July 9
The hair on the back of her neck stands on end, and she wonders how easily she might nab one of the bottles of champagne chilling behind the bar to her left. She bites her lip: one of the bartenders is trying to seduce a woman twice his age, aware, surely, that her husband is standing hardly two feet from them; the other barman, a fat Welsh guy with a ruddy face, has just escaped off somewhere. In the dining room she hears the clinking of a knife against a glass, but then, this is no surprise; since they arrived two hours ago she’d hardly been able to take a breath without being interrupted by one of Eloise’s friends, clambering over herself to prove her worth and adoration for the bride. Through strands of flickering tea lights Alice can see her sister’s face, beaming and intoxicated by the praise being heaped on her, on Ollie, on their ability to create something so perfect and enviable, to forge it through the sheer strength of their love.
She needs that champagne.
The woman’s husband gently pulls her away from the seductive bartender, and the ruddy Welshman returns; her hopes for a full bottle squandered, Alice settles for two flutes of champagne. Out on the lawn, a few guests have ventured out for cigarettes, and above them the smoke hangs in the humid air. In an hour, their ranks will grow; the fathers who now look at their sons disapprovingly will stumble out and try to bum a fag.
It’s different than younger weddings she’s been to, Alice thinks, the ceremonies she attended right out of college, the first few of which marriages are just now starting to crumble in divorce: there wasn’t the standard bum rush for the bar at the beginning of the evening, the tittering excitement of everyone getting dressed up together for the first time. No, this wedding—her sister’s wedding—has a distinctively thirty-something vibe to it. That’s not to say the people around her, the Hennies and Flossies and Poppies and Minties, aren’t looking to get fucked up. They are, they definitely are, and they’ll pay for it in the morning. But they’ve clopped over this well-worn territory before; they know how to at least cultivate the impression that they’re pacing themselves.
Confronted with such unabashed happiness, she suddenly feels like she’s going to be sick with anger. Where the hell is Paul? she wonders. She needs him. She wants to rest her head on his shoulder and to see her defeat reflected in his eyes.
Outside, away from the smokers and the toasts and the ruddy Welshman, Alice kicks the tire of a Fiat, then yelps as the pain radiates through her toes to her knees. She remembers back in May, sitting on the phone at her office, trying to broker a truce between Paul and Donna. She was nice then. Good. Sure, one could argue that in acting as mediator she was advancing her own interests just as much as anyone else’s, but still, at least altruism was a pleasant side effect of her selfishness. How then, in a matter of a few short months, has she pulled such an abrupt 180? How has she become such a monster?
She looks down at the dress she’s got on—it’s the same one that the rest of the bridesmaids are wearing. (Eloise had bought the dress for her—but then, of course she had.) Watching Henny and Flossie float around in theirs, Alice wants to tear hers off. Wants to throw it down to the cobblestone streets, stomp on it, and run, screaming in her underwear, through the claustrophobic alleyways of this awful little town. Instead, though, she kicks the wheel of the Fiat again, this time relishing the pain. Then she limps over to one of the cabs that Eloise has hired to take guests home in an hour, when the party’s scheduled to end. Slipping the driver a ten-pound note, Alice tells him to take her back to the farm now, please, even though he’s technically off duty. She’s afraid of what she’ll do if she stays here, she realizes.
She’s become, suddenly, afraid of herself.
*
The farm, Tenderway Glen, sits at the base of a long, though not necessarily steep, gravel hill, and as the cabdriver approaches it he tells Alice that he can’t take her all the way to the house, but rather must leave her here, on the side of the main road.
“Got to be back in twenty minutes, and I reckon trying to turn around down by the house will take me nothing short of an hour.”
“But there’s plenty of room to turn around down there,” Alice pleads. “And really, it’s not that far. It just looks like it because of the field, and the way the hill curves around that hedge.”
“Don’t know what to tell you, miss. I’ve got paying guests waiting.”
“But I’m a paying guest.”
“Surely you know what I mean.”
She doesn’t, but she gets out of the cab anyway and slams the door. Before the road slopes down the hill to the house, it passes by a small field where, this morning, a company section of the Boys’ Brigade set up camp for a weeklong jamboree. On the acre of unruly grass they’ve erected pup tents, and passing them Alice sees the flicker of flashlights. Charred driftwood and charcoal cut through the mossy scent of wet grass, and as she picks her way past a naked flagpole, she hears young voices whispering beneath the domes of one of the tents. Are they talking about her, she wonders? Did one of the boys, sneaking out for a piss, see her emerge from the cab, her dress hiked up around her knees, her heels dangling from her left hand? And if that’s the case, what are they saying? Are they swapping stories about where this gorgeous mystery woman is going, about why she’s floating down to an old dairy farm in a cocktail dress at nine o’clock at night? Or do their predictions inch closer to the truth? Are they imagining Alice closer to what she actually is: tired, half drunk, annoyed with her shoes, disappointed in herself?
She doesn’t go into the house. For starters, she doesn’t have a key, but also the thought of being alone in such a large space, surrounded only by other empty rooms, sickens her. So, instead, she sits down on an empty bucket in one of the concrete cow stalls that face the house’s lawn. It’s been a while since they’ve been used, she imagines; the stall itself smells more like fresh paint and concrete than cow dung. She likes it, though. She just likes that the stalls are here. She likes her ass pressed up against the tin bucket, and the sensation of her feet against the cold, stark floor. She likes looking into the rambling mess of trees and weeds and hedges beyond the perimeter of the house. She likes hearing the sheep baa.
She reaches into her clutch for her phone and calls Jonathan.
He picks up on the third ring. “Jesus Christ, Alice.”
“You’re telling me.” She leans back against the stall’s wall and feels the concrete scratch against her skin. “I’ve had a terrible night.”
“I told you to stop calling me,” he says, and she sits up straight again. “Why the fuck are you calling me?”