The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel Read online

  And 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.

  * * *

  You 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).

  Guess where I read about it? On Facebook! Isn’t that hysterical? I’m now Facebook friends with Susan so I get all the updates about what’s going on in your lives. Quite amusing really, considering how much you always loathed the whole social networking thing. Susan’s “status” (I bet you didn’t even know they were called that—those little pithy sentences we use to sell our lives to hundreds of our closest friends) read:

  Susan Gooding Clive nominated for music award. About bloody time!

  About bloody time. So typical of Susan not to gush, but clearly so proud too. And after it, 24 comments from some of her 456 friends (yes, I’ve scrolled through them all, pondering relationships, trying to fit together some of the pieces of the life you kept so well hidden. “My friends are all so dull,” you used to complain, and I’d think it was some kind of a compliment with its unspoken inference that I was somehow some benchmark of wit. I blush now to think what a high opinion of myself I must have had).

  Lots of the comments were ringing endorsements of Susan herself.

  “He couldn’t have done it without you, hon.” “Behind every successful man is an awesomely successful woman” and so on.

  Have you read the comments? You really should take a look. I think you’d find it quite enlightening to see how people view you and Susan from the outside, as it were—presuming to guess at the unknowable dynamic of other people’s relationships.

  I watched the awards ceremony. Well, of course I did! Obviously I guessed that you wouldn’t feature very prominently in the television coverage. After all, you’re not exactly A list, are you? And at very nearly fifty (oh, how you’d hate me reminding you of that), the camera might not exactly love you. Plus I knew Susan would be wearing something navy and sensible, not split to the navel and held together with safety pins, so it was a fair bet that she wouldn’t help you get a starring role on the red carpet.

  But funnily enough I did spot you arriving. I know you’ll have watched the footage back already about a million times, so it won’t be news that you and Susan appeared briefly in the background while that female rapper with the black hair was being interviewed.

  “There they are!” shouted my son Jamie who, at nine, still believes there’s a certain magic attached to appearing on the television, and indeed to knowing anyone who appears on the television. Remember how you always worried so much about my children—“I’d hate for them to be damaged because of me,” you’d say mournfully. Well, here they both were, sprawled out on the sofa, already texting their friends to tell them someone they know, actually really quite well and have been to their house, is on terrestrial telly right now. You made their night! I know you’ll be pleased (“I only care about the welfare of the children in all of this,” you’d say during our angst-ridden conversations about “the future”).

  And there indeed you were, making your way self-consciously down the red carpet, trying to look as if you weren’t aware of the flashes and the reporters and the crowds of Japanese tourists and mothers and daughters in matching rainwear, all wondering if you were anyone important.

  I must say a dinner jacket suits you very well. It lends you a natural authority that the usual jeans and T-shirts sometimes lack. And I liked the way you kept one hand firmly interlinked with Susan’s, even when you rather awkwardly waved in the direction of the film crew: reassuring and faintly proprietorial.

  “Susan looks lovely, doesn’t she?” Daniel remarked, as I think he felt duty-bound to do.

  Tilly sniffed, unconvinced. “Why does she always have to wear blue? It’s sooooo boring.”

  But in truth Susan did look very well. I think she’d done something different with her hair. It was piled up on her head in big round curls, like a vanilla ice cream sundae, and her long midnight-blue dress was cleverly cut to disguise her less flattering angles. It was touching to see what a big effort she’d gone to not to let you down. You must have been very proud. It reminded me of how you used to love planning my outfits for me, emailing me in the morning to ask what I was intending to wear that day, or to beg me to put on some particular item of clothing if we were due to meet up. A couple of times you even appeared to weep when I walked into the pub or restaurant or wherever we’d arranged to meet. “You just look so beautiful,” you’d explain, your eyes traveling over me, sucking me up like a hand-held vacuum cleaner. “I’m jealous of your clothes for touching your skin. I’m jealous of this,” and you’d run a finger down whatever top I was wearing. “And these,” and you’d stroke the inside leg of my jeans. “And I’m particularly jealous of these.” Your hand creeping inside the waistband to feel what knickers I had on.

  When you and Susan strolled hand in hand out of the camera shot, I thought that was the last we’d see of you. Daniel, of course, remained constantly on the alert for glimpses as the ceremony got under way. “Is that them?” he’d ask whenever the television camera panned around the audience. “I thought I saw Clive up there, top right of the screen.”

  But just as I’d resigned myself to the probability that you and Susan wouldn’t be making a return appearance, you were announced as a winner! What a fantastic surprise!

  I hadn’t even expected them to televise the Best Producer award, to be quite honest. I mean, the glamour quota isn’t exactly through the roof in that sector, is it? I have to admit I sat up a bit in my seat then, while Daniel positively whooped and hollered. I wasn’t too impressed with their choice of presenter for that award though. I mean, if they’re going to choose someone from a reality TV talent show, they could at least have gone for one of the bigger names, but I suppose they had to take what they could get. Competition for that particular honor couldn’t have been that high I should imagine. And I guess one could say she added a telegenic touch to what might otherwise have been a bit of a drab segment, although it was a little distracting the way her breasts seemed constantly on the verge of popping out of that dress. It would all have to be done with tape, don’t you suppose? I imagined her boobs covered with little sticky strips like a child’s gift wrapping. Well, you were the one who was closest to her. Maybe you noticed something?

  When she started to read the list of nominees, slowly and carefully as if reading were a skill she’d only recently mastered, I sat up a little straighter in my chair, realizing
you were about to come on-screen again. Sure enough, there you were, your head filling the television like God. Just before the camera swung round to the next on the list, it panned out a little to show Susan sitting next to you, your hands still adorably intertwined. Such a comfort it must have been during those nail-biting minutes of waiting before the result was announced, to have her sitting next to you, that reassuring squeeze of the fingers.

  And then all of a sudden the envelope was being opened, and there was your name, sounding so strange on the puffy, pink-glossed lips of the talent show star. Thank goodness she didn’t throw a little extra line in as they sometimes do, “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy” or “Justice has been done.”

  Daniel broke into spontaneous applause as the camera focused on your face, for a split second frozen in uncomprehending shock, then creasing into smiles as you turned to Susan and kissed her long and hard on the lips before springing to your feet and making your triumphant way down the aisle toward the stage, pausing every few rows to shake a hand or receive a congratulatory pat on the arm. Then up onto the stage, taking the steps two at a time with youthful vigor, quite as if you weren’t someone whose back was inclined to go into spasm at the slightest overexertion.

  When you bent to kiss the talent show star, her prodigious breasts were momentarily pressed flat against your dinner jacket and her lip gloss left a faint pink sheen on your cheek.