At least I didn’t have to cancel a wedding.
Effie imagined herself in a white dress and veil, crying and begging as she had indeed done, only this time in front of an audience in florals and wide brims with carefully matched bags and shoes, rather than in her pajamas on the stairs of her flat just before the front door had banged shut. She shivered the memory away.
After a few nights apart, Effie’s entire body was looking forward to seeing Ben again. The time they’d spent together had so far been the giggling, wine-flushed, last-people-in-the-restaurant sort—and what inevitably came afterward. She had been more than a little bleary in the classroom at Coral Hill Prep of late, after chatting into the dawn with Ben while tracing the whorls of hair on his chest with one finger.
Muted in her palm, Effie’s phone hummed, and she felt her insides wriggle. It was from Ben: “See you soon, gorgeous.”
She blushed enjoyably in her seat: there would be more chance for that this week. But Effie was also looking forward to spending daylight hours with her new boyfriend. They had gone out for breakfast together one weekend, walked in the park, but since they were single thirty-somethings with efficient and established lives, one or the other of them eventually had to head off to something else. Effie craved the sort of uninhibited, languorous, limitless hours that come only with being in a foreign country and having taken one’s watch off. Strolling through a market town, cycling through vineyards, simply lying by the pool with Ben, making small talk.
The pool. She had studied it endlessly on the website’s photo gallery over the past six months: on her phone, from her desk in the staff room, in bed, in several pubs with countless glasses of wine in hand. Lapping azure water overlooking rolling fields of lavender and sunflowers demarcated by avenues of needle-pointed cypress trees: a Hockney air-dropped into Cézanne country. Effie stretched her thin limbs and aching joints in the car at the very thought, at the baptismal qualities she had projected onto it, and warmed in anticipation of unfurling beside it as soon as she arrived. She had been almost existentially cold for half a year.
“Have you heard any more from Lizbet? How is she?” Anna was asking from the front.
Effie stalled as the car flew along. She didn’t want to describe how their once bubbly, golden hair–tossing friend, whose white teeth were always bared in a shriek of laughter, had become sad-eyed and silent, a watchful lank-haired supplicant who wished only to rewind to before the breakup.
“She’s doing okay,” she replied, from the backseat. “Up and down. You know.”
Anna did know. She had picked Effie up only too recently, and Lizzie had done similar for her years before she had met Steve. Women spend half their party decade either in this coma or sitting at its bedside, Effie thought, waiting for their friends to wake up. When they do, the prescribed medicine is booze and solidarity, a pile of handbags on a dance floor. Rehabilitation comes in learning how to smile again, how to dine alone, how to talk to strangers. How to spend a Friday night in with only one’s soul for company.
They all knew the stunned desolation of brokenhearted grief, all felt their friends’ hurt like a memory of their own. At university, Anna and Effie had practically scraped Lizzie off the floor after one such rupture. For several days, Anna had coaxed soup into her mouth, while Effie persuaded her up and out of bed, into an exam hall to answer the questions that would move her life on in the right direction, past this painful and unforeseen bump in the road. Effie knew that Lizzie counted the favor she had done back then as above and beyond the call of duty. She supposed it had been—she had made Lizzie promise to tell no one, not even Anna—but Effie had done it gladly.
It hadn’t taken that long for them to come round from breakups in their twenties, but in your thirties….Effie had found that it was different, more difficult. Once people began to swap their urban family of flatmates and pals for the cozy little biological units they were creating at home, there were fewer—if any—who could offer the necessary hours of vigil. The only single woman among her friends after the breakup, Effie often faced the prospect of a whole weekend devoid of plans, and it sent her spiraling into a breathless crouch of despair every time. She found solace in books and daytime cinema trips, but only had to imagine herself at the Singles ’n’ Salsa night in the pub at the end of her road and the panic would come again.
She knew she could always turn up at Anna’s house, where the background thrum of toddler patter, the washing machine, and something from Steve’s obscure vinyl collection might drown out the internal static for an afternoon. Effie delighted in Sonny’s company and lavished attention on him as though he were her own blood. Childcare came naturally to her, and she recognized a wistfulness in Anna’s gratitude.
But Effie also knew she was an addendum there. If she and Sonny played a game or painted a picture, he always wanted to tell Mama and Dada he had won, to show them what he had made. Effie yearned to be so crucial to somebody, at the center of a little world. As much as she wanted the company, she didn’t like to highlight how much she needed it.
Effie had gone round to hold Lizzie’s hand the evening after the email. Dan had already moved out of their pretty garden
