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

It was all Effie could do not to cling to Bertie as if he were a life buoy, a kindly flotation device in the shape of a grown-up.

They paid for and bagged up their shopping, then drove back to the Oratoire, in silence.

20. Anna

Anna was spying on Iso when she first noticed Lizzie’s behavior. Watching, waiting. The former bride was frozen like an animal caught in the open, stock-still until the moment of threat has passed.

After taking a deliberate time-out from suffering stonily alongside the others to go and sit on the bed she had slept in—alone—the previous night and cry in a quiet and businesslike way, Anna dried her eyes and moved over to the window, from where she could look down at the scene by the pool from a distance.

Her husband was asleep on one of the loungers, wearing his faded paisley swimming trunks with yet another grotty old band T-shirt, one flip-flop hanging off his left big toe over the edge of the sunbed. He had tried to talk to her again after lunch, after Effie had left with the cousin.

She had brushed Steve off again, hadn’t wanted to discuss it until she knew she would be able to speak to him without a torrent of unrelated resentments shooting forth and knocking him off his feet. It didn’t seem fair to pelt him with the issues she thought she’d left at home with her little boy. Then again, what had last night crystallized but her well-developed sense of losing him to another woman? Had whatever happened last night happened because he was full of his own complaints too?

Anna looked down at Ben, handsome but slack-mouthed in sleep on another lounger. She had seen the way Effie opened like a flower in sunshine when he looked at her, how his company and attention had given her friend back the warm coat of confidence she had been lacking in the months since her breakup. Anna hoped he wouldn’t let her down.

She shifted her gaze to Charlie, sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling in the water. He had managed to soak up the ambience like bread in oil; his olive skin was already a shade darker, and his chocolatey crop of hair seemed almost jet black, just like one of the locals. A beautiful man, but a flighty one. Anna smiled affectionately as he slipped under the water, part athlete, part clown.

Then she regarded Iso, splashing serenely nearby, lying on a hot pink inflatable she had brought with her in her suitcase—“a great prop for photos,” she had explained before persuading Charlie to blow it up for her.

How he hadn’t brought up a lung—or yet more of the half-digested wedding breakfast, given the state he was in—while doing so had been a mystery to every onlooker. Yet more curious to them, though, was how this woman, the one who had woken up naked with somebody else’s husband, had managed to charm her still-devoted boyfriend into doing her this favor. Their relationship seemed—so far—unpunctured by recent events, much like the inflatable; although Anna knew from a brief and testy sojourn at a holiday camp with Sonny and her parents last summer (while her three sisters had been abroad with their spouses) that those things never stayed intact for long.

She had gone with Sonny’s grandparents to Oakwood Lake Cottages because Steve had been away covering yet another music festival—one that, before Sonny, they had been in the habit of going to together but that he now “reported from” alone. As if he were on the front line with a notebook and pen rather than crowd-surfing and bar-hopping. Holidaying with her parents rather than her husband had felt like a teenage regression—Anna had spoken to them in much the same appalling tones as she had during those difficult years, and she had been mortified by her behavior by the time the holiday was over. But it had been necessary to go: sheer survival tactics in the face of a week of solo childcare.

How on earth did Celia manage it, day in, day out?

By borrowing my husband all the fucking time.

“It’s not the same without you,” Steve regularly mewed on his return from these work jaunts, grizzled with late nights and beer. But he still seemed to have the same partied-out look they’d both once worn, the same pinprick pupils. The same rolling hangover after four nights on the trot—four nights she’d spent bathing and wiping and soothing their son.

Now, on his sunbed, Steve briefly roused, then turned over and rocked himself back to sleep exactly the same way Sonny did.

Anna watched as Charlie sluiced away the previous night; the remorse that had hung around him for most of the day was washed off by the tepid bath-like water. He submerged his head and came up refreshed, breaking the surface between Iso’s tanned feet where they dangled from the floating airbed. Her painted toenails matched the pink of the inflatable, Anna noticed. Everything matched, from Iso’s toes to her hairbands, her shoes and her bags, right down to her underwear. Right down to the matching towels she and Steve had been wrapped in.

On another lounger at one of the narrow ends of the pool, moved there by its occupant into this more solitary position, lay Lizzie, earbuds in and nodding to the beat as she read her book. This she held at a precise angle above her body so its shadow would not interfere with the more serious work of tanning as she followed its plot.

Anna smiled indulgently. Of the three of them—Effie with her Celtic coloring, she with her granny’s Irish blood, which began to steam in temperatures above seventy-three degrees—Lizzie was the sun worshipper, the lizard. That was partly why she and Guy had lasted so long. Anna could have told Lizzie that Guy was bad news, though she already knew