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

At the head of the table, where the corner of the terrace jutted out over the slope down toward the pool, Bertie sat with the new notepad open next to his plate. He tapped his pen on its first blank page like a street hawker of bad portraiture and was received about as enthusiastically.

“What,” asked Charlie, looking up from a plate of food that he’d describe as exquisite even though he’d been the one to make it. “Is. That.” He held his knife and fork accusingly in clenched fists resting on the tabletop.

“Please.” Anna sounded queasy. “No games. I can’t take some stupid team thing tonight.”

“Don’t worry.” Bertie reassured her with a smile. “This is how we find those wedding rings. We’re going to pool all your memories to come up with a rough idea of where they might have gone. What’s the last thing you all remember?”

Anna didn’t seem any happier at this suggestion.

Charlie cleared his throat and spoke again: “Come on, mate. It was just a big night, wasn’t it? What is this, Big Brother? We don’t need to retrace our steps—this isn’t a whodunit, nobody got offed.”

Effie couldn’t help thinking about the message. You deserve each other.

She was the one—she now realized with a sickening intensity—who stood to lose the most from whatever had happened last night. She felt shame pinching at her edges as she contemplated forfeiting what she had with Ben over some stupid, drunken incident with Charlie.

You deserve each other. They had both come here attached to other people, after all.

“Well, Lizzie could do with finding the rings,” said Anna lightly. “Besides,” she added, looking pointedly at her husband, “if nobody has anything to hide, it shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”

Her tight smile shifted to Lizzie. Steve, meanwhile, was so intently focused on his plate that the light from the table’s candles reflected in the sparser patches of hair on the top of his head. It was short and sober now, but he had for years kept it in a longish, face-framing, music-writer mod cut that Anna had seemed to loathe and desire in equal amounts.

Effie remembered that when the time came a few years ago for Steve to face the fact that his crowning glory no longer renewed as lusciously as it once had, Anna had met him outside the hairdresser’s afterward with a miniature of Jack Daniel’s in a plastic bag from the newsagent’s.

“You’ll always be a rock star in our house,” she said, and she’d toasted him with one of her own.

Anna thought her husband’s heart might break over the loss of that haircut; Effie knew he’d rather go full buzz cut than hurt the woman who had mourned it with him.

Steve cleared his throat.

“I’ll go first then,” he said, “seeing as we all know where I woke up. In the library, on the sofa opposite Iso, in a towel, with my clothes in a heap on the floor.”

Bertie began writing on the pad. “Very good, Steve—thanks, mate. Who’s next? Iso, perhaps—Steve says you were in the same room as him…” Anna snorted, and speared a pink slice of meat. “Did you see the wedding rings?”

Across the table from Effie, Iso shook the hair that framed her face from her eyes as she finished chewing. “No, sorry.”

“I fell asleep on one of the loungers by the pool,” volunteered Ben, shrugging charmingly and laying a warm hand on Effie’s bare thigh. “Woke up bloody freezing.”

“Now me!” cried Lizzie, who seemed to have enjoyed her first glass of wine and had poured herself another. “I went to bed as soon as we arrived and woke up sixteen hours later to find my own fucking friends had held my own wedding without me. How’s that?”

She spat the last syllable and took a swig. The others looked at the plates and shifted their feet beneath the table.

Bertie made a note—his writing spidery, Effie noticed, like a doctor’s. An adult’s. Her own was embarrassingly rounded for someone who liked to pride herself on being so cynical.

“Perhaps this isn’t doing much good,” said Anna, quietly. “We all drank pretty solidly until about two a.m.—then I couldn’t keep my eyes open, so I went to bed. Whatever…happened, I’m sure those rings are still in the house. They’ll probably turn up when we pack up to leave.”

The tines of Anna’s fork clinked against her teeth as she ate another mouthful just to give herself something else to focus on. The stiffness round the table suggested that the end of this holiday, when it came, might not be met with as much disappointment as a return flight usually is.

“Perhaps you’re right, Anna,” said Bertie, putting his pen down. “Unless you remember seeing them, Effie? Where did you end up last night?”

Thickly and painfully, Effie swallowed the morsel she had been chewing for what felt like hours. It was as big as a cannonball against the rawness of a throat that had been stripped by digestive acid for much of the morning. She flicked a glance at Charlie, but his gaze was resolutely on the glistening remnants of the meal cooling on the serving plate in the middle of the table.

“Me?” Effie tried to sound insouciant, as if the next part was oh-so-casual. As if she’d planned it “for banter,” as the sports teachers at Coral Hill so often claimed of their lame practical jokes. She considered using the phrase now, and decided against it. “Oh I, err…woke up in the honeymoon suite.”

Wish I had a glass of wine to wash that down with, she thought, but she managed to stay her hand from reaching toward the bottle.

The table was silent, its length framed by two rows of intrigued faces staring back at her like jurors along the bench, and Bertie at its head, desperately trying to arrange his face into something more neutral than the curiosity that had briefly trespassed across it.

“Really?” said Ben, almost admiringly.

“The honeymoon suite?” Anna cried. “What on earth took you up