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

Sonny’s jumpers—a soft, luxurious garment bought as a present at such expense the giver could not possibly have had children of their own yet and known how swiftly and remorselessly it would be ruined. When the kit arrived, clinically arranged in neat spools and packets, it was so far from the organic mess of haberdashery that lived inside the well-used tin her own mother—who had never worked but had raised four children instead—kept in a drawer at home that it made Anna want to cry. Nobody had ever taught her to sew either.

She darned the hole inexpertly; when she was finished, it made a lumpy scar across the flawless cashmere, as if transplanted from a pirate’s cheek. It reminded her of what she was: a Frankenmum reanimated from the corpse of who she used to be and stitched together with a barrister skin, improvising at everything because there was no one to show her how to do it. Her other friends were either childless or similarly struggling, trying to have it all without drowning in it.

Anna had a degree and a pupilage in law; her only qualification for being a mother had been her biology and her age.

Nobody had taught her what to say to her son or how to play with him. When they were alone together, there were sometimes great stretches of silence in which she felt Sonny’s little brain atrophying. The days she came home late and found him and Steve together, wrestling in the sitting room or lining up all his model animals on the kitchen table, she wanted to ask them what the rules were—not just for their game but for this life they were all feeling their way through.

She rubbed a stalk of lavender between her fingers where it sprouted in the scrubby grass of the hillside. What exactly was she complaining about?

Anna had lost track. A vague sense of being taken for granted, of being dreary with tasks and haggard with other people’s expectations. Of the sensation that life was one long to-do list and then, when she did manage to tick everything off, there was always another swing to push or story book to read. She was mourning time that was purely hers. On the rare occasions when she and Steve made it out for dinner, there was the knowledge that any wine consumed or late night embarked on—even at the weekend—they would be punished for the next morning, the inevitable headache even more pronounced now that Sonny had learned to climb into their bed and pry her eyelids open.

How had they spent their Saturdays and Sundays before him? Mostly drunk and asleep. It had been wonderful.

Now, though…Anna shuddered at the memory of the last night she’d spent drinking.

After they had found the second message—the one on Bertie’s pad—Steve had followed her to the château’s library, with its book-lined walls and low beamed ceiling, the long sofas where he and Iso had spent the wedding night.

“Are you okay?”

It was a question they asked each other regularly, except Anna’s queries were laced with varying degrees of passive-aggressiveness. “Are you okay?” was no longer an inquiry but a signal: too sharp, too stressed, too brimming with silent fury—with work, with how tired they were, how messy and dissatisfied they felt. “Are you okay?” meant Pull yourself together or Don’t take it out on me; it meant Snap out of it and If you don’t like it, do something about it.

When Steve said it now his face was soft, the lines either side of his mouth—deeper in the past few years—relaxed while his brow creased with care. “Are you okay?” was the question she’d been so desperate for him to ask her for so long that she didn’t know where to start with her answer, so instead she simply cried.

“I’m so sorry, love,” her husband breathed into her hair as she snuffled against his chest. He smelled of sun cream. “It was so stupid of me, so disrespectful. But nothing happened, you know. It never would.”

“I know,” Anna sobbed into his T-shirt—because she did. But his kindness made the secret she was keeping even more piercing, more shameful.

She’d got herself so caught up, it was no longer hers to tell.

But there were other truths she could share with her husband, ones that had been born with Sonny and hatched into spiky little creatures that had pecked at them ever since.

Sonny’s nursery school still always called Anna when he was sick, despite knowing that Steve worked from home five minutes down the road. The senior partners at Anna’s firm regularly remarked on her “real job” as a mother despite her working something like sixty hours for them most weeks and regularly missing her child’s waking up and going to sleep. She didn’t often make evening plans, but on the few occasions when she managed to get home before 8 p.m., Steve would arrange to meet one of his friends for a rare pint.

Why shouldn’t he, simply because I can’t?

Why should his life change, just because mine has?

Because they were supposed to be a team.

Between Anna’s desk and her duty of care, there was little time for anything else. She saw Steve still able to visit his record shops, go to his gigs, even—for fuck’s fucking sake—play his bloody computer games, although he had recognized that to do this in front of her anymore was petrol on a fire. The things Anna did in her spare time—her so-called spare time—were yet more chores: the leg waxes, dental appointments, and haircuts that kept her feeling (and looking, she hoped, although she had begun to doubt) like the person she used to be, rather than one growing gray hairs in neglected places.

Some women can’t afford that; be more grateful.

Anna had felt so betrayed by Steve’s larking around with Iso because, in her fast-paced and hectic but nevertheless very organized existence, the hurt pinpointed the very things she knew she was not on top of: her body and her husband.

The