Iso laid a cautionary hand on Charlie’s arm, in whose strong fist a dinner knife was still clasped.
“Shittier than being dumped for your best mate?” said Ben shrilly. He threw his linen napkin onto the plate in front of him. “Shittier than your friend siding with some…some internet trollop from an app?”
An intake of breath around the table. Even the insects paused in their humming.
But the phrase only made Lizzie snort with contempt. “Internet trollop! Christ, Ben, what are you—the virtue police?”
Plenty of the men who posted those photos seemed to think they were, Anna mused. Witchfinders with keyboards. What difference did another woman make, given the morass of them online? The internet had made female flesh ubiquitous and disposable, bouncing hairless bodies with no feelings attached that were simultaneously lucrative and worthless.
Lizzie would need her and Effie as she patched her life back together, tried to move past the trauma of threat, but for now Anna resolved to be lighthearted. It was a tonic for the ills they had each of them carried to this place with them, along with their luggage. She and Effie rushed to Lizzie, and the three of them melded, as they had so many times over the years, into a squash of tears, hair, and giggles.
“Internet trollop!” Iso howled, a few paces away. “I’m going to put that in my bio!”
The women opened their arms to her and she crept into their huddle, newly appreciated and warmly welcome.
Ben watched them with a deepening sneer. Despite his height and impressive chest span, he deflated like a forgotten balloon in the face of their mirth. For a certain type of man, female laughter is the most terrifying sound.
“I think,” Effie said through a tangle of summertime, sun-bleached hair, “that the time has come for you to leave, Ben.”
“Seconded,” Charlie said, folding his arms. “Go and pack your bags, and get out of here as soon as you’re done.”
“I wouldn’t stay if you begged me to,” Ben spat. “And it’s not like you haven’t in the past—both of you.” He gestured at Lizzie and then to Effie, who colored as though she had been slapped. “Bitches, all of you. Bunch of desperate slags.”
“Ignore him,” Lizzie said, her arms about her friends’ necks like a boxer being helped from the ring. “He’s pathetic.”
“Somebody should go with him, make sure he doesn’t do anything else creepy,” Iso said.
As Charlie followed Ben inside, she called out again: “And use the landline to book him a taxi immediatement!”
Then they sat, survivors of a showdown, and drew up a chair for Dan next to Lizzie’s. Silent and shell-shocked, they gazed down at the table, still laden with hospitality, as though they had never seen it before. The prospect of food and wine that had so recently turned to ash in the mouths of those chewing it seemed to rise again, phoenixlike, now that the source of irritation had gone.
Steve cleared his throat. “Errr. Drink, anyone?”
Was there any other response?
Each head nodded gratefully and Steve ducked inside.
Lizzie began laughing, with the giddy, unnerving hysteria of the relieved. She had forgotten how to feel light. The psychological wounds Ben had given her would take some time to heal, the scars even longer to fade, but right now, Lizzie reasoned, she could medicate convivially. When he had departed, this house would be replete with all of her favorite people in the world; she intended to make the most of it.
Steve returned with yet another cold champagne bottle, poised to pop the cork.
“There’s still so much left in there,” he said, squinting and aiming it away from the table as he eased the stopper out with his thumb. “Despite our best efforts to put a dent in it.”
“We can charge that to Ben,” Iso said. “I saved his bank details off his phone.”
As Steve poured, Charlie appeared in the double doors. “He’s going,” he said, jerking his head toward Ben, who was making his way scowlingly across the Hall to the front door behind him. “Any final words?”
“You can have her, mate,” he called contemptuously over one shoulder.
“I meant them to you,” Charlie snapped.
“Oh, there is one more thing.” Ben hove into view once more, framed by the Hall lights where the altar had once stood ready. “I bumped into your ex last week, Effie. James, isn’t it?”
Ben’s eyes glittered at her through the fresh night air.
“He’s getting married.”
61. Effie
Well, that’s just not possible, she almost said.
James doesn’t believe in marriage. Thinks it’s a sham. When you love someone enough you don’t need a piece of paper to prove it.
But as Effie tried to speak, tried to sit up from where she had slumped in her chair, pinned there by the knife Ben had successfully launched right into the center of her heart, the center of her being…she realized finally that these words—James’s words, the ones he’d intoned whenever the subject had come up—were not the sort of solemn vow she had once taken them for.
Oh, she thought as enlightenment washed over her like a searing, stinging scourge.
He just didn’t want to marry me.
Effie expected the hole in her chest to fill with battery acid, for her ribs to break with the agony of it. She waited for the stream of tears that had never been far from her eyes these past six months or more to flow again, a salty tide that would irrigate her misery, turn her back in on herself as she questioned over again why and also why not me as well as who and then why her.
But the tears didn’t come. Instead Effie felt as though an anchor had been lopped off from around one ankle. There was pain—a dull sort of ache, a throb of embarrassment at what she now saw had perhaps always been inevitable—but there was also something far more complex beneath, something far more interesting.
Indifference and another question with it: What now then?
For the first time, the thought
