The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel Read online

  Breathe in. Stomach out. Breathe out. Stomach in.

  I’m concentrating on my breathing, visualizing the breath coursing through my body just as I’ve been told, and yet the message is there in the pounding rhythm of the blood pumping around my body, in the wild, unbridled pulsing at my wrist. Clive is never coming back.

  Susan is wonderful, isn’t she? I know it’s the word people always use about her, but it’s so apt (of course I discount the people who use other words, like “bossy” or “controlling.” What do they know?).

  I wasn’t at all expecting to hear from her yesterday and had resigned myself to another day of sitting in front of my computer, waiting for emails that never come and obsessively surfing infidelity forums. Then out of the blue, her name flashed up on my phone. Well, after the usual automatic split-second adrenaline attack (what does she know? Has she discovered anything?) I answered, making sure my “voice smiled” as Helen has taught me to do, and Susan told me that she and Emily were going to be having lunch just around the corner from me (so nice of her to imply that I live on the doorstep of wealthier Balham, rather than the suburban backwaters of Tooting). Did I want to come along?

  Well, I didn’t need asking twice.

  We met in a Spanish restaurant on the High Street, the one that’s always in the Sunday supplements.

  “I’ve always meant to come here,” I gushed to Susan. But what I meant was, I’d always wanted to be the kind of person who’d go there. There’s a distinction, don’t you think?

  Susan was looking marvelous again. It’s so refreshing the way even as an ex-model she values comfort over style. She had on a pair of comfortable-looking jeans with a loose-fitting tunic (navy, naturally), and her wispy, white-blonde hair (more white than blonde today) was artlessly pulled back into a ponytail. Emily, of course, was wearing an A-line, maternity-type top, even though she can’t be much more than five months pregnant and hardly showing at all.

  “I must sit near a door,” she told the waiter before we’d even been shown to our seats. “I need to have access to fresh air. You see, I’m pregnant.”

  She said “pregnant” in the same, hushed, awed tones as if she were announcing she had fifteen pounds of explosives strapped to her body that could detonate at any time.

  Once we were sitting down (how nice of that couple to give up their prized window seat when Emily clutched her hand to her chest and started faintly gagging. People are so kind, don’t you find?), Emily started perusing the menu in search of a dish that hadn’t been expressly created with a view to harming her unborn child. That meant Susan and I had a chance to catch up.

  I asked her all about the award, of course. She was typically self-deprecating, but I could tell she was pleased when I said I’d watched it. She told me that afterward, at the party, you’d hardly left her side.

  “There were lots of little dolly-birds there,” she said. “I told him ‘make the most of it, while you’ve still got your own teeth,’ but he just hung around me like a spare part. I can’t understand it. Normally, he’d have been lapping up the attention. Must be getting old.”

  “Oh, we’re all getting old,” I told her.

  “Rubbish. You look fantastic,” she lied. “The weight loss really suits you.”

  Of course, that was too much for Emily.

  “Being too skinny can be awfully aging though, don’t you think?” she asked, addressing the salt shaker in front of her.

  “I’m so much happier now I’m the size of a whale.” She held out one of her slender, birdy wrists admiringly. “I’m certainly not going to be one of those irritating women you always read about who goes back to a size zero a week after giving birth. I love my baby weight.”

  “Darling, you’re the size of a twig, so do shut up.” Always the adoring mother, Susan.

  Susan tells me she’s found the perfect Croatian holiday home. It’s on the island of Korcula, apparently, so a fraction of what it would cost in Istria or the Dubrovnik coast.

  “But it’s still at least twice what we’d budgeted,” Susan confided. “I’m not going to tell Clive though. Luckily he always claims to be clueless about money and leaves everything up to me.”

  You know, if you hadn’t always told me so, I never would have got that impression—about you being clueless with money, I mean. I know Susan is the financial brains of the operation, but you always struck me as someone who knew exactly how much everything was worth. It just shows you how wrong you can be about someone, I guess.

  Susan was talking some more about your renewing your vows. She said it was really just an excuse for a great big party, but of course I could tell it means a lot more than that.

  “Of course you and Daniel will have to be there,” she said. “It’s just going to be our closest friends.”

  That was kind of her, wasn’t it, to include us in among your closest friends? I know she doesn’t really mean it or, if she does, there are probably well over a hundred other “closest friends” who all come in front of us. But it was still a nice touch I thought.

  She explained that the party was organized for June, in two and a half months’ time.

  Emily seemed to get very agitated at this. “I’ll be nearly eight months pregnant by then. I really don’t know whether I’ll be in the right frame of mind for a big party. And you know, I’ve got that mums-to-be yoga workshop booked for the week after so I worry it will be too much for me. Honestly, I do think you and Dad could have timed things a bit better.”

  Susan rolled her eyes at me behind her glass of wine but was very placating when she spoke, reassuring Emily that the party wouldn’t be too onerous for her, and that she could always take a rest should it prove a little much.

  By this time the waitress was at the table—a pretty girl, Portuguese I think, with a gold ring through her eyebrow.

  Emily had a long list of questions about the food. Had that one been cooked with nuts? Did this one have raw egg? Pasteurized cheese? The poor Portuguese girl’s smile started to slide down her face as if it were melting.

  Luckily Susan distracted Emily by pouring a thimbleful of white wine into her glass.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she shrieked, horrified.

  “Just a tiny dribble can’t hurt you.” Susan was unabashed.

  “For God’s sake, Mum, it’s as if you want your grandchild to be born with two heads or something.”

  Susan’s very calm about things like that, isn’t she? She didn’t act in the least bit embarrassed, although I have to say I was mortified myself. Considering that most of the time Emily talks as if anything louder than a whisper causes her physical pain, she has a really penetrating voice when she sets her mind to it.

  But you know, after Emily calmed down, we started talking properly and I have to say that while I wouldn’t go so far as to say we hit it off, we did at least find some common ground. All right, that common ground principally consisted of talking about pregnancy experiences and what middle name sounds best with Cressida, but at least I felt a little progress was made. When Susan was in the loo, we even chatted conspiratorially—about you as it happens. Don’t be alarmed, Clive, it was all nice things, obviously. She said she didn’t know what had come over you recently but you’d been so ridiculously attentive to her mother it was quite sweet really. (Before you start, that was Emily’s word: “sweet.” I know how much you’d hate that particular adjective.) Emily said she and Liam were always teasing you about not deserving Susan, and how nice it was that you finally seemed to be taking what they said on board.

  Then we went back to talking about Emily.

  By the end of the lunch, I have to say we were all quite jolly. Emily even ventured that everything in the garden with the bland barrister husband might not be completely rosy. Apparently after the twenty-week scan he had failed to show sufficient enthusiasm for her inspired idea of having the scan photo made into a mouse pad for his mother’s birthday. “I think she’d prefer a smoothie maker,” is what he appare
ntly said. Emily decided that was rather insensitive of him, but I think he might have had a point, don’t you?

  Emily told me she was planning to have a baby shower. (I didn’t know such things existed outside of Friends, but apparently they’re all the rage among the young mummies in West London. Honestly Clive, it’s like a little kingdom all on its own where your sort live, isn’t it? The Vatican of London with different rules and different people and different customs. No wonder you knew I’d never really fit in there.) And guess what? She even invited me along! Well, I happened to mention I’d never been to a baby shower and how much I’d love to see what went on, and she said I could come to keep Susan company (presumably she’ll have an oldies corner, complete with the bland barrister’s mouse-padless mother). Now, I know you probably won’t want me to go—you’re so funny about those sorts of crossovers between our lives now. You used to find them quite exciting, do you remember, the thrill of the close shave?—but it would have been very rude of me to say no, wouldn’t it? And Susan seemed so genuinely delighted I was going to be there, I really didn’t want to disappoint anyone. You can understand that, can’t you, Clive?

  “I hate letting anyone down,” you used to tell me all the time, clutching your head and arranging your face into that very sincere expression you do so well. Do you remember how often you used that phrase as you vacillated to and fro between poor ignorant Susan and me, explaining it was a throwback to your own childhood when you’d been constantly let down by the adults around you?

  Well, Clive, I also hate to let anyone down (how considerate we’ve both become recently. How reluctant to disappoint). So I’ll go to Emily’s baby shower. It’ll be a novel experience for me. I’m looking forward to it so much. Helen has told me I need to find new experiences to break the old patterns I associate with you.

  I do hope she’ll be pleased.

  Please don’t be alarmed, but I went to look at your house last night.

  I know what you’re thinking, that it sounds like something a stalker would do, but I was just passing. No, honestly. I was in the area having a wander around Regent’s Park. Remember I once suggested we go there, and you said it was far too close to your home and would be like going on a date together in your back garden? I’d never fully explored it before so I decided to go, and seeing as you’d used that phrase “my back garden,” I thought it couldn’t hurt to pop along to your road, just to remind myself where it was.

  Of course it brought back memories of all those dinner parties where Susan and Daniel would chitty chat over the table and incredibly, never find it odd that the two of us were avoiding each other’s eyes. It’s lovely, your house, with its eloquently arched windows and curving gravel drive, and obviously Susan does have exquisite taste. The double-height glass kitchen at the back has appeared in more than one interiors magazine. “Bricks and mortar,” you always said dismissively. “It means nothing to me. None of it. She can keep the lot.” Yet in the end, you couldn’t bring yourself to leave it. Even bricks and mortar, it seems, exert their own pull.

  And I can quite see why you wouldn’t want to go. Why would you? It’s a beautiful house. I love the ornate wrought ironwork around the porch and the way the windows of the drawing room on the first floor (“don’t call it a drawing room,” I can hear you raging. “It sounds so pretentious!”) catch the evening light at sunset. Oh, yes, I suppose I did linger a little bit longer than strictly necessary, watching how the glass glinted orange then pink, and then how a floor lamp went on in the corner of the room, sending a muted yellow glow through the fluttering opaque curtains.

  I could see shadows moving across the room in the amber light. You’ve got to understand I wasn’t spying or anything. Anyone who happened to be standing on that opposite pavement in that exact spot could have seen the same thing. It’s just that it was quite a pleasant evening, just the slightest hint of a drizzle, but nothing at all serious. Back home, Daniel would already have got the kids to bed and be snoring on the sofa in front of a low-budget sci-fi movie on Channel Five. I really had nowhere at all I had to be.

  On the journey home (and it is a long journey, let’s face it, all those stops at platforms crammed with foreign language students and tourists clutching Hamleys carrier bags), I sat opposite a woman who was silently crying. She was about ten years older than me, in her early fifties probably, and her short hair was dyed very, very red. She had on a pair of green, high-heeled shoes so new they still had the price label on the soles, and I imagined her putting them carefully on earlier that evening, maybe stopping to admire them in the full-length mirror on her wardrobe door, not yet knowing that the night would end with her traveling home alone, with tears channeling through her thick foundation. Damaged people. How you used to love them.

  “She’s very damaged,” you’d airily pronounce about anyone with a hesitant manner, or a nervous laugh, or a less-than-firm handshake. Anyone in fact who annoyed you, or puzzled you, or who wasn’t as outgoing as you or as able to meet strangers’ eyes (God, how good you are at that—the whole unflinching eye contact. Must have been what made you such a hit with the younger, stroppier musicians). You could probably run workshops on how to do that, you know. “Eye Contact Skills—Beginners,” you could call the course. You’ve always loved a lucrative sideline.

  You know what’s funny though? Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m the one who’s damaged, like every part of me where you’ve ever laid a finger (and let’s face it, there are very few parts where you haven’t) bears an ugly black splaying bruise. Does that seem melodramatic to you? I’m so sorry. I see you now, wrinkling your nose in distaste. “A bit OTT,” you might sniff. Or, worse, “a bit obvious.”

  Damaged in transit. Maybe I’ll have a label printed up, or a T-shirt.

  A bumper sticker might be fun.

  Damaged goods.

  Silleeeee Salleeeee

  Sian called me today. Like I say, she has felt awkward since all this business happened, as if those years of being “a friend to the affair” (incidentally, that’s what they call it on infidelity forums—isn’t it wonderful?)—providing alibis, joining us for cozy dinners out—makes her somehow responsible for how it has turned out. She raises her eyebrows meaningfully at me when no one else is looking, silently asking how things are going. Am I over you yet?

  She thinks we should go out tonight, the two of us, get dressed up, head to Hoxton, hang out in a bar or pub, trying to blend in with the young things. Flirt with some men like we used to do twenty years ago. Sian has never conceded that we might not be quite the same people as we were when we used to traipse our twenty-something selves around the hotspots of late night London. “I don’t want to be surrounded by twenty-eight-year-olds,” I tell her now. “It makes me feel old.” “Speak for yourself,” she retorts, smoothing back her carefully highlighted hair with a gym-toned arm. How you used to enjoy mocking her, with her underage boyfriends and designer wardrobe. You refused to see the exposed heart underneath, looking for love in unsuitable places, just like all of us.

  Did I ever tell you about the time I met up with Sian a few years ago, the day she’d finally taken possession of a £1,000 Birkin handbag she’d been lusting after for years? When she arrived at the restaurant, she was like a doting mother, unable to stop fussing over the new arrival, stroking the soft camel-colored leather and cooing over its shape, its contours. Over the course of the meal, however, the pleasure in her new purchase drained steadily away alongside a couple of bottles of good Chenin Blanc. Yet another romance had just bitten the dust and Sian’s usual armor-plated self-belief was slipping. “I’m fed up with it all,” she said eventually, and I remember how shocked I was to hear her admitting to defeat. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked me. “When did this become my life?” I tried to cheer her up by reminding her of all the gorgeous young men, all the money she earned as a store buyer—money that she was free to spend on designer handbags galore. She looked at me then, a smudge of mascara scorched black across h
er cheek. “A Birkin bag won’t care about me when I’m old,” she said. Do you know, Clive, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite so sad?

  But today Sian wasn’t in the mood for self-pity. I think she believes the mourning period should now be over. I think Sian believes a bit of male attention will cure me of you. Well, I can’t pretend it wouldn’t be wonderful to be cured, finally, of this embarrassing, debilitating affliction. What relief it would be to wake up in the morning without subconsciously flinching in anticipation of the hammer blow of awareness of loss, or to step lightly through my life free of the tumorous mass of you. So tonight I will take the waters of Hoxton in the hope of a cure.

  In deference to my imminent restoration to the ranks of the living, I have dressed with particular care, pulling a floaty top on over my suddenly too-baggy jeans to hide the worst of the Misery Diet ravages. Tilly came in just now as I was putting on my makeup.

  “You haven’t worn makeup in months,” she told me, all suspicion. That girl sees everything, you know. Remember how it was always her who’d want to know who I was emailing late at night, or how you always used to call when Daniel was out?

  “I’m combating the seven signs of visible aging,” I told her. It’s always good to connect with my children through advertising slogans, I find. It’s like a shortcut to understanding. “I’ve reached sign five.”

  Tilly didn’t crack a smile.

  “Why is your neck like that?” she wanted to know.

  “Like what?”

  “You know, like the top of the curtains.”

  Ah, pleated. My daughter wants to know why the skin on my neck is pleated.

  I look at myself in the mirror and see what she sees—a too-thin forty-three-year-old whose skin no longer fits wearing a top that drapes over me like one of those frilly round cloths on what my grandmother used to call an “occasional table.”

  “Liz Hurley is older than I am,” I told her, defensively.