The Mistress's Revenge (15 page)

Could he be right that I “vacated” a perfectly well-functioning relationship, and all to be with you?

Well, obviously it started me thinking about those early days. You know I never really found you terribly attractive at first. I’m sure I’ve told you that before, in those days when I was so secure in your feelings for me that I didn’t feel the need to dissemble and could afford to be cruel or hard if the fancy took me. Those were the days when truth wasn’t a luxury, but a commodity like any other, that could be tossed around with impunity, knowing that however hurtful or disagreeable, you’d still come back for more.

It had been inevitable, of course, that sooner or later I’d progress from being your First Legitimate Female Friend to, well, what exactly? Your First Legitimate Female Friend With Benefits?

It started, naturally, with emails. I say naturally, because ours was a relationship that would have been impossible in the pre-email days.

How else could we have become so intense so quickly, so involved in every beating moment of each other’s lives, without ever leaving our respective homes? How else could we have left our partners in every single sense of the word (so already Daniel is proved right—I vacated him as he said), while physically remaining just where we were—you in one of your offices, me in my windowless London cubbyhole?

Ours was a thoroughly modern email affair, each nuance played out against the soundtrack of incoming message alerts, so it was only fitting that it started off that way. The messages between us growing steadily both in volume and in intimacy. You commented on clothes
you’d seen me wear, protested when I said I was going to get all my hair cut off. Details of your domestic life started creeping into your messages. “Don’t believe everything it says on the can,” you wrote in one email. “People would be shocked if they could see what Susan and I are really like.”

You told me how you’d got married so young that you were always trying to recapture the carefree youth you’d never had. That’s why there had been all the other women, you said.

Oh, hadn’t you mentioned the other women?

Of course, that was a genius move, telling me about the one-night stands, the frenzied flings, the aspiring singer-songwriters, the publicity girls, the back up singers, the prostitutes—the snaking long, ignoble line of “encounters” threading its way through the fabric of your long, glittering marriage. At one stroke you’d advertised yourself as both desirable and available. You needn’t feel guilty about being a home wrecker was your subtext. How can you wreck what is already wrecked?

But you were quick to divorce yourself (sorry about that choice of phrase) from the callow cheating bastard stereotype. None of this was a reflection on Susan, you said (I’m paraphrasing now—your voice is so deeply ingrained in me, it’s something I feel well equipped to do. I hope you’ll look on it as a sort of tribute). The women were a “necessary process” you needed to work through on your own, part of the personal development that had been interrupted by getting married while barely out of your teens. You and Susan were a team, you’d grown up together—“we brought each other up” is the phrase you used—but a team is made up of individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses. Surely I could understand that?

You were terribly good, I have to say. You played it all so perfectly. “I get the feeling you know exactly what I’m talking about,” you wrote, appealing to my vanity at the same time as probing for a hole in my marital armor through which you could come sliding in. And of course I gave it to you.

“No one can be all things to one person,” I told you. “Monogamy is an artificial conceit.”

No, I didn’t know exactly what it meant either, but of course I knew the message it would send out.

And so it began.

F
unny to think that at the start, you were the one doing the chasing and me the holding back. I don’t remember an exact tipping point where I knew your intentions had changed, but I do remember a dawning awareness that you were deliberately and overtly flirting with me. I like to think I didn’t encourage it, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t discourage it either, which maybe amounts to the same thing.

Of course it would be disingenuous to pretend I don’t remember the exact moment when we stepped over the line. I’d given you a lift home after an evening picnicking on the Heath with Cyd and assorted friends, watching a jazz band across the lake and drinking chilled white wine as the sun slowly set. Why wasn’t Daniel with us that night? I don’t recall. Perhaps he had cycled back on his own. He did a lot of cycling in those days. Susan was away for the weekend with your children. So I drove you home, and the sexual tension crackled between us like a bad phone line. What made me turn in through the gates and turn off the engine instead of just pulling in to the curb to drop you off? (Afterward you always pressed me for a reason, determined to make that moment part of the folklore of our love story. How disappointed you always were that I could never come up with anything beyond “I just thought, why not?”) Your face when I turned the engine off was a picture though, it really was. “Oh blimey,” I think you said, for once lost for words.

All through that long, clumsy first kiss, I kept up an internal monologue: “This is weird, how big his tongue feels, hope nobody can see us, this is probably wrong, this is definitely wrong, but it’s only a kiss, a kiss doesn’t really count.” I’d already decided that it wouldn’t go any further. I just wanted to test out how it felt—I was in the infidelity changing room trying on a dress I knew was way too expensive for me, but wanted to experience wearing, just once.

Later, you always referred to that night as Drive-In Movie Night because you claimed that when I pulled into your driveway and switched off the engine, there was a split second before I turned the headlights off where we both remained facing forward, staring at the illuminated garage wall, as if waiting for some entertainment to begin.

“Drive-In Movie Night was when it all began,” you always said afterward, conveniently forgetting that it was followed by that strange limbo period where we regressed to a kind of embarrassed, stilted, half friendship. How adept we are at rewriting our own histories. How willingly fact is sacrificed to flow. Now, when I remember that kiss, and your shocked “oh blimey,” I know that just as you were wrong about when it all started, you’re wrong about when it will end.

It isn’t over, Clive. You just don’t know it yet.

O
nce the immediate post-Drive-In-Movie-Night shock had worn off, we began to talk tentatively about what had happened as if probing a mouth ulcer with a tongue. Of course we both pretended to be horrified. “Can you imagine if we’d let it go further?” “How drunk must we have been!” “Thank God we stopped ourselves...” (Such experts we two are at turning our failings to our own credit.)

We wouldn’t discuss it again, we decided. We’d wipe the slate clean. And so we did... until Golf Course Wednesday. Where was it we were going that day? I forget. I know you’d taken me to meet your newspaper mate Douggie and then driving on somewhere to check out an upcoming band. I rather think there might have been a river beside which we sat awkwardly on a bench, eating sandwiches bought from Marks and Spencer.

Driving back through the heartlands of Hertfordshire (“I’d rather die than live here,” you said preposterously, as we swept past sprawling redbrick mansions with electronic gates and winking alarms), you went very quiet and then suddenly stopped the car by the side of an unmade road flanking a golf course.

“I am totally in love with you.”

Do you remember how that came out—with no preamble, no lead-up, you gazing straight ahead with your hands still gripping the steering wheel, engine still on? I made a noise, a startled, unconvincing attempt to demur, but you cut me off.

“I’d leave Susan for you, you know? I never thought I’d ever say that. But I want you to be in no doubt about how strongly I feel about you. I’ve never felt like this before.”

Until that moment I hadn’t been completely sure of my own feelings, but of course I was done for then. Not by the declaration of love, you understand, but by being put above all the others, above your wife. What woman could resist that?

T
he first time we had sex was at the Suffolk house one Sunday afternoon, at the tail end of a weekend house party. Susan had left earlier that morning—something about work—when Tilly asked Daniel if some of the other kids could travel in the Saab with them. You offered to drive me home instead. “I’ll help with the cleaning up,” I said, but really we both knew what I was there for. The master bedroom, with its antique French artfully peeling white wrought-iron framed bed and deep window seat overlooking the estuary bore Susan’s fingerprints in every one of its Farrow and Ball painted corners. You carried me in there (I didn’t know about your back then, or I’d never have let you) and lowered me gently onto the bed, and all I could see was invisible traces of Susan, smeared like excrement over the walls behind you.

Funny to think how unsure I was, even then, even long after the point of no return. Not unsure because of Daniel, strangely. Although this was the first time in over ten years I’d physically betrayed him, I’d done it so many times in my head by that stage that it felt almost like old news.

No, I was unsure about you, about your extravagance, your solidity, your sludge-colored eyes. As I’m used to Daniel’s skinny insubstantiality, you were too present, too big, too unavoidable. When you took off your shirt, I was half repelled and half fascinated by the unexpected
body builder pecs, stretching the skin like shop-bought haggis. I almost told you to stop, almost couldn’t go through with it, and yet something in me was thrilled by the sheer new unfamiliarity of you.

It would be good, wouldn’t it, to reminisce about how fantastic that first time was, how we reached heights of passion never before scaled? But of course it would also be a big fat lie. That first time was a disaster really, with traces of Susan all over the room and your insistence that you were too fat, too old, too married to appeal to me (knowing you better, I can see that show of insecurity was just another way of leading me in, giving me the illusion of being in control). When you pulled on a condom, your erection sank like an undercooked cake, leaving us both gawping like foolish goldfish, wrong-footed (I can hear you now, “you’re mixing your metaphors again”) and unsure what to do next.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told you, as of course I was honor bound to do.

But it did matter. We both, in our individual ways, felt there was something wrong with us, something that had made your cock cower like a small, scared thing.

We chose to blame it on Susan, on her presence in the brightly patterned rug, the arched ’70s reading light. We called it guilt, but by the time we had put our clothes back on, we both knew it was something else. It was resentment.

T
he second time we had sex, you cried for an hour. But that’s another story. Now, finally, the Zopiclone is crawling through my veins. My body greets it with joyful relief, like a much missed friend.

I loved you I loved you I loved you.

A
s soon as I logged onto my email account this morning, I felt something wasn’t right. There was nothing I could put my finger on, nothing out of place, just that nagging sense that everything wasn’t quite as I had left it.

This time, I have to admit, I felt a little bit apprehensive. I’ve changed my password, as I’ve already said. If you’d got into my emails again, you’d have to have been trying very hard.

I called up a contact who once advised me for an article I was writing on cyber-spying. I pretended I was writing another piece. “How hard is it to get into someone else’s email account if you don’t have the password?” I asked.

“Hard, but by no means impossible. You just have to have money and know the right people.”

When he said that, there flashed through my head a vivid recollection of the first time you told me about your hairdresser, Tony. “He’s part of some huge North London crime family,” you’d said, clearly thrilled, and even I recognized the surname. Apparently you’d been going to Tony since your midtwenties and he’d adopted you as an honorary brother. “Anything you need fixing,” Tony told you. “Anything at all.” How you relished that contact, your underworld link. “They’re just like the Sopranos,” you emailed me a couple of years ago, just back from a party at the Grosvenor for Tony’s anniversary. “Surveillance, hacking... Do you know, one of the cousins even told me how to run someone off the road and make it look like an accident? All the way home, I’ve been itching to try it.” You’ve always been uncharacteristically coy about it, but I suspect you’ve called on Tony’s family once or twice over the years, when business deals have gone wrong, and after I’d put the phone down on the cyber-stalking expert, I couldn’t help wondering if you might once more have found occasion to ask for their help.

Am I being ridiculous? Sorry, my sense of perspective seems to have deserted me.

After that call, I remained staring at the screen for a long time, idly clicking in and out of already read messages in my inbox, wondering if you were following my movements, monitoring me. I tried to feel happy about the idea, like I had before.

My head was pounding with a happy pill headache and my mouth was dry and furry like it had been Velcroed inside.

Was it you, Clive? Were you there?

In the end I closed down my account and lay down on my bed. As someone who works from home I’ve always maintained that taking a nap in the daytime is the start of the slippery slope, but this morning, I didn’t even think about it, just kicked off the old UGG boots that I wear round the house and lay down.

I don’t know where I am anymore. Everything keeps shifting and I can’t work out where I’m supposed to be.

T
he baby shower was such an education. Really, Clive, you should have been there. You always used to make such a big deal about what a “girl” you are. You’d have just loved it.