They all knew the stunned desolation of brokenhearted grief, all felt their friends’ hurt like a memory of their own. At university, Anna and Effie had practically scraped Lizzie off the floor after one such rupture. For several days, Anna had coaxed soup into her mouth, while Effie persuaded her up and out of bed, into an exam hall to answer the questions that would move her life on in the right direction, past this painful and unforeseen bump in the road. Effie knew that Lizzie counted the favor she had done back then as above and beyond the call of duty. She supposed it had been—she had made Lizzie promise to tell no one, not even Anna—but Effie had done it gladly.
It hadn’t taken that long for them to come round from breakups in their twenties, but in your thirties….Effie had found that it was different, more difficult. Once people began to swap their urban family of flatmates and pals for the cozy little biological units they were creating at home, there were fewer—if any—who could offer the necessary hours of vigil. The only single woman among her friends after the breakup, Effie often faced the prospect of a whole weekend devoid of plans, and it sent her spiraling into a breathless crouch of despair every time. She found solace in books and daytime cinema trips, but only had to imagine herself at the Singles ’n’ Salsa night in the pub at the end of her road and the panic would come again.
She knew she could always turn up at Anna’s house, where the background thrum of toddler patter, the washing machine, and something from Steve’s obscure vinyl collection might drown out the internal static for an afternoon. Effie delighted in Sonny’s company and lavished attention on him as though he were her own blood. Childcare came naturally to her, and she recognized a wistfulness in Anna’s gratitude.
But Effie also knew she was an addendum there. If she and Sonny played a game or painted a picture, he always wanted to tell Mama and Dada he had won, to show them what he had made. Effie yearned to be so crucial to somebody, at the center of a little world. As much as she wanted the company, she didn’t like to highlight how much she needed it.
Effie had gone round to hold Lizzie’s hand the evening after the email. Dan had already moved out of their pretty garden flat on the most superficial level, meaning his underwear was no longer there but his books and CDs were. Effie remembered this stage from when James left: every well-thumbed page, creased spine, and half-remembered romantic lyric was a ghost in the room, each a soft-focus Then that existed in filmic palimpsest with the shitty, unflatteringly lit Now. She’d thought that stage was bad, but she had found the empty spaces on the shelves once they had been removed even worse.
“Spray his belongings with your favorite perfume before you hand them over,” Cosmo had educated them all as teenagers. “He’ll be overwhelmed with memories and want you back.”
It hadn’t worked for Effie; it had just made James cough.
Lizzie had been distant and distracted when Effie arrived—but that was to be expected. Effie knew how having your life canceled without notice could change a person. She had tried her best to persuade Lizzie to come on the holiday with the rest of them, to spend what would surely be the most difficult week of her life with the people who knew her best—but Lizzie had been reticent. Even talking about the place she should have been married in had made her cry fresh tears.
“I can’t, Eff,” she’d sputtered into a tissue. “It would be all I thought about.”
“But won’t you be thinking about it here too?” Effie had gestured around the empty flat. “You’d be surrounded by your friends there—here you’ll just be by yourself, wondering when Dan’s next coming round to pick up his stuff.”
Eventually Lizzie had acquiesced: she would come with them to the Oratoire de St. Eris, the place she had chosen as backdrop for her future with Dan now recast as square one in the new journey her life would take.
Effie had been glad. As the single elder stateswoman, she knew the importance of company, and she’d wanted to make sure Lizzie would have it on request. Before she’d left the flat that evening, Effie had even offered to stay the night, but her friend had waved her off from the front step. As she walked away down the road, Effie had guiltily admitted to herself that the prospect of one more friend—one more than none—whose future felt that little bit less mapped out had felt reassuring. It had been a little soon to make the point to Lizzie that they would have each other, just as it felt a little soon to press Ben on the specifics of whatever it was they had together.
Effie had gone straight from there to the pub to meet him—not that she had told Lizzie that. Effie knew that, eventually, Lizzie would be delighted for her and for Ben—she knew how difficult Effie had found the past six months; but the news that a friend is having depression-busting, chandelier-rattling sex with your ex’s best mate wasn’t exactly what Lizzie needed to hear right then. Effie felt more reckless and spontaneous with Ben than she ever had done with James; that night, flush-faced and with a corona of pillow-static hair, she had told him of the plan to whisk Lizzie away with them, to soothe the rawness of her hurt with the company of her oldest friends.
The last six months hadn’t been difficult for just Effie. She and Anna had noticed a transformation in their friend over that time too. Lizzie had always been strong-minded and successful; she spent her days making the sort of trailblazing adverts that talking heads ended up commenting on in state-of-the-nation clip shows. She knew her rights and her worth like she did her target demographics, but she had surprised both of them by diving into the planning of her “Big Day” like a Victorian wallflower working on her trousseau.
These days, they met up less frequently than they had in their twenties and, just like their drinks when they did, their time together felt watered down. In recent months, Lizzie had been quieter than usual—withdrawn, almost—and, when Effie and Anna had managed to coax her out of herself, able to talk of little other than the wedding. She asked their advice about readings, place settings, and favors, with none of the sarcasm Effie might have overlaid or Anna’s resentment at how much time her own nuptials had taken up. Lizzie was almost obsessive about the wedding—to the exclusion of her old personality, in fact.
But she didn’t seem excited about it, either. Lizzie’s wasn’t the sort of bridezilla monomania or self-importance that bulldozed or hijacked every other topic of conversation between the three of them. It seemed as though she couldn’t let herself talk about anything else, didn’t trust herself to. When Effie and Anna shared stories about what sort of day they’d both had, what their weekends looked like, Lizzie simply shrank into the cushions of whatever sofa they were sitting on or remained blank across the table they sat at.
Effie had first noticed it after the engagement party: Lizzie had become so bland, so docile. A blushing bride but somehow lacking in enthusiasm too. Lizzie was no longer mischievous; she no longer laughed. She had once called something “wedmin” over brunch (Effie watched Anna repress a shudder), without even pausing to pull a face.
Lizzie had deployed the same determination she always brought to all things professional and planned the wedding like an automaton: the dress had been chosen with minimum fuss (neither Effie nor Anna had been invited along); the venue—lavish and far away—decided on swiftly and without too much agonizing. The invitation, a hand-finished fold-out card filled with multiple inserts detailing logistics and a single sprig of Provençal lavender, had arrived with little pomp and just the right amount of ceremony. Lizzie had diligently—robotically, even—gotten on with all of it.
So what had changed her mind?
4.
Anna
“She didn’t want to talk about it.” Effie’s voice from the back of the car wavered slightly with an emotion that Anna knew her fragile friend shared. As much as her heart went out to Lizzie—Lizzie, who had stepped back from bride to mere woman again—it was Effie, still, six months on, who concerned her most.
The head of his own digital marketing agency
, Effie’s ex-boyfriend, James, had constructed his entire identity around being ahead of the curve; James had always known the best bars, owned the best albums before anyone else did. He had a collection of prized T-shirts emblazoned with the inscrutable logos of cult Japanese fashion brands, of record labels and microbreweries—Anna could rarely tell one from the other—that reached out to the like-minded souls he passed in the red brick Shoreditch streets near his office (sorry, “workspace”) and meant nothing to the pedestrians James considered to be beneath his notice.
She and Effie had both been through breakups before, but this one…Anna pulled a strand of her dark hair in front of her face and rolled it between her fingers. This one had been life-changing. Effie had thought she and James would have children together, grow old side by side. He might not have been sold on getting married, but they had been together nearly six years; the rest of them had all assumed it was a done deal—despite the fact that they might privately have wished Effie could meet somebody who was more appreciative of her.
Instead, Anna had answered her phone during one of Sonny’s cute but terrifyingly brutal toddler football sessions one Sunday morning to hear Effie lowing like a dying animal.
“He’s gone,” she managed through the pain. “It’s over.”
Anna hadn’t even been able to get to her until two days later, and the fact had shamed her. In the old days, she would have been round with tissues and wine within the hour, but an inexcusably clichéd combination of childcare and court prep meant that the heartbreak Bat-Signal had gone unanswered for forty-eight hours solid. Effie had said she didn’t mind, that she had work to get through as well—but was that proof of how busy and grown-up they both were or of how dislocated they had become?
Between them, Anna and Lizzie had made time to check in on their friend but, as the weeks and months passed since the bomb had gone off in Effie’s life, Anna found she no longer had the stamina she once did for friend emergencies. She didn’t have enough evenings free, between the ones she spent either hunched low and late, scribbling at her desk, or rushing out of the office in case she could make it back in time for Sonny’s bath. She couldn’t keep in her yawns as Effie re-trod the shock, the incredulity, and the anger over bottle after bottle, well beyond Anna’s strict ten p.m. bedtime. She couldn’t manage the headaches the next day in the office as the love fermented to spite and the yearning distilled to fury. She couldn’t help Effie every minute of the day as they and Lizzie had all done for each other in the past. When they did manage to meet as a three, Lizzie had seemed barely able to concentrate on what Effie was saying anyway.
Anna felt Effie’s text messages buzzing in her pocket as she met clients, turned her phone facedown when the calls came during briefing sessions with her juniors. How did she have time to ring during the school day anyway? After a decade of devotion to Coral Hill Prep and teaching its precocious preteen girls with the type of enthusiasm that couldn’t be faked, Effie was now one step away from being headmistress at one of the most prestigious primary schools in London. Anna couldn’t imagine the pushy mothers, for which that particularly leafy, southwest quadrant of the city was famous, standing for anybody being anything other than full Mary Poppins when in loco parentis with their highly competitive, socially engineered charges.
So Anna yelled her advice out over speakerphone as she danced around the kitchen with Sonny’s potato waffles or soaped the paint out of his hair in the bath. Each time, she acknowledged briefly to herself—and hated—that her life no longer felt broad enough to encompass all of Effie’s feelings as well as her own.
A text message more than two inches long was an indulgence to her parental mind, and further evidence that her friend’s was unraveling.
Married for a year longer than Sonny’s tiny life span and with Steve for three before that, Anna had forgotten how distant memories, unearthed emails, the gradual joining of dots could precipitate aftershocks of emotion that felt as new and disorientating as the original landslide of a relationship ending. She could no longer recall how thinking back over a conversation in a new light somehow intensified and renewed what had happened all over again. An entire relationship could be recast in a moment, a love story rewritten in a second—but Anna did not have the energy to talk Effie down every time.
Instead, her responses had become copy-and-paste jobs, her patience stretched translucent. But now that she saw Effie for the first time in a few weeks—really saw her—Anna realized that her friend was still struggling under the weight of a decision taken about her future that she had not been consulted on.
After James’s departure, Effie’s complexion, always light and prone to rosiness, had become a blotch of blue-toned gray pallor. Her baby-soft hair was thinner, her athletic build now nearly skeletal; her joints were bony hinges and her sternum a ridged xylophone beneath her T-shirt. In a past life, wearing the contented pudge that came of being in long-term, loved-up, if not exactly red-hot relationships, the two of them would have joked about the cheese-rind skin and wine-coated teeth that accompanied glamorous, emaciated sorrow, but now—one of them wasting away under her own sadness, the other bloated with domestic grudges—there seemed little to laugh about.
Anna was pleased to see that some of her friend’s former glow had been restored recently, but she still wasn’t back to full strength.
I’ll speak to her properly this week. This holiday will be just what we both need.
That was why she’d also begged Lizzie to come with them, so that she might lick her wounds in their company rather than alone, in the flat she used to share with her now former fiancé.
As Anna glanced out the window and Steve began to slow to pull off for the exit toward the airport’s vast expanses of car park, there came the sound of two phones, hers and Effie’s, vibrating in unison as the same message arrived to them both simultaneously.
It was from Lizzie: “Are you at the airport yet? Running a bit late—eek! Can’t wait to see you both.”
5.
Effie
Ben was waiting there for her after the security checks. Broad and beaming with a nervous smile that made Effie’s own slightly jittery stomach lurch like a stalling car, he bent to kiss her cheek before greeting Anna and Steve. He had carefully saved a table large enough for the whole group, took coffee orders as the three of them schlepped their wheelies out of the way, and went to the bar as they settled in.
“I’m sorry—you’re seeing someone?” Anna said to Effie, once he was out of earshot, eyebrows raised practically to her hairline and her voice well above its usual pitch. “And it’s best man Ben?”
“We…just hit it off about a month ago,” she replied, embarrassed but earnest. “He’s kind of great.” And when Anna pressed her—on the when, the how, the what it all meant—she added: “Let’s just see, shall we? Even I don’t know yet.”
Ben handed the drinks around carefully, remembered perfectly who had asked for what, refusing repayment. Deliberately lingered as he brushed Effie’s fingers with his own when it was her turn to take a steaming cup. He settled into the chair next to hers and wiggled his eyebrows at her when Effie next summoned the courage to look up into his face.
Across the table, Anna waved at someone behind them: Lizzie, sprinting across the departures lounge, looking just as she used to coming back from college hockey practice when she would stop by Effie and Anna’s rooms for a cup of tea, dressed in a gray marled sweatshirt and navy jogging bottoms with her hair pulled back into a rough ponytail.
Already the shaken and shell-shocked woman Effie had put her arm around earlier that week seemed more herself again; she even managed a triumphant smile as she heaved her handbag down onto a chair. But it faded, replaced with confusion—and something else—when Lizzie registered the man at Effie’s side.
“Ben?” she asked bluntly, her voice hoarse with feeling. Lizzie’s face was suddenly full of color, her eyes
threatening to brim over with glossy tears. “What are you doing here?”
Ben’s expression stuttered like a blinking bulb. Anna, too, looked taken aback, her face stricken by a horrified half-smile, the body’s betraying impulse to laugh at awkwardness, to smooth away the edge it had introduced.
“It was my idea, Lizbet,” Effie said hurriedly, leaning across the table so that Lizzie was looking into her friendly face rather than Ben’s flustered one. “I asked him to come.”
Lizzie’s mouth moved as though in silent recital of some unknown text, her eyes searching Effie’s as though reading words in a foreign language.
“We were going to leave it until after the wedding so we didn’t distract from anything, but…” Effie’s voice cracked a little at the reveal. “Ben and I have been seeing each other for a little while.”
She turned her head to smile at him and saw that his face had begun to relax too. Effie felt a rush of tenderness for him: he had been so thoughtfully reticent about whether he should come this week, considering only Dan and whether or not his oldest friend might need the company in London instead. Effie could have been more careful of her friend’s feelings too, she realized.
“I’m so sorry, Lizbet,” she said. “We didn’t mean to give you a shock.”
“Surprise!” Ben laughed nervously.
Lizzie’s breath tumbled out as though she had been kicked in the stomach. “Well!” she laughed—a little too loudly—and Effie noticed the tears remaining in her eyes. “I didn’t realize I’d be the seventh wheel at my own wedding party….But still, what a treat to go away with you lot again.”
The Wedding Night Page 3
