How on earth did Celia manage it, day in, day out?
By borrowing my husband all the fucking time.
“It’s not the same without you,” Steve regularly mewed on his return from these work jaunts, grizzled with late nights and beer. But he still seemed to have the same partied-out look they’d both once worn, the same pinprick pupils. The same rolling hangover after four nights on the trot—four nights she’d spent bathing and wiping and soothing their son.
Now, on his sunbed, Steve briefly roused, then turned over and rocked himself back to sleep exactly the same way Sonny did.
Anna watched as Charlie sluiced away the previous night; the remorse that had hung around him for most of the day was washed off by the tepid bath-like water. He submerged his head and came up refreshed, breaking the surface between Iso’s tanned feet where they dangled from the floating airbed. Her painted toenails matched the pink of the inflatable, Anna noticed. Everything matched, from Iso’s toes to her hairbands, her shoes and her bags, right down to her underwear. Right down to the matching towels she and Steve had been wrapped in.
On another lounger at one of the narrow ends of the pool, moved there by its occupant into this more solitary position, lay Lizzie, earbuds in and nodding to the beat as she read her book. This she held at a precise angle above her body so its shadow would not interfere with the more serious work of tanning as she followed its plot.
Anna smiled indulgently. Of the three of them—Effie with her Celtic coloring, she with her granny’s Irish blood, which began to steam in temperatures above seventy-three degrees—Lizzie was the sun worshipper, the lizard. That was partly why she and Guy had lasted so long. Anna could have told Lizzie that Guy was bad news, though she already knew it; but he was bad news with a yacht.
Lizzie seemed delighted to have met Dan so soon after it had all finished with her ex: one final, exasperated row under the stars and then she’d arrived back at Heathrow, burnished as a terra-cotta goddess and lighting up the arrivals hall like a neon sign. Anna wondered yet again what it was that had changed her friend’s mind, what had brought them all here in such altered circumstances.
What exactly had happened last night, and what it was she had seen.
Looking down at Lizzie again, Anna wondered also whether something of the woman she knew was resurfacing. Anna had never seen Lizzie angry the way she had been that morning—nor did she want to see her that upset ever again. But Christ, it was an improvement on Lizzie’s barely there–ness of the past few months.
Canceling the wedding must have been the right decision after all.
Her gaze lingering, Anna realized that Lizzie wasn’t turning the pages, that behind her sunglasses she was scanning not the words in front of her but the view beyond. She had positioned herself at that end of the pool in order that she might see all of the action in the water. At the top of her arms, shiny with sun cream, the sinews were tensed and taut; her glistening haunches were ready to take flight.
Who was she looking at like that?
From the window, Anna couldn’t make out where the beam of Lizzie’s gaze landed, but she had a good idea. She shook her head, silly with suspicion. Lizzie was heartbroken, traumatized: that was why she was tense.
What am I even doing up here?
Lurking, and looking. Spying on her friends like some lonely, dirty thing. Staring at them all as if searching for clues, for the secrets they didn’t even know they were hiding.
And the ones they did.
21.
Eighteen Months Ago: Lizzie
I answered his messages on the dating app (probably far too quickly if we were playing by London rules, but we weren’t), threw some coins onto the bar for my beers, and marched back to my hostel, where I attempted to create a dinner-date look from the beach clothes in my case.
Since Guy and I rarely ate anywhere more formal than a crab shack on those yacht trips, the best I could manage was a black camisole and some sort of artistry with a sarong for a skirt. I had to hope the staff at the hotel wouldn’t pass comment on my Birkenstocks, and I thought again of the waiters I’d watched through Guy’s binoculars, aligning napkins and tealights just so to manifest romance.
I felt like a student again, quixotic about what might happen in a time zone I didn’t belong in, an existence that didn’t feel like mine. I had felt the same life-out-of-life sensation at university when I had met someone who had promised to be an escape route from studying and the library rota but had soon turned out to be a reality check of a rather different sort.
Blood on water. I shook my head clear of the memory: not right now.
I could hardly breathe as I walked into the foyer, a little late, rather frazzled from the Bangkok city heat and following pavementless roads with no names but clusters of wires like washing lines hanging from every telegraph pole. The hard pebble of sadness that had lodged in my chest that morning transformed into excitement; my palms were sweating and my mouth dry, but I felt almost giddy.
Until I realized that the tastefully lit reception area was empty.
I swung my head left and then right, and the stone in my lungs was threatening to shatter with disappointment when a concierge in a striped waistcoat and white shirt gestured to the lift with a smile: “He’s waiting for you on the top floor, madam.”
It took a few dragging seconds to call the lift—I could feel my pulse beating behind my eyes—and as I waited for it to arrive, my back turned on the front desk staff, I was overcome with sweaty mortification that they had taken me for a call girl. My mother would almost certainly have agreed with them. Then, as I stepped into the mirrored box, I saw it illuminated on the interior panel: bar and restaurant, floor 61. The lift moved so quickly I felt like I’d left my stomach behind on the ascent.
I was amazed at the calm up there—no wind, barely even a breeze, and none of the car horns or scooter revs from the street. Lights on the tables twinkled like stars in the firmament, and the low murmur of voices rose like prayers.
As I stepped from the lift, all that separated me from the edge was a transparent wall of glass, and as I climbed a short flight of steps to the bar, the view to my left was of the city spread out in miniature below me, as if seen from the window of an airplane. It was like walking out into the heavens, but for the distant chinging of low-level, reassuringly bland house music from the bar.
I felt even more light-headed at the height and the proximity of the drop. Falling had never seemed so easy.
“Lizzie?” There he was at the top of the stairs, suited and slightly sweaty himself, collar open and eyes glittering at me. A blush of red that wasn’t sunburn surfaced on his cheeks, along with a nervous half-smile as though we were doing something naughty.
I had to keep reminding myself that we weren’t.
And that my plane left for London in ten—no, nine—hours.
From the start, there was no awkwardness. We fell into conversation the way people fall in love: swiftly and incidentally, zapping between topics like synapses flashing in the brain. The books we’d read, the films we’d seen. TV shows we both loved. His traveling days and mine—soon over—and our eagerness to repatriate, take our feet off the gas, the search for something gentle—meaningful but instinctive, homely. Not so much a quest for spirituality as the search for someone to share a bag of crisps with.
“A big one or a small, though?” he joked. “Not enough crisps for two people in a small one, and I’m looking for a woman who understands that.”
I laughed and gazed at the lights spread around us. Other skyscrapers, like trees in a forest, emerged from the night as if on a heat map, their outlines invisible but for the red lights they were dotted with to warn planes of their hulking presence in the dark. The river wound sluggishly off in the distance, under a suspension bridge beneath which traditional wooden boats passed, garnished with blinking fairy lights. Desp
ite the breadth of the view and the fact of all that humanity below, the air remained so still and so silent as to convince me that the two of us were alone up there.
“I’ve never been anywhere like this,” I told him. “I grew up in the countryside. In a wold.”
The word “wold” became raucously funny for some reason—the champagne and the cocktails, I suppose, but also the great breath of relief we had both exhaled at having found each other.
“God, there isn’t much out there on those apps, is there?” I giggled sadly. “One of the other guys on there had listed ‘eating’ as a hobby.”
He mimed strangling himself and twinkled at me. “That’s exactly why I messaged you, actually,” he said, serious now. “I’ve been on a few terrible dates in my time, but I saw your picture and I thought, ‘This woman—no, this goddess—aspires to more in life than simply digesting.’ ”
This time I laughed so hard I thought I would fall out of the sky.
My plane was now leaving in seven hours, and I planned to spend all of them with him.
22.
Effie
Invigorated by his swim, Charlie offered to cook dinner.
As Effie counted out cutlery from the drawer, she watched beneath her eyelashes as he shook the vinaigrette into life from where it had settled in its glass bottle. Iso had presumably assured him that nothing had gone on with Steve—could Charlie say the same to her?
Effie knew that her own doubts would subside if she didn’t prod any further—just like the oil trickling down the insides of the stoppered bottle in Charlie’s hand, eventually coalescing once more at the bottom into something manageable, before settling and lying tidily, undisturbed. Where they would pose no problem to her and Ben.
The others ferried bowls of fresh salad and baskets of bread to the table outside. It and eight metal chairs were the sole occupants of the patio now that the wedding guests’ folding seats had been removed. Charlie himself carried the large plate of barbecue-tender duck breasts across the terrace from the grill, with no small amount of ceremony. He was one of those men who took pride in the fact that he could cook, not because it was a life skill but because it was an all too rare accomplishment among most of the well-to-do, hands-off men of his acquaintance.
Effie knew he prized it like an eccentricity, a quirk of nature, unaware that there were other men—men like Steve, for example—who cooked regularly and without pomp. Admittedly also with less red meat and fewer esoteric glazes, less swagger, far fewer utensils, and an altogether less intensive load for whoever would wash up in their wake, but with the laudable aim of feeding their families and their loved ones, rather than simply to show off their place in the modern gendersphere.
She understood that cooking gave Charlie a sense of himself: skilled, modern, a catch. Tonight, it had helped him shrug off the greasy coating of self-loathing his hangover had left him with. The sun had melted some of it, and the pool had rinsed off yet more. His performance in the kitchen had been cleansing, and the wine currently tinkling into a glass—“Why not?” he had asked with a shrug when Lizzie had suggested opening a bottle. “We’re on holiday!”—had been a rebirth of sorts.
“Charlie’s so amazing in the kitchen,” Iso purred as he set the dish down in front of them.
The nervous, shivering man Effie had encountered in that very room nine hours earlier had been replaced by the usual Charlie, smooth and self-confident. Even Steve and Anna seemed more relaxed; they had tended a salad, side by side, at one of the thick marble worktops in the kitchen, and the efficiency of the production line they formed spoke volumes even though they had exchanged no words.
As Effie set the table with Ben, she laid some of her inner turmoil to rest, regulated her feelings and breath with napkins and cutlery. When they had finished, Ben coaxed her to walk the perimeter of the grounds with him, stopping to kiss her as they took in the view across the valley from the pool.
“It’s surprisingly hard to get you on your own with all this lot around,” he said as they stood entwined and silhouetted against the beginnings of sunset in front of them. He threw a glance at the house and waved back to Lizzie where she stood, alone, on the terrace, looking out at the horizon too. She didn’t return his salute.
When they reached the table, the sight of yet another sweating green bottle sheathed in cooling chrome raised Effie’s pulse briefly. Her mouth dried and her stomach flipped at the thought of consuming anything from within it. She’d have no trouble turning down a drink this evening—her first day without alcohol in she didn’t know how long. Quite when she had come to rely on it so much was yet another thing she couldn’t remember; but it was something she and Ben had rather bonded over this past month, a shared hobby.
Is binge-drinking a hobby? Remembering Bertie’s abstemiousness, Effie flinched at the knowledge that she’d drunk as much the night before as most people consume in a week.
At the head of the table, where the corner of the terrace jutted out over the slope down toward the pool, Bertie sat with the new notepad open next to his plate. He tapped his pen on its first blank page like a street hawker of bad portraiture and was received about as enthusiastically.
“What,” asked Charlie, looking up from a plate of food that he’d describe as exquisite even though he’d been the one to make it. “Is. That.” He held his knife and fork accusingly in clenched fists resting on the tabletop.
“Please.” Anna sounded queasy. “No games. I can’t take some stupid team thing tonight.”
“Don’t worry.” Bertie reassured her with a smile. “This is how we find those wedding rings. We’re going to pool all your memories to come up with a rough idea of where they might have gone. What’s the last thing you all remember?”
Anna didn’t seem any happier at this suggestion.
Charlie cleared his throat and spoke again: “Come on, mate. It was just a big night, wasn’t it? What is this, Big Brother? We don’t need to retrace our steps—this isn’t a whodunit, nobody got offed.”
Effie couldn’t help thinking about the message. You deserve each other.
She was the one—she now realized with a sickening intensity—who stood to lose the most from whatever had happened last night. She felt shame pinching at her edges as she contemplated forfeiting what she had with Ben over some stupid, drunken incident with Charlie.
You deserve each other. They had both come here attached to other people, after all.
“Well, Lizzie could do with finding the rings,” said Anna lightly. “Besides,” she added, looking pointedly at her husband, “if nobody has anything to hide, it shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”
Her tight smile shifted to Lizzie. Steve, meanwhile, was so intently focused on his plate that the light from the table’s candles reflected in the sparser patches of hair on the top of his head. It was short and sober now, but he had for years kept it in a longish, face-framing, music-writer mod cut that Anna had seemed to loathe and desire in equal amounts.
Effie remembered that when the time came a few years ago for Steve to face the fact that his crowning glory no longer renewed as lusciously as it once had, Anna had met him outside the hairdresser’s afterward with a miniature of Jack Daniel’s in a plastic bag from the newsagent’s.
“You’ll always be a rock star in our house,” she said, and she’d toasted him with one of her own.
Anna thought her husband’s heart might break over the loss of that haircut; Effie knew he’d rather go full buzz cut than hurt the woman who had mourned it with him.
Steve cleared his throat.
“I’ll go first then,” he said, “seeing as we all know where I woke up. In the library, on the sofa opposite Iso, in a towel, with my clothes in a heap on the floor.”
Bertie began writing on the pad. “Very good, Steve—thanks, mate. Who’s next? Iso, perhaps—Steve says you were in the same room as hi
m…” Anna snorted, and speared a pink slice of meat. “Did you see the wedding rings?”
Across the table from Effie, Iso shook the hair that framed her face from her eyes as she finished chewing. “No, sorry.”
“I fell asleep on one of the loungers by the pool,” volunteered Ben, shrugging charmingly and laying a warm hand on Effie’s bare thigh. “Woke up bloody freezing.”
“Now me!” cried Lizzie, who seemed to have enjoyed her first glass of wine and had poured herself another. “I went to bed as soon as we arrived and woke up sixteen hours later to find my own fucking friends had held my own wedding without me. How’s that?”
She spat the last syllable and took a swig. The others looked at the plates and shifted their feet beneath the table.
Bertie made a note—his writing spidery, Effie noticed, like a doctor’s. An adult’s. Her own was embarrassingly rounded for someone who liked to pride herself on being so cynical.
“Perhaps this isn’t doing much good,” said Anna, quietly. “We all drank pretty solidly until about two a.m.—then I couldn’t keep my eyes open, so I went to bed. Whatever…happened, I’m sure those rings are still in the house. They’ll probably turn up when we pack up to leave.”
The tines of Anna’s fork clinked against her teeth as she ate another mouthful just to give herself something else to focus on. The stiffness round the table suggested that the end of this holiday, when it came, might not be met with as much disappointment as a return flight usually is.
The Wedding Night Page 11
