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

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 collect 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