The Mistress's Revenge (35 page)

H
ello. It’s been a while.

Sorry, does that sound like a Tim Rice lyric? I rather fear it does.

To be honest, I haven’t even been able to pick up this journal in all these months. Strange to think at one stage it was practically surgically welded to my hands. How quickly we ingrates outgrow our support systems, eh, Clive?

I don’t need to look at the last entry to remember when it was and what it said. Nearly fifteen months ago but it remains scratched into my mind with a rusty nail. The bus, the hospital, the baby.

I won’t think about the baby.

O
f course, there have been a lot of changes since then. I like to think that progress has been made, of a sort.

For starters, I’m no longer the Invisible Woman in the Cubbyhole, half chair, half human. As, for that matter, you’re no longer the Sad Fuck in a Box. That’s a kind of progress wouldn’t you say, right there?

The cubbyhole is no more, the house is no more. I don’t have to hide myself away from Daniel and the children in order to scribble in this notebook. I have all the time in the world now. Funny how I used to dream of having time to myself. Time to do my own thing free of other people’s expectations. Now it often seems as if I have nothing but time. And no one expects anything. Be careful what you wish for. Isn’t that right?

I’m lying on my uncomfortable bed now (how many beds did we share over the years, Clive? I imagine them in a row like a Slumberland showroom, some queen-size, some swollen with pillows, many with those bolted on headboards-cum-bedside-cabinets you find in cheap chain hotels; all filled with ghosts). Looking up, I can just about see
through the window where October is massing stolid in the gray sky. A room with a view. A room of my own.

Be careful what you wish for.

T
here’s a card from Jamie on the melamine bedside table. It has a picture of flowers on the front, and inside is written, in careful joined-up writing, “Good luck, Mum.” The letters, so conscientiously rounded, are painful for me to see; it’s like someone is sewing them straight onto my heart, so I try not to look at them too often.

Nothing from Tilly of course.

“She’ll forgive in her own time,” Daniel said the last time he brought Jamie to visit. “It has been very hard on her.”

He didn’t have to add “and on all of us.” It was written in the hollow plains of his face, in the gray hair now threading through the blond.

I remember Tilly’s face as she described to me, on one of her rare early visits, how she and Jamie gone back to the house with Daniel, just before it was repossessed, knowing that they had just a few hours to salvage from it whatever they could. Working against the clock, she’d stuffed her things—all the lovingly collected detritus of childhood, cards from friends, photos of girls in pink pajamas taken at various sleepovers, posters, festival wristbands—into black bin bags and carried them outside. She told me how the neighbors had pretended not to be staring and, as she spoke, hotly remembered shame oozed from every pore. These days I’ll grab at any branch to flay myself with and my mental birch filled in all the details her adolescent awkwardness refused to furnish. In my mind I saw the bags lined up on the pavement outside, Jamie’s ripped where he had overstuffed them with the broken train sets and remote control cars he was too big to play with now, but couldn’t bear to leave behind. I saw the stained mattresses leaning against the garden wall, and the grubby, misshapen cushions. I saw Tilly’s humiliation as she noticed one of her bags was open at the top, a teen bra spilling over the side. Each image was another lash of the birch.

I deserve it, of course. I deserve it all.

My poor, lost girl.

D
aniel told me about Sian without meeting my eyes, just a few weeks ago.

“I’m delighted,” I lied.

I’m not, of course. To tell you the truth, the idea of Daniel and Sian together sickens me to a degree I never could have imagined. At night, I torment myself imagining her sleeping on my side of the bed, slotting effortlessly into the life I thought I didn’t want. The surprise, I suppose, is that she should have wanted it, although the more I think about it, and about her face when she said: “A Birkin bag won’t care about me when I’m old,” the less of a surprise it turns out to be. To be quite frank though, I’m horrified at the idea of Sian being the mother to my children that I spectacularly failed to be, the image of her hairbrush in my kids’ bathroom, her high-heeled black work shoes next to Jamie’s muddy sneakers in the hall. Despite all those years of evangelical singledom, my fear is that she will slide into my family like melted butter. And Daniel will allow it, of course, just as he allows most things, convincing himself that the path of least resistance is the very path he would have chosen for himself anyway. Sometimes I force myself to picture it, enjoying the brutal stab of pain that comes from imagining her face next to Daniel’s on the sheets I bought, or how she might smooth back the damp hair from Jamie’s face when he has one of his nightmares. Those things I force myself to confront, yet when I picture her in the early-morning gloom, preparing the sandwiches for Tilly and Jamie’s lunch-boxes, my mind closes down. Funny the inconsequential things that prove too painful to be endured.

The night after Daniel told me I bit a hole clear through my pillowcase. It was quite shocking to see it the next morning, jagged and ugly and soggy with grief. But I said, “I’m delighted,” because of that need I have to be punished and to suffer.

Sian has yet to make the journey to see me. She wrote me a long letter though, saying things like: “If I’d thought for a minute you still had feelings for Daniel, I’d never...” and “You can never know how much I’ve agonized about this, how much we both have.” So now it’s Sian and Daniel who are “we both.” Now that Daniel is irrevocably lost to me, I can finally, as Helen Bunion had urged for so long, experience him as a separate entity, and I can see how far removed he is from the ineffectual man my warped obsession had made him out to be. Turns out he is stronger than I ever gave him credit for. He has had to be. More importantly, I see now he has something that I never really noticed before, certainly never valued. Integrity. Oh, don’t make that face, Clive. I know how you’d scoff. “I haven’t an ounce of integrity,” you used to boast, adding “thank God,” for comic effect. Now, belatedly, I see how integrity might have its advantages.

T
here is a folded, unread newspaper next to the bed. Today’s. I don’t have to open it to know it will carry a picture of your face—perhaps the same one as on your website. That’s the one the papers often seem to choose. How pleased you must be that you selected that so judiciously. Next to it might well be that photograph of me taken at your vow renewal party. The skeleton in pink is how I think of it. I think that must be the only one the media can get hold of. My friends and family have been very loyal. Much more so than I deserve.

Rarely does a photo of one of us appear without the other. How ironic after you invested so much in trying to distance yourself from me that you and I should end up bound so inextricably together, our images forever twinned in the public imagination.

The other day there was a new photograph of you. I don’t mean to offend you, Clive, but I was a little shocked. How old you seem to have gotten suddenly. And how gaunt. The last time we met I bemoaned that extra layer of fat you wore like a detachable coat lining. And yet now it’s gone I find I mourn it. Funny, but that’s about the only thing I miss these days. If it wasn’t for the associations with what
happened, I don’t know that I’d feel anything now when I look at your picture. You’d be just another man. Sorry. Another Tim Rice moment. I do apologize. I don’t know what has come over me. Really I don’t.

M
y eyelids feel weirdly heavy, probably a result of not sleeping last night. I do believe I saw every shade of night through the uncurtained window, while my thoughts raced chaotically on, and my heart hammered away inside me. The walls are so bare in here, there’s nothing to look at except the window. For the first time in ages, I longed for a sleeping pill—just one little white lozenge-shaped merciful Zopiclone. But I am free of all that now. Whether through accident or design, my body really has become a temple. I’ve put on weight too, gaining just as quickly as you seem to have lost. Why, it’s almost as if I’ve been sucking you dry, Clive!

To be frank, before last night it had been a long time since I really thought properly about you. I suppose it must be some kind of psychological self-preservation thing. One’s mind won’t allow one too close to the things one cannot bear to face.

But last night, it all unfurled again, that endless, nightmare carpet that led me here.

I knew I’d have to go through it again today. I knew everyone’s eyes would be on me, judging me, my day of reckoning.

To be honest, I’ve been shocked by the amount of interest there’s been in the whole thing. All those letters, all those messages. The few times I’ve ventured onto the internet I’ve found forums where people I don’t know discuss all aspects of it all—motivation, moral prerogative—as if you and I were characters in a play rather than real people. So I knew there would be a crowd, but I had no idea until I was driven there and saw the press of bodies outside, some with cameras, even TV cameras, exactly how big it was going to be.

You can’t imagine, Clive, how it felt to be in that room. Sitting trying to look as if I was concentrating on what was being said, but all the time aware that everyone was looking at me, crowds of jostling
strangers, staring as if I was a character on their favorite soap, not as if I actually existed there in real life just feet away from them.

Oh silly me. Of course you can imagine it! You’re used to all that, you with your public-speaking background.

Mind you, the last time I saw you on the television, on the evening news, a few days ago, you were looking far from at ease, if you don’t mind me saying so. They’d filmed you climbing the steps of the courthouse, and you were almost hunched over as if not wanting to show your face. Just the top of your head was visible and I couldn’t help thinking how much thinner your hair has become. She was holding your hand, of course, and there was no matching shyness from her, as she smiled straight into the camera lenses, almost as if she’d been practicing. You must have been very proud of her, although I have to say you didn’t look it. You looked, and I almost hesitate to say this as I know how much you’ll hate it, but you looked smaller somehow. Diminished. She, in contrast, seemed enormous, an Amazon among women, gripping your hand with iron fingers.

Be careful what you wish for.

T
his room seems so hot, despite the cool October weather outside. I can’t get comfortable. I’m lying here propped up on one elbow, and all the muscles in my neck feel like they’re straining in the wrong direction. Yet one more consequence of getting older, I suppose.

There’s a photograph on the beside table, propped up against the reading light next to Jamie’s good luck card. It’s one Daniel brought me of the two of us with Tilly and Jamie on holiday in France seven years ago, so it predates you. I wonder if that’s why Daniel chose it. We’d rented a big house in the countryside near Bordeaux with two other families, an eccentric place that had once been a recording studio. There was a swimming pool outside and I remember we had to take turns to act as lifeguards because Jamie was only three or four and treacherously transfixed by the brilliant blue water. Tilly at eight was still young enough to be happy most of the time and to believe her
parents were basically on her side. We are all sitting on the back steps of the house. Daniel and I on the lower step, Tilly and Jamie above us. I can’t remember who took the photograph. Must have been one of the other adults. Funny, I can’t even be sure exactly which friends they were. All the holidays from that time blend into one another in a blur of big Greek salads and chilled white wine.

Jamie is leaning over Daniel’s shoulder, laughing at something just out of sight. Possibly the person who took the picture was making one of those faces adults make when they want children to smile for photos. Daniel is looking slightly up at Jamie, and laughing probably just because Jamie is. Tilly’s still chubby arms are round my neck and her face is burrowed into my neck, blowing a raspberry most likely. But it is my own face I keep being drawn to. My mouth open in a roar of hilarity, my eyes all but lost to laughter lines. I am indisputably happy. I am unrecognizable.

Of course I know why Daniel chose this particular photo. To remind me, as if I needed reminding, of what I once had and what I’ve lost. I don’t blame him. I would have done the same.

But you know the odd thing, at the very same time as I mourn that Sunday supplement family in the photograph, I’m reminded of another memory from that same holiday, or one very much like it. We are driving along the autoroutes of Western France. The kids are overheating in the back of the car, uncomfortably trapped by excess pillows and sleeping bags. My feet are wedged into one side of the passenger footwell by a bag of last-minute provisions that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. At the wheel, Daniel, oblivious to the clammy irritability pervading the rest of the car, is humming to himself. Every now and again, he breaks off to read out a road sign. He has always fancied himself a linguist and he pronounces the names of the French towns with obscene, though clearly sincere, relish. Veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeldeeyuh (Villedieu), Aavronsh (Avranches). With every utterance, my stress levels are rising. I will him to stop, but he carries on. Leeeeeeeeeeemowj (Limoges). I have lost the circulation in my feet, the kids are squabbling fretfully in the back as I look down at the map and see that the next turnoff will be for a town called Châteaubriant. As soon as
I have seen the name, I hear Daniel’s voice in my head saying it out loud “Shatowbreeeeeonte,” and I know, beyond all doubt, that if he does, I will throw open the car door and run and run and never stop. My whole body tenses as we get nearer to the turnoff and I await the first signpost to Châteaubriant. My knuckles on the road atlas are white with anticipation. Now, all these years later, I can’t remember what happened next, whether Daniel lost interest in pronouncing the French names, or whether he did and I somehow let it wash over me. But I still remember that clenched dread, that conviction that a breaking point had been reached.