The Mistress's Revenge (2 page)

Jamie was very keen to tell me that Mr. Henshaw was still off with an undisclosed mystery ailment. He seemed to think I should know all about Mr. Henshaw, so I nodded fervently and hoped nothing more would be required.

Tilly gave me one of those looks. Do all girls do them, I wonder? Those withering looks that make you feel like you’ve just done something utterly, hopelessly stupid? I expect your Emily spared you those. She’s such a Daddy’s girl, isn’t she? She saves them for the rest of us.

“I don’t know why you bother talking to Mum about that stuff,” Tilly told Jamie. “She hasn’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”

“Yes she does!” Jamie’s face turned a little red. “I told her about it yesterday.”

“Go on then.” Tilly was looking straight at me, thirteen-year-old eyes fixed unflinchingly on mine. “Tell us who Mr. Henshaw is?”

Helen Bunion talked to me once about engaging with the children and I tried to remember what she said. I knew it had something to do with distracting them by answering their question with a question. Or maybe that’s what you’re definitely not supposed to do. I have to admit I must have looked a bit vacant, standing there trying to work out whether to distract or not distract, because Sian, who tends to treat children like none-too-bright delivery men who require precise instructions and firm handling, broke in:

“Your mum’s not been feeling too good recently.”

Two young sets of eyes fixed on me with sudden interest.

“What’s wrong with her then?” It struck me as a little bit bizarre that Tilly was talking about me as if I wasn’t even there. But part of me was also relieved. If I wasn’t being directly addressed, I couldn’t be expected to answer.

“She looks all right to me.”

Jamie wasn’t so sure.

“Her eyes do look sort of smaller, like they’ve been shrunk.”

“I’m not sleeping well, that’s all,” I told them. That’s an appropriate motherly response, isn’t it? To try to diminish your own problems so as not to worry your children. (So often these days I have to ask myself what’s appropriate and what isn’t. It’s as if I’m understudying
the role of mother for the first time, without any real vocation for playing it.)

Jamie came and gave me a hug, one eye on Sian looking for approval. Tilly stayed where she was, twisting a strand of hair slowly around her finger.

“You must have a guilty conscience,” she said.

Sian shot me a meaningful look. That word “guilty” of course eliciting Pavlovian response. But it’s quite clear to me Tilly was just being provocative. And the truth is I don’t feel guilty. Not about any of it. I’m sure I ought to, but I actually don’t. “Guilt is so plebeian,” you used to say dismissively. You always thought of it as a wasted emotion. And of course you were right. So clever of you to classify emotions like that—according to their usefulness. I must start doing the same, I really must. Cutting out the emotional chaff must make your inner life so much more efficient. You must have the Volkswagen of inner lives, Clive. I’ve got to hand it to you.

Y
ou know, I can forgive the fact I begged you to warn me in advance if you were dumping me and you still let me turn up at that restaurant on York Way Friday with a jaunty impatience and un-washed hair and only my second-best jeans. I can forgive the way you told me it was over before I’d even taken off my coat and then somehow expected we’d find a way of filling the next three tortuous hours, me with my arm still halfway in my sleeve. I can forgive that awful, excruciating, pain-ridden lunch while the waitress hovered uncertainly around the uneaten food, a smile stretching her face as if it might snap, and I tried not to meet anyone’s eye. I can even forgive you asking for a receipt (even good-byes it seems are tax deductible). But what I can’t forgive is the way you scurried off so gratefully when we got outside and I told you to go. You were halfway down York Way, your laptop bag bouncing insistently against your back, before I realized you really were going to leave me there crying in the rain.

Silleeeee Salleeeee, you used to write in your emails.

*  *  *

N
ow, before you say anything, I know you’re cross with me. I got your email last night and I’m doing my absolute best to understand how you feel. This journaling is really improving my understanding skills. I think you’d be pleased. “Please try to understand just a little,” you pleaded shortly before you left me crying on York Way Friday. “Just try to see things from my point of view.” I think I might just be starting to get the hang of it now, this empathizing thing, this seeing things from other people’s points of view. It has a lot to recommend it.

So now I’m asking you to see this from my perspective just a little. Show a little empathy. You must have picked up a lot of that from your own therapist. Goodness knows you’ve had enough sessions. Mind you, you always did like to hear yourself talk. I remember you coming back from that first meeting with the therapist so pleased with yourself. “I had her completely wrong-footed,” you crowed. “She had no idea what to make of me. I didn’t fit into any of her neat little boxes, you see?” But still, you’d think something would have rubbed off from all those sessions, some sort of self-awareness. So I hope you’ll try to understand.

There I was last night and I started thinking about Susan and wondering how she was. I know Susan and I haven’t exactly been best friends—that Aussie accent can get in the way rather, don’t you think, softened though it undoubtedly is by nearly three decades in the UK. More like close acquaintances. But I always liked her. Sometimes I used to think I liked her more than you did. “I don’t want Susan to end up lonely,” I’d say magnanimously. “She doesn’t deserve it.” Or “How can we build our happiness on Susan’s misery?”

You’d always make a pained face when I talked like that. “I feel just awful about Susan,” you’d say (those were the words you always used to describe your guilt about her—“awful,” “dreadful,” “wretched”). “But when two people are as much in love as we are, surely we have a duty to be together, to be happy?” And anyway, “Susan will be okay,” you’d always say. She was so very capable, so terribly resourceful. You made her sound like a library.

Now I have to admit that word “bitch” in last night’s email did hurt. Do you know, I had to break off from reading that email and actually look up other emails from the past, cheerier ones, like the one in which you’d said you would kill anyone who ever hurt me? “I know that sounds naff but that’s how you make me feel,” you’d written. “It’s something very primeval.”

Primeval. What an interesting choice of words. You know, now I come to think about it, that’s kind of how I feel a lot of the time at the moment. Primeval.

You know, the interesting thing is that subconsciously I believe I was actually hoping the you who wrote the first email would protect me from the you who wrote the second. Isn’t that ridiculous? I should probably save that up and tell it to Helen at the next session. She’s really big on the subconscious. It’d be like taking an apple to the teacher.

Anyway, last night I was thinking about Susan. I do that quite a lot since you painted such a vivid picture of your life together. It’s been so useful because now I can picture what she’s doing at any time of the day. It makes me feel closer to her somehow. I know that after dinner, the two of you tend to slope off together to the second floor of your lovely St. John’s Wood house where you have a huge duck-egg-blue sitting room with French windows leading out onto a private roof terrace. Not that I’ve seen it for myself, of course, but you described it so well I almost feel that I’ve been there. There you lounge on the vast designer daybed with Susan’s ancient, flatulent dachshund and read the papers and watch the telly and comment on the things you’ve seen or read.

“Just chitty chat really,” you’d assured me. “Nothing like the range and depth of the things you and I talk about.”

So last night, I was just a teeny bit at a loose end. These evenings are so long, don’t you find? That yawning gap between dinner and oblivion? And I started imagining Susan and you relaxing among the plump, velvet cushions. In my head I’d already followed you through your usual routine. I knew that you’d eat in your gleaming double-height glass-roofed kitchen, sitting around the blond wood square table where Daniel and I enjoyed several dinner parties—so strange to think of it now. You’d probably have eaten in the company of your son
Liam who I never got to meet and one of his gorgeous, big-toothed, shiny-haired Sloaney girlfriends with their impossibly long legs. After you’d done the cleaning up—your way of showing appreciation for whatever culinary delights Susan had brought home from her up-market catering firm (successful businesswoman, former model, wife, mother, so very, very capable)—the two of you would have made your way upstairs.

And suddenly this idea came to me to call Susan. Don’t laugh but I’ve always thought the two of us would be closer if circumstances were different. Sometimes I’ve allowed myself to imagine dropping in for coffee on Susan’s days off, and sitting chatting over the kitchen table while you sit working at your computer in your top-floor office. Maybe the three of us could go off and get a bite of lunch a little later on.

So I called Susan’s number. “Hello stranger,” she said, and I imagined her meeting your mildly quizzical gaze and mouthing the word “Sally” before lying back on the cushions so she didn’t see how your mouth froze into an O shape, or your fingers shook as they gripped the edges of the Times.

I didn’t even know what I was planning to say to her until I actually heard her voice. That unfortunate Down Under accent gives her a rather no-nonsense type of voice, doesn’t it, to match her tall, athletic frame, like I imagine a PE mistress might have. “Take a deep breath and run a couple of times around the quad and we’ll soon have you feeling tip top,” is the kind of thing a voice like that might say. Susan probably wouldn’t have much time for journaling. “Go out and buy yourself a nice dress, or take yourself off to Marrakech for the weekend,” she’d probably say. “Much better than sitting in a darkened room wallowing in your own misery.”

I remember once, very early on when we hadn’t known the two of you long. We were all out somewhere and Susan had been talking about pensions and how she’d be entitled to a big chunk of yours, no matter what. “You have to protect yourself, you know,” she’d said. “If Clive and I ever divorced I’d take him to the cleaners.” You’d laughed along with everyone else, even though one sensed you’d heard this
speech a hundred times before. I wonder if maybe being taken to the cleaners was something that flashed quickly through your mind when you heard me on the phone last night, saw Susan’s mouth stretch soundlessly into the shapes that make Sal-leeeee. I do hope it didn’t cause you too much anxiety. Worry is such a futile emotion, Helen always says. I don’t bother telling her that futility is one of my specialist subjects.

How did it feel, I wonder, lolling on that designer daybed, listening to your wife chat away to your mistress? Oops, I mean ex-mistress of course. I can’t imagine it was terribly comfortable, although I’m sure you carried it off with your usual insouciance. I expect you were wondering what it was I was saying every time there was a silence (which, let’s face it, isn’t that often when having a conversation with Susan, although I did my best to hold my own). I expect your heart was rather painfully hammering, despite those warnings your doctor gave you to keep stress to a minimum. (That was one of the reasons you gave me for ending it, do you remember? That all the stress of your double life was taking its toll on your health? You even rolled up your sleeve to show me the little raised patch of stress-induced eczema in the crook of your arm. “I must start putting myself first,” you said without even a flicker of irony.)

I must say, Susan was very friendly on the phone, very voluble, as if I’d caught her at a loose end and she was glad of the interruption. She wanted to know all about how I’d been.

“It’s such a long time since we last got together with you and Daniel,” she said warmly. “You must both come to our house for dinner one night.”

I could imagine the look on your face. I’d have paid good money to see it, I really would.

“I would love that,” I told her, truthfully. “But in the meantime why don’t we go out together, just the two of us for a girlie night out?”

“Good idea. Men are so boring, aren’t they? I don’t know about Daniel, but Clive’s such a grumpy old bastard.”

I laughed.

“At least we’ll be able to have a proper chat,” said Susan.

An hour and a half later your email popped up. It had that “sent from my iPhone” tag along the bottom and I imagined you barricaded in your master bath, running the cold tap in the sink to cover the tapping of the keyboard.

I must say, you sounded terribly out of sorts in that email (which, incidentally, contained more typos than I’ve ever seen in such a short message—don’t iPhones have a spell check function?). I can, of course, see why that phone conversation with Susan might have bothered you. Believe me, I’m not as insensitive as you seem to think. But I still think “bitch” was a little strong.

C
italopram. That’s the name of the happy pills the doctor gave me. I keep wanting to call them Cilitbang. Waging war on stubborn stains. Helen Bunion would adore that. All that hidden symbolism. Might you become just a stubborn stain in time, Clive? Silleeeee Salleeeee.

When I first went to see that doctor, I sat hunched over in the plastic chair next to her desk, feeling like something shriveled and leathery and dug up from a peat bog. She was in her twenties, a temp at the doctor’s office I’ve been registered with for years but hardly ever visit. She has long wavy blonde hair and was wearing a perfectly tailored skirt and suede mushroom-colored knee-high boots so soft they made you want to lean across and do tic-tac-toes on them with your finger. She looked at me brightly with her flawlessly (though discreetly) made-up eyes and said “And what can I do for you?” That’s when I started crying of course, at the notion of someone maybe being able to do something for me, or someone even wanting to try.