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

of a more tangible nature—with her coffee table, say, or her wooden bed frame.

“I’ve never felt like this about anybody before.”

She heard his voice from the deep well of her memory.

Had he really said those words, or was she simply spinning what she wanted to hear? Charlie had apologized to her on the landing, but for what? Effie felt herself anxiously disassociating from the scene as her mind whirred on. The thinking part of her brain levitated like a drone high above the slatted table they were gathered around.

It’s just Charlie.

There he was, sitting two people along, spinning beer mats with Bertie as if they were a pair of teenagers, the low-key aggression he had displayed toward the other man yesterday as he had tried to reconstruct the wedding night now apparently neutered.

Stop being so silly.

A warm hand on the side of her neck brought Effie back to the square, the laughing of children playing near the plashing droplets from the fountain. She refocused her eyes from reverie to short distance and turned to look at Ben’s warm and smiling face, the hint of a golden tan already collecting on his strong cheekbones. His pink lips hovered near hers, and she leaned in to brush them.

He had been Lizzie’s best man. But he was hers now.

—

They crisscrossed their way back through the tents of the market to the cars, which they had parked in a dappled grove in front of a squat-towered medieval church.

“Shall we take a look inside?” asked Bertie.

Its heavy, studded doors—not unlike those of the Oratoire—swung open noiselessly when he pushed before anyone had time to dissent. Inside, sunlight scored the darkness with dusty shafts across the aisle and between the rows of plain wooden pews. The faintest trace of incense still hung in the air, left over from that morning’s service like motes of prayer.

In the old days, Effie thought, Charlie would have petulantly sparked up a cigarette and sat outside to deliberately avoid anything vaguely educational, but he had mellowed in recent years—and given up smoking, just like the rest of them. What a cliché we all are. She watched the curve of his dark, already tanned neck as he bent his head to read one of the information boards detailing the age of the bell tower, the provenance of the stones, the names of the saints who decked each pillar.

People came here to search the divine countenance, but as Bertie slid into a pew on the far side of the nave, it was clear he was looking for somewhere to sit and make a phone call. Leaving Ben to look at a marble effigy—a reclining knight no doubt versed in chivalry and ladies fair—Effie stole across the aisle and sat down next to Bertie, a question on her lips.

He mimed to shush her, then showed her as he tapped the foreign mobile number of Marie the wedding planner, scavenged from the dog-eared and now void invitation he had packed in his suitcase, into his screen.

She answered on the third ring. “Oui, allô?”

“Bonjour, Marie!” Bertie attempted in French, before stalling and diverting to his mother tongue. His hushed tones joined the general murmur of the others as they bent to look at the baptismal font, meandered through the side chapels. Effie always felt that old churches echoed with centuries’ worth of whispers even when empty.

He continued: “I’m calling on behalf of Lizzie Berkeley, whose wedding was supposed to happen on Saturday at the Oratoire?”

He waited while the woman within his phone pulled up the details, and he crooked the phone out away from his face so Effie could hear her voice.

“Ah yes!” Marie trilled. “How could I forget? On, off, on—the course of true love is never straight, am I right?”

Bertie made a general noise in agreement. “Err yes, perhaps,” he said. “But it was in fact supposed to be off, just plain off. The bride thought she had canceled everything. Then the setup, when we arrived was, er…on?”

“Oui,” singsonged the tinny voice in his ear. “That’s right. She canceled my services just over a week ago. Oh là! I told her it was too late to get most of the money back, far too late.”

Bertie tutted appreciatively.

“But then,” the voice continued. “Then—and I was delighted, you know, because they seemed such a lovely couple—the groom emailed me to say they had changed their minds.”

“Aha,” said Bertie. He turned slightly to make eye contact with Effie, and she felt her insides plummeting with the knowledge that it wasn’t simply the administrative error they had all hoped for. The thought of having to break this news to Lizzie made her stomach contract with dread. “I see.”

“They had changed their minds,” Marie continued apace, “but wanted it smaller, more private. So just set up and go. Et voilà—I do!”

Bertie was silently contemplative.

“There is a problem?” Marie said tetchily down the line.

“No, no, nothing that you can help with, Marie,” Bertie replied quickly. “Just checking you’ll be picking up the furniture…”

“At the end of the week, as arranged, oui. Anything else?”

“No, thank you, Marie. Goodbye.”

Bertie braced himself with one palm on the cool wood of the pew in front of him. He had begun this trail of clues with all the enthusiasm of an amateur orienteer, but Effie could see that his disappointment welled not so much at the search being over but at what it might cost his cousin when she found out. He had wanted to be able to soothe some of the anxiety he had recognized in her—as Effie knew he had done all those years ago—but the news that Lizzie’s spurned groom had reinstated the ceremony she had canceled would hardly be easy for her to take.

“I think we have to tell her,” Effie muttered to Bertie’s contorted expression, noting how his cheeks were mottled with angst. He nodded sadly.

As Bertie explained the call to Lizzie, with her braced in the car’s middle seat between him and Effie, the former bride’s face closed