Effie reached a slender wrist over to the table where the glasses stood, took one and passed it to Anna, then picked up another for herself. She raised the honey-colored liquid so that it filtered the warm Luberon sunshine onto her face into an even deeper gold.
Lizzie’s sadness was not hers to wallow in; Anna had come away in order to feel better about her own life too. She proposed the toast to herself and her future privately, silently, and drank deep, the warmth on her skin replicated in her throat, her stomach, her heart as the champagne worked its magic.
10.
Lizzie
My friends never even knew anything was wrong.
That wasn’t exactly new. Effie and I had kept what happened at university from Anna for years—were still keeping it from her. Not because I thought she would have done any differently or told me and Effie not to do it, but because I couldn’t bear her judging me for it. The sense of fairness that runs through her like words in a stick of rock wouldn’t have been able to simply tell me that it was okay, that I’d only done what I’d needed to, and that Effie had, too. And unfortunately, that was all I was capable of hearing back then.
Anna had studied Law—a big, solid hulking course that spread across her daylight hours like the giant tomes she so often had cascading over the desk in her student room—while Effie and I had done English, an altogether more ethereal sort of studying that also involved lots of books but focused more on the abstract discussion of them. Over coffee, perhaps, or cake. Discussions we had in cafés, on the sofas in our shared set of rooms with cigarettes nipped between our fingers. On the green banks of the river where the columns of our college mirrored dapples of sunshine on the water. Discussions that often weren’t really about the books at all in the end but about music, clothes, films, boys.
To put it bluntly, Anna had to go to lectures, and we didn’t. She had to get up early every morning, and we didn’t.
By the time we met up with her again for dinner every night, Effie and I would have had a whole day together. Sometimes we’d go shopping, others we’d drink cocktails—lurid pink ones that were in fashion at the time because well-dressed New Yorkers ordered them on TV. That’s why Anna never knew about what happened: because it took root late at night and unfurled during the day. By the time it had run its course, we were all sitting our finals and there was no point dwelling on it anymore.
After the engagement party—oh God, the engagement party—I knew I must have been behaving strangely, because Effie—whose near-constant battle with hungover anxiety had become something of a joke since we’d all turned thirty—asked whether she’d said something that had hurt my feelings. I assured her: no, nothing to worry about. Even if she had, I wouldn’t have had the spare emotion to be upset by it.
Anna looked at me as though I was letting the side down, egging me on to bitch about a wedding I was organizing as if I wanted it, even though I knew life would never be the same if it went ahead. I couldn’t: if I started talking as though anything was less than perfect behind the facade, I didn’t know what else might come out.
I had originally thought the wedding would fix the problem, return him to the man he’d been before; but in the run-up the threats got worse. The cruelty, the panic, the mental torture. The constant worry on the horizon. It was with me always, even when he wasn’t. I realized that it always would be unless I did something about it.
That was when I stopped obeying him.
He didn’t like that, me being free, making my own decisions. What he had—those pictures—no longer had the heft they might once have done. They lost their value, some of it at least. They could still wound, but they weren’t terminal.
Until he told me what else he had done.
By that point I felt so dirty, so soiled by them and by him, that I didn’t have much left to lose. So I canceled the wedding.
I gave it all away. The love, the trappings of it. The Big Day and the lifelong company. In exchange for my freedom. The liberty to live again. An exoneration from the worry-load of guilt I felt at having let it all happen to me. To us.
It wasn’t until I saw that room, dressed and readied for the day I had convinced myself I no longer wanted, that I realized: I’d made yet another mistake.
Stupid Lizzie, caught off guard. Again. As if that wasn’t the reason it had all kicked off in the first place.
I’d been blind time and again. Of course he wasn’t going to let me go that easily.
The Morning After
11.
Effie
A noise that might have come from her, but she wasn’t sure. Then consciousness. But no air.
Effie’s mind raced as she fought to catch her breath. Something clamped over her mouth let neither life in nor protest out, but allowed only an impotent sucking against the seal that was preventing her lungs from filling.
As her oxygen-starved semiconsciousness cast around in confusion, she dragged her eyelids open to a pure and bright white light so intense it was more feeling than sight.
I must be dead.
So why am I still in such pain?
Effie wiped her face with a heavy, sleep-numbed hand and peeled from her cheek warm flakes of skin that tore off in great layers and then clung to the ends of her fingers. One further clumsy swipe and cool air rushed into her open mouth and dry, desperate throat in a gasp that sounded like a horror movie corpse being reanimated. She was not dead; every fuzzy and frayed nerve ending spoke of how alive she was.
Alive—and in a state of terrible, terrible suffering.
There was more skin peeling from her bare arms and legs, flaking off and bubbling as if from giant sores.
What the—
Effie shook the bridal suite rose petals from her hands and brushed them off her chest, her cheeks. The one that had stoppered her mouth as effectively as any gag lay on the pillow next to her, damp and crumpled.
Oh Christ.
Effie had had mornings like this before, where the weight of existence took a demi-second before reattaching itself, and she experienced a momentary lightness—the brief float of a sheet being shaken out and straightened in midair above a bed before it gently kisses the mattress once more. Then—the reserves of optimism emptied, the well of memory refilled—Effie’s earthly heaviness would resume.
It had been at its most intense right after James had left, when her old life still existed as living history in the borrowed moments between sleeping and waking, before she remembered he had gone. As she outgrew them, the thump back down to earth grew less bone-shattering with every day; with Ben by her side, waking up was no longer anything to fear.
Except he wasn’t next to her this morning.
Without moving her pounding head, Effie pieced together the room. White sheets, white canopy, white walls. White light gleaming in shafts through the windows—she must have left them unshuttered. A white bridal suite, for a white wedding that hadn’t happened.
How had she ended up in here?
Her mouth was dry, her tongue a rubber bath mat suckered to its roof. Her eyes felt gritty, and her vision swam with pressure flecks when she rubbed at them. Day-old mascaraed lashes cracked and broke clean off under the friction of her fists. Effie’s joints ached; her limbs were heavy. Her heart, tentatively stretching itself awake for the day, returned to its senses and sank that little bit lower into her chest when it, too, realized just how hungover she was.
Effie looked around herself at a too-familiar scene: yesterday’s clothes piled on the floor next to the bed, flung there as an indistinct consequence of actions that she knew, logically, must have happened in order for the garments to have ended up where they had, but one that she couldn’t quite remember being active in. Imagine, yes, but not remember.
In the last six months she had sometimes lurched awake in rooms with the knowledge that something had happened there—an abstract sense of pas
t action, lingering like the final note sung by a lone voice—but no further details. Sometimes there were showreels, teasers almost, to accompany the rooms: flashes of time out of sequence for her to attempt to edit into a narrative. Tears. Fury. Blinkered first-person perspectives of shouting and laughing, their sound muted and the words muffled. Brief and blurry glimpses of light switches, bathroom tiles, faces, mouths. Crying. Retching.
And there were the rooms she woke up in alone, but with the feeling that someone had recently absented themselves, like the March Hare dashing off. A scent, perhaps, or an abandoned item of clothing—a tie, a sock, a cuff link. And a humming, a thrumming; a guilty throbbing or dull, insistent ache between her legs that she felt she could not possibly have signed up for in those moments of half-life, given that she sometimes awoke knowing neither where or even who she was anymore—nor who she had been with—but which she had more than likely invited or embarked upon willingly enough before the blackout curtain fell mid-act.
No, I don’t do that anymore.
Nevertheless, Effie eyed the dent in the pillow next to the one her head was resting on. A crater in the linen that contained within a few stray hairs—short, dark; dark?—and an empty glass on the bedside table adjacent to it. And then she remembered—some, not all.
Drinks by the pool. More drinks by the pool. At some point, drinks in the pool; at another, music. Indoors now and laughter. Swaying to a beat, now spinning, and then collapsing. Words of comfort, screeches of hilarity, then darkness and now here. At Lizzie’s wedding.
How much did I drink?
Stuttering into life, Effie raised herself on bony elbows and saw her skinny naked body reflected in a ghoulish pale blue against the white, white sheets and under the harsh tones of morning in this white, white room. Her hip bones rose like sleigh rails on either side of the empty stomach slung taut between them. James used to cup the one closest to him in his palm as she woke up. “Too nobbly,” he’d say, when she was working too hard and eating too little. They were sharper now than they ever had been.
“Ben?” she tried to ask the room, but her throat was too dry to disturb the silence.
Water.
Effie swung her feet to the floor and stood, allowing the room a moment to finish swaying around her before she took her first steps. She hooked her feet back into yesterday’s skirt and T-shirt, pulled them up and over her, then walked slowly—padding and plodding as though bowed by age or infirmity rather than the stacking sensation of shame upon shame that she was beginning to feel—out of the room and onto the terra-cotta-tiled landing.
The house was silent but for the holiday half-sound of light cotton curtains swirling on currents of warm air as it met the building’s ancient coolness. A door creaked somewhere in a breeze, the sonorous timbre of mature timber only ever heard in old buildings, across flagged floors with no plush carpets to guzzle up the noise. Outside, the tinkling hum of a garden sprinkler puttering water across the lawn to quench its thirst and the low, long-distance hum of an engine in motion—a lawnmower, Effie assumed before remembering that she was no longer in the city. A tractor, then, or an airplane, something mechanical whose buzz and drone matched precisely the one beginning to kick in at the point where her skull sat on the stem of her neck.
She approached the top of the stairs, moving gingerly with her head down, shoulders hunched against the day and its insistence on time passing as usual despite a slowness she felt emanating from her very bones. The ancient coldness of the stone steps seeped through the bamboo soles of her flip-flops, and when she looked up and over the balustrade into the Hall, she wondered, briefly, whether she was looking at a scene from its past, some great and boisterous banquet abandoned by lords and ladies long finished their wassailing.
The two tables that ran the length of the large room were strewn with the wreckage of festivities—dishes started but not finished, dobs of cream and sauce all over. Glasses lay upended on them; the many empty bottles that hadn’t smashed had rolled and come to a stop on their sides in the channels on either side between them and the thick stone walls. One of the benches had been knocked over and left lying where it fell; a smashed vase and the wildflowers it had contained lay not far off. The tablecloth hung asymmetrically, as if grabbed on the way down, a magic trick aborted.
Farther along the length of the room, one of the elaborate freestanding candelabra ringed with brass sconces leaned drunkenly against the sandy-toned stone wall, its candles melted down haphazardly and standing askew like crooked teeth. A few yards away, another lay on its side, ivory wax cooled into fragile stalactites where it had spilled from the holders.
The trellis arch stood firm over the double doors, but the flowers that had yesterday sprung from it in beauty now hung blowsily down, their fullness pointing at the steps below as if avoiding eye contact.
Effie took the final few stairs into the Hall slowly, absorbing the mess with eyes that were wide yet bleary and panda-rimmed with sleep-smudged makeup. As her foot connected with the floor at the bottom, there was a loud clanging noise, like a metal gong from within a doorway just a few yards beyond where she stood—the kitchen.
If she had seen the room before now, she had no memory of the occasion. A high-ceilinged stone space that was part rustic pantry and part luxury condo, with wooden pulleys that dripped bundles of fresh and drying herbs alongside an eight-hob range of the sort TV chefs practice posing in front of. Leaning on it with his back to the doorway in which Effie stood, still and cautious, was Charlie. His dark head was bowed and his breathing labored; each exhalation ended with a small moan—whether of pain or sorrow, Effie could not tell.
As she stepped into the room, slowly and feebly, her foot connected with an empty wine bottle. It spun on the floor with a grating clatter before slowing to a halt along a line as straight as any arrow, pointing directly at the man its disturbance had frightened so much he had leaped several feet and turned, apparently in midair, to face the intruder.
Charlie’s face crimsoned from ashen to puce and then settled into a pale shade of green. “Oh, it’s only you,” he groaned weakly, swallowing thickly in a way Effie recognized to be a precursor of a day’s worth—or more—of drinking-related illness.
A beat then, and his face colored again—briefly this time, like the dimming of a bulb whose glow falters momentarily—before he spoke, gruff now and self-conscious.
“Look, Effie, there’s no need to mention—”
“Oh my God!” went up the cry—Lizzie’s cry—in the Hall, and the two of them sprang toward the door. The instinctive movement left them both reeling against its frame as their heavy bodies caught up with sprightly reflexes honed in the years before they had ever really felt their hangovers.
“What the fuck?!”
Lizzie stood at the top of the flight of stairs that led into the Hall, her white cotton nightgown a mockery of the dress she should have worn to survey the room. Her bird’s-nest hair suggested deep but tormented sleep. Her arms were crooked in question marks by her sides, her fingers spread wide, claw-like.
She looks like a horror movie prom queen.
“What the fuck, guys?” She sounded broken, but her face was savage with rage. “Why would you—? How could you have…”
Effie followed Lizzie’s glistening, tear-filled eyes as they traveled around the room and could see that her friend felt its ravishing like a physical blow.
“My wedding, this was my fucking wedding,” she continued, clarion sharp against the silence of the others. “The one I had to cancel, the one that has broken my fucking heart! Could you really not have restrained yourselves?”
Effie understood only too well that the destruction of the tableau stood as a leitmotif for the emotional turmoil within. Her own flat had been a mausoleum of pain after James; she refused to wash his coffee cup for a month, had preserved his clothes in the heaps he’d left until he came to col
lect them. She’d slept in a T-shirt of his until Anna pointed out that she was trying to have sex with a ghost. Now here was Lizzie, phantom bride at a Mary Celeste of a reception. As she surveyed the scene, she clawed at the place on her chest where her heart was, as though trying to dig it out and stop the pain.
“I haven’t even got the refunds back yet,” she said, quieter now, voice deadened by the weight of realization dawning. “I probably won’t now. Do you know how much this will cost? You’re like a bunch of sodding teenagers. You just don’t give a shit, do you? Did you just decide to have my wedding without me?”
Shamed, Effie scanned the room once more. She hadn’t noticed, on first dull-eyed inspection, that in among the listing lamps and spilled drinks were the usual marital rites the guests might have reasonably expected during their stay at the Oratoire for Lizzie and Dan’s nuptials.
Now she saw that the tiered white cake had been cut into and a thick, solitary slice extracted; the bone-handled knife used in the disfigurement lay discarded nearby. Effie realized that the floor was scattered with what she had at first glimpse assumed to be rubbish but could now tell was a sprinkling of dried petals—the petals left out in baskets as confetti. Some way off, behind the altar on the terrace outside—in the middle of an aisle now obstructed by knocked and fallen chairs that had meant to accommodate another eighty or so guests staying in the town at the bottom of the hill—a bundle of carefully selected and deliberately folksy-looking wildflowers lay on the stone flags. Surrounding it were several dead heads and petals that it had shed on impact, as if hurled.
Lizzie’s bouquet.
Beyond the back row of chairs, Anna had been standing silently on the terrace, eyes closed and chin tilted, bathing her face in the morning sunshine. As voices rose within, her lids snapped open and she strode back toward them, twisting through the melee of chairs and through the open doors. Her capable, toddler-strengthened arms were folded across the white cotton T-shirt she wore with a pair of navy shorts. She looked considerably less haunted than the rest of them, Effie thought, as Anna took in the scene with the detachment of somebody not appraising it for the first time.
The Wedding Night Page 6
