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

of Celia, of the hours Steve spent at home during the day while Anna was in court, at the office, meeting clients, and she wondered whether he had in fact ever spent them as she had feared: groping their Welsh neighbor’s staggeringly svelte post-toddler body. Or was it all in her imagination?

If it was, that made their situation even harder to face up to honestly: the fault for the fissure between them would lie squarely with Anna herself. With her stress, her job, her inability to govern their unruly son. She had turned onto her side and pushed her left hand—and its ring finger—under the pillow, and had fallen asleep just as light began to crack around the edges of the wooden panel shutters.

“Should we try calling the wedding-planner woman again?” Iso asked across the breakfast table.

“I wonder whether we really need to,” mused Ben. “We’ve cleared most of it away—as long as you and Dan don’t get charged for anything, Lizzie. But you can sort that out when you get back, I’m sure. No need to stress over it now.”

Lizzie set her lips together in a line, and left her croissant uneaten. They were so buttery and fresh, nobody else had managed to resist one.

Fifteen minutes later, they were in the town nearest to the Oratoire, back to what they had begun, in their state of slightly nervy isolation at the château, to think of as civilization. It was a three-horse sort of place at best, although there were enough artisan bakeries to sustain an entire team. With sidewalks had also come phone reception, at least—around the table, a semicircle of heads bent over work emails and text messages.

Behind the cat eyes of her sunglasses, Anna stared across the town square, beyond the squirting arcs of the fountain at its center to the ornately carved neoclassical buildings on the other side. They wibbled in the heat as the spray danced in front of them.

A scientist—an old one Anna remembered learning about at school—had once tried burning things and bottling the wibbling vapor they gave off before attempting to reconstitute them from the contents of his flasks. From cold wibble. Anna felt like she and Steve were repairing their marriage from much the same. The heat given off during their passionate years, whether in adoration or in anger, had turned out to be an insubstantial ether they seemed doomed to chase for the rest of their days. Perhaps that was just what marriage was after a while.

She sipped her Perrier Menthe through a striped straw that no one had demanded from her when the drink had arrived on its silver platter, that nobody had slurped on or chewed to a blocked pulp, that had caused no arguments, brought forth no tears. Anna missed her little boy with a piercing sharpness.

She ground the soles of her sandals into the grit under the table in her resolve not to check her own in-box. She had received—and pored over—a few pictures of Sonny sent by Steve’s mother: wearing a crown and waving a piece of paper around; watching television (television!) with his sippy cup; head back and laughing on the swings near their house. She needed no more contact from the world beyond the plane trees that lined the pétanque pitch they were sitting by. That Steve was spending his time in the bright sunshine reading reviews of gigs in dingy London basements on his magazine’s website had begun to prickle her skin in irritation, so Anna cast her gaze around for something to distract from it.

People-watching—that was what these tables on the square were for. So why does it feel like so many of them are watching us?

As the group had walked around the tents and canopies of the market that morning, Iso had nodded in greeting to a teenage girl who had stopped in her tracks at the mere sight of them, as though the brunette in a ribbed crop top and high-waisted shorts in their midst was some kind of celebrity. The girl immediately raised her phone to Iso and snapped a picture: a follower.

They made a spectacle here, this huddle of long-limbed folk on their phones, pale bodies unlocked from starchy tailoring for a week, ill at ease (except for Iso) in clothes that showed so much skin. The locals pecked around them like birds, edging closer to take a look but fluttering back again whenever any of them shifted in their seats.

Across the square, standing behind the fountain, a man in wraparound sunglasses was staring at them. Strong brows and a Roman nose.

Dan?

Anna sat up quickly and angled her head to better make him out between the plumes of water. He had the same build as Lizzie’s former fiancé, the same coloring, even.

But the man moved off too quickly for Anna to get a good look; he was probably, she figured, just another local out for a morning stroll. Whoever he was, he had been scanning the group at the table from left to right with some intent—though then again, Anna noticed, so too was the little old lady on one of the wooden chairs next to them.

24. Effie

Effie was oblivious to it all as she composed a reply to James’s message. There had been nothing more from him since the last salvo, and she could hold out no longer against responding.

A room—but not a bed—shared with Ben had thrown her already jumbled thoughts and feelings for her ex back into play, tumbled her regrets about the past and her hopes for the future together like a salad. They had slept chastely in their twin beds, too exhausted, in the end, after a day’s hangover and the fuss over the freezer before lights-out to even push the frames together, let alone try anything more vigorous. Waking at such a polite distance from the man she had spent so many nights entwined with had left Effie jittery with all the many unknowns