The Mistress's Revenge (8 page)

Tilly glanced over at me, her green eyes sharp like broken bottles.

“Oh Mum,” she said. “Mum wouldn’t even remember to mention us at all.”

L
ater, when all the others had gone to bed (when did Daniel start going to bed at the same time as the children, I wonder? It seems to have happened without me even noticing it. We used to watch late
films together long after the children were asleep, lying at opposite ends of the sofa, stroking each others’ feet through our socks, but nowadays I look up from the News at Ten and find myself sitting on my own, the rest of the house shallowly breathing in the darkness), I got out my laptop and watched the replay of the award ceremony all over again. Amazing thing isn’t it, this instant repeat facility we all have now, this ability to endlessly relive our lives again and again on YouTube or Catch Up? I wish it had been around when I was younger, I really do. There’s so much I seem to have forgotten.

When it got to the section with your speech, I kept my fingers poised over the pause and rewind buttons. I know it was silly but I wanted to be in complete control.

I freeze-framed through the minute and a half, watching the way your face evolved seamlessly from jokey to tearfully sincere and how your oh-so-familiar hands played with the rather garish award, your bitten nails pink against the shiny gold-colored metal. Zooming in again and again until the point where the picture started to blur at the edges, I gazed at your eyes, dark-lashed and puddle-colored. It was the closest I’d been to you in fourteen weeks (not that I’m counting, you understand, well, no more than I might count the number of weeks after, say, the death of a second-division friend). I noticed that your curls looked slightly darker, although still flecked through with the occasional dashing streak of silver. Have you had a little bit of salon work done, Clive? If so I must congratulate you, they’ve been terribly subtle. I know how secretly vain you are about your hair, even while proclaiming that you’d “just as soon shave the whole lot off and have done with it.” I remember lying in hotel beds in a tangle of boil-washed sheets watching through the open bathroom door as you reached into your coat pocket and withdrew a nylon-bristled hair brush and a travelsized bottle of “taming serum.”

“I’ve never known a man to take quite so much trouble over his hair,” I told you, amused.

“It’s only because it’s so dreadful,” you’d tell me, anxious that I shouldn’t believe you vain. “My hair is totally unmanageable.”

There was a trace of pride when you said that, as if your intransigent
hair was somehow an indication of an ungovernable personality, someone who chose to live outside of the rules.

I miss running my fingers through your hair, feeling those two slightly raised scars on your scalp, evidence of childhood misadventures. I miss the way you’d suddenly turn and, with your back now against the bathroom mirror, you’d pull me toward you so that I was gazing up into your eyes, the same distance apart as I am now from my laptop screen. I miss the sudden change in atmosphere, the imperceptible intake of breath, the sexual charge that made the hairs on my arms stand up. I miss it all. I miss it all. I miss it all.

After a while, when I’d stared at your magnified face on the screen for so long I felt my eyeballs must surely carry a negative imprint of your features, I forwarded on until I came to a close-up of Susan. Then, again, I froze the frame. Leaning back on the sofa, I held the computer on my lap at arm’s length just looking at Susan, trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be her during those particular heady minutes. I summoned up the disbelief, the elation, the sheer soaring pride. And of course, the total vindication. Susan’s not stupid, she knows people over the years have questioned whether you were just a little too ambitious, too flirty, too self-obsessed to be a Good Enough Husband. Now here was full justification of the compromises she had made. No wonder she looked as if her happiness might smother her!

As the camera panned out to show her sitting in the crowd, flanked by well-wishers, all sneaking looks of ill-concealed envy, I froze the frame again and leaning forward placed my thumb squarely over Susan’s face, so that she was visible only from the cleavage down. Then, and I know you’ll think this rather—what was that word you always used—twisted, I imagined my own face superimposed onto her body, so it was me sitting there in my finery, soaking up the attention, the praise, the adulation. It was me you kept glancing over to as you made your word-perfect off-the-cuff acceptance speech, it was me who was fêted, it was me who was the cat who got the cream and who, following the after-show party, would lean into you in the back of the taxi home, with one hand on your prized award and the other on your
thigh and whisper of the other rewards that would be yours once we got home.

I pressed my thumb harder over Susan’s face, twisting it roughly against the hard screen of the laptop not caring what smudges I left behind. Harder and harder as if, through sheer force of my will, I could rub Susan completely out. But when I took my hand away, there she was still, the big lacquered curls already drooping like five-day-old lilies, the black line of smudged mascara scarring her cheek.

Good old Susan. She always did dig herself firmly into place, embedding herself like a splinter into the very flesh of your life until your skin grew fresh over the top of her and it would have needed something needle-sharp to pick pick pick her out.

I
met Liam yesterday! Isn’t that the most bizarre thing? Remember how you always said you’d love me to meet your son one day because you thought we’d get on so well? You were so, so right.

I’d gone to an exhibition at the Royal Gallery that I’d been meaning to see for ages. Blood and Rage is how the critics styled it. I couldn’t really think of anything more apt. So I thought, “Why not?” Helen Bunion has told me I need to forge new habits that don’t include you, break the patterns and set different ones. So why not an exhibition? Why not a bit of blood and rage? New patterns are a great survival strategy, Helen says.

I don’t mind telling you, Clive, I need all the survival strategies I can get!

So I went to the exhibition, and it was remarkable. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Swollen globs of purple paint, as if the artist had dissected some once-living thing over a canvas and then hung it up to admire (remember how, when you told me it was over, I said rather rabidly that I felt like a part of me had been ripped off and my insides were leaking out over the floor? Well, now imagine that, except in a painting. Incidentally, please forgive the overblown Jacobean
melodrama of all that. I’m honestly embarrassed about some of the things I said. I was overwrought. I really was).

After I’d looked around the exhibition I remembered you telling me your son worked in a swanky brasserie a street or two away so I decided to go there for some tea. Well, there’s nothing odd about that, is there? There were lots of middle-aged women there queuing for tea on their own, and they can’t all be stalkers, can they? Nope, just women with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than look around an exhibition of paintings that look like slashed, bleeding livers before enjoying a nice pot of tea. You can’t blame them, can you?

I knew he was your son right away. And it didn’t hurt that the bill had his name in the corner. Liam. He had a lovely smile, just as I imagined, and your eyes looking down on me. As tall as you, I think, but not as broad, and no sign of the slight paunch that you wear so self-consciously under your clothes like an extra thermal layer.

The tea that he brought me came in a silky bag and smelt of patchouli. I asked if they didn’t have any plain PG Tips and he smiled in a way that made it obvious I wasn’t the first person ever to ask him that. When he smiled, a little dent appeared halfway down his cheek, just like yours. I looked at it a lot. I hope he didn’t notice. You’re right. He’s nice. I think in other circumstances we’d have been friends. I gave him a ridiculously big tip, wondering if it might make me more memorable. Perhaps he might, the next time he saw you, say: “A woman came in the other day for a cup of tea. She was really nice. You’d have liked her.”

Silly hey? Silleeeee Salleeeee.

I
do think you need to calm down a bit.

Have you tried any breathing techniques? Helen Bunion swears by them, she really does. Apparently the idea is that you focus so intently on your breathing that you forget about all the other stuff that’s causing you stress. Well, like I say, that’s the idea. I have to confess I’ve struggled a little with the whole concept. Helen says I have to take air
in while pushing out my stomach so that there’s a maximum amount of internal space to fill with wonderful life-giving oxygen. Breathe in, stomach out; breathe out, stomach in. That’s the bit I struggle with, coordinating the breathing with the stomach. I’ll start off fine, but then realize that I’m either breathing out and pushing my stomach out too, or breathing in and pulling it in. Then I’ll panic and try to remember what the right combination should be, and my breathing gets shallower and shallower, and my stress levels higher and higher. I don’t tell Helen that, though. She’s very proud of her breathing techniques and I’d feel a bit like I’d failed her if I admitted I couldn’t actually do them.

Anyway, I don’t mind telling you that that phone call this morning left me a little bit shaken. After all, it was the first time I’d heard your voice in person, as opposed to the television for nearly four months. Of course, you didn’t sound remotely like you’d sounded on that awards program the other night. Your voice had that hard, ugly tone you’d used on the ferret-faced Romanian squeegee man, the same gravelly menace. If I didn’t know you so well, I’d almost have been scared.

“What the fuck were you thinking of?”

I did know, of course, what you were talking about, but I was so surprised at hearing your voice again that I played rather lamely for time.

“Clive! How lovely. What exactly can I do for you?”

Could you hear my heart hammering down the telephone line? That wild thumping rhythm drowning out my stupid, lying voice.

“Don’t fucking patronize me, Sally. You know exactly what I’m talking about. That fucking piece of shit you wrote in the Mail.”

How to play this, I wondered... Of course, when the commissioning editor had replied to say they loved the piece, I’d had a feeling there might be, well, repercussions, although I’d assumed they’d take the form of another email tirade. But then hey, any reaction is better than no reaction—isn’t that what you’ve always told me?

“Oh, you read it, did you?” Of course you’d read it, especially after I emailed you last week on impulse telling you to look out for it. Could I really have thought it might jolt you back to me? Sometimes my own self-delusion leaves me breathless, it really does. Still, I tried
to keep my voice level. “So you’ll have seen then that it was all totally anonymous, so there can be absolutely no comeback for either of us.”

There came a sort of mini explosion then from your end of the phone. I really thought there might have been some kind of electrical malfunction, but it was just you getting ready to roar.

“No comeback? Are you fucking insane? You write a basically blow-by-blow diary account of our fucking five-year affair without bothering to disguise any of the fucking details—”

“I did change the details. I made you ten years older for a start.”

Of course I knew that was one of the things that would have wounded you most, that cruel extra decade arbitrarily yoked around your neck.

“Thank fuck Susan’s out of the country on business so with any luck she won’t get to see it, and I don’t know how many of my friends would actually recognize me from the gross misrepresentation you managed to get across.”

“So that’s all right then, isn’t it?”

“No it’s not fucking all right. You could have fucking ruined me. You still could. You have no right to take liberties with my life, my wife, my family.”

“You’re overreacting,” I told you, but my voice was already wavering, going squeaky round the edges. It was that term “wife” of course. That filthy four-letter word.

“No one knows about us. No one ever knew about us. There’s no way anyone could put two and two together.”

But of course, you weren’t taken in, and neither did I really expect you to be. We both knew full well that the threat of exposure was the very thing that had motivated me to chart the diary of my fall from grace in print, the predictable, brutal arc of a failed affair. But Susan was abroad, so all had been really for nothing. Well, apart from the fee, which of course didn’t go amiss.

“Aren’t you worried about Daniel reading it? Surely you can’t want him to find out his partner” (the slight emphasis on the word “partner” as if it wasn’t really a proper word) “was sleeping with his mate for the past five years.”

Funny to think of you as Daniel’s “mate.” I’m not sure you would always have described yourself that way. In fact I seem to remember you describing him several times as “spineless” and more than a few times as “passive-aggressive,” a favorite term of yours.

“Daniel doesn’t read that sort of thing,” I told you, trying to keep my tone chatty and upbeat, although the black pen I had in my hand was busy tearing violent gashes through the paper on my desk. “And anyway, I’m not sure I even care anymore if Daniel finds out.”

You weren’t buying it, and who can blame you?

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous. Of course you care. If Daniel ever leaves you he’ll take your kids with you, and make no mistake about it.”

Make no mistake about it. Did you always talk like that? Or has success made you more pompous?

“I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing, Sally. But I have to warn you, you’re about to get completely out of your depth.”

Well, once you’d said that, there was a bit of a silence, wasn’t there? You see, I was still trying to reconcile the snarling voice on the phone with the man who’d once driven all the way to Dorset with me when I had to pay a duty visit to my father only to promptly catch the train straight back to London again as soon as we arrived at the other end. “I can’t bear to think of you sitting in the car on your own all that way,” you’d told me when I’d protested that it was too much to ask. “Anyway, it gives me the chance to spend four whole hours with you by myself.”