The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  He looked at her through filmy, sad eyes and shook his head.

  Anna could see that he had felt in the past week every single emotion he thought could possibly exist, from anguish and despair to shame and contempt, and finally gut-wrenching regret, pulse-quickening fear. Now, the drag of pity, of empathy for how she had suffered. It had weighed so heavy on his heart as he had traveled across the Channel and the length of a country to find her that Dan thought he might have accidentally left it behind him in London, beating feverishly in the flat they had shared. He looked utterly drained, emotionally and physically wrung out, and he leaned into Lizzie as though he were losing blood.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Dan whispered to her. “I just wish you’d told me, so I could have helped you fix it. You’re mine—remember? Mine to love, comfort, honor, and all that.”

  The others blushed and tried not to watch too conspicuously as he grabbed her in a hug and a kiss that was mainly sweat and travel rime accumulated on this last-minute dash to France. Dust from the road had stuck to the tears drying on his cheeks.

  There was a beat of stillness, and then Charlie turned toward Ben. The focus of all the accusations, now a target for all their resentment, their outrage. Their loyalty.

  “That was really shitty behavior,” he drawled ominously.

  Oh no, don’t fight. Anna’s intestines shriveled at the spectacle of it, two posh boys in fisticuffs outside a luxury holiday rental as though they were streetwise kids.

  Iso laid a cautionary hand on Charlie’s arm, in whose strong fist a dinner knife was still clasped.

  “Shittier than being dumped for your best mate?” said Ben shrilly. He threw his linen napkin onto the plate in front of him. “Shittier than your friend siding with some…some internet trollop from an app?”

  An intake of breath around the table. Even the insects paused in their humming.

  But the phrase only made Lizzie snort with contempt. “Internet trollop! Christ, Ben, what are you—the virtue police?”

  Plenty of the men who posted those photos seemed to think they were, Anna mused. Witchfinders with keyboards. What difference did another woman make, given the morass of them online? The internet had made female flesh ubiquitous and disposable, bouncing hairless bodies with no feelings attached that were simultaneously lucrative and worthless.

  Lizzie would need her and Effie as she patched her life back together, tried to move past the trauma of threat, but for now Anna resolved to be lighthearted. It was a tonic for the ills they had each of them carried to this place with them, along with their luggage. She and Effie rushed to Lizzie, and the three of them melded, as they had so many times over the years, into a squash of tears, hair, and giggles.

  “Internet trollop!” Iso howled, a few paces away. “I’m going to put that in my bio!”

  The women opened their arms to her and she crept into their huddle, newly appreciated and warmly welcome.

  Ben watched them with a deepening sneer. Despite his height and impressive chest span, he deflated like a forgotten balloon in the face of their mirth. For a certain type of man, female laughter is the most terrifying sound.

  “I think,” Effie said through a tangle of summertime, sun-bleached hair, “that the time has come for you to leave, Ben.”

  “Seconded,” Charlie said, folding his arms. “Go and pack your bags, and get out of here as soon as you’re done.”

  “I wouldn’t stay if you begged me to,” Ben spat. “And it’s not like you haven’t in the past—both of you.” He gestured at Lizzie and then to Effie, who colored as though she had been slapped. “Bitches, all of you. Bunch of desperate slags.”

  “Ignore him,” Lizzie said, her arms about her friends’ necks like a boxer being helped from the ring. “He’s pathetic.”

  “Somebody should go with him, make sure he doesn’t do anything else creepy,” Iso said.

  As Charlie followed Ben inside, she called out again: “And use the landline to book him a taxi immediatement!”

  Then they sat, survivors of a showdown, and drew up a chair for Dan next to Lizzie’s. Silent and shell-shocked, they gazed down at the table, still laden with hospitality, as though they had never seen it before. The prospect of food and wine that had so recently turned to ash in the mouths of those chewing it seemed to rise again, phoenixlike, now that the source of irritation had gone.

  Steve cleared his throat. “Errr. Drink, anyone?”

  Was there any other response?

  Each head nodded gratefully and Steve ducked inside.

  Lizzie began laughing, with the giddy, unnerving hysteria of the relieved. She had forgotten how to feel light. The psychological wounds Ben had given her would take some time to heal, the scars even longer to fade, but right now, Lizzie reasoned, she could medicate convivially. When he had departed, this house would be replete with all of her favorite people in the world; she intended to make the most of it.

  Steve returned with yet another cold champagne bottle, poised to pop the cork.

  “There’s still so much left in there,” he said, squinting and aiming it away from the table as he eased the stopper out with his thumb. “Despite our best efforts to put a dent in it.”

  “We can charge that to Ben,” Iso said. “I saved his bank details off his phone.”

  As Steve poured, Charlie appeared in the double doors. “He’s going,” he said, jerking his head toward Ben, who was making his way scowlingly across the Hall to the front door behind him. “Any final words?”

  “You can have her, mate,” he called contemptuously over one shoulder.

  “I meant them to you,” Charlie snapped.

  “Oh, there is one more thing.” Ben hove into view once more, framed by the Hall lights where the altar had once stood ready. “I bumped into your ex last week, Effie. James, isn’t it?”

  Ben’s eyes glittered at her through the fresh night air.

  “He’s getting married.”

  61.

  Effie

  Well, that’s just not possible, she almost said.

  James doesn’t believe in marriage. Thinks it’s a sham. When you love someone enough you don’t need a piece of paper to prove it.

  But as Effie tried to speak, tried to sit up from where she had slumped in her chair, pinned there by the knife Ben had successfully launched right into the center of her heart, the center of her being…she realized finally that these words—James’s words, the ones he’d intoned whenever the subject had come up—were not the sort of solemn vow she had once taken them for.

  Oh, she thought as enlightenment washed over her like a searing, stinging scourge.

  He just didn’t want to marry me.

  Effie expected the hole in her chest to fill with battery acid, for her ribs to break with the agony of it. She waited for the stream of tears that had never been far from her eyes these past six months or more to flow again, a salty tide that would irrigate her misery, turn her back in on herself as she questioned over again why and also why not me as well as who and then why her.

  But the tears didn’t come. Instead Effie felt as though an anchor had been lopped off from around one ankle. There was pain—a dull sort of ache, a throb of embarrassment at what she now saw had perhaps always been inevitable—but there was also something far more complex beneath, something far more interesting.

  Indifference and another question with it: What now then?

  For the first time, the thought felt interesting. Exciting.

  “What a twat,” Effie said conversationally.

  “He’s lying,” Lizzie said. “Ignore him, he’s lying.”

  “No,” Effie said, dry-eyed still and marveling at the fact. “He’s not lying.”

  She knew that Ben had told her the truth because, for the first time in months, everything suddenly seemed to make sense. The questi
ons had stopped, the endless internal match replays of conversations. The suspicions, the regrets, the if only I’d…

  “But, Ben?” she called to the man in the doorway. A man she had once thought her superior but had realized, earlier this week in fact, that he was far less intelligent than she was, not to mention far less funny.

  I will never again make do with someone.

  I will never again persuade myself to like someone.

  I will never assume that somebody else’s company is better than my own.

  “You’re a twat too.”

  Iso squealed and Ben’s handsome face briefly cracked with a snarl as he left the stage not to rapture but to ridicule. As he turned and crossed the length of the Hall, a silent chorus of heads swiveled and heard, from inside, the historic creaking of the paneled door before it closed again and, beyond it, an engine revved into readiness.

  Anna turned to Effie, seized her hands where they lay in her lap, determined not to be late to her side when she most needed support. Not again, never again.

  “It’s fine.” Effie squeezed her friend’s fingers, then reached for her glass and sipped. “I’m fine. Weirdly.”

  She smiled, and when the smile reached her eyes, she touched her cheek to make sure her face hadn’t cracked like cold porcelain in a hot oven.

  “I might actually be better than fine.” She shook herself as though waking from a daze.

  “Music?” asked Steve, darting back through the doors and flicking a switch.

  Those horns, that Motown beat, the high hat.

  “Happiness condensed to three minutes,” he said with a smile, and stood beneath the trellis arch, taking up his official role as wedding DJ once again. Anna joined him and wriggled under one of her husband’s arms to lean against him and survey the scene on the terrace. The lights twinkled on, but the smiles outshone them in even more brilliant wattage.

  Lizzie and Dan stood uncertainly and began to sway under the stars to the beat, the soaring strings. Their first dance, finally.

  “My God, Dan!” called Anna, as the groom broke into a series of well-judged steps. “You really mastered that routine.”

  Next to them, Charlie and Iso clasped together and twirled. Her putty-pink dress billowed as she spun, and when he whipped her back into his arms, Charlie dropped his dark head against hers.

  “I was going to ask you,” he muttered into her ear, and she laughed and wriggled as his breath tickled the soft skin. “I swear, I was going to ask you tonight, but I don’t want to steal their thunder.”

  Iso smiled and moved off again, shimmying to the rhythm of the song. “I know you were,” she called back to him. “And yes!”

  By the table, Effie and Bertie stood eyeing the others like a pair of awkward scarecrows, sentinels to the dance floor unfolding before them but unable, in their stiffness, to engage with it.

  “Don’t you want to dance?” she said teasingly, tapping her foot.

  He shook his head quite firmly. “You definitely don’t want to see me dancing.”

  “Oh, come on!” Effie yanked on his arm and spun herself into Bertie’s chest, where—as she landed—he scooped her into an elaborate salsa in perfect time to the music.

  “What?” she yelled gleefully over the tune.

  “They made us learn at school,” he said apologetically as he twisted and marched her expertly, counting under his breath before executing a perfect if robotic turn and steering her back across the patio like a wheelbarrow.

  On the next dip, the ends of her hair grazing the flagstones, Effie threw back her head to look at the clear moon where it floated in the sky on a lavender tide.

  When Bertie pulled his dancing partner upright again, he spun her away and Effie’s feet, bare on the terrace since she had kicked off her beaded sandals, skittered backward along the ripples of the still sun-warmed granite beneath. She felt herself floating away from the epicenter of the party, untethered and bobbing at the edge of the group. The fairy lights warped in her vision, and the music seemed to slow.

  Not again.

  This time, she landed. In a pair of arms so strong, so familiar, so warm and protective she could feel the love radiating through them like a heartbeat in time with the music.

  Inches from her face, Lizzie’s smile beamed through the dark, the dimples in her cheeks such familiar landmarks that Effie felt she had walked through her front door and back into her life.

  Effie turned her face, angled her chin, and the lips that pressed on her temple were the same soft touch that baptized Sonny anew after every trip, tumble, and gritty graze. Anna curled an arm round each of them, and the three women swayed together. The same hug, the same huddle, whether minutes had passed or months, weeks or years.

  Home.

  “In sickness and in health,” murmured Lizzie.

  Effie closed her eyes and nodded. These women were her past and her future, so many ends and beginnings, so many lives old and new. Whether false starts or ever afters, the three of them held an eternity in their arms.

  “For richer, for poorer,” Anna croaked, her throat tight.

  The still point of the turning world; there the dance is.

  Effie laughed and felt her heart wing up to join the silver orb, full and gleaming, above them.

  She bent her head to theirs and whispered, “I do.”

  To Freda, who has blossomed alongside these pages, and Douglas, whose heart started beating during the edits

  Acknowledgments

  The first draft of The Wedding Night was written in what now feels like another lifetime and a different world—one where we could socialize and travel freely, celebrate en masse and meet each other without having to think through the consequences. By the time I finished the final manuscript in 2020, a holiday like the one in its pages had become logistically impossible and in some countries actually illegal.

  Sometimes I can’t believe how much I used to take for granted. But The Wedding Night is a novel about the things we assume will always be there—our friends, our loved ones, our privacy—and how close we can come to losing them. I hope its message resonates, despite curtailed horizons, almost as much as I hope we can have group holidays (and hangovers) again soon.

  There are so many people to thank for getting this book out into the world during unprecedented times. My brilliant agent, Laura Macdougall—with love to Thea. My editors at Ballantine and Hodder, Hilary Teeman and Kimberley Atkins—your ideas and enthusiasm were a driving force—and to Caroline Weishuhn: Your dating insights brought me into the digital era! To Denise Cronin and the Random House rights department: Thank you for repping me far and wide. There are so many others at PRH and Hodder who have polished my words and put them out there—Colleen and Debbie, Vero and Alice in particular. To Kate Miciak, who gave me the chance to do something I love—I am forever grateful and always learning.

  To Alex—tops pal—for providing the time, space, and happiness to write, and then listening to endless anxieties on the subject. To Freda and Dougie for keeping my heart full. To my parents, first readers again and always the most important, and my sisters: my champions; my Dooms.

  To Anna and Nicola, who have taught me confidence and made me strong. To the Mexico gals, my Loose Women, and The Times fashion desk, who all toasted and Zoomed The New Girl into existence in a closed world last year—and, of course, to the amazingly kind community it found out there. Thank you so much for reading.

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  As the novel opens, we see Effie and Anna reminiscing on how their friendships have changed since their university days, as they’ve all grown older and their lives have changed. Have you ever had similar thoughts about old friendships? Were you able to maintain those friendships, or did they fall away?

  One of the things Anna struggles with throughout the novel are he
r feelings about becoming a mother, and how becoming a mother has affected how she sees herself, her husband, her friends, and even her career. Have you ever found yourself in a similar position, where a dramatic life change has affected how you view your life, and how others in your life view you?

  Throughout the novel, we see Effie struggle to find a healthy way to cope with her recent breakup, even as her friends try to help as much as they can. Have you ever felt similarly, or have you ever helped a friend who was feeling similarly? What effect, if any, do you think societal pressures have on Effie’s coping mechanisms?

  Lizzie, too, is struggling with the dissolution of her relationship and calling off her wedding. What do you think of her friends’ decision to take her mind off things by going to the château anyway? Do you think it would help or hurt?

  As the novel progresses, we see Lizzie’s ex continue to psychologically torment her, even though she’s ended things. Why do you think that is? What do you think motivates her ex to treat her this way—is it embarrassment, or pride, or something else altogether?

  As secrets begin to come out, we learn to what lengths Effie has gone to for Lizzie, and in turn, what lengths Lizzie has gone to for Effie. Would you go to similar lengths for your best friend? Why, or why not?

  At the beginning of the novel, Effie and Anna are quite intimidated by Iso and find it hard to warm up to her, but despite not growing close with the women, Iso stands up for Effie and Lizzie and is a key part of the novel’s resolution. How did you feel as you watched the women band together? What do you make of the fact that society often pits women against one another instead of teaching them to band together?

  By Harriet Walker

  The Wedding Night

  The New Girl

  PHOTO: ©CLAIRE PEPPER