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

to appreciate the luxury of sleeping next to someone—the same someone!—every night. Who had met Steve so long ago she’d never used a dating app, never even opened one up, let alone had her flaws clinically assessed by men of indistinguishable age who sent uninvited pictures of their shriveled cocks. Anna, who clearly disapproved of Effie’s being with Ben because of his link to Dan, but who had the luxury of no longer needing to market herself like a secondhand car surrounded by models fresh off the lot.

“What a place!” Bertie breathed as they drove through the countryside. “What perfect scenery.”

How at odds with their environment the seven pale and rueful faces must have looked when he walked in, staring back at him from where they huddled in the dark around the table like creatures of the deep, when there was glorious French sunshine to bask in only yards away behind the door. Effie began to laugh at the image, and when she explained it, Bertie did too.

“I’d sort of forgotten what British drinking culture is like,” he said. “There are plenty of other expats in Shanghai, but I realized pretty soon that I didn’t like most of them.”

They had exported their native need to get regularly and destructively sloshed with them, he explained, just as they had shipped their grand pianos and artworks to their new homes.

“I like a couple of beers of an evening—perhaps a few more on very special occasions,” he told Effie, and she squirmed with internal shame. “But, ugh, none of those sticky shots.”

Effie felt him contemplating her as she sat at the wheel, wondering perhaps what it was this nervous, skinny woman was so keen to get away from—and whether she realized she’d never be able to leave her own thoughts behind.

With the car parked and a coin found to activate a shopping cart of proportions usually reserved for the Christmas haul, they stood at the entrance to the supermarket. Even the discounts looked exotic.

For Effie, French supermarkets were a happy place. They reminded her of childhood holidays spent exploring the aisles, the new tastes and aromas they promised. Oregano and citronella. Sea-creature floats she and her brother would take to the beach once and puncture immediately. Pristine, perfect stationery she’d beg her parents for so she could keep a holiday journal, but that she’d invariably ruin with the first clumsy strokes of her juvenile handwriting.

Now she was fascinated by the gadgets—a salad spinner, a twist-in lemon juicer—that here were considered fundamental to human existence but that at home would be puzzled over and prodded like something washed ashore. Effie loved the newness of foreign brands, trusted the generosity of packaging she had never seen before over the crabbed, penny-pinching labels she recognized from England. There was a sense of bounty to shops in France: the brimming bins of plump and plentiful produce here were quite different from the insipid, uniform groceries available from the shop at the end of her road in London, where gray commuters fumbled even grayer fruit and veg into polyethylene bags under blinking strip lights.

Effie felt her headache begin to recede from simply being in the presence of so many antioxidants.

The picking of fruit, the counting of portions, the meal planning, the meat selecting, the demi-fluent translation of cooking instructions and serving suggestions made for an easy and companionable hour or so, and Effie almost forgot the circumstances that had thrown Bertie and her together, the confusion that awaited them back at the house.

“What made her do it?” Bertie asked Effie somewhere between the cheese and an admirably comprehensive zone devoted entirely to breadsticks. “Why did she call things off?”

Effie looked up from the packet she was reading. “She hasn’t said. Nothing specific, at least—just says they had their doubts.” She unhooked three baguettes from where they stood in a sort of baker’s umbrella stand and added them to the trolley. “There’s something, though. Something happened. Lizzie was different after the engagement party, but she won’t talk about it. Not to me, at least.”

“Then I won’t press her on it either,” Bertie replied. “But that reminds me…”

He looked left and right. They had finally—after at least three tunnels of wine, along which Effie had felt her lymph nodes begin to shrivel—reached the no-man’s-land end of the supermarket’s hangar, where children’s clothing and sports equipment jostled for space on the shelves with televisions and smaller white goods. Bertie craned his neck to see to the end of the next aisle, then pulled the now-cumbersome and willfully wheeled cart with him down a dark aisle decorated at one end with a spray of cheap gardening gloves.

“Here we go!” Bertie selected a large ring-bound notepad from a display. From a nearby shelf he picked up a pack of indelible marker pens, which Effie knew, even through their plastic wrap, would smell of her office back at the school.

She frowned at him. “Are we going to start taking a roll call every day?”

“This”—he smiled, tossing the pad onto the mountain of food that would feed their number for the next week—“is how we work out where those wedding rings have gone. Who saw them last, where, and when. Helps me think better. We’ll build a timeline that will tell us everything you drunken sots have forgotten!”

He beamed at her, arms spread wide and pleased with himself, and Effie had to concentrate on not bursting into tears, just as she had practiced every day at her desk these past six months.

Bertie’s enthusiasm was so wholesome—his entire personality so sensible—that he reminded Effie of the shame she had felt on waking that morning. She had yet to tell anybody what she remembered of last night, and the fact of it made her feel dirty and soiled all over again. All the self-loathing of the morning and the anxiety—of the half-year she had spent living under that feeling as though pinned to the spot by it—washed over her once more. The desolation, the sadness, the drinks,