The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

denim cut-off shorts stretched out beyond the table and crossed delicately at the ankles.

Effie felt exhausted just looking at her. She saw it in Anna’s reaction too—the primal slump that happens around women so ineffably beautiful that they make one feel almost evolutionarily redundant by comparison. The worst part was that Iso looked a lot like Anna used to—before the big job and the baby had taken their respective tolls.

She seemed nice enough—friendly, quick to smile and to giggle, eager to chat, none of the standoffishness or the arrogance that so often comes of growing up attractive. And her awkwardness around Lizzie was noticeable, too: as someone so clearly in the first flush of whatever she and Charlie had going on, Iso kept looking at Lizzie as though she was a specimen, a case study in it all going wrong.

Over another round of drinks (a beer each for the boys, peppermint tea for Effie—it was too early for gin, and she still had a slight hangover from the wine she’d drunk while packing her suitcase), Iso told them that she was an “influencer.”

“Is that like a fixer?” asked Steve.

“No, mate, no,” Charlie jumped in earnestly. “She doesn’t buy drugs for rock stars. An influencer is, like, someone who knows what we want before we do, and shows us how nice life could be.” He winked at Iso across the Formica table.

“For a fee,” said Anna briskly, fiddling with one of the ties on the embroidered peasant blouse that Effie knew she had been persuaded into buying after seeing one of her competitive mum friends wearing it on Facebook.

“That’s right,” Iso said smoothly, uncrossing and recrossing her golden haunches. “I’m a content creator who uses products and clothes to inspire my audience as they follow my adventures around the world.”

That explained the tan, at least, thought Effie. “Wow,” she said. “How many followers do you have?”

Iso dimpled into her yellow drink as she took a sip. “Nearly seven hundred thousand. But it’s really not about the numbers—it’s about creating a community.”

Effie had met Anna’s eyes for less than a second, just to confirm that they were both thinking the same thing.

A few hours later, across a narrow sea and a patchwork of asphalt and farmland, the rental car and its passengers barreled along through the French countryside. Excitement rose in each of their chests, along with a feeling of having been liberated, like actors faced with a run of scenes for which they weren’t needed onstage. This was a chance to return their bodies to a natural, unmannered state; for their minds to abandon the usual rote; to wipe their faces of all the expressions they assumed simply to get themselves through the day.

After they had collected their bags, picked up the keys to the rental car, and clunked its doors shut behind them, there had been a collective exhalation. A Zen state of calm contentment descended, perked up now and again by the familiar landmarks of Being on Holiday: the serried ranks of vines on either side of them, automated sprinklers spinning and zapping crops with bursts of water. The roadside shrines, signs pointing visitors toward the local, bottle-lined caves de dégustation. Swimming pool showrooms and garden centers with their driveways full of birdbaths and plaster-molded seraphim.

“Who buys all these amphoras?” Anna asked as they passed a fourth outlet replete with neoclassical patio accessories.

“Am all phora good-looking garden,” joked Steve in a hokey French accent, and she batted lazily at the arm he wasn’t steering with as the car rumbled on.

Lizzie was quiet, jollied along by the other passengers. Anna and Effie took care not to make eye contact too obviously whenever their friend’s words trailed off and a veil of introspection clouded her features as though she was remembering words spoken, decisions taken. In the driver’s seat, Steve set his sights firmly on the hairpin bends ahead and the mopeds that emerged suddenly from its grassy sidings as though loosed deliberately to test his reaction times.

The sun settled into a low afternoon sky as if staked there on a picture hook, throwing yolk-yellow rays over the granite protrusions they climbed and the limy rivers they crossed. Effie felt her heart buoy—still a relatively recent occurrence after what seemed like years. Her shoulders unhunched and her neck lifted like the stems of the sunflowers they passed. She could tell, from the way the dust swirled in the light and the noise of the crickets through the windows, that the air when they stepped out of the car would be a warm embrace on her bare skin. Not that she was cold anymore: where she sat in the middle of the minivan’s backseat, she could feel the heat from both Lizzie’s and Ben’s thighs where they pressed either side of her own.

“Plenty of fabulous scenery for Iso’s Instagram account,” Anna remarked drily as they bombed along a smooth tarmac road with medieval hilltop villages strewn to its left and right. Charlie and Iso were making their way to the château in a sexy and antisocial two-seater soft-top, while the rest of them had piled into a rather more family-focused people carrier.

“Are we on holiday with a celebrity, then?” Steve asked from the driver’s seat.

“No!” Effie and Anna both replied quickly, while Lizzie paused to weigh it up.

Ben pulled out his phone and typed Iso’s name into the app’s search function, watched as her profile page and its grid of exotic destinations, tasteful bikini shots, and artfully placed succulents loaded up. “I don’t know,” he said. “She looks pretty famous to me—this cup has got three thousand likes!”

On his screen was the turmeric latte from the airport, its bilious foam somehow rendered almost sparklingly golden against the gray marble tabletop. Except the table had just been plastic printed to look like veined stone. Nobody clicking on that photo would know that Iso hadn’t been in the sort of upmarket café that had highly polished counters and thick cotton napkins—or, Effie reflected, that