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

She didn’t want to speak to her ex. They had met up for a coffee six weeks or so ago, and even that contact had cost Effie in regression. Her frail, feigned nonchalance had spattered up the walls of her flat along with the muffin they had shared after she’d spent the subsequent three hours of the afternoon in a bar, trying to drink away the very sight of him.

She decided to text him: “I’m on holiday. What do you need to say?”

Effie clicked Send and watched for the ticks to turn blue. When they didn’t immediately, she put her phone facedown on the table. Then she lifted it, unlocked it, and checked again. Still gray. She thrust it deep into the straw bag she had brought out with her.

“Did anyone get through to this Marie woman about collecting all the wedding furniture?” asked Bertie, and Lizzie shook her head quickly, almost violently.

“I’ll text Dan,” said Ben. “See if he knows anything about it.”

Effie saw Anna’s attention snap back from observing the scene around them. “Let us know what he says,” she said, simply, from across the table.

Effie watched as, next to her, Ben tapped out a message to his oldest friend: “Mate, some of the wedding stuff arrived after all. Thought everything canceled? Give us a ring when you can.”

Effie noticed the awkward phrasing as soon as he wrote it. Dan had given Lizzie a ring six months ago and—Effie saw it now, still sparkling on her friend’s finger across the table—she had yet to give it back. There were two more that had gone astray in the château up the hill behind them, too.

Ben ended his message with a single telephone emoji—the black Bakelite handset of an obsolete desk phone—and clicked his screen dark again.

Why do we still think of phones that way when they’ve looked totally different for more than a decade?

She reached into her bag and flipped the smooth, thin brick of her iPhone over in her hand: a lifeless slab to be stabbed at clinically in bird’s-eye view rather than caressed close up or laughed into. Effie’s contained within its hard drive a hotline to the most intimate details of her existence—diary, several dating apps, even a period tracker and fertility monitor—but she couldn’t remember the last time she had used it to listen to another person’s voice.

Instead, Effie messaged friends and family almost constantly on her phone, and refreshed the headlines on it several times a day to stay in the loop. But the immediacy the device offered—the connections and relationships it fostered—was a thing apart from the warm-blooded reality of living. Rather than joining people up as the old ones had—stringing love and friendship between homes like bunting, along the lines that still hung in near obsolescence from poles on each side of the square they were sitting in—these new phones had untethered them from their surroundings and the people they existed alongside. She and James had spent so much time scrolling through theirs on the sofa next to each other, she hadn’t noticed what should have been obvious: that they shared a flat but not a future.

What else had she missed?

Thinking again of the cartoon phone, Effie let her mind unfurl itself further. Why did they, the oldest friends she had, all still think of one another—their dynamic and what drove each of them—in exactly the same terms as they had at university when, clearly, they were all so different now? They had experienced that change alongside one another, but how much had they ever really acknowledged it?

Anna had always been the responsible one—that had crystallized into her being a reliable sort of fixer, her former brilliant steadfastness morphed into a mundane alarm clock–like dependency. Lizzie, at times impulsive but always considerate, still hadn’t even told them why she had taken the most important decision of her life. What had happened between her and Dan, why they were all here. Not even in private to Effie, as though the secret they had held close between the two of them for so long counted for nothing.

Effie had once been lively and witty—the silly one—but she had felt her brand of humor wither to sarcasm these past months. Any vivacity she had was turning to bitterness as she stewed and steeped herself in sadness. And Charlie. Louche, caddish Charlie, despite his puppyish affection for them, was flighty with the many other women who had flitted through his life in the years they’d known him. It had been easy to laugh at his clownishness, because the hearts being broken were not theirs.

Effie’s own felt a little heavier in her chest again. Once Ben had closed their bedroom door last night, he had yawned and stretched extravagantly, climbed into the tiny bed opposite hers, and turned his back on her. If it had come as a surprise, her reaction had even more so: Effie had realized she was quite relieved. She’d been so flustered by it that she had forgotten Charlie’s attempt to prune back whatever might have budded between them on the wedding night.

She had always wondered—dispassionately, really—whether the way they had tessellated in their first year—so perfectly matched in both interests and intellect that they could have passed for an old married couple—could ever rear its head again between them. Now, as she remembered the heat of him next to her, and the gruffness of his voice in her ear during those grasped moments on the landing, Effie felt less objective about the possibility. In fact, she felt rather wistful.

Stop it. This is exactly what he does. What he has always done. You used to laugh at the girls who fell for it; don’t become one of them.

Effie had no physical evidence of something happening between her and Charlie. She knew from having pored over her goose-pimpled skin under the bare bulb of one of the house’s bathrooms that the fading bruises that dappled her legs had all been self-inflicted during collisions