No, it was the wedding that had made such an escape possible—the idea that she was fulfilling a duty to someone else, to her friend Lizzie, rather than simply indulging her own needs.
Anna swallowed the lump of gloom that had settled in her throat. She should text Lizzie, really.
She noted that Steve’s first reaction, in contrast to her own, had been for the sundered couple.
What a selfish cow I am.
It’s easier for Steve to be kind; he isn’t as stressed as I always am.
As Anna paged around her screen composing a message to Lizzie, the bride-to-be who had so recently become the bride-that-wasn’t, her phone buzzed in her palm. An email:
From: Charlie Bishop
To: Effie Talbot, Anna & Steve Watson, <ajbr86@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Some news
Hey you lot,
I’ve taken Lizzie, Dan and Ben off the thread. Just thinking, I’ve been slammed at work recently, had this week booked off for ages, paid for my flights, and already coughed up to stay at the not inexpensive “Oratoire de St. Eris.” It’s too late for us to get our money back, I’ve checked.
I suppose what I’m saying is this: I could really do with a holiday, and this might as well be it.
Shall we just go anyway? And persuade Lizzie to come with?
C
A bird broke out in song from a Clerkenwell rooftop somewhere above Anna’s head, and she thought—just for a moment—that she might join in.
A Week Later
3. Effie
“…plus you know he has this hot new girlfriend now?”
Anna’s voice drifted over from the front seat and Effie came to as if surfacing from underwater, hungry with dread for the last nugget of information she had just heard.
Please, no. I can’t take it just yet. Give me another week. Another month.
“Who has?” Effie heard herself demanding, taut and urgent. Her question ripped through the cozy atmosphere and easy chitchat of the car and landed in the dashboard, a quivering javelin hurled from the backseat, sharp and discordant.
This was what she had been most afraid of. In the early days of heartbreak, it hadn’t been the idea of being alone forever or the prospect of picking up a life that was in pieces and trying to reassemble it—like gluing a smashed vase back together without ever having seen it whole—that pulled her awake in the middle of the night, cold and shivering with loss and residual disbelief.
It was the thought of her ex-boyfriend finding someone else. The idea that someone else might make him a different, more genuine shade of what she had mistaken for happy. That some other Effie—but crucially not Effie—was doing everything with him and for him that she had once done; and that—this time—it felt right to him. Even though, to Effie, things had never felt more shockingly, paralyzingly, chaotically wrong.
Effie might have felt more positive recently, but her hurt was still raw, her heart still porous and vulnerable. Six months was not quite long enough to get over six years with someone. Despite the promise of happiness on the horizon, Effie was still not ready for this.
Anna shifted in her seat and her face appeared around the headrest in front. “Charlie has,” she said, sighing and scanning Effie where she sat. Her keen eye, honed over years of close friendship, discerned a dullness to her friend’s skin, a lack of shine in her usually twinkling gaze. There were shadows under her eyes, and the cotton skirt Effie was wearing stopped at her knees, displaying pale thin shins mapped with coffee table–height blue and purple bruises. “Charlie,” she said again, quietly.
Oh thank God. Anna turned round again and Effie went back to chewing the skin around her fingernails and looking out the window. As they hurtled toward the airport, the receding city gave way to liminal business parks that looked like corporate greenhouses and were guarded with spiked metal fences.
They had had to move their flights back a day—officially because something had “come up” at Anna’s work, but the truth was that the friends had engineered the delay to avoid the pain of waking up at the château on the morning of Lizzie’s big day with none of the planned preening and no white dress to put on. Instead, the morning had been like any other and they would arrive at the Oratoire just before the sun went down on what would have been the wedding date itself.
“Do we know her, Charlie’s girlfriend?” Effie asked gamely.
Anna’s left arm was dangling from where she held the passenger-side grab rail in the car’s ceiling. Effie’s mother always clung to it during car journeys, too.
Effie had been ready for years now to ride up front next to the father of her child, the safest and softest cushioned carapace money could buy and its oblivious pudgy cargo anchored with seatbelts behind her. Instead here she sat, surrounded by the crumbs sprinkled from Sonny’s own safety throne when Anna had removed it that morning, fretting at a scab on her leg like a surly teen.
Anna replied to her question with a laugh. “Only that she’s called Iso and she’s—what?—Charlie’s first proper girlfriend since…you?”
Effie snorted. She had barely been a girlfriend, let alone a proper one. They had coupled up briefly during their first term at Cambridge, those russet-leaved weeks when freshers try on new personalities like hats to see what suits.
Charlie and she—with their nearby rooms off the same tiled corridor, their shared kitchenette and penchant for curling up and watching films late at night while others in their year marauded around the pubs and cobbled streets of their university town—had settled into a
