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

“I see,” she said brusquely, as though hearing bad news from the office. “Well, as long as they’re coming to collect it all, I suppose.”

“I just wish I could get through to him.” Behind Effie, having dutifully taken his turn in one of the car’s cramped rear seats, Ben’s voice was flat. He removed his hand from her shoulder, where he had been gently tickling her neck, to anxiously rake it through his short hair, seemingly the most stunned of them all.

The text he had sent Dan had still not been delivered. “I’ve never known him like this,” he said, his eyebrows slanted with worry. “I just hope…”

“What?” asked Effie, staring up into his face anxiously.

Ben breathed out, an “Eeeesh” of air escaping through his teeth. “Dan can be a bit…sensitive about stuff not going his way, that’s all.”

25. Anna

As the chunky rental car crested the stony driveway, the figures of Charlie and Iso were visible outside the Oratoire, but their expressions of confusion—no, worry?—came into focus only as Steve parked up by the open front door, around which they loitered.

“There’s someone inside,” said Iso, as Ben unfolded his tall frame from the back of the car.

“Great!” he exclaimed, and Anna heard a wobbling bravado in his usually smooth voice. “Let’s go and ask them what’s going on.”

Rounding the dark corner of the Hall after him, Effie and Anna heard the banging of pots and scraping of chairs in the kitchen. Whoever was in there was taking no pains to hide his or her presence, and this punctured some of their fears. Holiday homes, especially big houses, always had several sets of keys distributed between several sets of people, a cast of thousands who roved like the staff of some great estate in eras gone by. There were cleaners and pool boys, gardeners and maintenance men. Whoever it was might even have more information about the wedding setup.

Beyond the door to the kitchen, an elderly woman was attempting to navigate the remaining detritus of the Big Day. Short and kindly-looking, she had wrapped her doughty physique in a floral tabard that made Effie think of the faded wallpaper in her mother’s sitting room. The woman looked at them all with dark, inquisitive eyes that peered like currants out of a bun.

“How am I supposed to clean with all this in the way?” she lamented.

Her southern, agricultural dialect was one that Anna could barely understand, let alone reply to the way she had to the clear, bourgeois voices that had floated out of Madame Wynn’s giant cassette player at school. The housekeeper fumed esoterically in words Anna wasn’t meant to know, and Anna attempted, with British awkwardness, to calm her down.

She hadn’t been expecting the wedding to take place either, they gleaned from her exasperated demeanor and extensive repertoire of mime. Clearly, they were not the first visitors not to be able to chat away with her in the vernacular. Non, her orders had simply been to check that all was well with the Oratoire’s guests this week.

Anna used her thumb and little finger to make telephone gestures at the housekeeper as she removed her apron, finished with her rounds for the day. “Marie?” she asked, nodding hopefully.

“Non, non,” the old woman tutted, mirroring the gesture. “Matthieu. I tell.”

She picked up a string bag of peaches from the kitchen table and shuffled on thick legs out of the Hall, back into the sunshine.

As they watched her leave, Charlie’s voice rang across the stone floor toward them, high and with the slightest tremor to it. Anna, Effie, and Lizzie all jerked to attention when they heard it—noticeable for the fact that it betrayed something they had never heard from him before: shock. Iso seemed surprised too.

Charlie was as unflappable as he was unembarrassable, but it was clear that something had penetrated that world-weary facade.

“Guys!” he shouted back to them.

Please, not another dead animal. Anna felt sick in advance.

“Come and see this!” Not a cry but a bark. From someone who didn’t want to deal with something alone.

But when they reached the terrace, Charlie wasn’t alone—Ben stood with him. Despairing of the monoglot dumb show in the kitchen, they must have opened the doors onto the terrace with the intention of hurling themselves, in dusty clothes, straight into the pool to freshen up.

As Anna bounded across the terrace toward the two men, she lifted her head to see the table, still with the scattering of crumbs they had left after breakfast, and next to it Bertie’s notepad—that bloody thing again—with its pages fluttering slightly in the very lazy breeze.

But it was not as they had left it.

Iso ran out to Charlie first, worried by the expressions she had seen on the other women’s faces. They weren’t far behind her. Then Bertie and Steve. They made an unconscious semicircle behind Charlie and Ben, taking in the open notepad like a group of student doctors taking instructions from a consultant.

The top page—where the night before Bertie had detailed their memories—had been ripped off. Quickly and savagely, leaving a jagged overhang onto the page below. It wilted, upside down, in the sun-bleached grass a few paces away, where, every so often, the warm, lazy air stirred it slightly. Several more pages had been torn out too, as if in a sort of frenzy, and had scattered in the slow air around the terrace and lawn.

The next fresh page of the pad had been written on. With the same black marker pen that Bertie had used but in bigger, bolder letters and with more force. The paper had ripped in places under the pressure of the angry scrawl; the scratchy block capitals—different from the ones in the wedding book—looked as violent as they felt to read.

When the huddle around the pad digested the message, each person felt it had been left there for them.

“TELL THEM THE TRUTH.”

26. Six Months Earlier: Lizzie