The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel

by Tamar Cohen

  Sunday, of course, is family day. Emily and her bland barrister husband will come for lunch, and Liam will produce whichever Sloaney girlfriend he has on the go. You’ll sit around in the light-filled kitchen or, if the weather’s good, around the teak table in the garden. Liam will poke fun at Emily’s pregnancy, Emily will pretend to be cross. Susan will placate, placate. You will tell amusing stories about the microcelebs you have met. The papers will be read, two or three bottles of good Chablis will be drunk, and you’ll think to yourself, “I nearly lost this. What a fool I’ve been. What an idiot, what a prick.”

  Helen says I must stop this endless projecting about your life. She says I must stop eulogizing it and try to remember all the times you complained about how dull weekends were, with your dull friends and your dull, dull, routine. She says I must take the energy I’m expending on imagining your life and invest it back into mine. I must stop thinking of your family, she tells me, and start thinking about my own.

  But weekends in my house are small, mean things where people sniff blindly around each other like laboratory mice.

  “Can we go somewhere today, like normal families do?” Tilly asked earlier today, while we sat eating cheese sandwiches for lunch.

  To be fair, Daniel’s look of dismay was fairly fleeting (as opposed to mine, I fear).

  “Of course we can go somewhere, sweetie,” he said, throwing me a loaded glance that could have had any number of meanings. “Where would you like to go?”

  But Tilly couldn’t think of where she wanted to go, and Jamie wanted to stay home and play Modern Warfare II.

  “I’ll stay with Jamie and you two go out,” I said, trying not to sound too eager. “What’s on at the cinema?”

  Tilly looked at me scathingly.

  “Don’t bother,” she said.

  Don’t laugh, but sometimes, Clive, I feel I’m not equipped to cope with the teenage years. It’s like I’ve done only the introductory course, got the grade 1 certificate, but now we’re getting onto intermediate territory, I’m hopelessly out of my depth. I know you’ve already successfully negotiated all of this. Do you remember how you used to tell me you were so glad you’d be around to give me advice when I reached this stage? Do you remember that, Clive?

  In the end nobody went out today and Tilly spent the afternoon in her room on Facebook while I shut myself up in the cubbyhole and surfed definitions of “brokenhearted” on the net.

  * * *

  Before Susan and Emily arrived for lunch today, I sat down at my computer as always.

  Can you imagine my surprise when, in place of the usual (0 unread) in my inbox, there were 11 bold new messages, waiting for me like Christmas presents under the tree?

  Finally, I thought, my luck is changing. I believe in luck a lot more these days, incidentally. I always used to dismiss it, do you remember? You make your own luck, I used to declare. But now I’m not so sure. Now I think luck might be one of those things like curly hair that just happen to you whether you like it or not. It’s quite a comforting thought, in a strange way.

  So there I was, naïvely excited at the sudden riches in my inbox. But as I opened them, I began to feel ever so slightly sick.

  They were all from clients of mine, magazines and websites I’ve written for before and cultivated over the years and one after another they all said the same thing: “We’re sorry you feel that way. Our working relationship is now at an end.”

  Thank God for the happy pills! While on one guttural level I absolutely knew something awful had happened and that whatever it was, it spelled disaster for me, it was as if I was absorbing all this information through a filter so that by the time it arrived in my brain, it was already watery and tepid.

  Most of the messages were replies to an email I seem to have sent to all the contacts on my “work contacts” list. I read it, with an almost dispassionate interest, as if it was written by someone else (which, come to think of it, was partly true!).

  As before, the message that had been sent out was an old one which I had once sent to a friend, also a freelance writer, with whom I often used to moan about work.

  I won’t bore you by copying out the whole thing (and I suspect it’s probably unnecessary anyway, hey, Clive?), save to say that it started off by me ranting about how bored I was with freelancing, and how idiotic most of the commissioning editors were, and how I couldn’t be bothered to even pretend to be interested anymore. “I just do it on autopilot and think of the money.” I went on to list some of the ways in which I’d been cutting corners—sloppily copying out chunks from old newspaper cuttings and telling commissioning editors that certain experts were “impossible to get” when really I just couldn’t be bothered. Then I’d gone on to bad-mouth particular publications and personnel for being “tight-fisted” or “moronic” or, in one inspired instance, “insufferably bland.” That’s when the sender of the message had been particularly clever, personalizing each message by substituting the name of the addressee (that personal touch is so important, wouldn’t you say?).

  The final paragraph was me recounting a particularly unedifying personal anecdote about how I’d gone out the week before with a (named) contact who was deputy editor on a magazine and we’d had a meal and three bottles of expensive wine on her expense account and she’d been sick into her handbag on the way home.

  Needless to say, as I cast my eye down the list of unread messages (which, by the way, seemed to be growing by the minute), there was one from her as well.

  Isn’t it funny how you can spend twenty years building up a career and pfffff, it’s over in a heartbeat, vanished into nothingness just like the baby that never was?

  I sat wedged into my cubbyhole and tried to summon up a sense of outrage, but to be honest, there was little forthcoming. To tell you the truth, I won’t miss it—the phone interviews scribbled down on the backs of envelopes because I’ve run out of notebooks, the greasy begging phone calls to commissioning editors, the endless quest to find a new angle on the same tired old ideas.

  I tried to put a positive spin on the whole sorry situation and not think about the wider economic implications of my sudden enforced unemployment or of the unopened official letters already piling up in the drawer. Only when I thought about you, Clive, did the pharmaceutically generated equanimity begin to falter.

  I imagined you sitting down at your own oak desk in your glass-sided Fitzrovia office and, just as I had done, clicking onto your inbox, where I know you routinely find upward of 100 emails have accumulated overnight—invitations, interview requests. “It’s such a bore,” you used to groan theatrically. “I don’t want to deal with any of it, all I want to do is spend the day emailing you.”

  I imagined you getting down to the business of the day, the business of making money and being Clive Gooding, and I couldn’t help but make a few comparisons.

  I bet you don’t have a drawer piled high with letters you’re too scared to open (“oh, I just send all that sort of boring stuff to my accountant. Life’s too short!”). I bet your career hasn’t been put through the shredder, I bet your children aren’t blithely going about their business unaware of the axe of homelessness dangling over their heads. I bet you don’t lie awake in the night compiling lists of saleable assets (few).

  That’s when the acid began to gush and the palpitations fluttered. Even now, seven hours later, I still feel that gorge rising and have had to do lots of highly focused breathing to try to sink it down again. Breathe in, stomach out. Breathe out, stomach in.

  Tell me something, Clive. How is it that every time I think I have nothing left to lose, I lose something more?

  So, it’s fair to say I was not in the best frame of mind to have Susan and Emily round for lunch. They arrived separately, Emily first. The poor girl was quite flushed, despite that cool breeze we had today. It seemed my neighborhood had made her nervous. Walking past a group of “hoodies” on the corner of the next street, she’d felt so intimidated, she’d had to zip her Bal
enciaga handbag right up and hug it to her chest.

  “A woman in my condition is so vulnerable,” she told me, as if explaining something to a foreigner. I didn’t like to remind her that I’d been in her condition twice myself. Perhaps she thinks people like me subscribe to a different condition altogether, with a completely different experience of pregnancy. Are there different classes of pregnancy in Emily World, do you think? What an interesting view of life she must have!

  Susan was late and appeared a bit out of sorts.

  “I really should be doing some work,” she told me. “I’m surprised you have the time to have leisurely lunches, Sally.”

  That was quite ironic in the circumstances, wouldn’t you say?

  I went to the expensive deli yesterday (I can’t face M&S after the last time), so I’d bought loads of food for lunch—lovely Greek salad, couscous with roasted veg, goat’s cheese tart, ciabatta, a whole plate heaped with cold meats, hummus, olives. Then, while I’d been queuing to pay, I’d tossed into the trolley a couple of packs of sushi, some readymade quiche, and a raspberry cheesecake. (I’m finding it difficult to estimate quantities at the moment, or assess what goes with what. Perhaps you’d already noticed?)

  “Oh, I didn’t know there’d be food.” That was Emily, of course. “I’ve already eaten. I have to be so careful about my diet at the moment. Little and often.”

  Curious to think what Emily’s definition of lunch is, if it doesn’t involve food.

  So Susan and I ate, or tried to eat, the obscenely overladen spread—the sweaty quiche, and rubbery goats’ cheese tart, the ciabatta so sharp crusted it cut the roof of my mouth, the oily Greek salad and coagulating couscous. I thought about dinners I’ve had at your house, where Susan has effortlessly served up vast platters of filo parcels and exotic salads with bits of fruit in, and vats of liqueur-soaked fresh cream trifle. It was not my finest hour.

  Emily looked a bit horrified by my house. I don’t know whether she’s ever visited someone who doesn’t have a cleaner before. I tried to look at it through her eyes (there I go again, with my automatic empathizing reflex), and I could see why she might be slightly alarmed. I did try to clean up the kitchen this morning, but got sidetracked after the email nightmare, so there were still piles of unwashed plates in the sink (we do have a dishwasher, I hasten to add, it’s just that nobody seems capable of emptying it). The floor was okay, I think, as Daniel had vacuumed in there just a few days ago, but there were a couple of sticky patches where Jamie had spilled orange juice and of course, Emily happened to tread in those, so her dainty little ballet pumps stuck to the floor and made a rather horrible squelching noise when she pulled them unstuck.

  I blamed it all on the kids, and swore the place had been spotless a couple of days ago, which isn’t entirely a lie. Well, okay, it is a lie, but it had been much better at least. I was glad she didn’t look in the living room, and rather apprehensive about what she’d find in the bathroom. I did mean to clean the toilet, but it just went clean out of my head. The Citalopram does that, I think. Funny because when I first started on the happy pills, I had a massive influx of manic energy and started jumping up to mop the floors in the middle of the afternoon, but these days I don’t have the energy even to notice the dirt, let alone do anything about it.

  I needn’t have worried because after a mercifully toilet-free hour, Emily announced she was going to meet a friend to go shopping.

  “I have absolutely nothing that fits me,” she said with a mock wail. “I’m the size of a house.”

  I think that was probably my cue to contradict her, but do you know, I just couldn’t be bothered. I think that emailing business must have been weighing on me more heavily than I’d thought.

  After Emily had left (don’t worry, she got a cab. After her nasty experience with the hoodies, she wasn’t taking any more chances), Susan and I fell into a dispirited torpor.

  Susan seemed anxious that I shouldn’t form the wrong opinion of Emily. “She can seem like a complete snob, but she’s got a big heart,” she assured me. I was quite flattered that she minded what I thought, but then Susan said gently that she felt I’d been a little “short” with Emily. That was her exact word: “short.”

  I was quite taken aback when she said that, I have to say. I don’t think I was short with Emily at all, and though as Susan pointed out I had called her anally retentive, it must have been quite obvious to everyone that I meant it as a joke. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but is Susan sometimes just a little slow in getting things?

  While we were having a coffee (how embarrassing that I offered her filter coffee before realizing we had only instant. I don’t think she noticed though), Susan told me that she had a few numbers for me, of people I could “talk to”—my budget counseling is what she meant, not the Samaritans or anything (I hope!). I think she might have been expecting a bit more gratitude but, do you know what, I just wasn’t in the mood. I don’t need to fucking talk to anyone, I need to have my fucking life back. And do you know who has my fucking life? Susan, that’s who.

  Breathe in, stomach out; breathe out, stomach in.

  I changed the subject by quite abruptly asking about you and her and about how the hysterical bonding was going. I am nothing if not a masochist. (Sometimes I think I’d like to take the sharp end of Tilly’s compass and jab it again and again into the skin of my upper leg. Through the denim of my jeans. Do you ever get that feeling?)

  If Susan was surprised by my sudden change of tack, she didn’t say so.

  “I actually think we’ve reached a completely new stage in our relationship,” she said. “We’re so honest with each other now. Sometimes I think we had to go through all that shit earlier in the year just to get to where we are now.”

  Then she went on to confide that just a few months ago things had gotten so bad between you that you’d talked about moving out.

  “I even thought at one stage that Clive could be having an affair,” Susan told me.

  Can you believe that? She actually said that to me? That she thought you might be having an affair? (Remember how you professed to hate that word “affair”? “That’s not how I feel about you,” you said. “I feel married to you.”)

  Of course I asked her, well, you’d have done the same. I asked whether she still thought there was any possibility of that.

  Susan shook her head, white-blonde bob shimmering like cheap tinsel.

  “He swore on my life that he hadn’t,” she told me. “And I believe him. Clive is a lot of things, but he’s not an out-and-out liar. He knows my feelings about that. If I thought he’d slept with someone else, he’d be out. Simple as that.”

  Hear that, Clive? Simple as that.

  So then I did the thing that you’re probably not going to like. In my defense, I was still quite churned up about the career-sabotaging emails and Emily and the whole thing. So—and please try to understand just a little bit—I told Susan about an article I’d seen in one of the papers recently that she might find interesting. An affair diary. Now, before you start, I didn’t tell her where I’d seen it. I’m not that stupid. I just told her she might quite like to read it. What are the chances that she’ll actually go to the trouble of googling it, hey? And even if she did, she wouldn’t put two and two together. I’m sure you’re perfectly safe.

  Still, I did regret it rather once I’d closed the door to her. I don’t know what came over me, I really don’t, blurting it out like that. But rest assured, Clive, I’ll be bringing it up with Helen. Clearly there’s still much work to be done!

  Another sleepless night. I’m thinking about Susan’s face when she said that thing about you not being a liar. I’m thinking how much I regret that hurting you involves hurting her. I’m thinking about the line between love and hate and how you couldn’t fit one of Tilly’s baby-fine hairs between the two. I’m thinking about what we’ve done to each other and to everyone else. I’m thinking about you. Always about you.

  I can’t cla
im it was altogether a surprise to hear from you this morning. I knew you’d be cross. But really I had no idea you’d be that cross. How could I have guessed Susan would go home and look that affair diary feature up? I mean, would you? She must have been very bored last night. Couldn’t you have kept her more occupied? Wasn’t there some hysterical bonding you could have been getting on with? I told you she wouldn’t put two and two together though. She’d definitely have said something if she had. Yes, I know you said she gave you a “funny look” but you’re inclined to be paranoid. I think it’s fine, I really do. But of course I can’t pretend not to be excited that you’ve finally suggested meeting up, even if it’s only for you to get “heavy” with me (“I don’t want to get heavy with you,” you said in that Blood Money email—remember?). I have a feeling there are going to be a few threats made (yours) and maybe a few tears shed (mine). It will be the first time I’ve seen you in five months (I don’t count that glimpse of you in the tube station ticket hall, your smile for Susan, your arm around her shoulders).

  “We have to sort this out once and for all,” you thundered down the phone this morning, and while I was a bit shocked to hear the naked hatred in your voice, I have to confess I was a tiny bit thrilled as well. It was the indifference that had been hurting more than anything, you see. It was the way you said, “I’m sorry you’re feeling so dreadful” as if my feeling dreadful was a completely separate thing to how you were feeling, as if the one had no bearing on the other, as if your feelings were suddenly your own private concern. So hearing your feelings so clearly in your voice, knowing I’d provoked some feeling, any feeling in you, felt good. Call me silly, but the hatred that glinted in your voice, like grit catching the sun, felt like progress.

  And so we’re to meet up on Thursday. I can hardly believe it. I’ve got nothing to wear. My clothes lie in an unwashed heap behind the door of our bedroom while I wear the same jeans and sweatshirt day in day out. Even if I washed them, they’d still smell of failure. I need something new, something untainted. I’m going to go into the West End and hit the shops. I’m only forty-three years old, for goodness’ sake—plenty of time for jeans and sweatshirts when I’m sixty, or seventy. I have a new credit card Daniel doesn’t know about. Do you remember I got it just before York Way Friday, so that I could book hotels without it showing up on our joint account statement. Not that Daniel ever pays much attention to that sort of thing, but better safe than sorry, hey? Of course you could never risk anything like that, not with Susan keeping such a close eye on the family finances (“money is so boring,” you used to say. “Fifty pounds or five hundred, it makes no difference to me”).