The Mistress's Revenge (6 page)

“You should email me sometime,” you told me. “I’ve got a mate who runs a property newspaper. He’ll give you some stuff to write that you might find amusing.”

“Amusing.” I’d never before met anyone successful enough to consider work amusing.

“He’s a bit pompous, isn’t he?” I asked Daniel on the way home, zigzagging up the hill toward our Victorian house with its dark rooms and uninspiring gardens.

“Oh, I really liked him.” Daniel always likes everyone. So much less effort than having to form a real opinion.

Then had come the invitation to lunch at your St. John’s Wood villa. I’d walked into the enormous square hallway with its sweeping staircase, past the gleaming, double-height kitchen and into the “family room” at the back with its curved wall of floor-to-ceiling French windows. I’d taken in the flamboyant rugs and the outsized abstract paintings by a sister of Susan’s who apparently had once been quite well known, and I’d tried to ignore the sickly feeling that swept over me, the knowledge that our own South London Victorian terrace with its knock-through lounge and understairs toilet would never again feel good enough, nice enough, special enough.

A hard, ugly kernel of jealousy lodged in my gut like a gallstone.

I never told you all that, did I? I expect you find it all a bit distasteful. When you come from money, there’s an unwritten law that you should pretend to find both the acquiring of it and the spending
of it rather a tiresome chore, something you frankly don’t really pay much attention to. But when you come from a lackluster semi on the outskirts of a provincial southwestern town, you tend to notice these things.

That lunch was the first time I met Susan. With her rancid dog under one arm and a Scotch in her hand, she meeted and greeted the disparate group she’d gathered with the ease of someone who genuinely likes people, and has faith that there’s a good chance they will probably like each other too.

“Aren’t they just an amazing couple?” whispered Cyd, gazing at you and Susan as though in the throes of a celestial vision and taking a long drag on her long joint. “I just love these guys.”

Of course, it would have been churlish to do anything but love you guys too. There you were with your urbane bonhomie, your table with the theatrical candelabra, groaning with fresh salads and interesting Lebanese meze, all cooked by Susan’s loyal catering team, your Smeg fridge stocked with wine and cava, your hilarious tales of being rollicking drunk at the Ivy with any number of has-been celebrities.

“They’ve been married for more than twenty years! And they’re still so much in love!” Cyd confided in hushed, awed tones.

The hard pellet of jealousy inside me shifted painfully as I thought about the decade of mismatchment Daniel and I had notched up, those one hundred and twenty months jammed uncomfortably together like an ill-fitting jigsaw.

Of course, if I’d known then that the sour-faced divorcée neighbor who sat silently on the end of the table and surveyed each forkful of food mistrustfully before popping it into her mouth was sour only because she’d been once been your lover, leaving her front door open at night for you to slip out of your house in the first-dawn light, and still couldn’t understand why you never came anymore—(“one time I got up to go and she started to cry. That’s when I knew it was over”)—my jealousy might have been tempered slightly and interfered less with my enjoyment of the gorgeous food and entertaining company.

But then, you always hid all that stuff so well.

*  *  *

T
he compartmentalizing is something I never could manage to get right. You were, naturally, a black belt in it. How many times did you make the journey straight from Premier Inn to marital bed without even stopping to pass go? I did admire that, I really did. It probably came from all those years trying to break into the music business, oiling your way into record company offices, turning yourself into whoever the bosses wanted you to be. What’s that they call it nowadays in recruitment terms? A transferable skill. That’s what it is, being able to parcel up all the separate bits of your life into distinct sections and keep them from touching one another like a TV dinner. There’s a lot to be said for a talent like that.

A
nd so it began: a loose and meandering friendship. When invited into your and Susan’s orbit, we’d get together for lunches on your lawn or pile to your Suffolk bolthole to go crab fishing from the jetty in front of the house, or when the weather denied us that adjourn to cozy country pubs, taking over fire-warmed rooms with an arrogant sense of entitlement. And when you weren’t around, well, our life went smoothly along just as it always did. The children went to the local school. Daniel decided to start a mountain-bike hire business and took to cycling off after lunch in a vague spirit of research, returning a few hours later all red cheeks and sticky Lycra. I wrote patchily and badly for magazines, sitting in the cubbyhole in my dressing gown, pitching ideas to commissioning editors in high-heeled shoes and black tailored clothes, eating dressing-free salads in Tupperware containers at their desks. And yes, eventually I did contact your mate Douggie on the property paper. And while the work wasn’t amusing, neither was it onerous. We struck up an email relationship, the two of us, which grew into a faltering but real (or so I liked to think) friendship.

“Susan’s never allowed me to have a female friend before,” you told me, wonderingly. “It’s quite a big departure for her.”

I scoffed then, do you remember? I couldn’t conceive of being “allowed” to have friends of the opposite sex. “Daniel knows he’d be out on his ear if he ever tried to tell me who I could and couldn’t be friends with. You’ve got to have trust, haven’t you?”

Laughable now, isn’t it?

Of course that was before I knew about the divorcée neighbor and the couple of women you’d picked up in a wine bar in Brighton who met up with you for a threesome a few times until you realized they were more interested in each other than you, or the Brazilian prostitute you were given as a “reward” for creating a surprise hit for a has-been South American artist, or the crazy “girlfriend” who liked you to watch while she picked up men in a bar wearing no knickers. Once I knew about all that, I could better understand why Susan might have had certain trust issues—even though she of course had no idea about any of that stuff—your long, illustrious, blindingly successful career of infidelity.

So, I was the one female friend you were allowed to have. I was flattered of course, in my usual shallow way.

“Susan likes you,” you told me. “And she knows you’ve been doing some work for Douggie.”

And so the emails crept up, from a couple a month to one a week, until we were writing every day, several times a day—idle gossip, the waspish observations. I realized that the more acid-tongued I was about my friends or people I met at your parties, the warmer your response. So together we developed denigrating nicknames for them all. Remember Nurse Ratched, with her thin-lipped smile and her white orthopedic-looking shoes, and your favorite, The Child Bride, perpetually astonished by her brood of awful children?

And you egged me on, of course. Finding the inevitable snags of thread in the makeup of perfectly nice people and pulling and pulling until great gaping holes appeared big enough to put a fist through. We excelled, the two of us, in character annihilation and congratulated ourselves on our own discernment, our membership in a little unspoken club of two. That it was founded on an ability to spot the mundane, the laughable, and the weak in everyone apart from ourselves
never bothered us, did it? We turned sneering into an intellectual pursuit and called it wit. And boy, how pleased we were with ourselves.

“You’re the only person who really gets all this stuff,” you’d say to me. “You’re the only one on my wavelength.”

I’d feel as smug as the kid who got an A plus on her history essay, hugging her “well done!” to herself throughout the long school day.

Looking back on it, I was, of course, ripe for the picking. Bored, frustrated, intellectually starved. Your first legitimate female friend. I wore the label like a medal.

Often in your emails, pinged ten miles across London from your jumped-up box room in St. John’s Wood, you’d tell me quite unashamedly how you’d read some mawkish piece in the Daily Mail and started weeping uncontrollably or how the tears were plopping onto your keyboard while you listened to opera at full blast and thought about the mother who died when you were just a child, and the largely useless absentee father, a builder turned property tycoon who never quite knew what to do with the son he wanted to make into both street fighter and aristocrat. And about the resentful grandmother who brought you up in that soulless Hertfordshire pile; the long, lonely days spent chasing ghosts through empty, high-ceilinged rooms and pressing your nose up against the shop window of other people’s family lives.

“I don’t know how to do love,” you always said proudly, as if it were something that ought to come with an instruction leaflet like an IKEA flat-pack wardrobe. “I’m an emotional baby.”

But other times, you’d felt the need to remind me that you could also be very hard. How else, in the days when you were trying to break into the business, could you have kept on knocking on doors that were constantly being closed in your face, taking on men who never gave you the benefit of the doubt. Do you remember that time I went with you to visit the father of a young girl you wanted to sign up, an East wide boy who knew his daughter had talent and wanted a share of it by proclaiming himself her manager? We’d driven out to Essex and taken a stroll hand in hand along the sea front, then parked up in front of an orange-bricked newly built house with tiny windows and mock Roman
columns holding up the porch and you jabbed your elbow into my side when I started giggling at your sudden cockney accent. “Orlroight mate?” you said to the gold-chained man in the high-waisted jeans who opened the door—you with your voice dripping with money—and I bit my lip to stop the laughter. Still, there was obviously some kind of recognition there, I thought, some element of grudging mutual respect. “There’s a side to me that you’ve never seen,” you’d brag. “A side I won’t show you because I don’t want to frighten you off.”

I only saw a glimpse of it once. You’d stopped your ridiculous black Jag at a traffic light on the North Circular (“isn’t is awful?” you’d said the first time you got that car. “It’s such a cliché. I hate it with a passion”). All of a sudden, a gang of pointy-faced Eastern Europeans jumped up from the side of the road with buckets and squeegee mops. “Don’t fucking think about it,” you muttered, as one of them headed determinedly for your car. “They’re only young,” I murmured feebly, but you weren’t listening. Your eyes were locked on the skinny young man approaching the gleaming hood. “Fuck off,” you mouthed, but still he came closer, his expression blank, clearly used to this sort of reaction. As he plunged his squeegee into the mucky bucket and reached toward the windshield, you suddenly ripped off your seat belt and leaped from the car in one fluid movement, flinging open your door so wide that it flapped on its hinges. Like I said before, you’re one of those powerful men. Powerful men driving big black cars can be scary, even to hardened, ferret-featured Romanians. Before he turned and ran, water sloshing out of the wildly swinging bucket, I saw a look of genuine fear sweep over his face.

When you got back into the car, you noticed my alarm, and your face softened with concern.

“Just ignore my stupid outburst. Some things just wind me up, that’s all. I’d never do anything to upset you, you know that. I’m such a clumsy idiot.”

But that came later, of course, after the emails had segued into something else. At the beginning, it was just you tapping away in your box room while Dvor̆ák’s Rusalka blared out at full volume and the tears splattered on your fingers.

*  *  *

Y
ou should have told me you had been nominated for an award! I’m so pleased for you, really I am. Nobody deserves it more. Well, apart maybe from the record company minions, who do all the boring admin and sound checking and preliminary editing, getting ready for you to come on and take center stage, but really of course, as you always say it’s your name that brings in the talent. Without it, they’d be out of a job, all those scuttling, muttering minions. So I’m delighted to hear about your nomination. Best Producer. What an honor!

Remember how you used to enjoy making up different job titles for yourself when we were booking into hotels—sanitation inspector, tax collector?

“I’ve never had a problem telling lies,” you once told me, more than a little proud. “It’s something that’s always come very naturally to me. I just don’t even think about it.” Once you think about it, you’d explained, you’re done for.

And you were absolutely right—no false claim there! Do you remember the time we booked into a cheap hotel in a business park just off the A1. It was only 10
A.M.
, way before normal checking-in time (although terribly convenient for the school drop-off).

“My wife and I have just flown in to Luton from a plastics convention in Panama City,” you informed the pimply clerk. “We’ve got a six-hour stopover before we’ve got to go back to the airport to fly on to Paris where we live. We’re incredibly tired. Can you make sure we’re not disturbed?”

The lies flowed out of you as easy as muzak. “Do flights from Panama City even go to Luton?” I hissed as we crammed into the tiny lift, the sweaty champagne bottles clinking in their M&S carrier bags. “Who cares?” Your hand inside my coat, your tongue inside my mouth.

So anyway. I’m delighted about your nomination—even if the ceremony will only be televised on a satellite channel.

How you’ll enjoy adding that little fact to your company website (incidentally, I love the new photo you have on there—still five years
out of date, of course, but five years is a big improvement on fifteen. Did you get it professionally done? I thought I could detect a hint of airbrush although to be sure I’m no expert in these things).