Only last night, unable to sleep again after one of Sonny’s predawn wake-ups, Anna had found herself trying to turn Steve’s phone off night mode in order to read his messages. She had crouched by his bedside table, inches from her husband’s slack features as he snored, and paged about unsuccessfully, attempting fruitlessly to hack the tech-nerd model he had insisted on paying slightly extra for. With whose money, Steve?
The two of them had a long-running joke about her not being able to work it, but the gag was becoming less funny the more texts her husband received from the same number just before lights-out each night.
It was difficult for their neighbor Celia, ferrying Olwen around her shifts at the salon without a partner to share the load, so Steve tried to help out where possible. Sonny and Olwen went to the same nursery, after all.
But those same shifts meant Celia—slim, attractive, naturally maternal Celia—was around far more during the day than Anna ever could be. Around during the day and just next door to where Steve wrote and interviewed and edited from the table in their kitchen.
Stop it.
Celia never seemed to be cross or frustrated with Olwen the way Anna so often was with Sonny.
Stop it.
Really, the perpetual state of low-level chaos in which Anna and Steve’s neighbor and her daughter lived was a cautionary tale; Anna should feel sorry for a woman whose husband had left her last year, not fear her as competition.
Anna needed this break. Just a week, surrounded by her friends, the people she had known since university, the gang who had grown into their thirties alongside her. A holiday that actually felt like one, instead of the usual kind she and Steve now had post-baby—ones that involved all the same chores, just set against a different backdrop, and made her and her husband feel like some bedraggled touring drama company permanently out on rep. Anna had had Lizzie and Dan’s wedding week on the horizon for so long, she had convinced herself that it was her opportunity to rediscover who she had been when they all met, to remind Steve of the real woman he had married. The one who laughed at his jokes and didn’t check her watch or her emails all the time.
Now the wedding had been called off, and that woman felt even more beyond her reach.
Anna’s phone vibrated with a message again: Steve.
“Damn. Poor Lizzie and Dan. Can we get our money back? We could just go somewhere by ourselves for a week?”
As much as Anna was desperate for some time with her husband—actual quality time rather than the silent and stodgy variety they spent watching TV dramas when they were too tired to speak—she knew she would only feel guilty if they did that. Choosing to leave Sonny behind was quite different from having been forced to by someone else’s wedding plans. When they’d seen the words “no children” on the invite, there had been a split second of indignation, but then—the spreading warmth of realization, followed swiftly by a giddiness Anna hadn’t felt in years.
The sort that descends at the beginning of a night out, at the first sip of whatever you’ve chosen to fuel it with, at the prospect of not knowing when or where it might end.
If she and Steve went away by themselves, she knew that the bad-mother pangs would no doubt kick in the very evening they arrived and she’d spend the next six days painfully aware of her son’s absence instead of reveling in her husband’s company. She’d be haranguing Steve’s mother for pictures of Sonny within hours—shots of him covered in cereal and glitter. Or mud, as it tended to be when he spent time with his grandparents. Why did they always let him get so dirty?
No, it was the wedding that had made such an escape possible—the idea that she was fulfilling a duty to someone else, to her friend Lizzie, rather than simply indulging her own needs.
Anna swallowed the lump of gloom that had settled in her throat. She should text Lizzie, really.
She noted that Steve’s first reaction, in contrast to her own, had been for the sundered couple.
What a selfish cow I am.
It’s easier for Steve to be kind; he isn’t as stressed as I always am.
As Anna paged around her screen composing a message to Lizzie, the bride-to-be who had so recently become the bride-that-wasn’t, her phone buzzed in her palm. An email:
From: Charlie Bishop
To: Effie Talbot, Anna & Steve Watson,
Subject: Re: Some news
Hey you lot,
I’ve taken Lizzie, Dan and Ben off the thread. Just thinking, I’ve been slammed at work recently, had this week booked off for ages, paid for my flights, and already coughed up to stay at the not inexpensive “Oratoire de St. Eris.” It’s too late for us to get our money back, I’ve checked.
I suppose what I’m saying is this: I could really do with a holiday, and this might as well be it.
Shall we just go anyway? And persuade Lizzie to come with?
C
A bird broke out in song from a Clerkenwell rooftop somewhere above Anna’s head, and she thought—just for a moment—that she might join in.
A Week Later
3.
Effie
“…plus you know he has this hot new girlfriend now?”
Anna’s voice drifted over from the front seat and Effie came to as if surfacing from underwater, hungry with dread for the last nugget of information she had just heard.
Please, no. I can’t take it just yet. Give me another week. Another month.
“Who has?” Effie heard herself demanding, taut and urgent. Her question ripped through the cozy atmosphere and easy chitchat of the car and landed in the dashboard, a quivering javelin hurled from the backseat, sharp and discordant.
This was what she had been most afraid of. In the early days of heartbreak, it hadn’t been the idea of being alone forever or the prospect of picking up a life that was in pieces and trying to reassemble it—like gluing a smashed vase back together without ever having seen it whole—that pulled her awake in the middle of the night, cold and shivering with loss and residual disbelief.
It was the thought of her ex-boyfriend finding someone else. The idea that someone else might make him a different, more genuine shade of what she had mistaken for happy. That some other Effie—but crucially not Effie—was doing everything with him and for him that she had once done; and that—this time—it felt right to him. Even though, to Effie, things had never felt more shockingly, paralyzingly, chaotically wrong.
Effie might have felt more positive recently, but her hurt was still raw, her heart still porous and vulnerable. Six months was not quite long enough to get over six years with someone. Despite the promise of happiness on the horizon, Effie was still not ready for this.
Anna shifted in her seat and her face appeared around the headrest in front. “Charlie has,” she said, sighing and scanning Effie where she sat. Her keen eye, honed over years of close friendship, discerned a dullness to her friend’s skin, a lack of shine in her usually twinkling gaze. There were shadows under her eyes, and the cotton skirt Effie was wearing stopped at her knees, displaying pale thin shins mapped with coffee table–height blue and purple bruises. “Charlie,” she said again, quietly.
Oh thank God. Anna turned round again and Effie went back to chewing the skin around her fingernails and looking out the window. As they hurtled toward the airport, the receding city gave way to liminal business parks that looked like corporate greenhouses and were guarded with spiked metal fences.
They had had to move their flights back a day—officially because something had “come up” at Anna’s work, but the truth was that the friends had engineered the delay to avoid the pain of waking up at the château on the morning of Lizzie’s big day with none of the planned preening and no white dress to put on. Instead, the morning had been like any other and they would arrive at the Oratoire just before the sun went down on what would have been the wedding date itself.
&nb
sp; “Do we know her, Charlie’s girlfriend?” Effie asked gamely.
Anna’s left arm was dangling from where she held the passenger-side grab rail in the car’s ceiling. Effie’s mother always clung to it during car journeys, too.
Effie had been ready for years now to ride up front next to the father of her child, the safest and softest cushioned carapace money could buy and its oblivious pudgy cargo anchored with seatbelts behind her. Instead here she sat, surrounded by the crumbs sprinkled from Sonny’s own safety throne when Anna had removed it that morning, fretting at a scab on her leg like a surly teen.
Anna replied to her question with a laugh. “Only that she’s called Iso and she’s—what?—Charlie’s first proper girlfriend since…you?”
Effie snorted. She had barely been a girlfriend, let alone a proper one. They had coupled up briefly during their first term at Cambridge, those russet-leaved weeks when freshers try on new personalities like hats to see what suits.
Charlie and she—with their nearby rooms off the same tiled corridor, their shared kitchenette and penchant for curling up and watching films late at night while others in their year marauded around the pubs and cobbled streets of their university town—had settled into a routine of mundane domesticity so quickly it had scared her. Effie had ended it before Christmas that term, determined to see something more of university life, and Charlie had become a friend instead.
In fact, Charlie had become a rogue—our rogue, the three women who knew him best called him, to differentiate him from other, less special lotharios and exonerate his comically clichéd treatment of the women he lured into his orbit, kept around for just long enough that they fell head over heels for him, then quickly tired of.
Anna and Lizzie had joked for a decade now that Effie had broken Charlie and turned him promiscuous with that early rejection, but Effie knew that he too had felt a jolt of unease at how immediately the two of them had become so middle-aged together. Then, that sort of banal intimacy had upset the natural order of things; now it was all Effie craved.
“I wonder what’s so special about this one,” Anna continued.
“The hotness, I imagine,” said Effie sarcastically.
“No wonder he was so keen to go on this holiday,” Steve said from the driver’s seat, glancing up at the mirror as he signaled. “He probably can’t wait to show her off to us.”
Anna laughed—once, and tersely, because she couldn’t remember Steve ever having shown her off to anybody. “Makes a change—he usually keeps them hidden, in case they get the wrong idea: meeting the friends means it’s serious, after all.”
“That’s true—Dan didn’t even introduce us to Ben until the engagement party,” Effie piped up from the backseat, her voice light but loaded. She met Anna’s brown eyes in the passenger seat’s visor mirror. Steve changed lanes, apparently unaware.
Ben was Dan’s best friend and erstwhile best man. He and the groom had been to some godforsaken authoritarian boarding school together, where they had formed the sort of brotherly bond that had been strengthened by cold showers and early morning army drills on frozen rugby pitches. Charlie had taken him off the email chain earlier that week: they hardly expected the best man to join them—Lizzie’s mates—on a holiday that had once been his best friend’s wedding.
And hadn’t he been worth the wait? Effie turned back to the window and warmed herself with a smile that she knew Anna couldn’t see in the mirror.
Effie had only met Ben a couple of times in the months after the engagement party, and had tried to be friendly—he’d be escorting her back down the lavender-bordered aisle after the ceremony, after all. They had gotten along fine at the party: the two of them had spent much of it with their heads either bent together or thrown back in laughter, chatting by the bar, while James had looked on sourly from the sidelines. But in the weeks afterward—after James had finished with her—Ben had been aloof, occasionally acerbic, and—frustratingly at the time, although Effie was prepared now to admit she had been at one of her many low ebbs—entirely uninterested in the face of her slightly desperate attempts to flirt with him.
It was several months later that Effie found herself sitting opposite the best man in a busy pub not far from the school she worked at—which, happily, took up most of her time these days. Ben had met her at the gates long after Effie’s beloved girls had filed out, ducklings in boater hats, and gone home. He was all plans and secret projects for a video he wanted to make and show during the speeches on the couple’s big day.
It was to tell the story of Lizzie and Dan’s relationship, a montage of their moments together, starting with how they’d met on a dating app and ending with messages from those who hadn’t been able to make it over to the Oratoire—once a medieval convent, now a lavish, Instagram-friendly rental property—for the ceremony. As he explained it to Effie, asking for her opinions, her ideas, how she might be able to quietly corral Lizzie’s network while he contacted Dan’s, she had seen the rather brusque man she’d come to expect thaw before her eyes, watched all his stuffy reserve evaporate under the heat of his boyish enthusiasm. They ended up having a rather lovely night in the pub, as they planned and plotted, drank pints, and swapped stories.
It had turned into a rather lovely morning as well.
Since then, Effie and Ben had seen a lot more of each other. The gaping wounds that her ex, James, had left—in her life, her future—were beginning to heal. She still felt sad, still caught herself staring for minutes at a time into the past as though it was a view from a window. But for the first time in months, Effie also felt optimistic. Loved, even. Though that word had not been uttered yet—it had only been a month.
But Ben was so open, so genuine, so keen to make plans and put things in the diary with her—plans she was only too glad to accept, after realizing those pages had gradually emptied without her noticing toward the end with James—that Effie wondered whether it might not be long before it was said.
It was in this spirit that they had decided to keep their relationship—or whatever it was; Effie felt superstitious about labeling it—under wraps until the wedding. Let’s not distract from Lizzie and Dan’s day, Effie and Ben had reasoned to each other one morning as the sun crept onto the pillow they shared, like a hand reaching in through the curtains. They would tell the others after the ceremony.
In the week since Lizzie’s email, Effie had seen less of Ben. They had both been busy mopping up their friends’ tears but, even in this, they had been thrown together.
Ben had offered to help cancel various deliveries; refund wedding favors and gift-list items; send back chairs, tables, and the like; have floral displays taken down and trellises dismantled; return the unlucky rings so they could be cast into Mount Doom and smelted down for the next unwitting fingers. As best man and de facto maid of honor, he and Effie had, between the two of them, ensured that the mundane disassembly of the wedding had not entirely fallen on the already overburdened shoulders of those currently busy with the far bigger task of unpicking the life they had planned together.
At least I didn’t have to cancel a wedding.
Effie imagined herself in a white dress and veil, crying and begging as she had indeed done, only this time in front of an audience in florals and wide brims with carefully matched bags and shoes, rather than in her pajamas on the stairs of her flat just before the front door had banged shut. She shivered the memory away.
After a few nights apart, Effie’s entire body was looking forward to seeing Ben again. The time they’d spent together had so far been the giggling, wine-flushed, last-people-in-the-restaurant sort—and what inevitably came afterward. She had been more than a little bleary in the classroom at Coral Hill Prep of late, after chatting into the dawn with Ben while tracing the whorls of hair on his chest with one finger.
Muted in her palm, Effie’s phone hummed, and she felt her insides wriggle. It was
from Ben: “See you soon, gorgeous.”
She blushed enjoyably in her seat: there would be more chance for that this week. But Effie was also looking forward to spending daylight hours with her new boyfriend. They had gone out for breakfast together one weekend, walked in the park, but since they were single thirty-somethings with efficient and established lives, one or the other of them eventually had to head off to something else. Effie craved the sort of uninhibited, languorous, limitless hours that come only with being in a foreign country and having taken one’s watch off. Strolling through a market town, cycling through vineyards, simply lying by the pool with Ben, making small talk.
The pool. She had studied it endlessly on the website’s photo gallery over the past six months: on her phone, from her desk in the staff room, in bed, in several pubs with countless glasses of wine in hand. Lapping azure water overlooking rolling fields of lavender and sunflowers demarcated by avenues of needle-pointed cypress trees: a Hockney air-dropped into Cézanne country. Effie stretched her thin limbs and aching joints in the car at the very thought, at the baptismal qualities she had projected onto it, and warmed in anticipation of unfurling beside it as soon as she arrived. She had been almost existentially cold for half a year.
“Have you heard any more from Lizbet? How is she?” Anna was asking from the front.
Effie stalled as the car flew along. She didn’t want to describe how their once bubbly, golden hair–tossing friend, whose white teeth were always bared in a shriek of laughter, had become sad-eyed and silent, a watchful lank-haired supplicant who wished only to rewind to before the breakup.
“She’s doing okay,” she replied, from the backseat. “Up and down. You know.”
Anna did know. She had picked Effie up only too recently, and Lizzie had done similar for her years before she had met Steve. Women spend half their party decade either in this coma or sitting at its bedside, Effie thought, waiting for their friends to wake up. When they do, the prescribed medicine is booze and solidarity, a pile of handbags on a dance floor. Rehabilitation comes in learning how to smile again, how to dine alone, how to talk to strangers. How to spend a Friday night in with only one’s soul for company.
The Wedding Night Page 2
