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

Drinking was supposed to be fun too, wasn’t it?

She noticed how the younger teachers at school had a steely grip on their vices, how they matched late nights in the pubs with early mornings at the gym. How, when they could be persuaded to swap their evening Mandarin or pottery classes for the sticky crush at the bar, they drip-fed themselves wine interspersed with plenty of water, while Effie drained glass after honeyed glass.

Where, she often wondered, had they learned this restraint? Effie found it suspicious and vaguely censorious. Didn’t they need to cut loose? Didn’t they find their tongue, their spark, their chutzpah in the easy confidence bestowed by the second-cheapest option on the wine list? There was only one explanation: they were bores, these kids. Moralistic losers saving for a house deposit. And watching them nurse their wine spritzers, Effie would order herself another sauv blanc out of sheer exasperation.

She had come of age during a time when your personality was but the slice of lemon to whatever was in the glass you were holding, had bolstered herself by knocking back whatever at hand was least warm and least bitter. They all had—at university, where friendships were formed through weights and measures, optics and ring pulls, reinforced by each “Cheers” and “Bottoms up.” Salty hands and citrus grimaces. This was how she, Anna, Lizzie, and Charlie had socialized, not exercise or ceramics! Their favorite story was how they had once found Charlie asleep in a phone box; Iso’s generation didn’t even know what one was.

And hadn’t it been fun? Hadn’t drinking helped Effie forget her every care? The shyness, the awkwardness, the clanging sense of her own imperfections and devastating lack of things to say—all alleviated with the warm flush and sugary finish, the red faces and shouty slurred words. What was the worst that could happen? They’d stumble home, wake up in time for lunch, and do it again the next night, awarding each other different badges of honor each time. They continued to do it once they had jobs too, adjusting their hours slightly around the office.

Effie hadn’t felt a moment of regret until her late twenties, when hangovers began to announce themselves in nausea and a dread so existential it deserved an -ism all of its own.

More recently, however, she had realized that she did in fact have some regrets during that time. The fact of having hurt feelings, of saying rather more than was politic, of not being taken seriously. The fact of having shared her body with people that, in the cold light of day, she’d rather not have done. Effie had always thought of these facts as things that could be shrugged off, like the sluggishness that followed any night on the sauce, but when she watched the junior teachers she worked with, she understood that they were things that could have been avoided instead.

She had been careless with herself for most of her life, careless of her friends, careless of James. Now she had been so careless that she literally didn’t know what she had done or who she was anymore.

Effie thought again of the message in the notepad. She didn’t know her own story, let alone whatever truth it was she had to tell. How could she when so many of the details in her life remained beyond her reach?

Beside her, Ben stirred and put his magazine down. “I’m going to try calling Dan,” he said with a resigned expression, and set off some way down the drive, phone aloft in one hand—as if that might help locate his friend, the man they were all coming to suspect was behind the strange campaign of terror in the château.

“Do you think he’s here?” Effie asked Bertie, simply, after a few minutes. Lizzie’s cousin was the only other person by the pool with her while Ben roamed the perimeter.

Lizzie’s cousin hadn’t tried to insert himself into her thoughts the way most men did. Effie found herself enjoying both the proximity and the distance he so instinctively seemed to gauge. Bertie tucked a corner of the page of the book he was reading down into a point to save his place.

“He seems to be,” he said carefully. “But I think we’re safe. This…intrusion is unsettling, but we haven’t been threatened. There’s no sign of forced entry or violence.”

Effie raised her eyebrows over her sunglasses.

“None of us know what happened between Lizzie and Dan,” Bertie continued. “The most likely explanation is that the person trying to unnerve us is the groom. The groom who un-canceled the wedding and isn’t picking up his phone.”

“But the note,” she pressed. “Do you think he’s coming for her?” Effie felt her gaze mist over at the ballsy Hollywood gesture. She had always liked Dan. Then came clarity as her default cynicism restored: “Isn’t it all a bit creepy?”

“The intersection between romantic and creepy has always been a difficult line for some men to tread,” answered Bertie. “Especially now that women have realized that they’re often one and the same.”

Effie laughed and looked out over the turquoise pool, her spirits lifting once more with some mental space from her own problems. How inviting it looked was directly proportional to her mood, and she began rummaging in her bag for sun cream.

—

She was climbing out of the bath when she noticed it—just a trickle at first.

Effie had retreated to the bath when her skin had begun to feel tight with sun exposure and the rime of lotion and salty sweat on it had hardened into a gritty layer. She, Ben, and Bertie had spent all afternoon by the pool, exchanging a few words now and then but otherwise simply enjoying the mutually comfortable silence that came from reading and staring out across the plain beneath them.

She and Ben had regained some of the ease that had eluded them the previous night; some awkwardness, she rationalized, was only to be