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

awe when he thought she wasn’t looking). He wanted to make it up to her, and he wanted to be her friend, at least sometimes, too.

Anna could see that the fact that she had all too readily assumed the very worst about him and Iso although those kitschy purple towels had hidden the details of it had made Steve indignant. She found that reassuring: irritation was better than guiltily accepting his wrongdoing. Less reassuring was the fact that Steve clearly didn’t remember the full story.

Iso was attractive; that was not in doubt. What an attractive woman could do to even a comatose man was a question for the biologists. It wasn’t like he was used to that area being regularly disturbed.

Ha! Not for months.

Anna had sensed in her husband, in the years since his small son had been born, the horror of temptation—at a bare shoulder here, a glossy lip there, Celia’s laugh and the way she tucked her hair behind her ear. If they walked past a beautiful woman in the park, he would look at the ground like a medieval friar while Anna held herself so straight she felt brittle in the wind. Other people’s sexiness hung in the air between them like a reproach, a veil they had to communicate through. Even hours later, Steve’s guilty adrenaline coursed in waves like an aftershock around the body he had promised in eternity to his wife—the very same flesh he offered forlornly to share with her every so often, and was consistently rebuffed.

Shaking the thoughts from her mind, Anna laid out a lunch consisting of the same platters they had spent the morning clearing away. Given the toxins still coursing through them all—now topped up with the nervy unease the violently dismembered cake couple had sown among the group—nobody felt particularly excited to see the food again, but a few hours’ work had fostered appetites in even the most unsettled stomachs.

Rustic olive-painted plates were piled high or low, depending on how weak their owners still felt, then taken back through to the tables in the Hall. The wedding party, as Anna had come to think of them all, sat along each side of one wooden table on benches recently straightened and picked at dried-out crudités—as much a victim of the previous night’s excesses as they were—in silence.

As the sun rose and, with it, the heat of the day, the crickets outside the pale house increased their volume to an earsplitting pitch, until the surly diners could no longer hear their own thoughts. It was a reprieve of sorts.

As they chewed their food and mopped it up from their plates, scooped the dregs of the wedding spread into their mouths, the recognition of another noise dawned on each of them slowly, like moonlight over a hilltop. They looked askance at one another as if to check they were correct, as if their senses had become as tricksy as their memories had over the past day or so. As if they could no more trust their own instincts than they could the other people in the room.

The rumbling came from outside, a low grumble peppered with cracks and bangs every so often, like scratches on a record or the looping pops of one left to rotate long after its tracks have played out. It became louder and more regular, until it crescendoed near the door at the far end of the Hall—where the rental cars were parked.

The pops had been the stones on the dusty drive crunching under the weight of wheels, the rumble an engine as a vehicle—a new one—pulled up once more outside the Oratoire.

“Are you expecting anyone?” Anna asked pointedly of Lizzie, her gray eyes boring into the woman whose canceled life event had brought them all here and had now cast aspersions—and a fair share of doom and gloom—over each of them.

“I don’t know, Anna,” she replied tetchily. “I don’t know what’s going on. It isn’t my wedding anymore. I’m not the one inviting surprise guests.”

Lizzie looked at Ben briefly, then testily at Effie, and Anna sensed from her friend’s expression that lunch had begun to coagulate guiltily in the bottom of Effie’s stomach.

“Maybe it’s Marie,” Effie offered, with groggy enthusiasm at the potential arrival of someone who might seem to be in charge.

“Maybe she’s come to collect all this stuff,” ventured Steve.

Once the wedding’s architecture was gone, Anna thought, the shadow it had cast over the holiday might lift, too. Her nightly circuit of their house to stuff Sonny’s cuddly animals and pull-along toys into their storage boxes, to reunite his pens with their caps and each shoe with the other, often acted like calming yogi breaths on her mood.

Steve stood, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and softly burped some of the hungover indigestion away from where it had bubbled up, listening as the noise appeared again in reverse: from loud to quieter, a regular purr to one pitted with the fits and starts of the loose shale on the driveway. The car—or whatever it had been—was leaving again.

They continued to watch the front door, all turned toward its blank and pocked medieval panels as though they were a television screen—or, at least, a window that might give some clue as to what was going on beyond it. As the only person to have fought off the postprandial stupor—which was technically also a preprandial stupor—and to have successfully launched himself upright, Steve made his way from the table toward the door in the archway.

“Might as well see if we can tell who it was,” he said as the noise receded further.

But as he drew closer to the dark wood, there came a shrieking noise as the rusty metal ring of a handle was lifted on the exterior and turned—with some reluctance, it sounded like, from the wail of complaining iron. A chink of light appeared on the stone flags beneath, an acute angle of white on gray that grew longer and larger