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

lasted. Sometimes I wish I’d never left the dance floor and my best friends, never let myself be cornered like that—kept the memories of that night purely light and joyous, rather than sullying them in the dark.

My marriage was finished even before the engagement party was.

27. Effie

“But who…?” Steve was the first to speak as the loose pages from Bertie’s pad billowed lazily around their ankles, like seaweed caught in the shallows.

Next to him, Effie’s brain was connecting the frozen look of fear on Lizzie’s face with the invasion of the château’s centuries-old serenity—not just this morning but the day they had arrived—and the re-installing of a wedding canceled, a relationship broken off.

“It has to be Dan, doesn’t it?” Anna murmured quietly next to her.

“Ach, guys…” Ben rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, swung the other in a limp fist through the air beside him in an arc. A loose punch with no target, but it was charged with exasperation and emotion. “I hoped it wouldn’t come to this…”

To his right, Lizzie simply closed her eyes.

“But I’m worried he’s gone off the deep end, yeah,” he finished, his hand now coming to rest across Effie’s shoulders, drawing her to him.

Before he could finish speaking, Lizzie turned silently and walked back into the house. Effie followed her up the stairs to her bedroom, desperate to comfort her, but the door was locked and she couldn’t even make her voice heard above the noisy sobs coming from the other side of its oak panels.

Suspicious and shaken after taking in the angry message, the group scattered to various corners of the house and its grounds. Like characters in a murder mystery, they found themselves suddenly mistrustful of their holiday companions, as though there might be strychnine in the tea, a revolver behind the shower curtain. A muffled thump and one fewer in the party by morning.

Don’t be stupid.

Anna, too, had looked pained and taken herself to the cool of the library; Steve went after her. Charlie and Iso retreated upstairs to exchange their own truth—one of very few things that girl wouldn’t put on social media, Effie thought spitefully. As Iso had moaned to them several times, the lack of Wi-Fi was severely compromising her output.

Effie retired to a lounger by the pool, where Bertie lay dozing nearby. Next to her, Ben read a magazine—a political one that asked big questions—and laced his fingers into hers as they held hands between the two sunbeds.

Despite the atmosphere, she had to admit the scene was perfect: he had reached for her almost unconsciously as soon as she had sat down, whereas she had practically had to chase James down for the briefest of embraces toward the end. But Ben’s apparent contentedness only served to increase Effie’s anxiety that she had somehow compromised what they had together: her mind continued guiltily to whirr over the events of their first night at the château and the possibilities it still contained.

Laughter. A shriek. A man’s voice.

Whispers and tears.

And then a blackness so empty Effie worried she would collapse in on herself if she got too close to it. She was scared of atomizing in the great void of her memory; there was simply nothing there at all. Nothing, until there had been whiteness again. Whiteness and that bed. Those petals.

Effie scrolled through the grainy footage in her head. So much for all her plans to luxuriate in the sun and zone out from her fears, to allow the lapping of water nearby to lay the internal ghosts to rest. Her mind was working in overdrive, and the flapping, guzzling filters in the swimming pool provided an infernal drumbeat as her thoughts spun over and over.

What did I do? (Thunk.)

What did I say? (Thunk.)

Who was I with? (Thunk.)

What the fuck happened? (Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.)

The thought Effie had not yet allowed herself to approach directly but that kept creeping into her head, uninvited, was at which point all of her clothes had been removed.

“You’re ready to be happy again.”

Had he really said that?

She flinched involuntarily at the sound of Charlie’s voice inside her head and gave a short, cringing moan that made Ben lift his head to look at her. Still not ready to dwell on that one.

This was all she had within her to build a picture of that night, those lost hours. What had she given away during the darkness? No more than she had willingly—drunkenly—offered too many others in recent months: her loneliness and her dignity.

Hooking up was supposed to be fun, wasn’t it?

It hadn’t been at university, but back then Effie assumed she’d been too green, too inexperienced. Too full of self-loathing to make it work for her, this universally acknowledged fun thing that some young people (men) liked to do and other young people (women) pretended to. At nineteen, she was not well versed enough in her own body to find pleasure in other people throwing it around for her.

Now a grown-up—she had a career and a mortgage; what more would it take to convince her she was one?—Effie was too self-possessed to find much pleasure in giving it away either. That was what had been such a revelation with Ben: the confidence she had found being with someone so enthusiastic for her; the way he touched her like a precious jewel rather than flipping her like a steak on a barbecue; his presence, eyes tracking hers rather than scrunched closed to make it go quicker. Such dedication to being in the moment, in fact, that he wanted to linger over it, to remember, to record for posterity….Effie had never felt herself so hungrily pored over as she did with Ben, and she found that it thrilled her.

Before they’d met, she had downloaded several dating apps to make sure she didn’t end up on the shelf, but they had instead brought her, several times, to an uncomfortable precipice with men she had barely begun