“Lizzie, I—,” Effie began confidently enough, then halted, as if suddenly chastened. “I’m so, so sorry.”
From the other end of the terrace, climbing the steps that led from the swimming pool, Ben loped toward the open doors. He wore the same clothes as yesterday and an expression of sore confusion that seemed etched into his face as though onto a statue. His feet were bare, his lips slightly gray.
Effie dragged herself from Charlie’s side in the lee of the kitchen doorway along one wall to approach Lizzie. She walked bowed, with the morning’s weakness but also in penance, regret.
On the opposite side of the room, the altar stood, framed by the doorway, still serene and seemingly undisturbed by the chaos surrounding it. A tide of spilled…something had licked around its wooden base, but it stood otherwise untouched, upright in the morass like the crow’s nest on a sinking ship.
A rustling sound came from one of the open doorways at the other end of the Hall. Steve made his entrance, bare-chested with his lower half wrapped in a purple towel, blinking himself awake and into daylight with what looked like a difficulty similar to that which Effie had experienced upstairs. His eyes tracked guiltily to Anna by the altar, her face pulled into the sort of wordless query only couples can exchange.
She stood behind the podium, stony-faced. In front of her, the teak shelf was empty—the thick-paged guest book now lay at a drunken angle on the long table nearest to where Effie stood, hunched and swaying slightly. The pair of golden rings that had sat in its crease and caught the sun yesterday—was it really only yesterday?—were gone.
Shouldn’t Dan have had the rings ahead of the ceremony?
The thought was so fleeting, given what Effie’s eyes took in next, that she never voiced it, had forgotten it in the time it took her to breathe. On the textured vellum of the wedding book, somebody had entered the first and only message in celebration of the wedding that hadn’t happened. Block capitals, tidy but arresting, in the black ink of the Sharpie left for precisely that purpose, and in the purposeful handwriting of a “Back in five minutes” shop sign, a “Deliveries round the back” note: functional, anonymous. Which made what it said even more strange.
Effie blinked. She rolled her vision over the square letters once more, noting the varying gaps between them, the seasick slant of the lines that gave away the late, lush hour at which they were written. She felt a butterflying nervousness settle into her stomach. It mixed there with the resident nausea into a gluey, anxious curdle.
“ ‘Congratulations,’ ” she croaked. “ ‘You deserve each other.’ ”
As she read the message aloud—more in an attempt to disprove the fruits of her own literacy than to alert anyone else as to the book’s contents—Iso appeared in the doorway behind Steve.
Luminous, tanned, and glamorous in even a state of bedhead—the edge only slightly taken off her sleekness with a telltale smearing of eye makeup just like Effie had woken up with—she was clad in a matching shade of lavender beach towel to Steve’s, wrapped around the middle of her from sternum to upper thigh, and nothing else. As she heard Effie mouth the words into existence, her dull and semi-somnolent expression leaped into fresh urgency. In its wake came the seconds-later reverb of creakiness and pain that Effie and Charlie had experienced in the kitchen.
“Did someone get married last night?” Iso croaked.
The woman’s every move was followed by almost a million people, but Effie could see that the most recent activity, like her own, had failed to upload. The young “influencer” was experiencing a Page Not Found moment, a 404 error message in the depths of her brain. She put one hand to the top of her head, as if that might stop the pulse there beating like a Taiko drummer, scrunched her thick dark hair in a fist, and looked at her other hand, clenching the purple towel to her otherwise naked body, as she noticed Steve similarly wrapped next to her.
“Oh my God.” Iso’s voice was a rusty gear in need of oiling. “Did we get married?”
12.
Anna
Iso’s words hung in the Hall like confetti above their—aching—heads, then fell to earth not with the picturesque quality of the floral gauntlet that each new couple runs after their ceremony but with something rather more like the reality of it. On every nuptial showreel, in between the smiling shots harvested for the albums, the silver frames, the profile pictures, are the unfortunate stills where the well-meaning blizzard dive-bombs the bride’s and groom’s eyes and clogs their throats like a cloud of Highland midges.
Across the room, Anna saw Charlie’s face crumple in confusion. At the other end of it, her husband stood rigidly beneath the stone arch of the doorway and trained his unblinking eyes on the woman he had promised never to forsake for anyone else, whose forehead he had cooled with flannels for two days during childbirth, whose subsequent pelvic-floor issues he knew like an old friend, whose salary paid two-thirds of his mortgage every month.
She knew Steve couldn’t really have married a complete stranger—on holiday, with no vicar, no celebrant, no certificate—but, for once, it wasn’t the legal issues Anna was sifting through. No, it was everything else that might have happened. The thought of Steve pretending to marry another woman—even as a joke—was almost as horrifying to Anna as the idea that he might potentially have consummated this new union while in the haze of more free alcohol than he had seen at even the biggest rock band’s album launch.
Just as she knew that Steve’s hands would be clammy and cold right now, Anna also knew how he often had to grapple with big, not-quite-memorable nights upon waking, had sometimes been forced to ask colleagues and friends to fill in the blanks—who hadn’t? But those blanks had never before contained quite so much potential. Everything she had suspected him of doing with Celia—things they had not done together for so long—Anna now pictured happening with Iso, and her own hands began to tremble.
Anna thought once more of their wedding day as she weighed Iso’s question in the balance, set the beautiful young woman’s words against the ballast of Steve’s horrified expression and dumbstruck pose. He had been in tears as he’d made his vows to her, even though he was the one who spent his life propping her up and soothing her fears. When it came to it, she had remained dry-eyed in the face of her usually lighthearted husband’s own emotional collapse.
She was tearless now too, but inside she felt like a crumbling building, as though great chunks of masonry were falling away from her core. She had thought they might revisit some version of their youth on this holiday, had hoped that whatever fiction she had created between her husband and the woman who texted him late at night had been just that. But if Steve could wake up naked with someone he had only just met, there was little doubt where he had already smoothed away the sharper edges of his conscience: number 68. Celia’s house. The final bricks holding Anna up crashed down within her.
Is this how betrayal feels?
In response to the apparent infidelity unfolding in front of the fragile audience members—unfolding like a loosely wrapped beach towel—Anna could only summon a great and primordial weariness. It was one she could no longer remember being without. There was a certain “dust to dust” inevitability to Steve cheating on her: the reflexive disappointment that being with a man—any man—eventually came to, because they were all so consistently untrustworthy.
When did I become so cynical?
“Errr, no?” When Steve finally answered Iso’s question, he sounded high-pitched and strangled, like the time he’d forgotten to set up the direct debit for Sonny’s nursery fees and their son had been barred from daycare for a week. A week that, because Steve had been away at a festival for his music magazine, Anna had had to cover at the last minute, a week of trial by toddler as well as by jury.
Seeing him there with Iso, Anna weighed the endless drudgery of care and career that was her constant companion against her husband’s consist
ent ability to shrug off that burden and wear the guise of his younger years without it pulling or digging in the way all her own clothes did. She felt her heart wither toward him, wondered whether he might actually have broken it beyond despair and beyond repair.
Still, Anna’s skeptical nature couldn’t quite believe that the worst had happened. She knew only too well how her husband wore his guilt: Steve was not in repentant mode but enervated—and rightly so—by the prospect that his wife would be angry with him regardless. He and Iso clearly hadn’t got married, but what else had they been up to, with their matching hangovers and coordinating nudity?
“It would be more convincing if you hadn’t framed your denial as a question, Steve,” Anna replied, unfolding her arms and stepping slowly over the threshold into the bedraggled Hall.
13.
Effie
Christ, imagine being married to a barrister.
Effie felt Steve’s regret and damp-palmed confusion as if it were her own. Her stomach heaved at the palpable awkwardness that now permeated the space like some kind of unwanted, cloying room spray. Yesterday it had been coming off only her and Lizzie; now, it seemed, everyone had had a squirt of the tester.
Steve cleared his throat. “No, look, Anna, of course we haven’t got married. Don’t be ridiculous, I would never—I wouldn’t— Look, we just didn’t….Nothing happened, okay?”
That he could barely look at his wife was an unfortunate by-product of her standing with the day’s bright sunshine behind her rather than shame or mendacity, but he seemed aware, as he blinked his eyes to the floor once more, that it didn’t look good.
“Then who wrote the note? And why?” Charlie asked weakly.
By the table, Effie stared at the letters again. No identifying curlicues or tells, just incontrovertible black on white. Nobody raised a hand or spoke to claim them.
She looked around the room.
Lizzie was asleep and Anna must have gone to bed too.
Steve and Iso are both naked under those towels.
Effie glanced over at Ben, who stood queasily just beyond the Hall, bracing himself against one of the paned French doors and shivering.
Ben genuinely looks like he might have slept outside.
She swallowed drily, thinking of the flashes of memory, the blank spots in her timeline. The dent next to her in the bed. Dark hairs, not blond. Not the hair of the man she had brought here in the hope of cementing whatever it was they had together—the thing that had given her reason to smile again.
What have I done?
“Look,” she said feebly, “it doesn’t actually mean anything happened.” Effie took in the scene again: the cake, the bouquet, the bottles, the glasses, and the smeared plates. “We clearly just…overdid it.” And she steadied herself with one hand on the tabletop.
“Well, thanks a lot, guys,” Lizzie said, the pitch of her voice high and ragged: a semi-scream that came from the gut. “I came here to try and get away from all this…shit”—she gestured at the tables, the food, the flowers, the incontrovertible fact of a wedding party well and truly thrown—“and you celebrate while I’m fucking asleep.” She wiped a heavy hand across her face. “What time did you even go to bed anyway?”
“You didn’t hear us come up?” Anna asked quietly.
Lizzie shook her head slowly. “Dosed up, remember.”
Bed. Effie tried to remember the fact of having gone to bed, something she knew she must have done because she had woken up in one. But there was no recollection there—only a worried whirring that echoed around her head as her empty mind flicked through its Rolodex of likelihoods.
Charlie.
She felt a settling sensation in her bowels, like snow shifting in a drift. Charlie, standing only a few feet away from her, wore the tragic look of a man who knew he had let himself down. What had he said when she’d walked in on him in the kitchen? “There’s no need to mention—” And then he’d been interrupted.
Charlie, who she’d known for so long, had been with once, long ago, for a clutch of weeks that added up to just a few minutes over the life span of their friendship but that now felt more relevant than they had done in years.
Charlie, with his short, dark hair, just like the ones she’d found on the pillow next to hers. In the honeymoon suite, where the newlyweds would go after they’d been married.
Effie lifted her head where she leaned on the table and retched efficiently into the ruined plate of hors d’oeuvres nearest to her. As she wiped a long strand of bile from her chin, she caught his eye and the look was almost symbiotic. A fellow sufferer…and what else? He darted his pupils away before she could search his face for clues.
Lizzie was still standing at the top of the stairs, a player in the eaves waiting to be lowered into the action on a wire. Now she descended for the exposition. “What on earth did you lot do last night?”
“We had some drinks—” Charlie began.
“A lot of drinks,” interrupted Effie.
“Ben kept pouring shots,” Anna said, and Lizzie’s expression hardened.
“We danced,” murmured Iso.
“Yes! We danced!” Effie agreed, relieved to at least be able to corroborate something.
“We carried on drinking.” Steve’s eyes were big brown pools of contrition, directed toward Anna, his alcohol buddy and hangover soulmate for seven years who knew just how badly affected he could be by both. “What was that cocktail you mixed up, Ben? I felt like I was on drugs.”
Ben’s voice came out like a gargle of stones. “Called a shambles,” he said. “Vodka, champagne, Red Bull.” He shrugged guiltily. “Fun, but lethal.”
“Then what?” asked Effie. Her hands and upper arms were shaking as she tried to re-tie her hair into a ponytail, away from her face, where a slick of anxious sweat was building on her forehead, the bridge of her nose, the nervous zone on her upper lip.
“Then I went to bed, you lot carried on, and whatever happened…happened.” Anna spread her hands, waiting for them to enlighten her. “Lizzie, did you really sleep through the whole thing?”
The question almost sounded accusatory: directed at the one person who couldn’t have had anything to do with their antics.
“I was out cold.” She cleared her throat and shrugged her shoulders in quizzical mode. “Should I be jealous? Clearly, I didn’t have half as much fun at my own wedding as you lot did.”
Lizzie took a few more steps into the rubble of the night before. “You know, part of me thought you might have tidied some of this away so I didn’t have to see it all again this morning. Demolishing it instead was certainly one approach.”
The set of her face was frosty and thoroughly unimpressed.
Though Effie winced at the acerbic tone, Anna held Lizzie’s stare for a moment, opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She tapped the fingers of one hand along her jawbone, then tried again. “Well, I think we need to contact whoever set all this up and tell them to come and collect it. Do you have their numbers?”
“I told you: we already canceled it all. Me, Dan, Effie, Ben. We called them all.” Lizzie’s tone was frustrated, bordering on disgust.
Anna softened and began walking toward her friend, still ignoring her husband, where he stood in the doorway to her right.
“I know,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I know this must be…very weird. And upsetting. All our fault—we messed up. But is there somebody we can get in touch with to sort out the…?” She gestured around the room. “All this?”
“I’ll try Marie?” Ben spoke up, querulously, from the opposite side of the Hall. Marie was the woman Lizzie and Dan had paid to knit all the strands of their day together on the ground from her office in a nearby town. “Think I got some reception over there yesterday.”
He pulled his phone from his pocket and strode farther off across the terrace, toward whe
re the landscape lay on the horizon.
“Should we call Dan?” Effie asked quietly.
Marie had been Dan’s find, Dan’s contact. Dan’s responsibility on the list of things to be undone. He had been the one to call her, to explain that they wouldn’t need the long list of things she had been working through for them. Lizzie hadn’t been able to face it. Now she set her jaw against the specter of the man she had once wanted to grow old beside: too painful to have on this holiday, in this room, in her head.
Ben returned from the end of the terrace, shaking his head. “No answer,” he called. “Barely any reception, but just enough to get her voicemail.”
“Look,” Anna said gently to Lizzie. “We’ll get in the car, drive to the nearest village, and you can call Dan.”
Both Charlie and Steve cringed at the prospect of taking the wheel in their current state. But it was Lizzie who seemed most anxious at the suggestion, and simply shook her head.
“No,” she said quietly but adamantly, the haunted look returning to her pale face, the blood draining beneath the freckles. “I can’t speak to him right now. Please don’t make me.”
Anna narrowed her eyes, but Effie moved in a few paces to stand next to the heartbroken former bride and laid an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t worry, I’ll call him,” she offered.
14.
Anna
Anna picked up the keys to her and Steve’s rental car from the terra-cotta bowl painted with gaudy ripe lemons that sat on the sideboard at one end of the cool, dark Hall, then wrested open the front door of the house, which led straight out to the limy track where the cars were parked.
The Wedding Night Page 7
