The Mistress's Revenge (16 page)

At first I didn’t even think I was going to get to go. After that lunch with Emily and Susan in which I felt like I’d made real headway with befriending Emily, everything went completely quiet. Luckily I hadn’t forgotten. I knew when Emily was having her baby shower (what a lovely expression it is, isn’t it, that image of babies raining down from above?), so a couple of weeks after that lunch, I dropped her a line.

Don’t be disapproving, Clive. I’d asked her for her business card, and it just seemed like a courteous thing to do, to drop her an email asking how she was and explaining how much I was looking forward to my first baby shower. I have to say, she replied pretty much straightaway. I got the feeling she was a teensy bit bored actually. Perhaps she was regretting giving up her “job” at just over five months. (Sorry, I don’t know why I put “job” in quotes like that. It just came out that way.) Anyway, she said she’d be “delighted” if I came, and told me all the details. Well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it was yesterday, camped out in Emily’s lovely Notting Hill garden (it only rained just a tiny bit, and it didn’t spoil things at all. You must tell Emily that she needn’t have gone and locked herself in the bathroom all that time. Nobody minded in the least about getting a teeny bit wet).

I’d agonized about the gift, I don’t mind telling you. I kept imagining Emily telling you that I’d given her something wildly inappropriate, or cheap or tasteless or any of the myriad of things I could imagine
Emily saying. I googled baby showers to find out what was expected and discovered it’s considered good manners to buy presents for both the baby and the mother. Expensive business this baby shower thing—especially for someone who hasn’t worked in the last six weeks. Still, what’s another hundred quid on the overdraft? It’s a brand-new life we’re talking about here! In the end I went for a sweet little babygro from BabyGap (remember our baby, Clive, the puffed-up baby that wasn’t?), and I bought Emily some extortionately expensive bath oil from Space NK. Shame that when I arrived, it all went straight onto a huge groaning anonymous pile of presents. I should have attached a gift tag. Emily does have a lot of friends, doesn’t she?

I sat next to Susan of course. We were in dowagers corner, the two of us and her rheumy-eyed dog, alongside the mother of the bland barrister (clearly forgiven for her unwitting transgression over the scan photo mouse pad). Her name was Frieda. Well, obviously you know that already. How ridiculous of me to drop that in when you and Frieda are probably on the closest of terms, her being family and everything. I do think you were being unkind when you used to refer to her in your emails as the unthinking man’s Joan Collins. I’m quite sure that isn’t really a wig (although I’ll admit her forehead appeared to belong to someone else entirely).

Anyway, Susan and I and Frieda got on like a house on fire, we really did, once I’d gotten used to the way she kept leaning away from the two of us as we spoke, as if she was worried about catching a calorie or something. And her face having just that one expression takes a bit of getting used to, doesn’t it? I thought at first that she was going to be really hard work, but Susan managed to loosen her up. (She’s amazing like that, isn’t she?) She talked quite a lot about you, actually, did Frieda. She obviously considers you two have rather a special bond, in fact she became quite animated really (which naturally made me worry for her face. One got the definite sense that too much expressiveness might cause some sort of surface cracking).

“I think you quite fancy old Clive,” Susan said cheerfully after Frieda had remarked for the second time how you were so much more “impressive” in the flesh than you’d appeared on the television. There
was something in the way she said “flesh” that made one think of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. You could almost hear the smacking of the lips.

Frieda gave an anorexic smile.

“You’re lucky, Susan, dear,” she said in a way that made it clear that in the normal run of things Susan would not be the kind of person Frieda would envy. “Clive has still got enough charisma to compensate for the fact that he’s nearly fifty, and not what he was.”

Don’t shoot the messenger here, I’m just telling you exactly what she said.

To give Susan her due, while she didn’t jump up and down in your defense, neither did she wade right in and trash you. She said something sharp about charisma not paying the bills and deftly changed the subject. Neither of them seemed to notice that I was finding something endlessly fascinating in the bottom of my glass of wine. The truth is that for all the good “work” I’ve been doing with Helen on taking away your power, or what’s the term Helen uses? “disinvesting” you of your power, I still can’t hear your name spoken out loud without feeling something rip all the way up inside me, like I’m being filleted from within with a rusty knife.

Luckily we talked about something else after that. Babies probably. There was an awful lot of talk about babies. Well, what did I expect? It was a baby shower! There was just one slightly awkward moment, when Susan fixed her blue eyes on me as if she was sizing me up for a coffin, and asked me if I was “quite all right.”

I made some sort of joke I think, but though Susan smiled, she wasn’t really laughing. She said I didn’t seem quite myself (again that phrase, as if not being myself was a bad thing). She said she was surprised that I could afford to take a day off as she’d have thought I would be working during the week.

“Work isn’t exactly that great at the moment,” I told her, promising myself that I wouldn’t go into details, wouldn’t talk about the endless hours in front of the blank computer screen, the half-finished features, the phone that never rang.

“Well, you must call Clive,” Susan told me decidedly. “He’ll find you some work to do.”

It was a wonderful moment. Quite filmic I thought. The wife in the garden in her navy polka-dot summer frock, telling the mistress (sorry, sorry, ex-mistress) to get in touch with the husband.

“I’m sure Clive” (I couldn’t help pronouncing the word with a slight wince, the way Tilly does when the wire on her brace digs into the inside of her cheek) “is very busy at the moment, especially now he’s a famous award-winning producer.”

I was aiming for amused detachment, but it probably came across more as a whine.

“Nonsense,” said Susan. “All he does is sit around all day trying to figure out how his iPhone works while other people do the work for him. Give him a call.”

I nodded, and tried to remember how to arrange my mouth into a smile. There was a burning sensation deep inside my rib cage on the left-hand side as if my heart was being seared like fresh tuna. Luckily Frieda broke the moment.

“I think I might give Clive a call in that case,” she announced rather startlingly. “I’ve got a few ideas for promotional campaigns that I think he’d be very interested in. I’ve been meaning to get back into the workplace for ages now.”

She said “workplace” as if it was a foreign city she’d always meant to visit—Prague, for instance.

Susan caught my eye then, and a look passed between us. For a split second, there were just the two of us, wordlessly colluding, but then back you came, Clive, barging in between us, the elephant on the lawn.

Anyway, the rest of the shower (quite appropriate term that, considering the weather), passed very pleasantly. Like I said, it was a shame Emily got herself in such a state about the rain. It was only a little splash after all. Susan was very calm about it, I must say. She must have stood outside that bathroom door for over twenty minutes, persuading Emily that her life wasn’t really ruined just because the silk tablecloths had gotten a little bit damp.

“Don’t mind me. I’m just one big wobbling mass of hormones,” Emily sniffed when she eventually returned outside where the guests, slightly bedraggled now, were doggedly eating lunch from sodden paper plates.

It was quite sporting of her, I thought, to make that comment. She’s not very good on humor, is she? Least of all when it involves herself. But you could tell Susan had had a word and smoothed it all over.

Good old Susan. And to think you nearly gave all that up, all that goodness. For me!

I could have stayed there all day, in that lovely walled garden in Notting Hill, with the decked dais and the sculpted water feature in the shape of a large egg. In fact I very nearly did stay there all day. Don’t be so suspicious Clive, I was just enjoying myself, that’s all. But then I realized that it was just me and Susan left, and Emily kept talking about how exhausted she was (she’s quite right; all that sitting around can get very tiring in her condition), so I reluctantly said my good-byes.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Susan asked, seeing me out through the immaculate hallway, tastefully done out in different shades of taupe and ecru. Emily, I decided, was definitely the kind of woman who knows the difference between the two. Would you say that was fair?

Susan said that while it was lovely to see me, she hadn’t really thought that babies were exactly my thing.

How could babies not be someone’s thing? Silleeeee Susan.

I told her it had been a fascinating anthropological experience. That seemed to mollify her a little and I felt I wasn’t some sad, nutty, premenopausal woman with too much time on her hands.

On my journey home, I imagined Susan making her way back to your house in St. John’s Wood, already full of all the stories she would tell you. Were you waiting there for her when she got home? In that amber-lit drawing room with the squashy sofas and low coffee tables and the gold discs lined up on the walls like pirates’ treasure? Did you pour her a drink and stroke her cheek and say “well done, you”? Did you talk about your daughter, the Sacred Vessel, and your as yet unborn grandchild and all the other fragile ties that bind you together
like spun sugar? Did she say “oh, Sally was there”? And did your heart roar, just for a moment, and your eyes involuntarily blink to shut out the memories? And did you think of me? Did you think of me? Did you think of me?

Oh God, did you think of me?

A
man followed me this morning.

No, I’m not saying that to try to be dramatic. It’s actually true!

I had gone to the shops to get that math stuff Tilly’s been nagging me to get for weeks. She made a big scene last night, saying not to bother now because the test was over and she hadn’t had a compass or a ruler or that funny plastic semicircular thingy so she’d probably failed. She was trying to make me feel guilty of course. Good job the Citalopram stops all known guilt. Dead! (I must ask Helen why I go into advertising speak whenever I think about it? Maybe it’s a recognized psychological syndrome.) But I must have had some nagging concern because I set off purposefully for the hugely expensive stationery shop, and actually made it there, rather than meandering uselessly through all the other shops, vacantly picking things up off the shelves, unsure what I’d set out to buy, which is what I find myself doing more and more.

Anyway, when I came out, I noticed a man leaning against the lamppost to the right of the stationery shop, smoking a cigarette. Now that in itself is unusual around these parts because the yummy mummy brigade have effectively brainwashed the populace into believing that smoking within a half-mile radius of their offspring is tantamount to child abuse. But the man was also looking directly at me.

At first, and please don’t laugh at my conceit, I thought he might just fancy me. After all, there was a time not so long ago, when some men did find me attractive (“gorgeous,” you whispered under your breath as I came in). Then I reminded myself of my unwashed hair, my too-baggy jeans, the sweatshirt of Daniel’s that I’ve been wearing for the last four days, and the tortoiseshell reading glasses I’d put on
to read prices in the stationery shop and forgotten to take off. (Don’t you hate that? That unignorable sign of encroaching age? The missing specs that turn out to be on your eyes the whole time?) And besides, there was nothing in the man’s gaze to suggest appreciation. He gazed at me steadily but blankly, like I was some kind of digital billboard.

I hurried off in the direction of home, noticing that one of the laces of my ratty Converses had come undone, but feeling too self-conscious to bend to tie it up. When I passed the M&S food hall, I decided on an impulse to go inside. Normally Daniel does the food shopping, but he’s much more of a basics kind of person, whereas as you know I like readymade salads in little pots and the kind of bread that goes stale in hours. I thought how nice it would be to get something for Jamie and Tilly that they’d really like. That would be the kind of thing a good mother would do, I thought.

But when I was inside, there was so much choice, I couldn’t really get my head around it. I thought I might get them a pizza, but then what kind of pizza? Stone-baked, or thick dough, or a plain one to please Jamie, or one with roast vegetables on it to contribute to their five a day? Or should I go for a readymade pie? Lattice-topped? Chicken and leek (would Jamie notice the leek?). I took one look at the bread section and felt giddy. Irish brown soda? Sunflower seed? Bagels? Rye? In the end it was too much and I stumbled out empty-handed.

And there he was again! The same man as outside the stationery shop. Leaning against a car hood (there was a woman in the passenger seat who looked like she was about to spontaneously combust), staring at me.

I know you’ll think I’m making it up, so I’ll describe him to you. He was in his thirties, dark and quite thick-set, with that kind of close-cropped hair men choose when they’re starting to go thin on top. He was wearing a black leather zip-up jacket with two cream-colored stripes up the sleeves, and pale, artificially faded blue jeans, stretched too tight over his body-builder legs. On his feet he had a pair of dazzlingly white sneakers with gold piping. His eyes looked black from where I was standing and, like I said, they were completely blank.

Is he starting to sound at all familiar, Clive? Might you have met
him somewhere before? At an anniversary party for your hairdresser, perhaps?

I admit I started to feel very uncomfortable at that point. I wasn’t scared exactly, because there were so many people around, but I was anxious. The thing is that recently there have been a couple of times when I’ve seen something, or thought I’ve seen something, that turned out not to be there. One time, when I was out with Sian, I thought I saw my brother across the bar, the one who lives in Edinburgh, but it turned out to be no one, a stranger who didn’t even look anything like him. Another time I went to pick Jamie up from his friend’s house and after we’d said good-bye to his mother on the doorstep, I tried to get into this blue estate car parked outside and couldn’t understand why my key wasn’t working, then realized that not only was it not our car, but I hadn’t even driven there in the first place! That was embarrassing, you can probably imagine.