That Anna had also been sipping from a chilled glass of white wine in the kitchen ever since she’d left Effie to freshen up and help her husband cook had no doubt gone some way toward making her mellow and sentimental, but she was anticipating tomorrow’s trip home with the same excitement she had left it, rather than dread at returning to reality. She couldn’t wait to leave this place and the callousness and resentment it had fostered in them all.
Tomorrow Anna would see her son again. Her life’s meaning was to be found in the hollow crease of his neck and behind the downy lobes of his ears, not at the bottom of a wineglass. That said, she had also enjoyed the spiritual refreshment that four mornings of waking up at her own leisure, rather than her three-year-old’s, had bestowed, so perhaps the meaning of life was somewhere between the two.
There were grateful murmurs now as Steve and Charlie carried the lamb, oozing juices on a broad wooden board, out to the table. Lizzie sat at one end, next to Ben like a little doting doll—blank-looking somehow—and Anna wondered whether she’d downed a Valium or two to take the edge off this final evening. Not a bad idea, she thought, switching her glance to Effie, who sat at the other end, looking resolutely at the cutlery in front of her and worrying at the napkin in her lap.
“Our last supper!” said Charlie, raising his glass with a nervous smile that was already askew.
We won’t get through dinner without a fight.
Anna wasn’t sure what they were toasting other than the sheer fact of the week being over and the opportunity to return to normality. Although a version of normal in which her two best friends were no longer on speaking terms was hard to imagine.
Oh, Lizzie, what have you done?
Opposite, Iso offered her glass to clink, and Anna obliged.
It was hardly Iso’s fault that her every dimpled smile reminded Anna of nighttimes spent leaking milk and smelling like a goat; the Anna that had followed Iso on Instagram a few years back was the one who’d been awake breastfeeding at four a.m. and unable to move because there was a sleeping baby on her chest.
Pretty cool to meet her, really.
“Santé!” she said. “Happy days!”
Anna tried to make eye contact with Effie as she drank, Anna suspected, through a throat constricted with anxiety.
Happy days were something to aim for, at least.
50. Effie
Beyond the trembling in her limbs and the butterflying sensation that her life would look very different without Lizzie in it, Effie tried to seek out positives. She would carry herself with more care, greater respect in the future.
In the drama of the week, she had at least almost forgotten James, had put him down like a heavy shopping bag and then neglected to pick him back up again. Her heart, rather than her back, was grateful for the lightening of that load, among its many others.
Effie knew that returning home—clicking that lock open and finding nothing moved behind the door, no other human to welcome her—would be another rite of passage to tick off, but she felt more capable of doing so now than she had since James had left. She didn’t feel strong exactly, but Lizzie and Ben’s revelation had hollowed her out: there was nothing to feel and, so, nothing left to fear either.
She had a job she adored, although she had neglected it of late, at a school full of girls who idolized her. She would make them stronger than she had been. In the coming years, all being well, she would take over as the head—everyone on the staff knew the job was hers for the taking—and build generations of young women who wouldn’t take anything like the sort of shit hers did.
Effie looked along the table at the woman after whose engagement party James had said goodbye to her forever, the woman who would be leaving here not with the man who had arranged that engagement party but with the one who had shown up at it as a fluke of circumstance. It was the sort of story they would tell their grandkids perhaps—with certain details omitted—and Effie’s heart cracked at the thought of not knowing Lizzie’s children.
She wondered whether this might be the sort of bitterness that long-term friends slough off like old skin with the changing of the seasons. But for now, she couldn’t help but feel an electric-sharp gratification that Lizzie’s face wore the expression of a woman not particularly happy with her lot.
The clinking of cutlery on plates as people served themselves without speaking, passed dishes without making conversation, and then chewed to the rhythm of the cicadas rather than the patter of the news about one another’s days was excruciating.
Perhaps we can all just go to bed before the dessert even comes out.
“What was that?” Iso asked, as a rare swirl of wind rattled the fairy lights winking valiantly above the despondent group.
Frozen under the jovial glow, those around the table in the middle of the broad terrace felt as if they were players on a stage. The château sat in its horseshoe on three sides, holding them in the center of the action; the plain below them was the audience pit, stretching right the way to the horizon.
“I thought I saw something move by the pool,” she continued, craning her neck to look down toward the bank of grass.
“Probably just an animal,” said Bertie, turning to follow her gaze. “A squirrel perhaps, or a mouse. I thought I saw a polecat the other night.”
“Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Charlie said firmly.
Next to him, Lizzie blanched where she sat
