The Mistress's Revenge (30 page)

Then Daniel was pulling me away and I didn’t want to go, but he said you had told him to get me home.

“You’re ruining their party,” he shouted.

“They’ve ruined my life,” I shouted back.

Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just slumped defeated and allowed myself to be dragged off. I don’t remember going back through the fairy-tale garden. I don’t remember retracing our steps along the candlelit passageway, past the shorts and flip-flops photo. I don’t remember anyone saying good-bye at the wisteria-framed front door. I do remember being sick into a particularly splendid hydrangea, and again by the curb.

I remember Daniel sitting in the driving seat of the car with his forehead pressing against the steering wheel.

I don’t remember anything more.

But that’s enough, don’t you think?

That’s more than enough.

J
amie came into the bedroom to see me a couple of hours ago and to talk about his birthday.

To be quite honest, I’d forgotten he had a birthday coming up. I felt a stab of pure panic. Birthdays are when things are expected of you, only I’m having trouble remembering what those things are. There are things I should be doing. If only I could get out of bed.

Daniel wants to call the doctor. I keep trying to imagine the young blonde doctor, with her matching shoes and tights, sitting on the edge of this bed, strewn with the fallout of the last three days.

“Poor old you,” she might say, eyeing the tissues and the cups and this notebook. “You are having a rotten time.”

I promised Daniel I’d get up; I told him I’m feeling better.

“We have to talk about what happened,” he repeated. But I sensed a slight wavering, as if it was already losing urgency.

Daniel thinks the doctor will be able to give me a neat pill and make me better. He doesn’t know that what’s wrong with me is you, and that there is no cure for that.

So I’m about to get up and dressed for the first time since Saturday. I don’t want to, but I must.

I’ve decided that I will turn getting up into a symbolic ritual. I will brush you off like old toast crumbs, I will leave you behind in the crumpled sheets, I will wash you on a boil wash until you are scrubbed raw and disinvested of all power. I will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the last five years and become the person I was meant to be, the one who inhabits that parallel universe in which I never met you but remained a good mother to my children and a dutiful lover to Daniel. I will make the last five years disappear. Pffffff! Like the baby that never was.

I will not think about how you got off scot-free, or what you took from me, or how you lied.

I will be free of you. I will not think of you. I will rebuild everything.

B
ack in the cubbyhole while the sickly moonlight trickles under the door, and the house winces in its sleep.

I am looking up information on Maui on Google. It looks incredible. Lucky you. You and Susan must be two days into your second honeymoon now, enough time to settle in and become acclimated. I’ve worked out if it’s 3:20
A.M.
here, it must be 4:20
P.M.
there. I imagine
the two of you will have enjoyed an hour or two rest after a long lunch somewhere in the shade. I expect you had fresh fish. You always did love that, probably with a simple green salad (you’ll both be watching your weight a bit after the blowout of the vows party). Now you might be contemplating a stroll down to the beach. Maybe you’ll buy a bottle of chilled white wine to take with you, or else pick up a drink from a beach bar somewhere.

You’ll both have your mobiles on you, of course. A busy, successful couple like you two never goes anywhere without being in constant contact with the outside world. And of course there’s always Emily to think of. I know she was frantic when she realized you’d be gone for a whole week when she was entering her last month of pregnancy.

“You obviously care more about getting a suntan than about your new grandchild,” she’d told Susan, wounded.

So I know you won’t want to risk missing a call from her.

What if I was to send a message to Susan? Now, as you strolled hand in hand following your nap? Would it really hurt? I could apologize for the other night, but tell her I still need to talk to her urgently. “I think you deserve to know about Clive,” I’d say.

Of course I won’t really do that. It would be cruel to do that to someone on their second honeymoon. I’ll wait until she comes back. I won’t bother her now.

But, do you know what’s so silly? Despite what I’ve just written, I’ve known all along that I would. As soon as I’d finished that last sentence, I picked up my mobile and started tapping out a text. I want to stop her, you see. I want to stop her before you arrive at the beach and start laying out your towels. I want to halt her midstep, while the sun scalds down on her bent head, and the tie of her halter-neck bathing suit digs into the back of her neck. I want her to look up at you in that still-white heat and know finally who you are.

N
ow it would be 6:15 Maui time. I’ve sent five texts to Susan and heard nothing.

A few seconds ago my phone finally beeped, but it was a message from your phone. How I hate my treacherous heart for the way it still lurches at the sight of your name in my inbox.

I picked up your message while Susan was sleeping. You are now blocked from both our phones and email accounts. Leave us alone and get some help.

Get some help.

I’m still trying to work out what kind of help I might need. Who do you think, Clive, might be able to help me divest myself of you? I’d really, really like to know. Is there a church body that can exorcise unwanted people from our lives? Is there some sort of salon where I could go to have you stripped off me with hot wax? Is there a doctor who can administer an enema to flush you out? Is there an architect who can rebuild the life you’ve left in the rubble?

I wish you’d tell me, Clive. I really do. I’ll take all the help I can get. I’m not proud. I’ll take it all.

Only there isn’t any help, when everyone I see is wearing your face, and every moment that passes is a moment further away from you, and when I look ahead all I can see is what isn’t there, and the life that’s in front of me is a taunting reminder of the life I should have had.

Do you see my problem, Clive?

Do you see?

Just a little empathy and I’m sure you will.

I
was still fast asleep when Daniel woke me up trying to force a letter into my face. I’d taken a couple of Zopiclone, maybe more, and was having trouble surfacing. His face kept swimming in front of me, red and cross.

“You have to wake up. I know you’re not really asleep.”

He wasn’t right, of course. I was asleep. I love the Zopiclone mornings when I can turn sleep off and on at will.

“It’s not fair of you waking me up. You know I have problems getting to sleep.”

Daniel wasn’t budging.

“For fuck’s sake, it is half past fucking four in the afternoon. The kids are home from school already. How do you think it fucking feels for them to see their mother comatose in her fucking bed?”

I’m probably exaggerating the number of fucks in that sentence for dramatic effect, but I expect you get the general idea.

To be honest, I was a bit shocked to find out it was that late. I could have sworn I hadn’t been asleep long. But then I probably needed it, wouldn’t you think? Daniel can be so puritanical when he wants to be.

When I finally forced my eyes open, he was still proffering the letter, shaking it impatiently in the direction of my nose.

“This is from the building society. Apparently we owe them six months’ mortgage payments. They want £4,590 by the end of next week or they’re repossessing the house.”

“They can’t do that. They have to send us warning letters first.”

Daniel was ready for that. He’s very quick, I must admit. He’d already gone through the filing cabinet next to my desk and discovered all the unopened letters, which he fanned out in front of me like a magician’s card trick.

“Here are your warning letters. Months and months of them, along with utilities bills and credit card bills. All in all we owe nearly £35,000. What the fuck have you done, Sally?”

Well, put like that it did sound a bit ominous. And when I tried to come up with an explanation, it sounded a bit weak and unconvincing. I mean, I couldn’t very well say that for the last five years I’ve been having an affair with Clive Gooding and he promised me we would have a future together, so when the work started drying up, I didn’t really try too hard to get more. Even Daniel, who is so willfully blinkered, wouldn’t go for that. On the basis that the best form of defense is attack, I decided to remind Daniel of his own dismal past record of financial mismanagement—the fancy kitchen shop that had eaten all our savings, the years working for his brother’s company that was always “about to take off” but never did, and now this sudden decision to retrain as a teacher, with the financial burden that placed on my shoulders.

“You’ve always been so glad to let me look after all that sort of stuff. Well, maybe you should have taken a bit more of an interest.” I was working myself up into an outrage. “Maybe I’m sick of having to deal with everything.”

Daniel shook his head in faux incredulity.

“You haven’t dealt with anything in months,” he spat.

W
hen I dragged myself downstairs to say hello to the children, like a Good Mummy, I was irritated to find Tilly wasn’t there. She’d gone out to one of her friend’s houses, according to Jamie. She could at least have let me know, don’t you think? I wouldn’t have rushed down if I’d known she was gone.

“Will you play Wii with me?” Jamie wanted to know.

I said I would, still in Good Mummy mode, and we played a couple of rounds of Wii tennis but I was finding it a real strain to swing the controller, and I kept forgetting which player was me. My head was still all over the place. “Am I the pink one?” “Am I the one with the glasses?”

“Never mind, Mum,” Jamie told me as I flopped back down onto the sofa and closed my eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”

He’s very intuitive when he wants to be.

The longer Tilly was out, the crosser I became. I didn’t know why she hadn’t just said she was going, and she’d left her mobile behind so we couldn’t call her. I lay on the sofa and tried to ease myself back into the welcome oblivion of sleep, but I could hear Daniel crashing about in the kitchen, slamming down pots. Every now and then he’d come in and stand in the doorway of the living room glaring at me, but I refused to open my eyes, and eventually he’d go away.

By the time Tilly came home, I was ready to have a real go at her, but when she appeared in the living room, my newly reawakened Good Mummy antennae sensed that there was clearly something up.

“A strange man came up to me on the corner of our road,” she said, and while her body language was full of bravado, her voice was that of a small child.

The man had apparently told her he was a friend of mine, and asked her to pass on his best wishes, but there was something about him that she hadn’t liked, something she described as “creepy.”

What did he look like? I wanted to know. But of course I knew already. Shortish and thickset with closely cropped hair and a leather jacket with stripes on the sleeves.

“Who was that then?” Daniel glared at me accusingly.

“Just someone I met through work who lives around here,” I replied.

“Nice friends you have nowadays.”

S
o now it becomes no longer a game (was it ever? I’m starting to wonder). Now my children are involved, and it’s beyond a doubt that the man in the leather jacket exists outside of my own head.

You think you can scare me, Clive. You think I’m a Romanian squeegee man who’ll run away with his bucket slopping. You think I’m a star-struck singer you can intimidate with your platinum discs and great big faux-gold award. You think you have it all in your favor. But you are wrong.

I only want what’s mine.

And if I can’t have what’s mine, I’ll take what’s yours.

T
hank God Daniel has gone to bed now. I can hear him snoring upstairs. Even his snores sound angry.

“You have ruined us,” was his tiresome refrain after the kids had finally gone to bed. So melodramatic. If he didn’t have anything constructive to say, I’d rather he didn’t say anything at all. My mum used to say that, I seem to remember. My mum is dead though. And the dead don’t talk.

He seems to think it is my fault we’ve gotten into such a financial mess. He’s right in a sense, of course, in that I should have opened the
letters, and I should have told him when the work started drying up. But I thought it would all be sorted out, you see? I thought I would be rescued. I thought you would rescue me (interestingly, Helen once accused me of harboring Rescue Fantasies. Isn’t it funny that she should pick up on that? She’s quite intuitive, Helen, although of course I strenuously denied it at the time).

And Daniel shouldn’t have left it all to me. He knows that really. He said as much this evening.

“I suppose I must take some of the blame for sticking my head in the sand,” he admitted.

That was big of him, wasn’t it? But then in the next breath he was laying into me again. Why hadn’t I told him I was having problems? I’ve always been happy to look after the joint account before. He’s not a mind reader (just as well!).

And so it went on, and on and on. And when he wasn’t talking about money, he was talking about the man who “accosted” Tilly. He wanted to call the police, if you can believe it. I pointed out he was being ridiculous, that it was just someone I once met.

“I don’t know you anymore, Sally,” he said (don’t forget Daniel doesn’t work with words, he doesn’t recognize clichés as you or I would).

And then guess what he said? Go on, guess. It’s amusing, really it is. He said: “You need to get some help.”

I’m not making it up! Hand on heart that’s what he said. Word for word the same as you.