; the Anna that had followed Iso on Instagram a few years back was the one who’d been awake breastfeeding at four a.m. and unable to move because there was a sleeping baby on her chest.
Pretty cool to meet her, really.
“Santé!” she said. “Happy days!”
Anna tried to make eye contact with Effie as she drank, Anna suspected, through a throat constricted with anxiety.
Happy days were something to aim for, at least.
50.
Effie
Beyond the trembling in her limbs and the butterflying sensation that her life would look very different without Lizzie in it, Effie tried to seek out positives. She would carry herself with more care, greater respect in the future.
In the drama of the week, she had at least almost forgotten James, had put him down like a heavy shopping bag and then neglected to pick him back up again. Her heart, rather than her back, was grateful for the lightening of that load, among its many others.
Effie knew that returning home—clicking that lock open and finding nothing moved behind the door, no other human to welcome her—would be another rite of passage to tick off, but she felt more capable of doing so now than she had since James had left. She didn’t feel strong exactly, but Lizzie and Ben’s revelation had hollowed her out: there was nothing to feel and, so, nothing left to fear either.
She had a job she adored, although she had neglected it of late, at a school full of girls who idolized her. She would make them stronger than she had been. In the coming years, all being well, she would take over as the head—everyone on the staff knew the job was hers for the taking—and build generations of young women who wouldn’t take anything like the sort of shit hers did.
Effie looked along the table at the woman after whose engagement party James had said goodbye to her forever, the woman who would be leaving here not with the man who had arranged that engagement party but with the one who had shown up at it as a fluke of circumstance. It was the sort of story they would tell their grandkids perhaps—with certain details omitted—and Effie’s heart cracked at the thought of not knowing Lizzie’s children.
She wondered whether this might be the sort of bitterness that long-term friends slough off like old skin with the changing of the seasons. But for now, she couldn’t help but feel an electric-sharp gratification that Lizzie’s face wore the expression of a woman not particularly happy with her lot.
The clinking of cutlery on plates as people served themselves without speaking, passed dishes without making conversation, and then chewed to the rhythm of the cicadas rather than the patter of the news about one another’s days was excruciating.
Perhaps we can all just go to bed before the dessert even comes out.
“What was that?” Iso asked, as a rare swirl of wind rattled the fairy lights winking valiantly above the despondent group.
Frozen under the jovial glow, those around the table in the middle of the broad terrace felt as if they were players on a stage. The château sat in its horseshoe on three sides, holding them in the center of the action; the plain below them was the audience pit, stretching right the way to the horizon.
“I thought I saw something move by the pool,” she continued, craning her neck to look down toward the bank of grass.
“Probably just an animal,” said Bertie, turning to follow her gaze. “A squirrel perhaps, or a mouse. I thought I saw a polecat the other night.”
“Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Charlie said firmly.
Next to him, Lizzie blanched where she sat and put her cutlery down. She had hardly touched her food as it was. After a week of tragic-heroine rations, she was looking weak and drawn, sadness and worry having taken their toll on her beauty.
“No, no,” said Anna, looking past Bertie’s shoulder into the darkness. “I can see something, too.”
The sunsets over the château were stately, bejeweled affairs, but when they were over, night thudded in with a quick and inky intensity. Besides the few lights in the valley, there was nothing much to leaven the vast emptiness beneath them.
Across the terrace from the Hall doors, just visible in front of the valley view, the pool lights were still on, which made looking beyond them or around them difficult in the dazzle, but slowly—uncertainly, and wary of upsetting the gathering—Anna made out a shape. Just to the right of the water’s edge, between it and the far corner of the quad they sat in. Still some distance away but steadily approaching.
A figure. A man.
The silhouette was breathing heavily, it seemed, shoulders heaving in time with its steps and the effort of drawing breath.
“Oui, qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” What’s going on?
Bertie’s tone was new, its friendliness and natural generosity exchanged for a sharp alertness. His voice sounded thicker than usual and came from higher in his throat as the adrenaline flowed.
Lizzie leaped up from her chair and spun in the direction he was looking. Her eyes peered through the beams and strained into the blackness around them. The lights were blinding the figures at the table even as they lit up the group perfectly for their guest.
Anna clutched Steve’s arm in fright—even he was tense like taut elastic, humming with nervous energy.
We are in France, not a horror film; we are in France, not a horror film.
Finally, the shape detached from the beam of the pool spotlights behind it and stepped toward the group. Closer now, and closer again, the crunching gravel testified footfall by slow footfall its progress toward the table, where plates had been forgotten, wineglasses untouched, forkfuls of food en route to mouths laid down.
“Have you told them the tru
th yet? Have you?”
The sound of Dan’s voice came hoarse and scratchy to them through the velvety night.
51.
Lizzie
He was here. The man I’d exchanged my future with in order to save my best friend.
Hearing his voice brought all the love and the hope that had been gradually leached from my life over the last few months roaring back, like when the Technicolor washes over after Dorothy lands in Oz.
My heart buoyed, then plummeted in fear. What if Dan made things worse?
He looked dusty and travel-weary—angry, too. He had every right to be; I wondered whether he was still cross with me for disappearing or whether…I didn’t dare hope he might have worked out who should really be in the firing line for his rage.
If I canceled the wedding, Ben had told me, all the pictures he had would be gone. Once I’d clicked Send on those emails ending my and Dan’s future together, Effie would be beyond his grasp, and I would be free. Heartbroken, but free.
The photos Ben had been sending me for the past few months might have made for some coarse remarks in the kitchen at work, a few choice comments in the pub. Mortifying, but then again, there aren’t many virgins working in advertising.
The ones he had taken of Effie these last weeks, however…It would mean the end not only of her livelihood but of her professional life. One does not become headmistress of a school like Coral Hill Prep—or any other in that bracket, for that matter—if there is even a hint of a smudge on one’s gleaming reputation. There would be no coming back from a dirty, permanent, internet-eternal blot like this. Those pictures would have ended her beloved career. They simply had to be destroyed—otherwise, her life would be.
If I had to suffer the loss of a man I had thought I might grow old with to save my friend, I would. Effie, the woman who had not only brought me back from the dead all those years ago but had made sure I was equipped for the rest of my life too.
The Wedding Night Page 24