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

When I think about the woman who got ready for her engagement party and the one who returned home from it, I can hardly believe we are the same person.

The first one—blond hair freshly blow-dried in a salon that was deliberately slightly too expensive for my pay packet, with green plants trailing beadlike leaves from the ceiling—didn’t have a scintilla of doubt in her mind. She applied her makeup with a showgirl’s rigor around a beaming smile so broad it was difficult to even blot her lipstick.

The other one, anxious and uncertain, cried it all off once her fiancé had fallen asleep.

Dan had bought me a dress for the party, one that I absolutely loved. I have it still, an albatross in a designer garment bag hanging at the back of my wardrobe. It breaks my heart to look at that dress now, because my fiancé zipped me into a straitjacket when he fastened it that evening and dropped a kiss on the back of my neck where I held my hair out of the way of the metal teeth.

When I took it off again at the end of the night, I half-wondered whether there would be bruises underneath. There weren’t, of course—not on the surface.

The dress was black with a swirling gold pattern, short and frilly, but with a high collar and long sleeves that ended in a spray of ruffles. I felt like a Christmas cracker. There was frost on the pavement outside our flat when we left and twinkling lights in the shops by then, so I fit right in. Comfort and joy: that was what my future with Dan looked like.

We still couldn’t believe we’d found each other. Who meets their soulmate on a dating app? Plenty of people, as it happens, but we were still reveling in the fortuitousness, the serendipity, the kismet of having both logged on at just the right moment. We were pinching ourselves; it had felt right from the get-go, and we knew how lucky that made us.

We skittered, head-to-toe wobbly with anticipation—me in velvet platforms, him in a pair of tan leather brogues his father had bought him to break in ahead of the wedding day—into the bar Dan had hired to hold our nearest and our dearest in celebration of the much bigger party yet to come.

May. That was all we had decided so far, but I’d just that morning booked us flights to visit a couple of venues in the south of France. After all those years crossing the globe following Guy around on that bloody boat, I could hardly believe I was drawing up my own itinerary, on my own terms, for the pursuit of happily ever after. It felt wonderful.

I hadn’t expected so many people to be there. They had balloons and streamers for us when we arrived, party tooters and glitter strewn across the tabletops between the cocktails—all gold, to match me. I was a gleaming statuette, Dan’s prize, and proud of it.

I saw Effie and Anna leap from the edge of a crowd that roared its appreciation as we walked in; they bundled me into a hug with congratulations all of their own. A constant at the center of a busy, changeable world—and, often, near a dance floor: my two best women, and the ones who knew me through and through.

We popped corks and clinked glasses, we smiled until it felt like our cheeks were spasming. I had more conversations that night about lace than I’ve had before or since, more questions about flowers, more unsolicited opinions on matters that were really nobody else’s business. A friend of Dan’s mother’s pressed me on the subject of birth control; from behind the table he was deejaying at, Steve wanted me to name our first dance, our favorite song. These are the stitches that make up the tapestry of every wedding—the dress, the guests, and the photos are just the yarn.

Steve played smoochy songs and stylish songs, some for the oldies and some for the girls; we went to the bar when the air guitars came out. Tottering slightly in my heels, I lurched around my clutch bag—gold, of course—with Effie and Anna the way we had done five nights a week at university, and perhaps now did only five times a year.

It was the way we had celebrated success when we triumphed, the way we lifted each other’s spirits whenever one of us needed it. It was on one of those nights out that I had met the man who could have been the father of my child—blood on water—but I wasn’t going to dwell on that at my engagement party.

Ten years on, we howled along to the greats like wolves baying at the moon, with more girth and gray hairs now but more strength, more power, more self-knowledge too. Or so I thought.

Effie was a little glitchier than Anna and me—we couldn’t keep up with her at the bar, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Wedding stuff was tough on her, given James’s resistance to it but, she assured us, it wasn’t a commitment issue; he just wasn’t into paperwork. She was right about that: he spent all night watching us from the bar, his face as joyless as an in-tray on a Monday morning.

He could have at least pretended to be happy for me.

Anna, meanwhile, was positively effervescent. A night out, her first in some time since Sonny had commandeered the space previously occupied by indulgent and hungover lie-ins. I worried for her head the next morning, but she didn’t seem that drunk—just hopped up on life. And love, I suppose. There was so much of it in that room.

I took a breather at one point: didn’t want my makeup sliding too far down my face, and I needed some water. My throat was parched from the heat of the disco lights and accepting everybody’s expressions of goodwill. From the great surprise that Dan had orchestrated.

If only it could have