The Mistress's Revenge (3 page)

She did a funny thing with her mouth when I cried, scrunching her lips together very tightly and blinking a bit while looking straight at me, her fingers still poised expectantly over her keyboard ready to fill in the “presenting problem” box. As she waited for me to stop crying, she did the same thing Helen does, tilting her head to one side while maintaining the lip-scrunching expression. I wonder if that’s a gesture all medical
practitioners are taught in Sympathy Classes. Does your shrink do that too? I expect they probably do a higher class of sympathy in Harley Street, do they? Maybe the head tilting is an exclusively NHS gesture.

“Poor old you,” she said.

As I cried, and the young blonde doctor tilted and scrunched, I suddenly had an image of myself as I must look to her—another middle-aged woman in a brown coat sobbing in a GP’s office on a weekday afternoon, and that just made me cry even harder, great snotty gulps that tore from me like vomit (I can see you frowning at that crass simile—you always fancied yourself as a wordsmith. “I’ll write a book one of these days, when I have time,” you always said as if it was as simple as bleeding a radiator).

When I’d calmed down a bit and got through five tissues from the square, pastel-colored box she kept on the shelf above her computer, she asked me what was making me so upset. I was in a quandary then. I wanted to tell her the truth because really I wanted the help she was offering so sweetly, and yet this was, after all, my family practice. I didn’t want to bring my children in at a future date, for a repeat asthma prescription or an unexplained rash, and find the same doctor sitting there, meeting my eyes with a quick conspiratorial lip scrunch. I didn’t want to see her look at them with pity as she inspected their tongues or shone a light in their ears, knowing their mother was a slut. Can you see my dilemma now?

So I told her between sniffs that my life was a mess, my relationship a disaster, my finances in ruins, my career a joke. I told her all the truths—except the big one. I didn’t tell her about you. I don’t know that she was actually that interested in the whole truth and nothing but the truth anyway, to be honest. She was much more concerned about the form she got me to fill in that listed lots of different scenarios and I had to circle the frequency with which they happened to me. When she asked me the one about feeling like I’d be better off dead, she looked very saddened when I circled option 3, “a lot of the time.” I was glad then, I hadn’t gone for my first choice, option 4, “all or almost all of the time,” which was far closer to the truth. Who wouldn’t feel they’d be better off dead if given the choice?

Between my snivels, I asked the sympathetic doctor for “something to help me sleep.”

“Oh dear, there’s nothing quite so awful as going without sleep, is there?” she said, and her long blonde hair made a little whooshing noise through the air as she shook her head sadly to emphasize how very sincerely she was empathizing.

“But you know sleeping pills are a very quick fix. They’re not actually addressing the underlying issues.”

As she said the word “underlying” her voice dropped suddenly very low, as if it were something a little distasteful.

“So we don’t really tend to prescribe them. We prefer to look at alternatives like cognitive behavioral therapy or, in some cases, antidepressants.”

I stared at her blearily through the tissue that was clamped to my nose and asked: “Will either of those work in time for me to get some sleep tonight?”

The young doctor laughed as if I’d said something quite funny. “I’m afraid the antidepressants won’t kick in for a good few weeks, and therapy is pretty much a long-term proposition,” she said kindly.

“So I have to wait a good few weeks before I can get a decent night’s sleep?” I asked her stupidly.

She did the scrunchy lip thing again.

“Poor old you,” she said a second time, at which point I obviously started blubbing all over again. “You’re having an awful time, aren’t you? But I’m afraid you’re just going to have to grit your teeth and get through these next few weeks. Just keep telling yourself that it’s not for long and in just a few weeks you will feel better.”

Just a few weeks?

Is she totally mad?

I
had such a lovely time with Susan last night. She’s such fun. I can quite see why you married her.

I’m trying to decide which was the best part, but you know I rather think it might have been getting ready. Does that sound silly? You see,
all the time I was getting showered and dithering over what to wear, I was imagining what might be going on in your house, and what might be going through your mind as you watched Susan getting dressed up to come and meet me. Did you try to issue some subtle warning, I wonder? Did you say “You know, Sally’s never been terribly stable’? Or your favorite: “She’s one of those sad, damaged women.” Yes, I rather think you might have. Susan will, of course, have been brisk but kind. “Oh you’re just an old misogynist,” she might have chided. “Sally’s just a little bit socially awkward. Anyway, I feel sorry for her.” Susan is always collecting lost causes. It was one of the things you used to complain about most bitterly. “Oh, I expect one of Susan’s misfits will be hanging around at supper,” you’d sigh. Or “We had to take one of Susan’s dysfunctionals with us on holiday.”

We started off in the Coach and Horses on Greek Street. Oh, how silly of me. Of course you know where the Coach and Horses is. It was with you I first went there. Now, for goodness’ sake, don’t read anything into my choice of venue. It just happened to be the first thing that popped into my head when I was arranging things with Susan. It’s very convenient, that’s all. Central for both of us. I can’t pretend that the irony of it completely escaped me, however, and I admit I did have a little chuckle when I steered Susan to that exact same table where we sat that one time when you asked me to marry you. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that little incident. You’d been having one of your periodic meltdowns where you angsted about where our relationship was going and you emailed me, terribly excited, to say you’d come up with some sort of a plan.

When I squeezed into the pub to meet you—it’s always so very crowded, isn’t it?—you had a smile on your face as big as Brazil.

“I know you’re going to think I’m being silly,” you said. How ridiculous that word “silly” always sounded coming from you with your ex-boxer’s physique, your angry curls, your flattened, much-broken nose. “But I’ve come up with an idea that might make both of us feel just a little bit secure.”

I felt relieved then, I remember. Finally you’d come up with a solution that didn’t involve wrecking lives and destroying families. Sliding
into the seat opposite you, my cheeks still flushed from my walk through Soho Square, I gazed at you expectantly, waiting for you to provide me with whatever answer had been staring us in the face the whole time.

“I want to ask you to marry me!”

My expression must have been a picture, it really must, because your terribly-pleased-with-yourself smile was already fading when I blurted out the one basic fact that you seemed to have overlooked: “But you’re already married!”

You looked a bit cross then and petulant, as if it was pedantic of me to have become hung up on a technicality at a moment of high romance such as this.

“I know I’m married,” you told me, clearly hurt. “I just wanted you to know how serious I am about you. I wanted to give you some measure of commitment.”

“How can you commit to me when you’re already committed to your wife?” I asked you, quite reasonably I thought.

Again that shadow of irritation passed over your face.

“I thought you’d be pleased,” you said, and your voice was small and bruised like an overripe plum.

Ironic now to think that the one marriage proposal of my life (I don’t count Daniel’s “Weddings are a waste of money but we should look into whether it’s worth doing it for tax reasons”) should have come from a married man.

I loved you I loved you I loved you I loved you.

S
usan was looking slightly older, I thought (although at forty-six she’s not far off my age), but more peaceful. Sorry, does that make her sound like a corpse? What I mean is she’d lost that gaunt look she wore for the last year of our affair. Not that I really got a chance to study her in those days, you understand. My guilt kept my gaze constantly averted, bouncing off the very corners of her so that I only ever took in small pieces—a blue eye sunk like a pebble into damp sand
creases, the corner of a mouth pulled down to the chin by invisible thread, the way sunlight brought the split ends of her straight white-blonde hair into sharp relief.

Last night though, she was sleeker, shinier, plumper. Her smile had lost the weariness of old. She was wearing her trademark navy blue, but she had over her dress a white jacket with a sequined trim that sparkled where the lights in the pub hit it. She looked alive.

“You look wonderful,” I told her, truthfully.

“Thank you, love, and so do you.”

It was nice of her to lie, but I could see she was a little bit shocked. You see, I haven’t exactly been looking after myself since we last saw one another (can it really be three months ago, that hunched figure weeping in the rain outside the restaurant on York Way?). Grief has hollowed me out with a blunt spoon, troweling grooves into flaccid flesh. My hair bears the telltale stripes of a bad home dye, the roots an alarming shade of blood-orange where the chemicals have been absorbed by greedy strands of gray, the rest a rusty brown, like corroded iron. I’ve lost weight (oh, the wonders of the Misery Diet) so now I wear my skin like an ill-fitting suit and the bones protrude, lumpen from my chest. Thank God she couldn’t see my legs where the hairs proliferate like weeds now that no one looks at them anymore.

“Sorry I’m late,” she bustled, shaking out her hair and trying not to look at the black shadows around my eyes or the slight Citalopram tremor of my fingers.

“Clive wanted me to go with him and look at some shoes he wants to buy. He’s such a terrible baby about things like that. So that threw my day out completely.”

I imagined the two of you peering into the shop window. It would be that old-fashioned men’s shoe shop up near Hampstead—you’ve told me before that’s the only place you’ll ever go. I remember how excited you were when you bought that pair of brown suede brogues there, and how much you fussed about them getting muddy when we went for that walk around the old mental asylum at Shenley in Hertfordshire. All those days out in places expressly chosen because no one else in their right minds would want to go there. All those pub lunches
in nameless villages up the A1 with floral cushions tied to the chair seats and midweek specials, three courses for £9.95.

I remember all that while Susan tells me all about the business of being her, about how hard she’s been working and how much she’s looking forward to getting away with you next week to the manor house in Scotland owned by your old friend Gareth Powell, the historian.

“It’s a wonderful place,” she tells me. “The full monty—flagstoned floors, big open fireplaces, a housekeeper who brings you cups of tea and homemade cakes.”

Well, it was all I could do not to chime in then, adding to the list. “How about the faded Persian carpets or the four-poster beds with the white, extra-fine Egyptian cotton bed linen?”

Don’t be silleeeee, I didn’t actually say all that. Nor did I tell her how many times you’d begged me to make up an elaborate excuse so I could have a “night off” and come to Scotland with you. How you’d already squared it with Gareth, who was excited by the thought of aiding and abetting a love affair (funny how, right at the end, in that agonizing endless lunch, you told me he’d advised you to give me up. “You’ll always love her, dear boy,” he’d apparently told you, this womanizing, two-faced, hypocritical old dandy. “But you know you have to give Susan another chance. It’s the right thing to do”). Wafting your open invitation at me, you’d built up a picture of how we’d spend our time in Scotland (“Make it two nights,” you’d wheedled. “Please”). We’d get up at six and take the path that threaded down from the gardens through the rocks and onto the little beach. “We’ll throw pebbles into the water,” you’d told me, “and sit on the big rock at the far end and take off our shoes and socks and dangle our feet in the water. And at night we’ll lie on the big old squishy tapestry sofa in front of the log fire and make love and then I’ll carry you up to bed and we’ll make love some more.” (I didn’t like to mention your bad back, not when you were so carried away by the Harlequin romance of your little fantasy.)

So this is what was going through my head as Susan was describing how very much she was looking forward to the Scottish mini break.
Of course I never had been able to engineer a whole night off to go with you, let alone two, but I’d pictured it in my head so many times. The house, the housekeeper, the fire, the sofa. Us, us, us. Except now it’s not to be us, after all. It’s to be you and Susan, walking to the beach in the early morning—you holding her hand to help her over the rocks, the two of you sitting side by side, feet dangling while you talk about where you can make changes in your marriage, how you can make it stronger.

Oh yes, Susan told me all about how you two have been through a rough patch but are now talking more than you’ve ever done throughout your marriage. I was very touched that she opened up so much, really I was. I hadn’t been expecting such a level of intimacy as, goodness knows, we’ve never had it before, but as Susan herself said, all the talking and couple counseling you’ve been doing recently has obviously made her more “connected” to her emotions.

Incidentally, don’t you think that’s a funny term? “Connected to my emotions.” It’s as if there was an option to choose to be unconnected to them, to somehow unbuckle them like a backpack and shrug them off onto the floor and leave them behind. I wish I could do that. Maybe it’s something I could ask Helen Bunion about, whether she can help me disconnect from my emotions. Maybe there’s a mental exercise one can do (Helen is very big on mental exercises). Or maybe we could role-play it. I could be me and she could be the backpack, or the other way around. Or there might be a visualization technique that could work. I could imagine packing those pesky emotions away into the back of a drawer or a box in the attic.