The Wedding Night
Page 25
The agony, though. The sheer gut-punching agony of deliberately wounding the people I loved the most: first Dan, as I pushed him away and out of my life; now Effie and, by extension, Anna too. Because of the nature of the wedge Ben had so carefully, so deliberately, with such cold efficiency, driven between us—the photos of Effie that nobody must ever see—she would never even know why I had been so cruel.
If the past six months hadn’t already felt like a slow trickle of poison into my veins, that in itself would have been the death blow. I’d felt hollow and empty; I thought my own pain would finish me off. That was Ben’s price for saving the best friend I’d ever had. That was the deal I had made with him.
But the moment I saw him at the airport, I realized he hadn’t stuck to his end of the bargain. Now I began to wonder why on earth I should either.
52.
Anna
Disheveled and dusty, the groom stood there, his very presence a rebuke to the food they had prepared, the crisp wine they were washing it all down with. It was his hospitality they were enjoying; he had paid for everything. Anna saw Bertie look awkwardly at his feet, then scowl as he remembered the threat Dan posed to his cousin.
He had come round the corner Lizzie was supposed to, dressed in long ivory silk, hair gently tonged to perfection and a bouquet in her manicured hands, ready to walk up the aisle and take her vows in front of the Hall’s French doors. Congregations sit patiently for brides on their special day, an indulgence of their last girlish foible, but the groom must be prompt and punctual. A groom must endure his bride’s lateness right at the front, with several hundred eyes fastened onto his back. Instead, the group at the table stared into Dan’s face, right into his eyes.
As he came closer, they could see tears glistening in his eyes. He wrung his hands together as though trying to pray, and there were scratches along the length of his shins, bare beneath his mud-streaked shorts. There was pain in his eyes, but wildness seemed to simmer there too, a spark about to fly. He staggered across the flagstones to them like a man wounded. Anna looked for blood or an injury, but his hurt was on the inside and stung all the more for it.
“Dan!” Effie cried, as if roused from a stupor, her eyes now flitting between Lizzie’s and Ben’s faces around the table, even though Anna knew her friend had been avoiding looking their way. “My God…Dan!”
Anna could see a glint of satisfaction in her friend’s face that the clandestine couple might yet be publicly dressed down.
“Hello, mate.” Charlie rose warily from his seat, still chewing a mouthful of food. “What can we do you for?”
Across the table, Steve began to stand too, and Bertie. Ben, meanwhile, remained in his seat, wearing an expression of amused disbelief and with it—was it really?—an idiotic sort of smirk, as though tickled by the turn of events.
“Stop where you are, please,” the bride’s cousin called into the darkness toward the groom. “Or we’ll call the police.”
This time it was Dan’s turn to be amused. “How?” he laughed wryly. “You know Lizzie and I chose this place because you can’t get a phone line out of here to anywhere. You couldn’t call the police even if you knew who it was you should be calling them about.”
“Dan, please.” Lizzie’s floral dress billowed slightly as she stood and moved toward him: one arm reached out, her palm wide in a stop sign. Her voice was sorrowful but final. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“I came to tell you all the truth,” he replied, calmer now and his breath less ragged. He swayed slightly in the gloom and turned his own palms to the sky: a question, a plea.
“Why don’t you come and—” Instinctively, Anna tried to make a space for him at the table, but Steve put a hand on her shoulder, and she stopped.
The tears on Lizzie’s face welled from her eyes in rivulets and ran down her cheeks like the first raindrops on glass. “It will be so much worse if you go through with this, Dan. Please.”
He bristled, pulled himself upright from where he had wilted in sadness and seeming exhaustion. He walked taller now, continued his slow steps toward where they sat, waiting for stage directions.
“I have all the pictures,” he spat, pointing a finger at Lizzie where she stood in front of the table, at its head like an honored guest. She closed her eyes as the words hit her—not in a blink but in a death-mask’s expression of resignation at forces beyond her control.
“I have all the pictures and I am going to finish this.”
53.
Lizzie
I saw a couple of the photos—not out of curiosity, you understand, but because Ben sent them to me to threaten and blackmail, prove he wasn’t bluffing. I closed the images almost as soon as I had clicked on them, as soon as I realized what they were. The knowledge that I was no longer in charge of just my own fate hit me like a bus; I felt like my heart was beating outside my body.
But I had seen enough to feel briefly—so briefly—proud of my friend. Go, girl, I thought madly, paying no heed yet to the consequences.
Because she looked like she was having a great time—and for the first time, I’d wager. Certainly since awful, drippy James, who had never really valued her, never adored her the way she deserved. Never made her feel beautiful, either. What a shame that it had taken a man like Ben to make her realize that she was.
That was when I became determined to untangle her from the mess I’d made of my own life so she could carry on feeling beautiful, meet someone else if she wanted to, have their children if she felt like it. Raise all those little girls at her school to be better at looking after themselves than I had proved to be.
I almost sent those emails canceling my wedding with a smile on my face—even though, inside, I thought I might not survive the loss.
I had to do this for Effie, because of what she had done for me.
54.
Effie
Pictures? What pictures?
Effie could see Lizzie’s desperation to shut her former fiancé up.
“You shit!” Dan suddenly shouted, flecks of spit flying from his mouth and landing in the lavender beds. “You utter, utter shit!”
On the other side of the table from Lizzie, the true target of Dan’s wobbling pointed finger stood up: Ben. His chair rasped on the stone as he pushed it back behind him, hands spread in front of him as if fighting flames.
“Mate,” he tried nervously. “Buddy, slow down.”
Effie turned her head to him so quickly her neck cricked in protest. Anna’s eyes flew over too. His usual can-do slickness and easy charm were crumbling under Dan’s reproachful anger.
“You see what he’s really like?” Ben said shakily, glancing around the table.
It was true: Dan, dusty and half-crazed on the grounds of what should have been his wedding venue, seemed a darker and more savage shade of his usual buttoned-up accountant self. But there was something to the heat of his anger that spoke of genuine and irrepressible emotion, Effie thought; nothing cruel or calculated, the way Ben had described him yesterday.
Ben, on the other hand…Ben, who despite arriving with Effie now intended to leave with Lizzie—his smoothness had begun to seem almost shifty. Effie was surprised to find that her sympathies lay not entirely with the frantic-looking man on the terrace but with Lizzie as well; despite the rift between the two of them, she wouldn’t have wished this awful scene on her.
“Lizzie, be careful. Stay back!” Ben reached a hand to Lizzie’s shoulder as she stepped away from the table and toward Dan. “You don’t know what he might do!”
She was now equidistant between the two men, contemplating her choices, the way her life might pan out. The midpoint, the most dangerous spot on any tightrope walk. Between Dan’s zeal and Ben’s studied calm, Lizzie exuded a nervy fatigue with it all: the jangling exhaustion of someone who hadn’t slept well for months.
“Oh, s
top it, Ben,” she said. She sounded weary, but her voice for the first time that week was steady and free of tears. “I’m not taking orders from you anymore. Leave Dan out of it.”
Ben bristled, the concerned expression wiped clean from his face and replaced with another: mounting irritation.
“What is going on, Lizzie?” Bertie’s kind face was a haze of confusion and unease.
Lizzie stepped farther from Ben, one more pace toward her former fiancé. “Ben is the real monster in all this, not Dan,” she said, looking into Dan’s eyes.
There was a shift around the table, although nobody appeared to move—a wobble in alertness, as if a predator had attempted a feint. The group sat rigidly in their chairs like a rabbit watched by a fox.
“Hang on,” began Charlie, rising from the table now too. “What about what you said about Dan—the control, the abuse—”
“Is absolutely not true in the slightest,” Lizzie said. “Ben made it all up.”
“I found it all on his computer,” Dan spat, his face purpling with the force of conflicting emotions, tangled loyalties. “Actually, I found it all on yours”—he turned to Lizzie—“and then looked for the truth on yours.” He whipped his head back to Ben.
“I’ve been staying at Ben’s while I move out,” Dan explained, his face softening as he spoke to the woman he had asked to marry him. “I was round at ours packing up my stuff, and I needed to use the computer—when I opened it, your email was open, and—I’m sorry, Lizbet, but I looked. I thought maybe you’d started seeing someone else.”
Dan’s voice cracked—Lizzie, eyes closed, looked as though someone had pulled out her heart and stamped on it, Effie thought—but he straightened his shoulders once more, cleared his throat. The anger returned.
“I just wanted to know,” he said. “So I looked at everything.”
Dan’s voice, as he explained what he’d found, was quieter now, softer and less brutally torn from him by the emotions that still pulsed beneath his skin and made one of his eyelids flicker irregularly.
He told them how he had then logged on to his oldest friend’s laptop, surprised that Ben hadn’t taken it with him on the sudden business trip that had come up in the wake of the wedding having been canceled, but had left it in the flat where he, Dan, was staying to ride out the heartbreak of having been jilted by the most wonderful woman he had ever met.
Anna shifted in her seat. The poor guy looked harrowed by the discovery of Lizzie and Ben’s secret love. “Do you want to sit down, Dan? Want a drink?”
“No,” he replied steadily. “I just want the truth out in the open.”
“Do you want to do this inside, mate?” suggested Ben, florid from the wine and in rude health from the sun, whereas Dan was pale and tired. “In private?”
But Dan only laughed cynically. “No thanks, I don’t think you can demand privacy from anyone anymore.”
Where she still stood between them, her dress billowing like the sails of a ship in rough seas caught between two ports, Lizzie’s eyes clicked open like a porcelain doll’s, from resigned despair to determination. She turned back toward the table.
“Ben has been blackmailing me for months,” she said. “He has…some photos that I didn’t want to get out.”
55.
Anna
Over the scorching reverb of the crickets and the flutter of moths’ wings against the lanterns that still flickered around the dinner table, Dan began to describe what he had found in his bride-to-be’s in-box: a folder marked with an asterisk, full of emails from Ben.
Scrolling down the list, Dan had seen an attachment—a fuzzy picture, sent from his oldest friend to his would-be wife. He had felt the bone-chilling, finger-numbing onset of heartache, jealousy, impotent and embarrassed rage. A man scorned, a man tricked: his best mate and his girlfriend, the oldest one in the book.
But then he had read what else the messages contained—threats and begging notes, manipulation dressed up as a grand love affair—and he had gone back to Ben’s flat, its keys on loan and in his pocket, and looked on his friend’s computer too.
“You gave me the password in case I needed to use it,” Dan scoffed at the man across the table, who remained silent, expressionless. “You didn’t think I was even a threat.”
Ben smirked. Anna shifted her weight uncomfortably in her chair. By guessing it all wrong, she had only isolated Lizzie further in her attempts to protect Effie.
On Ben’s laptop, among the computer games and the corporate training modules, Dan—a man who ran audits of people’s lives for a living—had found another folder, one packed with grainy images, stolen moments, of limbs entangled and bare skin, cherubs in repose. A hundred or so. Long-haired, short-haired, slim, stocky, tall, short, their skin golden or black or white. All hair colors, and all eye colors too, he supposed, except they were all asleep when the photos had been taken. A diary of sorts, a catalog.
An unknown and unauthorized portrait of every woman Ben had spent a night with.
“You fucking creep,” Iso said, looking up, appalled and in revulsion, at the handsome man standing next to her. Her words broke the shocked spell the others had all been put under. “That’s disgusting.”
Effie too watched Ben in violent disdain as he stood, ramrod straight, denying nothing.
Dan turned to his bride again. “There was only one photo of you, Lizbet,” he said, then turned again to his oldest friend. “I deleted it and all the others too.”
Though her head had been sunk in shame, Lizzie now lifted her face to her former fiancé. She seemed almost hopeful. “Only one…?”
“But there’s still this.” Her fiancé dug in his pocket and pulled out a portable hard drive wrapped in a jaunty orange case.
Anna could tell from Lizzie’s face that the other woman recognized the discovery of it as yet another betrayal. “You said you’d delete them completely,” she spat at Ben. “You’d already backed them up.”
“No matter,” Dan said simply. “We can delete these soon enough too.”
He spun where he stood and pitched it, the case glowing as it arced through the night sky before landing with a satisfyingly deep splash in the pool. The surface rippled crazily like a broken mirror, then began to settle back to calm once more.
A muscle spasmed in Ben’s cheek, the only indication that he had heard what Dan was saying or seen what his friend had just done. To Anna, he seemed to be trying not to laugh.
“Well, what a display,” he said sardonically. “Chivalry isn’t dead.”
Anna growled with anger at him. “Was it you who uncanceled the booze and the flowers and all those bloody chairs?”
Dan’s eyebrows rose. “What?”
“Did you leave the message in Bertie’s notepad?” asked Charlie, wide-eyed. “And the writing in the mirror?”
“Why did you even come here?” Lizzie whispered. “I did everything you asked.”
“Her,” Ben said unapologetically, his chin thrust out and a finger raised to Effie.
“Me?” she shrilled in response.
“You’d do anything for her. Anything to protect her,” Ben said to Lizzie sullenly. “She’s your weak spot.”
56.
Effie
She pulled herself taller and tried to quiet the voice that kept telling her that of course it had all been a sham with Ben. A familiar dread began to nibble around her outline.
The pictures.
Of course he had never been attracted to her, because he looked the way he did and she looked the way she did.
He has pictures of me, too.
She’s your weak spot, Ben had said, and Effie’s voice was careful and calm despite it all: “I think we can safely say after this that there is nothing whatsoever about Lizzie that is weak.”
“Especially not Effie,” said Anna, a table’s width away,
without even looking toward the man who had wronged them both but fixing both friends with an expression so fierce her face seemed to glow in the moonlight.
Effie reached out an arm to Lizzie, made to approach her with wet eyes.
“No, wait!” Lizzie’s voice was ragged, and she held up a hand to halt Effie’s progress, a plea to be heard. “There’s more, I’m afraid.”
She looked to each side, at Dan and then at Ben, her blond hair swinging wildly with each turn of her head. She had her arms raised at each of them, a tragic Greek pulled between two impossible choices.
“Ben had been blackmailing me with those photos,” she said. “But they weren’t the reason I canceled the wedding.” She paused for breath. “I didn’t care what he did to me.”
Lizzie looked up at the stars to clear the tears pooling in her eyes. “But I was so fucking…stuck. Eff, I’m sorry I lied to you about me and Ben, but I just couldn’t risk you having it out with him, because…because…” She blinked and breathed in deeply.
“Because?” Effie prompted, and felt her stomach plummet. Here it comes.
“Because he has photos of you too,” she finished, brokenly, her voice fading out like an old gramophone record.
Inside Effie’s head, the static cut out. The stillness in her brain and on the terrace felt even more oppressive than the usual feedback loops. A greasy block of terror began to form in her stomach, and her palms were suddenly slick with shame.
The pictures he took, and the ones I sent when he asked.
In the depths of her panic attacks these last months, she had spiraled with the worry that it would be details from one of the blurry nights that would reach out of the past, out from the blank spots in her memory, to claim her dignity. Instead it was a series of carefully posed, sharp-focused, ultra-high-definition decisions she had made while fully in control and only too conscious. She had been so hungry for affection—no, attention—that she had given everything away willingly. Her humiliation was complete.