She knew Steve couldn’t really have married a complete stranger—on holiday, with no vicar, no celebrant, no certificate—but, for once, it wasn’t the legal issues Anna was sifting through. No, it was everything else that might have happened. The thought of Steve pretending to marry another woman—even as a joke—was almost as horrifying to Anna as the idea that he might potentially have consummated this new union while in the haze of more free alcohol than he had seen at even the biggest rock band’s album launch.
Just as she knew that Steve’s hands would be clammy and cold right now, Anna also knew how he often had to grapple with big, not-quite-memorable nights upon waking, had sometimes been forced to ask colleagues and friends to fill in the blanks—who hadn’t? But those blanks had never before contained quite so much potential. Everything she had suspected him of doing with Celia—things they had not done together for so long—Anna now pictured happening with Iso, and her own hands began to tremble.
Anna thought once more of their wedding day as she weighed Iso’s question in the balance, set the beautiful young woman’s words against the ballast of Steve’s horrified expression and dumbstruck pose. He had been in tears as he’d made his vows to her, even though he was the one who spent his life propping her up and soothing her fears. When it came to it, she had remained dry-eyed in the face of her usually lighthearted husband’s own emotional collapse.
She was tearless now too, but inside she felt like a crumbling building, as though great chunks of masonry were falling away from her core. She had thought they might revisit some version of their youth on this holiday, had hoped that whatever fiction she had created between her husband and the woman who texted him late at night had been just that. But if Steve could wake up naked with someone he had only just met, there was little doubt where he had already smoothed away the sharper edges of his conscience: number 68. Celia’s house. The final bricks holding Anna up crashed down within her.
Is this how betrayal feels?
In response to the apparent infidelity unfolding in front of the fragile audience members—unfolding like a loosely wrapped beach towel—Anna could only summon a great and primordial weariness. It was one she could no longer remember being without. There was a certain “dust to dust” inevitability to Steve cheating on her: the reflexive disappointment that being with a man—any man—eventually came to, because they were all so consistently untrustworthy.
When did I become so cynical?
“Errr, no?” When Steve finally answered Iso’s question, he sounded high-pitched and strangled, like the time he’d forgotten to set up the direct debit for Sonny’s nursery fees and their son had been barred from daycare for a week. A week that, because Steve had been away at a festival for his music magazine, Anna had had to cover at the last minute, a week of trial by toddler as well as by jury.
Seeing him there with Iso, Anna weighed the endless drudgery of care and career that was her constant companion against her husband’s consistent ability to shrug off that burden and wear the guise of his younger years without it pulling or digging in the way all her own clothes did. She felt her heart wither toward him, wondered whether he might actually have broken it beyond despair and beyond repair.
Still, Anna’s skeptical nature couldn’t quite believe that the worst had happened. She knew only too well how her husband wore his guilt: Steve was not in repentant mode but enervated—and rightly so—by the prospect that his wife would be angry with him regardless. He and Iso clearly hadn’t got married, but what else had they been up to, with their matching hangovers and coordinating nudity?
“It would be more convincing if you hadn’t framed your denial as a question, Steve,” Anna replied, unfolding her arms and stepping slowly over the threshold into the bedraggled Hall.
13. Effie
Christ, imagine being married to a barrister.
Effie felt Steve’s regret and damp-palmed confusion as if it were her own. Her stomach heaved at the palpable awkwardness that now permeated the space like some kind of unwanted, cloying room spray. Yesterday it had been coming off only her and Lizzie; now, it seemed, everyone had had a squirt of the tester.
Steve cleared his throat. “No, look, Anna, of course we haven’t got married. Don’t be ridiculous, I would never—I wouldn’t— Look, we just didn’t….Nothing happened, okay?”
That he could barely look at his wife was an unfortunate by-product of her standing with the day’s bright sunshine behind her rather than shame or mendacity, but he seemed aware, as he blinked his eyes to the floor once more, that it didn’t look good.
“Then who wrote the note? And why?” Charlie asked weakly.
By the table, Effie stared at the letters again. No identifying curlicues or tells, just incontrovertible black on white. Nobody raised a hand or spoke to claim them.
She looked around the room.
Lizzie was asleep and Anna must have gone to bed too.
Steve and Iso are both naked under those towels.
Effie glanced over at Ben, who stood queasily just beyond the Hall, bracing himself against one of the paned French doors and shivering.
Ben genuinely looks like he might have slept outside.
She swallowed drily, thinking of the flashes of memory, the blank spots in her timeline. The dent next to her in the bed. Dark hairs, not blond. Not the hair of the man she had brought here in the hope of cementing whatever it was they had together—the thing that had given her reason to smile again.
What have I done?
“Look,” she said feebly, “it doesn’t actually mean anything happened.” Effie took in the scene again: the cake, the bouquet, the bottles, the glasses, and the smeared plates. “We clearly
