The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel Page 6

  Moving in front of the microphone, you did that thing one often sees award winners do, where they gaze silently at the award, as though struggling to find the words to express how they feel. Knowing you, I’m sure you had your acceptance speech written and committed to memory the very day the nominations were announced, but I have to admit you did a wonderful job of appearing modestly unprepared.

  When the audience was completely quiet, you looked up again to the camera, and I wasn’t surprised to see the film of water in your eyes. You always did have that capacity to cry on command. It was one of your many enviable skills.

  “Wow,” you said, and for a second I was completely nonplussed, wondering when you’d started using expressions like that. “I really can’t believe this is real. What an honor! “So much of what I’ve achieved over the years has been done on a wing and a prayer and it wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t had the luck to be surrounded by some amazing people. My team at Trip Records who have smoothed over my rough edges more times than I can count and talked me out of some of my more foolhardy ideas” (typical of you to be self-deprecating while simultaneously bigging yourself up. That word “foolhardy,” with its connotations of youthful rashness and cavalier self-disregard).

  “The fantastic John Peterson, whose dedication to detail and professionalism has given the company its reputation for integrity” (how clever of you to compliment your loathed vice president in such a way as to make him sound impossibly dull and worthy in comparison to the dazzling, devil-may-care foolhardiness of you).

  “My wonderful children Liam and Emily who, despite their often-professed wish to have a father who was a lawyer or a banker or something nice and safe like that, have nevertheless loved me anyway” (a great touch that, the humble gratitude of an errant father).

  “And finally, my wife Susan.” Immediately the camera was close up on Susan’s face, as if it had been hovering all the while in anxious anticipation in the wings.

  And guess what? Well, of course you don’t need to guess because you were there, and as I say you must have watched the footage so many times since then it’ll be imprinted into your brain. Susan was crying! Actual real tears, trickling down her cheeks, which she wiped away with an angry hand. It felt weirdly voyeuristic, seeing her like that, moist-eyed and shyly quivering.

  “We’ve been married now for over a quarter of a century” (cue a spontaneous smattering of applause from the audience). “And not a day goes past when I don’t learn something new about her, something that makes me realize afresh just how incredibly fortunate I’ve been and how little I deserve her. Everything I am, I am because of her. Everything I’ve achieved, I’ve achieved because of her. All I can say is I must have done something pretty special in a past life to have been rewarded with all this. I thank you all.”

  By the end of your speech, which I must say was very well received, being neither too long nor too dry (unlike the winner who preceded you who made that classic mistake of going for a note of jaunty comedy, which always makes the audience feel short-changed, as if they’d like to snatch the award back and give it to someone who really appreciates it), the tears were sparkling in your eyes like cheap superfine sugar. Meanwhile poor Susan, to whom the camera kept cutting back and forth until I felt quite nauseous with the movement of it, had mascara snaking like spilled oil down her left cheek. You’ve got to hand it to Susan, she’s never been a terribly vain person, which, I reflected, seeing her black-streaked face magnified on our wide-screen television, was just as well.

  “I really should send Clive a message of congratulation,” Daniel said absently. “I’ll definitely do it tomorrow.”

  Sometimes I don’t know why Daniel even bothers saying half the things he says. Both of us know he won’t really text you a message of congratulation, even though the intention is there and he’ll probably end up convincing himself that he actually has done it, so genuinely does he mean to carry it out. Daniel has what Helen Bunion calls Delivery Issues. He can come up with no end of plans and ideas, but it’s in the enactment of them where he falls down.

  “Daddy, if you won an award, would you thank me and Tilly?” Jamie asked.

  I must say I had to bite back a bit of a smirk at that one. The idea of Daniel stepping up to the podium to receive some kind of recognition from his peers. What would it be, I wonder, the award for Best Sunday Cyclist? Or perhaps the Lifetime Non-Achievement award? Mean, mean, mean Sally. After all Daniel can’t really help being a “serial careerist” (I read that in a magazine the other day, about people who change careers so often they never quite get off the first rung). I have high hopes for the teacher training he’s halfway through though—after all, it’s already lasted longer than his last career (if you can call selling “stuff” on eBay a career)—although he hasn’t even properly got into a classroom yet! Some of the time I’m just as sure as Daniel is that there’s something really amazing waiting around the corner for him. I’m just not quite sure how he would find it without actually getting up off the sofa and at least looking around that corner to see what’s there.

  “If Dad won an award he’d thank the neighbors and the woman in Londis and that man who helped him fix his bike, and everyone who knows him, and everyone in the world.” Tilly can be merciless sometimes, but in the case of Daniel’s fabled long-windedness I think she probably has a fair point. “And then he’d probably tell them the story of how he had his first job at the age of eleven helping in his uncle’s hardware shop and didn’t even expect to get paid for it. In those days you just did it because you were expected to help out.”

  Jamie laughed momentarily before remembering that Tilly had said it, so he was honor-bound to find it unfunny. Daniel meanwhile had no such reservations and was smiling good-naturedly. I know I probably shouldn’t say it, particularly not to you, but occasionally I do wonder if Daniel is all there, or if some tiny little bit of him, the bit that deals with, say, self-awareness, has somehow become dislodged and sneezed out somewhere along the way.

  “What about Mum?” he asked, leaning his head back and running his hands through the overly long blond hair of which he remains justifiably proud. “What would Mum say in her acceptance speech?”

  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.”

  Later, 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?”

&nbs
p; 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?”