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

Effie had first heard Bertie’s name in connection with what had happened that summer after graduation; he knew what Effie and Lizzie had gone through together, and Effie, living back with her own parents, had been glad that Lizzie had someone she could turn to. Keeping a secret like that was hard enough, especially once it had sapped you of the strength to even get out of bed in the mornings.

Lizzie had returned home that summer, changed and chastened but even then still full of the light that seemed to have more recently gone out of her. Back then, Lizzie had been determined to do better—never to make such a demand of a loved one again, nor to forget what she owed her best friend. And to respect herself, her body: not to let a repeat carelessness happen again.

Lizzie had always been the golden child in her and Bertie’s family: blond where the rest of them were strawberry, bordering on carrot. Clever and bookish as they all were, but irrepressibly sociable where they were not; beautiful and proud of it, where her cousins all tended to hunch away from scrutiny. Lizzie had achieved the impossible at school—been both clever and cool, and Bertie’s rep (or, at least, his standing among the boys who might otherwise have tripped him and called him gay) had benefited from it immensely.

Effie knew the old story well. “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” Lizzie had said to Bertie after Sunday lunch one weekend as they hung around in her bedroom listening to music—around seventeen, they must have been. She’d gone to the optician’s the next day and become the first person in their family’s lineage of blinkers to get a pair of contact lenses.

It was only once she’d gone to Cambridge, left the village in the wold—now a golden, hay-scented sort of place in Bertie’s memory, even though it rained there as much as it did in the rest of England—that the cleverness and the cool had collided. She’d gone off the rails, to use a phrase of her mother’s. Not, of course, that Lizzie’s mum had known the half of what had gone on in those sunlit quads. Lizzie had always had secrets.

Effie stirred awkwardly at the memory. “What are friends for?” she said. “I only wish I could have been there for her this time.”

Bertie nodded. “Me too. What’s your view on Dan? I only met him once—he seemed…completely fine.”

It was hardly a ringing endorsement, but Dan had appeared completely fine to Effie, too. More than that: really quite pleasant. Mild and funny, supportive and caring—if a little on the neurotic side perhaps. But who wasn’t?

“He didn’t like being late,” she said after a few moments’ thought. “He always apologized profusely if they were ever late—which, given Lizzie’s respect for punctuality, was always. He practically dragged her out of the pub once when they were expected at some friend’s house for dinner.”

Bertie’s eyes widened. “Dragged…?”

“No, look, it wasn’t really like that,” began Effie. “I just meant…”

But maybe it was. Maybe it had been like that. It had to have been, hadn’t it, because although Lizzie had protested at various parts of the whole, sorry tale, she hadn’t denied it outright, and Ben had seemed on edge, all day. And Dan—the fact that he was here, watching them and leaving them notes. Even according to Effie’s currently rather skewed, chaotic barometer, this was not how normal people behaved.

“What do we do when he turns up?” she asked. “Anna’s convinced there’ll be a showdown. It feels…sinister, that he might be lurking about here somewhere. I’m not scared of him, but I’m scared for Lizzie. We don’t know what he might do.”

“No, we don’t. We just have to keep an eye on her,” Bertie said.

To that end, Ben had offered to move his single mattress to outside her door and sleep there overnight. Lizzie had accepted reluctantly, and they’d once again heard the turning of the key in her door when she retired to bed—early, and having barely eaten—as they’d finished clearing dinner away. Not long after Effie and Bertie had settled into a pair of chairs outside, the rest of the party had climbed the stairs, tired from the day’s events, punch-drunk at the unraveling of a story they thought they knew and one whose new ending they could not yet predict.

“I suppose,” Bertie said, “we’ll need to get the police involved once we’re home again if things don’t settle down. I don’t envy her that.” He narrowed his eyes and squinted across the valley floor before he started speaking again. “One of my lawyer friends just prosecuted a policeman who actually fined a woman who came in complaining about an ex-boyfriend who’d turned stalker. Thought she was a time-waster, apparently.”

“Oh?” Effie asked, sipping her wine, eyes searching his face even as he avoided her gaze. “What happened?”

“The guy killed her.” Bertie’s features were grim in the moonlight. “Some men can’t be trusted with love. It’s more than they can handle.”

She had no idea how to respond to Bertie’s quiet anger, so she drained her glass and ignored the urge to refill it. When, eventually, after a few minutes’ silence, she stood, a gentle smile uncreased the furrow in his brow and he wished her a good night’s sleep. Effie hurried to her room, stepping over the sleeping form of Ben where he lay like Lizzie’s guard dog in the corridor.

It would mean another night alone in a single bed, but she could hardly resent Lizzie for that.

—

What was that? That noise?

Confused with the fug and bleariness just two glasses of wine had veiled her with after a couple of nights off, Effie struggled to the surface of her thoughts, kicking her legs like a swimmer against the tide, only to find them tangled in cotton sheets.

She rolled over in the sunshine that had begun to pool on her where she lay. The first thing she saw as her eyes