The Mistress's Revenge (17 page)

So I didn’t completely trust myself about the staring man, not even then after I’d seen him for the second time. I began to walk home, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, which often helps I find. Do you remember, it was quite sweaty weather today, clammy and wet like just-removed sports socks? I get very tired these days, and sometimes it’s as much as I can do just to keep upright, so it took me ages to get to the corner of our road. When I did, I almost screamed out loud. Does that sound a bit too American B movie? Sorry, I don’t know how else to put it. Because there he was again, that same dark, squat figure with his whiter than white sneakers, standing in front of the gate to our house twenty-five meters away, just watching me come round the corner. I stood, absolutely transfixed just where I was, staring at him, just as he was staring at me. Can you imagine how we must have looked to anyone else? I dread to think. God knows how long we remained like that before, cool and unhurried, he turned around and sauntered away from me the opposite way up the street.

Still I didn’t dare move, not until I’d watched him turn the corner at the far end, pausing briefly before he did so to give one last glance in my direction. Once I was sure he had disappeared, I hurried inside my house, grateful that I’d remembered to bring my keys (have I told you
about the times I’ve forgotten them, twice in the last fortnight, and the hunky Italian next door has had to let me in through his house into his back garden and give me a leg up onto the flat roof over our kitchen?). My heart was like a metronome in my chest, loud and painfully sharp, and I stood in our cluttered entrance hall (no ecru, just loads of shoes) trying to remember how to breathe. The house was empty, and I was longing to tell someone what had just happened. Well obviously, when I say “someone” I mean you. I was longing to tell you.

I rang your phone, for the first time in weeks. It went straight to voice mail, just as I knew it would (do you remember when you first got that phone? “Now we have a lifeline linking us, night or day,” you’d said. “I want you to know I will always be here for you. Nothing will ever change that.”). Rushing to the cubbyhole, I sent you an email, headed “URGENT.” After twenty agonizing minutes without a response, I gave in and phoned Susan. I knew that if she didn’t have a job ongoing, there was a good chance she’d be at home. It was the closest I could get to speaking to you.

She listened quietly while I explained what had happened, trying to keep my voice from quivering. When I’d finished, she was uncharacteristically silent. “Have you called the police?” she asked me.

I was shocked when she said that. It had never occurred to me to phone the police. What would I have said? A man looked at me in the street? Then I saw him again outside my house? Again, there was a pause after I’d tried to explain all that. Finally Susan spoke, and she sounded strange, like a slowed-down version of herself.

“Look dear, I know you’ve been under a lot of stress recently with Daniel and not working. Don’t take this the wrong way, Sally, but don’t you think you should be seeing someone?”

You know what’s funny, when she said that, at first I thought she meant seeing someone as in dating! I really did! I couldn’t see what the connection was between the man who followed me and me having an affair. Then it dawned on me that she meant a shrink, or a therapist. Someone like Helen Bunion.

“I’m not mad you know, Susan,” I said, conscious of the slight warble in my voice. “It really happened.”

Susan sighed loudly. “I’m sure it seemed that way,” she said kindly. “And I’m sure it must have felt very scary at the time. But you know sometimes when you’re under a lot of pressure, quite innocuous things can seem threatening. You really should see someone. You’ve not been yourself” (and yet again that expression. But if I wasn’t myself, I wanted to ask her, who else was I?).

I didn’t tell her I was already “seeing someone.” Don’t ask me why but I didn’t want to share Helen with Susan. Helen is my own private thing. I don’t want to hand her around like a bowl of greasy peanuts.

Susan got a bit more animated once she’d decided I needed to see someone. She likes to have a mission, doesn’t she? Likes to be able to provide a practical solution.

“Leave it with me, I’ll ask around and get you some numbers,” she said.

I told her we couldn’t afford therapy (and it’s true, Helen is a luxury, like quilted toilet paper) but she pooh-poohed me.

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell them you’re on a budget.”

Value counseling. It’s very apt.

“The thing is, Sally,” she went on, “you must see that it doesn’t really make sense, all of this? Why would a perfect stranger stare at you out in the street, and then be waiting for you outside your house like he knew where you lived? It’s not very likely, is it?”

I had to admit, when she put it like that, it wasn’t very likely.

Not unless someone was trying to scare me.

And who would be trying to scare me?

I wish you’d been there, Clive, on the end of that phone that was to be our lifeline. Am I going crazy, or was he real, that man with the black dead eyes?

The only one who knows is you.

W
hen I went back to the computer just now, I saw that you had finally replied to my email marked “URGENT.”

In response to my message saying, “Something has happened. Please call me!” you had written just four words. Leave my family alone

D
id I invent it all, those mornings (not many to show for five years together, it’s true) when I’d wake up to find you lying propped up on your elbow? “I love to watch you sleep,” you’d say. “I love watching over you.” Was it all in my head? Your melting eyes? Your trembling hands?

“People move on,” Helen keeps telling me. “It doesn’t mean they weren’t ever sincere.”

People move on. I accept that. But what if they’ve promised to love you forever? What if they’ve told you they’ll never leave you? What if they’ve lied and lied and lied again?

Shouldn’t people be held to account for that?

U
nderneath the email from you was one from Emily. I clicked it open to find a rather limp sort of thank-you message. It didn’t even specify what she was thanking me for, just a generic “thank you for your lovely gift.” It was clearly a round-robin message she was sending to all her baby shower guests and not one that required any response. Still, I found myself double-clicking on “reply.”

It was so lovely to see you the other day. I know how long this last stretch of pregnancy can seem. Why don’t you and your mum come round for lunch one day next week? Tuesday?

I put in the bit about Tuesday because I wanted to give the impression that some days of the week might be a little more convenient than other days. I didn’t want them to know how the days of the week now blur together into one big long sea of empty hours. Once I’d clicked “send” I felt lighter than I had in days, stronger.

Do you think that’s what Helen means by owning my own actions? I do hope so. I want Helen to be pleased.

*  *  *

T
he weekends are the worst.

During the week I know there’s a good chance you’ll be working on your own in your box room (sad fuck in a box), or holding a meeting in your Fitzrovia office, or impressing a new signing with lunch at Le Gavroche.

But the weekends are a different matter.

It starts on a Friday night. I imagine you and Susan meeting after work at the Coach and Horses, or one of the half dozen other private members clubs you belong to. Possibly you’d each bring a posse from your respective offices, young things usually who hold you and Susan up as a shining example of everything they aspire to be when they’re that old (though in reality, of course, they don’t believe they will get old. Age is a hypothetical impossibility, like winning the lottery—they know it happens, just not to them).

You and Susan would display your fabled largesse, buying everyone drinks, dispensing advice and sympathy, being loud and funny with just the right amount of affectionate putting each other down.

“Aren’t they amazing?” they’ll ask each other. “They’ve been together over a quarter of a century!”

It will seem like an impossibility to them, these young things who probably weren’t even born when you and Susan posed for photos on the registry office steps. It will seem a freak happening, like a tsunami or a snowstorm in May.

And you will lap it up, the two of you reflected back to yourselves through all these young eyes. Then the Susan and Clive Show will get louder and wittier. You’ll probably take them to the Met Bar to show off how many celebrity has-beens you know.

You’ll end up piling home in a taxi with Susan, drunk on your own vitality.

Saturdays are worse. Then my imagination has you waking Susan up late with the papers and a breakfast tray, balancing it next to her on your huge white bed. Then you’ll climb back in beside her and the two of you will flick through the supplements, making
each other laugh with crass headlines or funny stories about people you know.

You’ll get up and potter off to Borough Market. Probably you’ll have people coming round for dinner and Susan, queen of her own kitchen, will already know exactly what she wants to prepare (how I long to be one of those women who opens kitchen cupboards without a sense of trepidation, one of those who actually claims a proprietorial relationship with her appliances—“my oven is self-cleaning,” “I couldn’t live without my blender”). The two of you will walk hand in hand through the packed stalls, and you’ll hold the shopping bag (I imagine it to be one of those worthy burlap things with the long handles) while Susan piles in filets of fish wrapped in waxy paper and oversized vegetables and runny cheese that smells like old dishwater. It doesn’t matter that it all costs five times the amount you’d pay in the supermarket. You like the atmosphere of the place, and the way you’re guaranteed to bump into someone you know.

Then later, Susan will start preparing dinner while you tidy up a bit (you love having Liam still living at home, but that boy has never learned to clean up after himself, you used to complain). Then you’ll both get ready, and you’ll tell her she looks beautiful, even though she’s probably just put on a different navy dress to replace the one she was wearing this morning. Your guests will arrive—probably other successful couples like yourselves. You’ll eat dinner, gush about Susan’s food, and laugh loudly at one another’s jokes. Then, when the plates are cleared from the blond wood square table, someone might put out a few small lines of coke to prove to yourselves that you’re all still young at heart, and when all the guests have gone you and Susan will dissect the evening, and work out who was damaged and who wasn’t and fall asleep back to back, but still holding each other’s hand.

Sunday, of course, is family day. Emily and her bland barrister husband will come for lunch, and Liam will produce whichever Sloaney girlfriend he has on the go. You’ll sit around in the light-filled kitchen or, if the weather’s good, around the teak table in the garden. Liam will poke fun at Emily’s pregnancy, Emily will pretend to be cross. Susan will placate, placate. You will tell amusing stories about the
microcelebs you have met. The papers will be read, two or three bottles of good Chablis will be drunk, and you’ll think to yourself, “I nearly lost this. What a fool I’ve been. What an idiot, what a prick.”

Helen says I must stop this endless projecting about your life. She says I must stop eulogizing it and try to remember all the times you complained about how dull weekends were, with your dull friends and your dull, dull, routine. She says I must take the energy I’m expending on imagining your life and invest it back into mine. I must stop thinking of your family, she tells me, and start thinking about my own.

But weekends in my house are small, mean things where people sniff blindly around each other like laboratory mice.

“Can we go somewhere today, like normal families do?” Tilly asked earlier today, while we sat eating cheese sandwiches for lunch.

To be fair, Daniel’s look of dismay was fairly fleeting (as opposed to mine, I fear).

“Of course we can go somewhere, sweetie,” he said, throwing me a loaded glance that could have had any number of meanings. “Where would you like to go?”

But Tilly couldn’t think of where she wanted to go, and Jamie wanted to stay home and play Modern Warfare II.

“I’ll stay with Jamie and you two go out,” I said, trying not to sound too eager. “What’s on at the cinema?”

Tilly looked at me scathingly.

“Don’t bother,” she said.

Don’t laugh, but sometimes, Clive, I feel I’m not equipped to cope with the teenage years. It’s like I’ve done only the introductory course, got the grade 1 certificate, but now we’re getting onto intermediate territory, I’m hopelessly out of my depth. I know you’ve already successfully negotiated all of this. Do you remember how you used to tell me you were so glad you’d be around to give me advice when I reached this stage? Do you remember that, Clive?

In the end nobody went out today and Tilly spent the afternoon in her room on Facebook while I shut myself up in the cubbyhole and surfed definitions of “brokenhearted” on the net.

*  *  *

B
efore Susan and Emily arrived for lunch today, I sat down at my computer as always.

Can you imagine my surprise when, in place of the usual (0 unread) in my inbox, there were 11 bold new messages, waiting for me like Christmas presents under the tree?

Finally, I thought, my luck is changing. I believe in luck a lot more these days, incidentally. I always used to dismiss it, do you remember? You make your own luck, I used to declare. But now I’m not so sure. Now I think luck might be one of those things like curly hair that just happen to you whether you like it or not. It’s quite a comforting thought, in a strange way.

So there I was, naïvely excited at the sudden riches in my inbox. But as I opened them, I began to feel ever so slightly sick.

They were all from clients of mine, magazines and websites I’ve written for before and cultivated over the years and one after another they all said the same thing: “We’re sorry you feel that way. Our working relationship is now at an end.”