The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel Read online

  You were terribly good, I have to say. You played it all so perfectly. “I get the feeling you know exactly what I’m talking about,” you wrote, appealing to my vanity at the same time as probing for a hole in my marital armor through which you could come sliding in. And of course I gave it to you.

  “No one can be all things to one person,” I told you. “Monogamy is an artificial conceit.”

  No, I didn’t know exactly what it meant either, but of course I knew the message it would send out.

  And so it began.

  Funny to think that at the start, you were the one doing the chasing and me the holding back. I don’t remember an exact tipping point where I knew your intentions had changed, but I do remember a dawning awareness that you were deliberately and overtly flirting with me. I like to think I didn’t encourage it, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t discourage it either, which maybe amounts to the same thing.

  Of course it would be disingenuous to pretend I don’t remember the exact moment when we stepped over the line. I’d given you a lift home after an evening picnicking on the Heath with Cyd and assorted friends, watching a jazz band across the lake and drinking chilled white wine as the sun slowly set. Why wasn’t Daniel with us that night? I don’t recall. Perhaps he had cycled back on his own. He did a lot of cycling in those days. Susan was away for the weekend with your children. So I drove you home, and the sexual tension crackled between us like a bad phone line. What made me turn in through the gates and turn off the engine instead of just pulling in to the curb to drop you off? (Afterward you always pressed me for a reason, determined to make that moment part of the folklore of our love story. How disappointed you always were that I could never come up with anything beyond “I just thought, why not?”) Your face when I turned the engine off was a picture though, it really was. “Oh blimey,” I think you said, for once lost for words.

  All through that long, clumsy first kiss, I kept up an internal monologue: “This is weird, how big his tongue feels, hope nobody can see us, this is probably wrong, this is definitely wrong, but it’s only a kiss, a kiss doesn’t really count.” I’d already decided that it wouldn’t go any further. I just wanted to test out how it felt—I was in the infidelity changing room trying on a dress I knew was way too expensive for me, but wanted to experience wearing, just once.

  Later, you always referred to that night as Drive-In Movie Night because you claimed that when I pulled into your driveway and switched off the engine, there was a split second before I turned the headlights off where we both remained facing forward, staring at the illuminated garage wall, as if waiting for some entertainment to begin.

  “Drive-In Movie Night was when it all began,” you always said afterward, conveniently forgetting that it was followed by that strange limbo period where we regressed to a kind of embarrassed, stilted, half friendship. How adept we are at rewriting our own histories. How willingly fact is sacrificed to flow. Now, when I remember that kiss, and your shocked “oh blimey,” I know that just as you were wrong about when it all started, you’re wrong about when it will end.

  It isn’t over, Clive. You just don’t know it yet.

  Once the immediate post-Drive-In-Movie-Night shock had worn off, we began to talk tentatively about what had happened as if probing a mouth ulcer with a tongue. Of course we both pretended to be horrified. “Can you imagine if we’d let it go further?” “How drunk must we have been!” “Thank God we stopped ourselves...” (Such experts we two are at turning our failings to our own credit.)

  We wouldn’t discuss it again, we decided. We’d wipe the slate clean. And so we did... until Golf Course Wednesday. Where was it we were going that day? I forget. I know you’d taken me to meet your newspaper mate Douggie and then driving on somewhere to check out an upcoming band. I rather think there might have been a river beside which we sat awkwardly on a bench, eating sandwiches bought from Marks and Spencer.

  Driving back through the heartlands of Hertfordshire (“I’d rather die than live here,” you said preposterously, as we swept past sprawling redbrick mansions with electronic gates and winking alarms), you went very quiet and then suddenly stopped the car by the side of an unmade road flanking a golf course.

  “I am totally in love with you.”

  Do you remember how that came out—with no preamble, no lead-up, you gazing straight ahead with your hands still gripping the steering wheel, engine still on? I made a noise, a startled, unconvincing attempt to demur, but you cut me off.

  “I’d leave Susan for you, you know? I never thought I’d ever say that. But I want you to be in no doubt about how strongly I feel about you. I’ve never felt like this before.”

  Until that moment I hadn’t been completely sure of my own feelings, but of course I was done for then. Not by the declaration of love, you understand, but by being put above all the others, above your wife. What woman could resist that?

  The first time we had sex was at the Suffolk house one Sunday afternoon, at the tail end of a weekend house party. Susan had left earlier that morning—something about work—when Tilly asked Daniel if some of the other kids could travel in the Saab with them. You offered to drive me home instead. “I’ll help with the cleaning up,” I said, but really we both knew what I was there for. The master bedroom, with its antique French artfully peeling white wrought-iron framed bed and deep window seat overlooking the estuary bore Susan’s fingerprints in every one of its Farrow and Ball painted corners. You carried me in there (I didn’t know about your back then, or I’d never have let you) and lowered me gently onto the bed, and all I could see was invisible traces of Susan, smeared like excrement over the walls behind you.

  Funny to think how unsure I was, even then, even long after the point of no return. Not unsure because of Daniel, strangely. Although this was the first time in over ten years I’d physically betrayed him, I’d done it so many times in my head by that stage that it felt almost like old news.

  No, I was unsure about you, about your extravagance, your solidity, your sludge-colored eyes. As I’m used to Daniel’s skinny insubstantiality, you were too present, too big, too unavoidable. When you took off your shirt, I was half repelled and half fascinated by the unexpected body builder pecs, stretching the skin like shop-bought haggis. I almost told you to stop, almost couldn’t go through with it, and yet something in me was thrilled by the sheer new unfamiliarity of you.

  It would be good, wouldn’t it, to reminisce about how fantastic that first time was, how we reached heights of passion never before scaled? But of course it would also be a big fat lie. That first time was a disaster really, with traces of Susan all over the room and your insistence that you were too fat, too old, too married to appeal to me (knowing you better, I can see that show of insecurity was just another way of leading me in, giving me the illusion of being in control). When you pulled on a condom, your erection sank like an undercooked cake, leaving us both gawping like foolish goldfish, wrong-footed (I can hear you now, “you’re mixing your metaphors again”) and unsure what to do next.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told you, as of course I was honor bound to do.

  But it did matter. We both, in our individual ways, felt there was something wrong with us, something that had made your cock cower like a small, scared thing.

  We chose to blame it on Susan, on her presence in the brightly patterned rug, the arched ’70s reading light. We called it guilt, but by the time we had put our clothes back on, we both knew it was something else. It was resentment.

  The second time we had sex, you cried for an hour. But that’s another story. Now, finally, the Zopiclone is crawling through my veins. My body greets it with joyful relief, like a much missed friend.

  I loved you I loved you I loved you.

  As soon as I logged onto my email account this morning, I felt something wasn’t right. There was nothing I could put my finger on, nothing out of place, just that nagging sense that everything wasn’t quite as I had left it.

  Th
is time, I have to admit, I felt a little bit apprehensive. I’ve changed my password, as I’ve already said. If you’d got into my emails again, you’d have to have been trying very hard.

  I called up a contact who once advised me for an article I was writing on cyber-spying. I pretended I was writing another piece. “How hard is it to get into someone else’s email account if you don’t have the password?” I asked.

  “Hard, but by no means impossible. You just have to have money and know the right people.”

  When he said that, there flashed through my head a vivid recollection of the first time you told me about your hairdresser, Tony. “He’s part of some huge North London crime family,” you’d said, clearly thrilled, and even I recognized the surname. Apparently you’d been going to Tony since your midtwenties and he’d adopted you as an honorary brother. “Anything you need fixing,” Tony told you. “Anything at all.” How you relished that contact, your underworld link. “They’re just like the Sopranos,” you emailed me a couple of years ago, just back from a party at the Grosvenor for Tony’s anniversary. “Surveillance, hacking... Do you know, one of the cousins even told me how to run someone off the road and make it look like an accident? All the way home, I’ve been itching to try it.” You’ve always been uncharacteristically coy about it, but I suspect you’ve called on Tony’s family once or twice over the years, when business deals have gone wrong, and after I’d put the phone down on the cyber-stalking expert, I couldn’t help wondering if you might once more have found occasion to ask for their help.

  Am I being ridiculous? Sorry, my sense of perspective seems to have deserted me.

  After that call, I remained staring at the screen for a long time, idly clicking in and out of already read messages in my inbox, wondering if you were following my movements, monitoring me. I tried to feel happy about the idea, like I had before.

  My head was pounding with a happy pill headache and my mouth was dry and furry like it had been Velcroed inside.

  Was it you, Clive? Were you there?

  In the end I closed down my account and lay down on my bed. As someone who works from home I’ve always maintained that taking a nap in the daytime is the start of the slippery slope, but this morning, I didn’t even think about it, just kicked off the old UGG boots that I wear round the house and lay down.

  I don’t know where I am anymore. Everything keeps shifting and I can’t work out where I’m supposed to be.

  The baby shower was such an education. Really, Clive, you should have been there. You always used to make such a big deal about what a “girl” you are. You’d have just loved it.

  At first I didn’t even think I was going to get to go. After that lunch with Emily and Susan in which I felt like I’d made real headway with befriending Emily, everything went completely quiet. Luckily I hadn’t forgotten. I knew when Emily was having her baby shower (what a lovely expression it is, isn’t it, that image of babies raining down from above?), so a couple of weeks after that lunch, I dropped her a line.

  Don’t be disapproving, Clive. I’d asked her for her business card, and it just seemed like a courteous thing to do, to drop her an email asking how she was and explaining how much I was looking forward to my first baby shower. I have to say, she replied pretty much straightaway. I got the feeling she was a teensy bit bored actually. Perhaps she was regretting giving up her “job” at just over five months. (Sorry, I don’t know why I put “job” in quotes like that. It just came out that way.) Anyway, she said she’d be “delighted” if I came, and told me all the details. Well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it was yesterday, camped out in Emily’s lovely Notting Hill garden (it only rained just a tiny bit, and it didn’t spoil things at all. You must tell Emily that she needn’t have gone and locked herself in the bathroom all that time. Nobody minded in the least about getting a teeny bit wet).

  I’d agonized about the gift, I don’t mind telling you. I kept imagining Emily telling you that I’d given her something wildly inappropriate, or cheap or tasteless or any of the myriad of things I could imagine Emily saying. I googled baby showers to find out what was expected and discovered it’s considered good manners to buy presents for both the baby and the mother. Expensive business this baby shower thing—especially for someone who hasn’t worked in the last six weeks. Still, what’s another hundred quid on the overdraft? It’s a brand-new life we’re talking about here! In the end I went for a sweet little babygro from BabyGap (remember our baby, Clive, the puffed-up baby that wasn’t?), and I bought Emily some extortionately expensive bath oil from Space NK. Shame that when I arrived, it all went straight onto a huge groaning anonymous pile of presents. I should have attached a gift tag. Emily does have a lot of friends, doesn’t she?

  I sat next to Susan of course. We were in dowagers corner, the two of us and her rheumy-eyed dog, alongside the mother of the bland barrister (clearly forgiven for her unwitting transgression over the scan photo mouse pad). Her name was Frieda. Well, obviously you know that already. How ridiculous of me to drop that in when you and Frieda are probably on the closest of terms, her being family and everything. I do think you were being unkind when you used to refer to her in your emails as the unthinking man’s Joan Collins. I’m quite sure that isn’t really a wig (although I’ll admit her forehead appeared to belong to someone else entirely).

  Anyway, Susan and I and Frieda got on like a house on fire, we really did, once I’d gotten used to the way she kept leaning away from the two of us as we spoke, as if she was worried about catching a calorie or something. And her face having just that one expression takes a bit of getting used to, doesn’t it? I thought at first that she was going to be really hard work, but Susan managed to loosen her up. (She’s amazing like that, isn’t she?) She talked quite a lot about you, actually, did Frieda. She obviously considers you two have rather a special bond, in fact she became quite animated really (which naturally made me worry for her face. One got the definite sense that too much expressiveness might cause some sort of surface cracking).

  “I think you quite fancy old Clive,” Susan said cheerfully after Frieda had remarked for the second time how you were so much more “impressive” in the flesh than you’d appeared on the television. There was something in the way she said “flesh” that made one think of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. You could almost hear the smacking of the lips.

  Frieda gave an anorexic smile.

  “You’re lucky, Susan, dear,” she said in a way that made it clear that in the normal run of things Susan would not be the kind of person Frieda would envy. “Clive has still got enough charisma to compensate for the fact that he’s nearly fifty, and not what he was.”

  Don’t shoot the messenger here, I’m just telling you exactly what she said.

  To give Susan her due, while she didn’t jump up and down in your defense, neither did she wade right in and trash you. She said something sharp about charisma not paying the bills and deftly changed the subject. Neither of them seemed to notice that I was finding something endlessly fascinating in the bottom of my glass of wine. The truth is that for all the good “work” I’ve been doing with Helen on taking away your power, or what’s the term Helen uses? “disinvesting” you of your power, I still can’t hear your name spoken out loud without feeling something rip all the way up inside me, like I’m being filleted from within with a rusty knife.

  Luckily we talked about something else after that. Babies probably. There was an awful lot of talk about babies. Well, what did I expect? It was a baby shower! There was just one slightly awkward moment, when Susan fixed her blue eyes on me as if she was sizing me up for a coffin, and asked me if I was “quite all right.”

  I made some sort of joke I think, but though Susan smiled, she wasn’t really laughing. She said I didn’t seem quite myself (again that phrase, as if not being myself was a bad thing). She said she was surprised that I could afford to take a day off as she’d have thought I would be working during the week.

&
nbsp; “Work isn’t exactly that great at the moment,” I told her, promising myself that I wouldn’t go into details, wouldn’t talk about the endless hours in front of the blank computer screen, the half-finished features, the phone that never rang.

  “Well, you must call Clive,” Susan told me decidedly. “He’ll find you some work to do.”

  It was a wonderful moment. Quite filmic I thought. The wife in the garden in her navy polka-dot summer frock, telling the mistress (sorry, sorry, ex-mistress) to get in touch with the husband.

  “I’m sure Clive” (I couldn’t help pronouncing the word with a slight wince, the way Tilly does when the wire on her brace digs into the inside of her cheek) “is very busy at the moment, especially now he’s a famous award-winning producer.”

  I was aiming for amused detachment, but it probably came across more as a whine.

  “Nonsense,” said Susan. “All he does is sit around all day trying to figure out how his iPhone works while other people do the work for him. Give him a call.”

  I nodded, and tried to remember how to arrange my mouth into a smile. There was a burning sensation deep inside my rib cage on the left-hand side as if my heart was being seared like fresh tuna. Luckily Frieda broke the moment.

  “I think I might give Clive a call in that case,” she announced rather startlingly. “I’ve got a few ideas for promotional campaigns that I think he’d be very interested in. I’ve been meaning to get back into the workplace for ages now.”

  She said “workplace” as if it was a foreign city she’d always meant to visit—Prague, for instance.

  Susan caught my eye then, and a look passed between us. For a split second, there were just the two of us, wordlessly colluding, but then back you came, Clive, barging in between us, the elephant on the lawn.

  Anyway, the rest of the shower (quite appropriate term that, considering the weather), passed very pleasantly. Like I said, it was a shame Emily got herself in such a state about the rain. It was only a little splash after all. Susan was very calm about it, I must say. She must have stood outside that bathroom door for over twenty minutes, persuading Emily that her life wasn’t really ruined just because the silk tablecloths had gotten a little bit damp.