The Mistress's Revenge (29 page)

Then he asked me if I was up to it. Don’t you think that’s an odd thing to ask? “It’s a party, it’s not climbing Mount Kilimanjaro,” I said, but I don’t think he heard. In fact, now I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if I even said it out loud.

So now we’re about to go, and all of a sudden I’m feeling so nervous, I think I might be sick. It could almost be my party, for how nervous I am. I could almost be the bride. Isn’t that silly? Daniel told me to eat something before we went, but I couldn’t even contemplate food. I tried a tiny bite of the digestive biscuit he brought me earlier and it tasted like a lump of hard sand in my mouth. I know there’ll be plenty of food at your house though. Susan is so terribly good at all that stuff. You must be so proud of your wife. Do you repeat that word to yourself as you watch her moving easily between guests at the marquee, making sure no one feels left out, handing out drinks and homemade canapés and warm words? Wife, wife, wife. That is my wife. My wonderful wife. My wonderful life.

Daniel is calling for me now. I can faintly hear him through the blender noise. It’s just as well it’s time to stop journaling. My hands are trembling so much my writing looks more like a lie detector graph. (All the lies I’ve told, Clive. All the lies we’ve both told. I imagine them all lined up like ranks of soldiers in a parade.) I have
to go now. I need a drink. I think everything will be fine once I’ve had a drink.

I will see you soon. Save a dance for me.

T
here’s a discolored patch on the ceiling above our bed where there obviously was once a leak. It’s funny but sometimes I think it looks like a map of Africa. Other times, if I really squint, I can see the head of an animal glaring down at me. Strange isn’t it, how one little thing can have so many different interpretations?

I’ll be quite honest with you though, the bed itself is a bit of a mess.

I’m lying propped up on my elbow writing in this notebook, and all around me is a sea of detritus. Empty pill packets, half-filled water bottles, tissues, unread newspapers, my laptop, my phone. I can even see a banana peel, although I can’t imagine who would have eaten that. I don’t remember the last time I ate. I think it might even have been at your house. How long ago would that be? Two days? Three? Time has become irrelevant. I think that’s a gift. Don’t you?

Daniel keeps telling me we have to talk about what happened, but I don’t really see the point. To be quite honest, I don’t even remember all of what happened. There are whole great swathes of time that seem to have been swallowed up along with the pills.

“We cannot just ignore this.” This is unexpected, coming from Daniel, who normally wouldn’t acknowledge the house was on fire if there existed an option to ignore it.

“What is there to talk about?” I ask. And of course I’m right. When you come down to it, there really is nothing to say.

A couple of times, Daniel has tried to force me to explain. “What was it you kept trying to tell Susan? What the fuck was going through your head when you were throwing yourself at Liam?”

He even managed to get really angry with me.

“I want an explanation,” he has said, puffed up and purple with righteousness. “You owe it to me.”

I think that’s a bit strong, don’t you? You don’t owe people things if you never promised them in the first place, surely? I never made Daniel any promises. Not one.

So instead of explaining to him, I’ll try to sort it out in my own head. You know, so often when you do that, you realize things weren’t as bad as you’d imagined them to be, don’t you? What in my head might have become an excruciatingly embarrassing episode might well turn out not to have even registered with other people or, if it has, to be just a humorous footnote, something and nothing. I’m sure that’ll turn out to be the case here. Something and nothing.

Not surprisingly I remember much more about the beginning of the night than the end. I remember arriving at your house, and seeing the swollen wisteria plant that grows around the front porch reaching all the way up to the wrought iron balcony, sagging with fairy lights, and thinking how beautiful it would be if I hadn’t just had a big argument with Daniel (about weekend parking restrictions, if I remember right), and if the lights weren’t jumping about in front of my eyes like fireflies.

Then I remember walking through to the back of the house, and how Susan had created a sort of passageway, lined with tea lights and photos from your two and a half decades together, all reprinted the same size in dramatic black and white. There was one in particular I remember looking at for so long that Daniel hissed I was creating a logjam as other arriving guests queued impatiently behind. It was a photo of you and Susan with Liam and Emily when they were tiny. You had Liam on your shoulders and Susan was holding Emily on her hip, and you were both dressed in shorts and flip-flops as if you’d come straight off the beach. Susan was saying something to a very cross-looking Emily obviously trying to cheer her up, and her mouth was stretched into an enormous smile as she cajoled her pouting daughter. Meanwhile you were gazing directly at Susan and your own smile was just for her.

You looked like the cat with the cream. It was jolt to remember that by the time that photo was taken, just a few years into your marriage, you’d already had two affairs, or maybe three. You once told me,
with a certain amount of rueful regret, that you’d even taken a girl’s phone number while on your honeymoon and met up with her after you got back.

“I’m not proud of myself,” you’d told me. “It was never about not loving Susan. There was just something in me that made me behave like that. I’m very damaged in many ways.”

When we arrived at the back of the house, emerging through the glass-roofed kitchen, where the reflections of tea lights danced on the ceilings like stars, I almost cried when I saw what Susan had done with the garden. The colored lanterns hanging from the trees, the candles reflected in the mirrored mosaic along the back wall—it was so beautiful. It really was. Glancing up at the house, I saw that every window twinkled with fairy lights, even your study at the top. I gazed at it for a long time, thinking of all the times you’d emailed me from there. “I feel imprisoned up here,” you’d declared dramatically. “I don’t belong here. I belong with you.”

Of course there wasn’t much of the garden on show because the marquee took up a lot of space. Inside, Susan had gone for a Japanese-style theme, with long tables and low seating and silk-covered cushions. Everywhere I looked were people gasping about how wonderful it looked, and what a special couple you were and how refreshing in this day and age to see such a long, solid marriage. The noise in my head kept getting worse and worse, as I struggled to hear what they were saying, and my restless fingers ceaselessly tap-tapped against my glass.

I remember Daniel telling me I’d already had two glasses of champagne. And me replying “And? Who made you alcohol monitor?” I remember the smile fading on Susan’s face when she saw my dress, but how she recovered herself quickly. “I seem to have started a trend,” she joked, but Emily, standing next to her in a clingy sky-blue dress that made her suddenly enormous bump look like a giant Iced Gem, looked venomous. “I brought you those baby clothes,” I told her, my voice hesitant as if I was attempting a foreign tongue. But when I looked for the bag I thought I’d brought, it wasn’t there, like the baby that never was.

And I remember you, Clive.

I remember you were talking to a couple I didn’t know over by the bar in the marquee. Your hands were gesturing expansively as you told one of your witty anecdotes, and they were both listening raptly. All of a sudden you glanced up, probably trying to remember the punch line (isn’t it awful what age does to our powers of joke telling, how it robs us of that moment of effortless revelation?). I’ve never fully understood before that phrase about the blood draining from someone’s face. Well, not until Saturday night. Your expression was a picture, Clive, it really was. And I have a feeling you quite lost your track in the story you were telling because the smiles on your audience’s faces started to look at little bit strained as they turned around to see what you were looking at. You recovered yourself well though, I must say. Must be all those years of conference speaking, I imagine.

All those things I remember perfectly. And I remember spotting Liam across the room and walking straight over to him, the drugs in my system propelling me forward. He was talking to a couple of young women, I recall, both of them wearing dresses that ended just below their bottoms and enormously high shoes with straps that looked like rib cages going up past their ankles. When I smiled at him, he smiled back, but immediately I realized he didn’t have the faintest idea who I was. I remember putting my hand out and saying something about meeting him at the brasserie and he said “of course,” in a very unconvincing way.

Daniel was right behind me and I introduced him to Liam, explaining where we’d met. “He served me some lovely wine,” I said. How idiotic was that? The wine wasn’t even terribly nice!

And all the time I was conscious of your eyes on me and it seemed impossible that everyone else in the room could be oblivious to the current running between us. I caught your gaze just once and there was a message in the hard shards of your eyes and the twitch at the corner of your mouth that was as clear as if you’d spoken it out loud. It didn’t require any interpretation. I knew you wanted to kill me.

Does that sound fanciful? I can just see you making a disapproving face at me allowing myself to indulge in such flights of fantasy.
“Real life isn’t like Midsomer Murders,” you’d say. Yet I know without any shadow of doubt that right there, right then, in that Japanese-themed marquee flanked by your wonderful family, celebrating your renewed marriage to your wonderful wife, surrounded by your wonderful friends, you wanted to kill me.

In many ways I was flattered.

After that my memories grow more disjointed. I remember my heart racing as if it wanted to gallop clear out of my chest and back through the fairy-tale garden and the candlelit passage and out through the front door and into the street where the air was fresh enough to breathe properly.

I remember Daniel asking me if I was all right so many times I began to feel like I was trapped in a kind of endless Groundhog Day. I drank more champagne because he kept telling me not to and noticed there were fireworks shooting across my eyes.

“I want you to leave. Now,” you hissed when you intercepted me coming back from the loo (such a hilarious idea to have yours and Susan’s faces printed on the loo paper. Liam’s work I imagine. How you must all have roared with laughter). Your face was closed like a trap.

“Are you threatening me?” I said, in my voice that wasn’t my voice.

You walked away, but I knew you were still watching as I crossed the floor and found Susan (how convenient the bright pink of her dress turned out to be—a beacon guiding me in).

“Lovely party,” I said, knowing you could see everything.

Susan glanced across at you, that much I remember. It occurred to me then that you two must have had words about me before the evening started. Perhaps you’d have done your “Sally isn’t terribly stable” routine. That look that passed between you, complicit, exclusive, was what finally tipped me over, I think.

“I need to speak to you privately, Susan,” I said.

As soon as the words were out, I knew that I was going to tell her everything. I knew then beyond a doubt that you were never coming back (finally, that exercise Helen made me do was taking hold). What use was there then in holding on to the secret I’d hugged to me for so long like a wraparound cardigan? Susan deserved to know what kind
of man she’d just remarried. But of course, that wasn’t my real motivation. Really, I wanted to see it all torn down, the colored lanterns ripped from the trees, the marquee poles wrenched out of position so the whole monstrous edifice collapsed around the heads of the shrieking guests. I wanted to see the quirky jacket with the fuchsia pink velvet collar (nice touch, that matching his ’n’ hers element) torn from your back. I wanted you exposed. I wanted them to see you for what you were—Liam, Susan, Emily. I wanted to leave a mark on your life that you would never be able to erase. I wanted you to know that I could do you harm.

The lights were still dancing around the corners of my vision, but even so I saw how Susan glanced at you again and made a slight face.

“Not tonight, dear. I’m terribly busy. Why don’t you call me next week?”

Then things get hazier still.

I know I tried again to talk to Susan, and I remember how she made her excuses and whispered in Emily’s ear.

I know Daniel tried to get me to leave, and I know I wouldn’t.

Then there was dancing and I was dancing with Liam. I had my arm round his neck, and one of the girls in the impossibly short dresses was standing right by us on her own, her glossy-lipped mouth slightly open in surprise as if I’d just snatched him away from her, as come to think of it, I probably had.

There were speeches. Susan’s first. It was short and funny, and I remember laughing until my knees gave way.

“Please let’s go,” Daniel said. But I wanted to hear your speech, even though each word sliced at my heart with a cheese grater.

“Twenty-six years ago, I thought I’d married the best woman in the world,” you said. “Today I know I’ve married the best woman in the world. I want you to raise your glasses in a toast to my beautiful wife.”

My beautiful wife.

People were cheering and raising their glasses, urine-yellow champagne sloshing against the sides.

“Liar, Liar, Liar,” I shouted, but the sound was muffled. Perhaps the guests heard “hear, hear, hear,” perhaps they heard nothing.

Daniel did though. He turned to me while the rest of the guests were cheering and clapping and tapping their glasses with spoons, until my whole head felt as if it was about to explode, and he stared at me as if I was someone he’d never met before.

That wasn’t the end, but my mind won’t let me remember more. I know I kept trying to talk to Susan and I know she kept avoiding me. I know I went back over to Liam (the shame the shame the shame) and I have a memory of sitting on his knee and him being stiff and unmoving and of the girl with the rib cage shoes shaking her head in amused disgust, her long glossy hair shimmering like brown velvet.