The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel Read online

  My new credit card has a limit of £2,000. Even better, I know that none of the unopened letters in the drawer have this company’s logo emblazoned across the top. It’s like a clean slate. I can start over. And it’s not as if it’s an indulgence. Buying new clothes will make me feel better. I feel better already to be honest, just thinking about it. New clothes, new me. I’ll have more energy, I’ll be able to tackle work again. I’ll find some new publications to work for, ones I haven’t burned my bridges with. I feel like things can change. I feel there’s a chance my life can move forward. Thursday beckons me on, alternately teasing and threatening. In forty-eight hours, I’ll be heading off to Piccadilly Circus (not Horsham or Borehamwood or any of the other “safe” but soulless places we used to frequent. I’ve been upgraded!) to meet you in a pub with a (hopefully) secluded upper level. I know I’ll be shaking with nerves. I hope you’ll try to be kind. I know you’re only meeting up to warn me off, but I need to remind you of why you loved me. I need to know you still want me (even reluctantly). I need to see myself reflected back in your eyes so that I know I am still real.

  Helen says my needs are just wants in disguise. Helen doesn’t know how it feels to be me.

  I am not in a good state.

  I couldn’t sleep last night (surprise, surprise), just like the night before, and took a last-minute emergency Zaleplon at 3 A.M., which gave me strange vivid dreams where I kept going up and down in lifts and trying to find you (sorry. Is there anything duller than other people’s dreams?). When I woke up I felt clammy and out of breath, and my heart was still searching.

  As my concession to economy, I went to the chemist and bought home-waxing strips rather than the expensive trips to the salon I used to make. Don’t worry, I’m not presuming anything will happen. I know you won’t be seeing my bare legs, but it’s impossible to feel like a woman of worth when you know your legs are furry beneath your clothes and your bikini line is creeping steadily southward. The waxing strips hurt, especially under the arms (don’t even ask about the bikini line), but it was a good clean pain, the kind that has a beginning and an end.

  After I’d finished, I looked at my naked self in the full-length mirror for the first time in months and saw myself through your eyes—thin and sallow and smudged with shadows. My legs, where I’d waxed them, were pimpled with a red rash and elsewhere my skin hung loose like a crumpled paper bag.

  I am filled with excitement about seeing you tonight but at the same time filled with dread. I need you to love me. I need you to want me. My needs are wants in disguise, said Helen. But I need those wants beyond all other things.

  I started getting ready almost as soon as the kids went off to school. Pathetic, isn’t it? You don’t have to tell me that, believe me I know.

  After the home waxing, I dyed my roots. Finally! You wouldn’t believe how much gray I’d allowed to grow like a badger stripe down my part. No wonder Stupid Pete hadn’t been able to perform. But let’s try not to think about him, shall we? I don’t like to think about him.

  The color my hair came out didn’t look much like the color on the packet, I have to say. It was supposed to be iced chocolate, but it has turned out a rather dull mousy brown and I have managed to dye the tip of my ear as well. I’m grateful for your failing eyesight. Hopefully you won’t notice all my imperfections. As long as your vanity keeps your glasses away, I’ll look mercifully airbrushed and permanently in soft focus.

  Please be kind. Please be kind.

  Sian was furious when I told her I was meeting you, even though I explained you’d only suggested it so that you could have a go at me. Now that she has turned against you, she is like a reformed smoker—as vehement in her disapprobation as she once was in her delight. Your deception has upset her beyond mere loyalty to me. I think you and I were proving some sort of point in her mind. She wanted to believe in the supremacy of love affairs and finds it bitterly disappointing that in the end it should be the mundanity of marriage that triumphs.

  “Haven’t you put yourself through enough?” she asked me. “You’ll be right back to square one.”

  I didn’t tell her that square one looked preferable to where I am now (square five? seven? ten?).

  “Don’t worry, I have no expectations except the worst,” I told her, blatantly lying.

  “He’s a cunt,” she said suddenly. I was quite shocked, I really was. Sian has an exaggerated Catholic streak running through her and doesn’t normally use words like that. I wonder if you’d be hurt if you knew what she’d said? You always pretend to love it when people are abusive to you, but I suspect you’d be a little bit wounded. I think you secretly believed Sian had a soft spot for you.

  “It’s okay,” I lied again. “I know he’s only coming to tell me to stay away from Susan and Emily. You know how paranoid he is. I’m not expecting anything.”

  But still I couldn’t help adding:

  “What do you think I should wear?”

  She refused to answer and when she put the phone down shortly afterward, her righteous anger hung around in the air like a bad smell. But it didn’t matter because I already knew what I was going to wear. I bought a dress yesterday, black and clingy and satin-shiny with a zipper all the way up the back. And then I bought the shoes to go with it—four-inch black wedges that give me slight vertigo when I walk. I’ll wear an old jean jacket with it so that it doesn’t look like I’m trying too hard. Of course you’ll see right through it like a shot.

  You’ll know it is all for you. All of it.

  The question is, will you want it?

  Half an hour earlier than I need to leave, but I’m going in a minute, just to get out of the house. Bloody Daniel. Bloody fucking Daniel. When was the last time he expressed an interest in where I’m going? Normally he hardly looks up when I say I’m going out these days. In the beginning he used to at least ask me about my plans (not so much because he was bothered about the answers, but just in the same way as you’d make conversation with one of your children—the point being in the conversation rather than in the answers). Actually, when I think about it, in those early days we might well have been going out together. I often forget about that—those early evenings standing side by side at the sink, sharing the mirror—him to shave, me to apply makeup—chatting companionably. Now those two people no longer seem real, characters in a film I once watched (something starring Meg Ryan?). He hasn’t appeared interested in my whereabouts for ages. So why does he have to start asking me questions tonight?

  I suppose it must be the clothes. After all these weeks of me slouching around the house in ever baggier jeans and sweatshirts, it must be a bit of a shock to the system—the heels, the dress, the absence of badger stripe, the troweled-on makeup covering up the worst of the dark shadows, the telltale eagerness after all these weeks of lethargy.

  It didn’t help that Tilly trumpeted it in advance.

  “Mum looks like she’s going to a Goth wedding,” she said, dropping down on the sofa next to Daniel.

  Daniel looked up then, and there I was in my finery, dandified and faintly ridiculous.

  Daniel’s eyes traveled over me from the new shoes to the new dress and the new hair.

  “You’ve been shopping,” he said. And his voice sounded like a slap.

  “I’ve had this for ages,” I lied, tugging at the new dress as if it was a rag. “I just haven’t ever worn it.”

  Daniel gave me a look I’ve never really seen before. Tight and hard.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, in that same stinging voice.

  I got angry then, when he said that. It’s not his right to ask me, is it? But Tilly was sitting there and I had to say something, so I made up a story about Gill, who I used to work with, and how it was her leaving party. Even as the words left my mouth, they converted to hollow things that bounced empty through the air.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  I think Daniel even surprised himself when he said that. There was a little giveawa
y widening of the eyes, but he didn’t back down.

  “I have to go. They’re expecting me.”

  Bounce, bounce, bounce.

  Jamie glanced up from the floor where he was lying watching the telly.

  “You’ve done something to your hair,” he said. “It’s younger than your face.”

  I pretended to find that amusing, but Daniel didn’t crack a smile.

  “I have to go,” I repeated lamely. “I can’t let them down.”

  “What about us?” asked Daniel. “What about letting us down?”

  You know what’s funny? As he said that, I felt a stab of pure panic that I couldn’t immediately place. Then I realized it was because he was looking at me—I mean actually looking at me. Into my eyes. It occurs to me now that it must be months, even years, since either of us did that. The whole eye contact thing. It felt like an invasion. Plus it was so annoying, him putting me on the spot like that in front of the children. It’s not as if I’m always going out somewhere. I hardly ever leave the fucking house.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” I said, and turned on my lofty heel and teetered back up the stairs. So here I am, far too early, but already desperate to leave. What gives him the right to question where I’m going? What gives him the right to make me feel guilty?

  Already I feel like a cheap present wrapped in expensive paper, with my young hair and my old face. I’m trying to claw back some of that good feeling I had earlier when I first got dressed and everything felt full of promise, but it’s gone now. In its place is this anger. Why does Daniel always spoil everything? Am I not allowed one single thing for myself?

  Right. I’m leaving now, before my nerves fail me. I won’t even say good-bye. I’ll just call out from the door.

  I don’t want them to see me go. They always have to try to spoil things.

  I’m only going to meet you. It’s not a big deal.

  Why do they have to make such a fuss?

  I won’t think about it. I’ll just think about nice things. In forty-five minutes I will see you. In forty-five minutes you will see me.

  You will see me.

  I have been up since 6 A.M. despite my hangover. Only when I’d been up a while did I realize I had slept without sleeping pills for the first time in months. I’ve cleaned the kitchen and packed lunches for Jamie and Tilly. I had to think hard to remember whether Jamie prefers chicken or ham. I wonder who has been making their packed lunches recently. I suppose it must be Daniel.

  You’re going to think me silleeeee but memories of last night crowd around my head like Smarties, one on top of the other on top of the other, each one brightly colored and candy sweet. Even the images from the early part of the evening, when your anger volleyed from you like machine-gun fire, are soft edged and sepia toned.

  You’ll never know how nervous I was loitering in Boots in Piccadilly Circus until I was just respectably late. I hovered around the makeup counters, sneaking glances in the smudgy mirrors under the pretext of testing out a new eyeshadow or wonder concealer. How many times did I wish I’d worn something different? Or had my hair professionally colored? Or splashed out on Botox? Or not gotten old? Every few seconds I glanced at my phone to see the time and tried to plot your movements. You’d be just arriving (you never could bear to be late), you’d be canvassing the bar, getting a drink.

  When I was finally standing outside the pub, my courage almost went AWOL. Really it did. The downstairs bar was full of twenty-something media types, and my teetering wedge heels made me feel like a fraud, like I was trying to be something I wasn’t, a man in drag.

  At the top of the stairs I hesitated, trying to compose a face to greet you. How did I look coming through that door? I’d gone for cheery casual. Did it work? Were you taken in? Or could you see, from your seat at a little round table near the wall, my heart slamming itself against my chest?

  As soon as I sat down, I understood two things a) you were angrier than I’d even imagined and b) you still wanted me.

  Does that sound bigheaded? It isn’t meant to. It’s just that I was so worried that your eyes would be blank, like they were on York Way Friday, all feeling drained from them like parched soil. But as soon as I came near you, the smile dying on my face as I met your clench-lipped gaze, I knew you still wanted me. That’s something one just can’t hide.

  There are so many things I want to ask you. What you were feeling at that moment? What you thought when I was approaching you? Whether the anger that had been coursing round your system dissipated away so you had to make a conscious effort to regenerate it. I want to relive every moment of last night, every second, every nanosecond. I want to brand it onto my memory with a white-hot poker.

  I love you I love you I love you

  I don’t mind telling you I was apprehensive at first. Antagonism came wafting off you like sweat.

  “You have got to stop this.”

  Do you remember, that was the very first thing you said to me? We’ll laugh about it one day, of course, but still it took me aback. I hadn’t even properly sat down, was still fishing around in my bag so I could go and buy a drink.

  “What?” I asked you. Clever, wasn’t it? All the opening lines I’d been rehearsing in the tube on the way, and that’s the one I came out with. “What?”

  Silleeeee Salleeeee.

  That’s when you started laying into me. About Susan, and Emily, and even Liam (for goodness’ sake!). You mentioned that comment on your company website. Well, when you put it all together like that, of course it was going to sound a bit unhinged. The way you said it sounded like I was a mad stalker or something!

  I sat silently and listened and didn’t say anything. Instead I let your words flow over me like I was submerging my head in a warm, soapy bath, not really taking it in, but looking at your eyes, and wondering what it meant that you were saying all this stuff and yet your eyes were saying something else.

  You’d bought a bottle of white wine, which we’d finished before you’d even reached the website bit. You stood up without even breaking your flow, then stopped suddenly.

  “Another?” you asked.

  I didn’t want you to think I was a pushover, wanted to prove I still knew my own mind (foolish, foolish woman—when did I ever know my own mind?) so I asked for a whisky, a double. When you came back you were carrying two.

  As we drank, you expanded on your theme that I was harassing your family, that I’d gone too far. I looked at your mouth as you spoke and traced your lips in my mind. Could you see I was doing that? Did my eyes give me away?

  Somewhere around the second double whisky I tried to explain myself. You’d got it wrong, I told you. You were misinterpreting the facts. York Way Friday had knocked me for six (I think I may even have used that expression—for the first time in my life. You’ll have to forgive me. I was overwrought!). I’d wanted to stay close to you, which is why I’d made that first call to Susan, but the rest had happened organically (I think I used that word too. God, I’m embarrassed to remember it all). And the website comment hadn’t been me. Had definitely not been me.

  “I’ve also been under stress,” I told you, not meeting your eyes. “Some weird things have been happening.” Then I told you about the emails and the man with the stripes on his leather jacket. You didn’t say anything, but I knew you were taking it all in.

  By the time we were halfway through the third whisky (or was it the fourth?), I could tell you were mellowing. Your sentences still began with a bluster but it blew itself out before reaching the end.

  “I should go,” you said. But we both knew you wouldn’t.

  “You’re looking good,” you told me reluctantly, your eyes traveling over me. “Susan said you were too thin, but I think it quite suits you.”

  I looked at your hand, as it lay on the table between us, tearing a cardboard coaster to shreds. Your fingers were so familiar. I imagined reaching over and putting my hand over yours.

  Then all of a sudden, my hand was on top of
yours. I couldn’t remember moving it there, it just seemed to have happened.

  There was a split second where we both just looked at our joined hands on the table, as if they didn’t belong to us at all, but were some kind of pop-up art installation. I think we were both waiting to see if you would move yours away. When you didn’t, I knew. But really I’d known from the start.

  Who was it who suggested going to a hotel? I know it doesn’t matter now but I hate to think there are parts of last night I can’t remember. I want to play it all again and again like a YouTube clip. I want to relive every second.

  I remember the taxi was abnormally large, and we giggled a lot about how big it was. Then we were in a hotel and the cheapest room was £270, and between us we didn’t have enough cash (not even the cash from the fridge—you hadn’t been prepared!). You didn’t dare use your credit card (not with Eagle Eyed Susan doing the household accounts) and I hadn’t brought my one credit card that was still working. We tried to get money from a cash machine in the lobby, I remember, but it kept saying “error.”

  “Eees faulty,” said a man in a corporate blue suit, in a strong Spanish accent.

  We found that hysterical, I remember. “Eees faulty,” we repeated to ourselves until we were almost crying.