The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  One eyelid began to tremble as Effie thought of the girls—my girls—in their boaters, rucksacks bobbing behind them as they walked in line like little ducklings through the school gates at Coral Hill. Of the other teachers in the school: wholesome, reliable, steady. Of the parents, just about as well versed in worldly sin as the next highly paid metropolitan liberal but insistent that not a whisper of it should reach their children’s ears. It would be like the Spanish Inquisition, Effie thought; she would be hounded out of there less with pitchforks than with horrified expressions, muffled voices, all those pairs of eyes on her.

  Where would she go then?

  Effie’s thoughts flickered in her mind like a scratchy old black-and-white film, sped up for laughs: from the Prep, past the other schools with sparkling reputations, down past the ones where she could still make a difference, and to the bottom of the pile. Even there, an HR department would Google her name and stop short at the image search; any potential employer pausing to read the Post-it attached to her CV would crumple the whole thing straight into the wastepaper basket.

  I will never be a headmistress. I will never get another job in education again.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered and began to sob—with embarrassment at her own poor judgment and horror at its ramifications.

  How could I have been so wrong about him?

  “Oh my God,” she said again. Any other words—the words she usually so prided herself on—were no longer there.

  “Effie, I am so, so sorry.” Lizzie ran across the flagstones to be next to her, to hold her. “I am so sorry he came after you. I canceled the wedding so he wouldn’t use them,” Lizzie said, looking up from where she had laid her head on Effie’s shoulder. “He said he would delete them.”

  Effie was a blizzard, a static hum. The reverb in her head turned up to fever pitch and then—

  Effie’s stomach relaxed so suddenly she wondered whether she was going to vomit. Her muscles spasmed, then bunched again in sorrow.

  “You canceled your wedding…for me?” Effie’s brown eyes were pools of gratitude and pain as she took in her friend’s ashen face next to hers.

  Lizzie smiled forlornly, matched her friend tear for tear as she spoke. “How could I not, Eff? After what you did for me?”

  Effie remembered typing. She remembered articulating arguments, framing quotes and ideas, as she heard her friend groaning and crying through the wall. She remembered sitting her own exams, half-waiting to be pulled out of them and interrogated for having put Lizzie’s name on an essay she had written. The many sleepless nights she’d tossed and turned ahead of their results being pinned up on the boards by the Senate House. They had gone to read them like criminals being led to the gallows.

  “Effie Talbot: summa cum laude,” the lists had read. “Anna Hewitt: magna cum laude.”

  Those two had never been in doubt, though.

  But there, just below: “Lizzie Berkeley: magna cum laude.”

  A pass, and a good one. Not what she deserved, but something she’d work the rest of her life to be worthy of.

  They had backed out of the quad as though inching back along the plank and onto the ship, then headed straight to the pub. When Anna had asked her friends why they were crying so much, they’d blamed it on the cheap, acidic white wine.

  As they’d graduated, kneeling in cap and gown, both Effie and Lizzie had expected the Latin-intoning scholar to break off when he reached their names and call out their wrongdoing. A month later—after the parties and the balls, the farewells and the swapping of new addresses in London—they had each gone home. Only when the doors to their parents’ homes had swung shut behind them had Effie and Lizzie finally dared to breathe out. They had gotten away with it.

  It was the out-breath that had confined Lizzie to bed, however. The realization of just how wrong she had gone, how close she had swerved to ruining her life and somebody else’s. Even adoring, gentle Bertie couldn’t reason her out of the doom she was feeling.

  “Maybe you’ll need to pay me back one day,” Effie had laughed, that day in Lizzie’s teenage bedroom, when she came to rouse her and set her back on the right path.

  “I had to pay you back,” Lizzie whispered to her in the still French night air.

  57.

  Effie

  “You little fucker,” Anna said vehemently, breaking the stillness of the scene.

  Ben smirked back at her, hands aloft in innocence. “Look, it was all consensual between two adults….I didn’t force anything—she wanted me to take those photos.”

  Effie felt a kick in her stomach and a gag hacked in the back of her throat. “In private!” she screamed over Lizzie’s brown shoulder, which was—for now—keeping her safe in its embrace. “They were private!”

  Her brain spun. Even if Lizzie had acquiesced to Ben, they would still be living under this shadow years later. Blackmail didn’t clear up like a thunderstorm; it lingered on like a black cloud on the horizon forever. Though Bangkok would eventually become a distant memory, the hold Ben still had over them meant Lizzie would still wake up with him in her head every morning—and so would Effie.

  “I can’t let you do this for me,” she said to Lizzie. “You can’t cancel your wedding for me, for these…photos. It’s not right.”

  She thought of adding yet more worry to the bustling cacophony already inside her head. “It will drive me mad. And it will break my heart to know that yours is broken too.”

  Effie swallowed hard, and her skin prickled with goosebumps. “If that means those pictures come out, then at least he won’t have anything over us anymore.”

  Lizzie gazed at her, eyes boring deep into Effie’s, and rested her forehead against her friend’s.

  “No!” Anna shouted from across the table.

  58.

  Anna

  She had worked with clients on images such as these before—high-profile clients, rich clients, old clients, and young clients. Always women, never men, because the male physique is no sort of currency—whereas a woman’s can be both chattel and millstone.

  Anna had represented women who had been forced to make the difficult choice between justice and dignity because of “evidence” their exes had had against them. Do you stand up to them and pursue them for what they owe you and your children, or do you back down because they now have the power to humiliate you on a scale more global and more infinite than our mothers could ever have imagined back when they told us to save it for someone special?

  That evidence was proof of intimacy gone sadly cold and trust misplaced, not moral failing. Anna had never understood the type of man who could weaponize the reputation of somebody he had once loved like this. Who could turn blissful memories, albeit ones now laced with heartbreak, to curdled shit; could break a life with a few vengeful keystrokes and feel no qualms about doing so.

  To use these intimacies, to upload and disseminate them, was a criminal act, and one these men could go to jail for—but it was more likely they’d just be made to pick up litter or clean graffiti for a couple of months. It was the woman who found herself in prison, trapped in panic attacks and flashbacks, public scorn. A conviction couldn’t make the rest of the world unsee any of it.

  Anna had known women destroyed by such photos, either backed into a corner and worn down like some exhausted, hunted animal or strung out across the internet like a clothesline full of dirty laundry. Even the strongest ones had several months of not being able to leave the house, then years of trauma; the weaker ones simply…gave up. The diagnosis was usually depression or anxiety, and the coroner’s report always said suicide—but neither of those was ever true: this was an act of terror, and the charge should have been murder.

  Anna was not going to let that happen to Effie. “No,” she said again, quietly now.

  “Ben, if you don’t delete those pictures, I will not rest until
you are locked up and everyone knows what you are.” She was in courtroom mode now. “I am one of the best divorce lawyers in London, and Bertie specializes in privacy law. My firm has the resources to squash whomever you hire in defense, and I will devote every spare moment I have to making sure that you are squashed too.”

  She could feel not only Effie and Lizzie staring at her in shiny-eyed awe but Steve too, and she felt a momentary flicker of something like pride: this was what she spent her time away from Sonny doing—being good at her job. In the constant negative appraisals of herself as a mother, Anna had devalued how hard she worked day after day.

  Ben’s haughty expression faltered, and his strong jaw seemed to fail him for the first time, as doubt made his shoulders hunch, his neck curl back into his shoulders. He suddenly looked so much smaller, Anna thought.

  Now Bertie, still in his seat, cleared his throat to speak: “Ben, whatever photos you have—in my professional opinion, I’ve got to say: Anna will eat you alive.”

  “They’ll be out there though, won’t they?” he snarled. “It’ll still be too late, and everyone will have seen them—you can’t stop me doing it.”

  Across the terrace, Dan’s shoulders fell. “But I deleted them,” he stuttered. “And the hard drive…I thought…”

  Another scrape of a metal chair on stone and Iso stood up halfway along the table, her dark eyes flashing brighter in the fairy-light glow than even her many strands of gold jewelry and jingling earrings.

  “Dan,” she said gently, “they’re all in the cloud. He still has them—but don’t worry, nobody understands how it fucking works.”

  She yanked her gaze to Ben and spoke more sternly than any of them had thought she was capable of. “Look, you’re obviously a creep of the first order—we don’t need a judge’s verdict on that. Delete those pictures now, or I will make you a viral sensation tonight—and not in a good way.”

  She stooped to pick up her phone from the table. “I’ve been taking pictures all week, and you’re in plenty of them. I can get your mug shot up to nearly a million people, with a description of exactly who you are and what you’ve done. You’ll be internationally hated by morning. You’ll be a Twitterstorm, a think piece. Your twisted little brain will be a discussion segment on the news.”

  “I mean, technically that is defamation, Iso, and you might, er…” Bertie muttered quietly beside her.

  “I don’t care,” she said to him firmly. “If you had any idea how many messages I get from girls whose boyfriends have shared pictures of them, whose friends have turned on them online. Whose phones have made them miserable. They’re a fucking disease, these things.” She slapped the one in her hand against the palm of the other. “I make a living from it, but that doesn’t mean I like what they do to people.”

  She said it all without even blinking, her rage as effortlessly, authentically composed as her pictures. Iso, Anna thought, you are fucking brilliant.

  “A million angry women,” she continued. “You’ll never get a date again once they know what you’re really like. Give me your phone—let’s get rid of them all, you rotten perv. What’s your passcode?”

  Wordlessly Ben slid his phone from a pocket of his shorts and held it out to the indignant glamazon. When she saw he wasn’t going to move, Iso gave a snort of exasperation and walked toward him, the swish of her pale linen sundress the only noise but for the eternal cricket hum.

  “Come on,” she barked at him, and Effie saw him flinch, craven before Iso despite towering over her. “What’s your passcode?”

  He gave it to her, and she began flitting around the screen of his phone, nodding and tsking gently to herself as she worked. Swiping and clicking, highlighting, moving to trash, emptying and restoring factory settings until there was nothing of Effie or Lizzie—or even Ben himself—left on the phone or stored in the cloud. Iso handed it back to him.

  “Fuck you,” she said politely as he took it from her.

  Anna burst into applause; Lizzie gave a whoop and rushed to hug her. Effie, trembling, gripped the back of the chair where she stood and wept with gratitude, her every limb shaking with the audaciousness of Iso’s save.

  “I had a feeling I was punching above my weight,” Charlie drawled, happily tone-deaf as ever and glowing with adoration.

  “Without a doubt, Chaz,” Effie laughed through uncontrollable tears. “Without a doubt.”

  59.

  Effie

  Her mind, so often in a tailspin that was fueled by so many dreaded wheres and what-ifs that she was unable to answer, began clunking into motion like a well-oiled piston. Finally, Effie understood what had happened with Charlie on the wedding night.

  Of course.

  They had been lying there, together in the honeymoon suite, the rose petals scattered around them. The heart shape someone had carefully strewn them in had been disturbed first when they had thrown each other down on the bed in gales of laughter and then again by the rougher action afterward.

  “I’ve never felt like this about anybody before,” Charlie had told her. “Nobody else has even come close.”

  A pause.

  “That’s why I’m ready to make the ultimate commitment—finally.” He’d smiled into the creased cotton he lay on, reached a hand out toward her cheek, and then…

  Then Effie had begun the jerky, guttural shoulder twerk that was the prologue to a day’s worth of alcohol leaving her system with abrupt and unannounced force. She had run into the en suite and bid adieu to it and to her dignity both, although it was nothing Charlie hadn’t seen before—as he had told her, in fact, while he’d patted her back and stroked her hair.

  “You will be happy again, Eff,” he murmured as she retched with such intensity that her bony knees scraped the floor and she thought her heart was breaking all over again.

  “You’re ready to be happy again, you just haven’t realized it yet. And you’ll meet someone who sees how brilliant you are.” He smiled at her when she next surfaced from within the porcelain bowl.

  Charlie handed her a square of loo roll for her stinging eyes and runny nose. Though her insides burned as though they’d been sandpapered, Effie felt like she had evacuated six months of cumulative misery as she caught her breath and calmed her sobs on the cold tile floor next to the loo.

  “Thank you,” Effie said to him. The six-foot, emotionally repressed man-child she’d first met when they were both eighteen had turned Tin Man, had finally discovered that there was a heart in there all along. “So, when are you going to pop the question?”

  “Final night of the holiday, I thought.” He grinned. “But Christ, Eff, don’t ever mention this soppy conversation again or I’ll kill you.”

  Charlie helped her up off the floor and sat her on the side of the bed with a tall glass of water. “You need to get some sleep. You look terrible.”

  He turned to the door. “Oh, and you’re covered in sick, so you might want to take those clothes off before you climb in.”

  Oh.

  If Effie’s skin had already felt tight with the various mortifications she had inadvertently put herself through recently, it shrank another few sizes, in those moments watching Ben study his newly emptied phone, as the latest humiliation sank in.

  Christ, you idiot.

  Charlie hadn’t been weird with her or flirting with her—or, rather: he had been both, because that was what he always was with everyone. Although Effie’s capacity for overthinking, for overanalyzing, for obsessing, for—let’s not beat around the bush—near-total narcissism was in the moment of realization shocking to her, she was able to see the calamitously clownish elements in it too. Doing so came as a relief, in fact, an antidote to some of the dread she felt she had been drenched with since the drunken wedding night.

  The tears rolling down her cheeks were, for the first time in six months, not entirely unhappy, but th
ey acted as a sort of catharsis for everything else inside her. Her emotions had existed so close to the surface for so long, they needed little encouragement to break through. From punch bag to punch line, she thought, and realized—with a force that made her laugh aloud—that she couldn’t wait to tell Anna and Lizzie.

  “Oh my God, Charlie,” she blurted, and her blush was instinctive rather than embarrassed. Effie had never felt more tenderly toward him. “I’m so sorry I was sick all over you.”

  60.

  Anna

  “Dan, why didn’t you answer your phone?” Anna asked the man whose gaze was now firmly—hopefully—fixed on Lizzie.

  “I thought I’d lost it somewhere when I was moving my stuff out,” he replied. “But now I’m not so sure that someone didn’t nick it.”

  Bertie scowled at Ben. “You sent the email to Marie about setting up the wedding from Dan’s account, didn’t you?”

  Ben shrugged, his expression deliberately provocative with surly boredom; Lizzie threw him a withering look that he reeled with. She clasped Iso’s arm tightly in thanks, then paced uncertainly over to where Dan stood.

  “So you were just pretending to make those calls?” Iso shrieked at Ben. “I knew you were lying about getting reception by the pool! I tried over there for HOURS!”

  Lizzie had reached Dan and stood, a supplicant in bare feet, one hand on his dusty, tear-stained face, the other reaching for the fingers she might once have slipped a ring onto.

  “I’m so so sorry,” she murmured. “Can you forgive me?”