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

braced her portion of Lizzie’s weight and, with it, something like guilt. Guilt for having been so pleased to arrive here with Dan’s best man, guilt at not having told Lizzie about him sooner. But Lizzie hadn’t been angry with her, Effie told herself, she’d just been surprised—and, now, was drained by the shock of the setup in the Hall. Effie remembered her own bittersweet feeling when she had heard the news that Charlie had finally found love—it was hard to celebrate someone else’s happiness from the depths of despair.

The second door they reached yielded a smaller double bedroom, with a carved wooden bed that was still canopied but less ritualistically dressed than the last. Provençal ocher and ceramic blue danced in wreaths along its curtains; a spindled chair sat against one wall next to a simple wooden wardrobe. It was a lovely room, Effie noted almost dispassionately as they entered: sympathetically refurbished, sophisticated but not too flashy. Authentically local-feeling, a replica in soft furnishings of the entire holiday pretense—a rustic make-believe with AC units and electric cooktops—of living like early modern villagers in these parts for a week.

She wondered how long it had been since these old walls had contained as much anguish.

“This will do,” Lizzie managed, and unfolded herself from their care. She went to the window, a tall oblong set in foot-thick ancient stone, opened it, and unlatched the external shutters, then quickly creaked them closed against the warm sunshine outside. The transition in the room to total darkness was so sudden Effie had to grope along the rough wall for the main light switch.

By the time she found it and pooled the room in yellow glow once more, Lizzie had moved back toward them.

“Lizzie…?” Effie began nervously.

But Lizzie only rummaged in her handbag where it lay on the chair, addressing them both without looking up.

“I’m just going to go to bed,” she said wearily. A metallic crackle announced that she had found a blister pack of pills. Popping two out, Lizzie turned her apologetic face, blotched with unhappiness and drawn with fatigue, to the two other women. “These will see me through until morning, and I’ll deal with it all then.”

When neither Effie nor Anna moved, she spoke again, quietly and more firmly, but her manner was also less jagged: “Please. I’m fine. I just need to sleep now.”

Effie remembered another time, years ago, when she had left Lizzie to rest, after stroking the hair from her feverish forehead as she settled, her heart tugging at the pain contorting her friend’s lovely young face.

There was little for it but to leave her once again to the warm tide of the tablets she had taken. One foot numb, then the other, followed by a cozy sensation of being beyond caring anymore. An attitude that would rise up through the torso like a blanket tucked in by a watchful mother, soothe the ache in her chest like a longed-for embrace. Effie had also taken comfort in it; the gradual slowing of the whirring cogs in her mind, whether with a few drinks or a couple of heavy-duty painkillers left over from a nasty ankle sprain the year before, had been a highlight of most days for her until recently.

Halfway down the stairs, at around the point Lizzie and her father might have stopped to pose for the photographer, Effie heard the click, not of a camera shutter but of the bedroom light switch, as their friend retreated into the darkness.

9. Anna

Outside, the late afternoon sun still twinkled jauntily—insistently, like a drunk friend who didn’t know when to leave—on the perfectly arrayed scene below.

“Any idea who we ring to sort this out?” Anna asked as she trailed after Effie through the trappings of the phantom wedding breakfast.

“Not really,” Effie replied, eyeing the lavish settings with regret. “Lizzie’s right—we already canceled it all once. I suppose we could try Dan? Bad enough that she has to deal with it—I don’t really want to bother him as well…”

It wouldn’t be an easy call, Anna thought, as she pulled her mobile from her pocket and stepped over the threshold, outside into the sun. No signal. However they fixed the mess, it wouldn’t be by phone—not from here, at least.

The two women walked the wrong way down the aisle and crossed the terrace toward the steps to the pool where Charlie, Iso, Ben, and Steve occupied four of the sun loungers that lined one edge of the lapping azure water. As Effie drew close, Ben stood up, then hesitated, still a little awkward about how to greet her in front of her friends. She headed for the point where his chest melted into one of his strong arms, and when she reached it, he crooked it around her in response.

On the slatted square table between Charlie and Iso’s recliners stood an open bottle of champagne, green glass beading with condensation in the sunshine, its contents already carefully shared out between six crystal flutes sourced from the placements inside.

“Seemed a shame not to put it to good use,” Charlie called to them as they approached.

He and Iso had scoped out the kitchen that lay to the back of the Great Hall and come across an anteroom piled high with box upon box of supplies for the wedding: bottles of the grape and grain variety, great bales of party food, one fridge stocked as though a hungry army were scheduled to pass through, another full of chilling bottles, their round, green bottoms facing out in uniform rows.

From the ground by the side of his sunbed, Charlie lifted a plate of cold meats in greeting. The local earthenware was hand-painted with bucolic dancing figures and fruits in stages from lusciously ripe to deliquescent, its surface fanned with slices of saucisson, crudo ham, and varieties of cheese so hyperlocal they practically counted as next-door neighbors.

Anna felt a familiar swell of authoritarianism rise within her and, with it, an annoyance