The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel

by Tamar Cohen

  “A grip? Where do I get one of those?” I asked him, helpless. “Can I buy one? Do you have a spare one?”

  And all the time, while I was spilling this stuff, I was silently urging him to lean in and put his arms around me and pretend to love me. If I say I was after just a fraction of the protection the thing that calls itself a baby already commands, you’ll think I’m crazy, but it’s nevertheless true. But of course Daniel couldn’t see beyond the hopeless giggles. He got stiffly to his feet, creaking with disapproval.

  “Let me know when you’re ready to start putting your children first.”

  My children. The words passed through me like gallstones. I had a sudden image of Tilly and Jamie swimming like goldfish in a glass bowl, visible but not attainable. Or perhaps I was the one in the bowl, obscenely gaping mouth pressed up against the glass, and they were on the outside, walking away.

  After Daniel had gone, I lay in bed and tried to cry but there were no tears. Instead my phone rang almost constantly. Sian wanted to come over immediately with a bottle of chilled Sauvignon Blanc to offer support. Daniel had rung her, apparently. (Oh, the cozy bonds forged by having a shared loony in your life. I imagined them comparing notes and shaking their heads in a synchronized show of regret.) She sounded hurt when I told her I wouldn’t let her in, saying again that she blamed herself for all of it, for buying into the romance of our affair. She had “enabled” you to gain a foothold in my life, she said again. She had facilitated my breakdown. I told her not to worry and that she hadn’t actually been all that important. Then she went very quiet and wounded and said I’d changed and how much she missed the old Sally and mentioned the Sauvignon Blanc again more for form’s sake, I think, than with much expectation of success.

  You always had loads of theories about Sian, didn’t you? You thought she was passive-aggressive, you thought she wanted to punish me for her own childlessness, you thought she fancied me (although, admit it, that was just a little febrile fantasy). You thought she fancied you. You thought I was too good for her, you thought she was too bad for me. You thought, yet again, that she was damaged.

  Damaged women. You always were such a sucker for them.

  And now I’m the most damaged of them all. And you’re nowhere to be seen.

  After Sian, there was my dad. Daniel has been busy with his address book, apparently.

  My father sounded uncertain, as though not quite sure why he had rung.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I couldn’t be bothered to dissemble. “The children have gone, Daddy. Daniel took them away.”

  There was a pause as he tried to gauge from my tone whether the children going might be construed as a good thing or a bad thing. Eventually, finding no barometer to guide him, he opted for the safety of the platitude.

  “Well, we must hope for the best.”

  I let him off the hook then. What else could I do?

  “How’s life with you, Daddy?”

  Immediately he sounded stronger. He was on more solid ground now.

  “I’ve been very disturbed by the oil spill. Of course it’s a disaster, but it’s galling to see the Americans are on their high horses again, when God knows the wreckage they’ve left behind them in places like Bhopal.”

  You’ve never met my father, have you? I’m sure you’d pronounce him “perfectly charming,” but I don’t suppose you’ll ever meet him now (remember how you used to declare yourself insanely jealous of the life I had outside of you, the mother you’d never know and the father you’d never met? “I want your life to start when you met me,” you’d say. “I can’t bear you to have existed before I knew you”).

  “I’m worried about the world, Sally,” my father said now, in all seriousness.

  That giggle came again then, quite unbidden, tearing from my mouth like a scream.

  “I’m worried about it too, Daddy.”

  When the phone rang a third time, I thought it would be my father again, perhaps remembering some new affront the Americans had perpetrated, or perhaps having recalled that losing one’s children was more serious than he’d first surmised.

  “Sally? Helen Bunion here.”

  And so I was to have the full treatment, the big guns, no expense spared.

  Helen had to inform me that Daniel had been in touch. She had, of course, told him that it wasn’t appropriate for her to discuss her clients with an outside party (what a funny description for Daniel—an outside party. Makes him sound a bit like your wedding vows bash in the marquee in your garden, doesn’t it?). But she had agreed to contact me as he was clearly most concerned.

  “It’s reached the point where I feel I must urge you most strongly to seek further help,” she told me. “You are stretching the boundaries of my remit.”

  Isn’t that classic? Stretching the boundaries of her remit. I even wrote it down I liked it so much. It’s scribbled here in the margin of my journal next to a doodle of a flower. (The flower has petals that droop down as if it’s dead.)

  You know, I rather think that’s what you might have done, Clive—stretched the boundaries of my remit. Maybe all that stretching is what keeps hurting so much.

  Helen told me she had “grave concerns” about my state of mind and urged me, once again most strongly, to contact my GP. She also said I had reserves of strength I didn’t even know existed and that I should draw on them, even when I thought I was all done. That bit about drawing on them made me think about the doodle of the dead flower and again I tried not to laugh.

  “There is support available to you, Sally,” Helen told me. “It’s vital that you know you are not alone.”

  I thought about that once she’d rung off, about the support that is available to me and about the fact that I’m not alone. Except that it’s not how it seems right now. Right now I feel like the most alone person that ever was. “Don’t confuse being alone with being lonely,” Helen has always told me, so I tried to work out which one I was and came to the conclusion I was both.

  Alone and lonely. The double whammy.

  The phone rang again. A withheld number.

  And it was you.

  “What did you think you were doing?

  Your voice quivered with barely controlled anger. For a minute I thought you were talking about us? What did I think I was doing when I got involved in “us.” I’d forgotten about Emily.

  “Emily had a nasty scare. Naturally Susan and I are getting the first flight back to see her. The baby is going to have to be induced early. The last thing she needed was you turning up and giving her a fright.”

  That was harsh, I think. I was trying to help after all.

  “When are you going to accept reality, Sally?”

  I stayed silent. Well, there didn’t seem much to say.

  “We had an affair and now it’s over. You have to move on.”

  “Where?”

  “What do you mean, where?”

  “Where would I move on to?”

  You sighed then. A theatrically heavy sigh, as if your chest was being slowly compressed by a giant hand, squeezing out every last breath of air.

  “I’ve tried everything to help you, Sally.” (Have you, Clive? Have you tried everything? Have you tried standing by your promises? Have you tried telling the truth?) “But I have to warn you, one of my contacts has taken great exception to the way you’ve been harassing my family. He’s not the kind of man you mess with and I’m afraid it’s now completely out of my hands.”

  “Should I be scared, Clive?”

  I thought about the man in the leather jacket and the way his teeth at the front were whiter than the others; a man who cares so much about what other people think that he has bleached only the teeth that other people can see. It won’t be him, I don’t think, this “contact” who has taken exception to me. Mr. Leather Jacket is too familiar now. Perhaps he even quite likes me. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility. There has been no enmity in the exchanges that have passed between us. No, th
ere will be someone else, another of Tony’s charming relatives perhaps, in a different jacket, who’ll tell you to leave everything to him and not ask too many questions, and you will so gratefully acquiesce. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” you might say vaguely, self-servingly, just feeling it important to have said it. “Some people just won’t listen to reason,” the man might say, regretfully. “Some people just need to learn the hard way.”

  I think you hoped I would back down then, but I continued:

  “Do you remember telling me how you lay awake at nights worrying about what you would do if anything happened to me?”

  Your turn to be silent then, after I said that. Then another one of those big, squashed-down exhalations.

  “I never said anything I didn’t mean. At the time.”

  That “at the time” such a clever touch—a get-out-of-jail-free card tucked carefully under the edge of the board.

  “Life moves on, Sally. People change.”

  But that’s just where you’re wrong, Clive. People don’t change. The world carries on spinning inexorably around but people don’t spin with it. They dig their heels into the shifting sand and cling on for dear life.

  After you’d put the phone down (wishing things had never got this far) I tried to hold on to the sound of your voice, tried to wrap myself around it like a T-shirt that smelled of you. But it faded far too quickly, and besides it had been hard and unyielding and not at all comforting. I lay for a long time thinking of how it had sounded as it said those three magic words “at the time.”

  The more I thought about that phrase, the more impressed I was. I’ve got to hand it to you, Clive. That “I said nothing I didn’t mean. At the time” is sheer genius. It gives you carte blanche to say exactly what you want, knowing that you can backtrack at any time in the future with your integrity intact. I really must remember it.

  The problem is, of course, that other people might not quite get how it works. Other people might take you seriously. Other people might start to plan their lives around the things you’ve said. Other people might be left free-falling.

  Did you think about that? Did you? Did you?

  So yesterday was the day for phone calls. And today has been the day for knocks at the door. Five separate times people have pushed open the gate with its rusty, grating latch and walked up the path, the soles of their shoes crunching in the muesli gravel. Five separate times I’ve heard the leaves of the out-of-control sycamore tree swish and the spindly branches crack as people bend their heads to pass under it. Five separate times that ominous knocking at the door (thank God the electric bell is now finally out of charge. How I hated the funereal drawn-out howl as its batteries slowly ran down.).

  Twice I even dragged myself out of bed to stand at the window at the sound of the knock, despite the bolts of pain whenever I stand upright. (The stupidity of me, yet again thinking, even now, it might be you at the door, coming to rescue me). Once I found myself looking down on the completely bald head and protruding belly of a man I’d never seen before; in his fifties, wearing a black nylon jacket zipped all the way to the top, black trousers, and black sunglasses. Something told me he wasn’t the Milk Tray Man. At first I thought he might have been the contact you were talking about, the one who’d taken such exception to my harassing your family. But then, after peering through the living room windows and knocking on the front door a few more times, he put something through the letterbox. I couldn’t imagine what your contact might have been posting so after I’d watched him drive away (incidentally, I noticed a child’s booster seat in the back of his car! Doesn’t that strike you as incongruous?) I forced myself to go downstairs for the first time in two days. There was a letter on the doormat with a handwritten address. When I opened it I discovered it was from a firm of bailiffs. Apparently Daniel and I owe £2,544.79 to a credit card company and they’ve been sent to collect.

  £2,544.79. It could have been worse.

  I have to admit the letter did upset me a bit. I’d decided not to take any medication today as I’ve almost run out, but after the visit from the fat, bald bailiff, I needed something to calm me down. To my delight, nestling under a box of Tampax in the back of my bedside nightstand I found three Cymbalta that a GP friend had sent me in the first throes of my depression. I washed those down with lukewarm water from the bathroom sink, trying to ignore the persistent whooshing in my brain as I drank.

  The second time I looked down to see who was knocking at the door it was Sian, and I withdrew my head quickly in case she looked up. She stood there a long time, I must say, shouting up at the bedroom window saying she knew I was there. I felt bad after she’d finally gone. She does genuinely care about me, you know, whatever you might think—within the restrictions of her own self-absorption. In the end I took two more Zopiclones and pulled the duvet up over my head.

  When I woke up a couple of hours ago, it was dark. My laptop told me it was 1:24 A.M. and I couldn’t work out what day it was. In the end I googled “what day is it today?” and found a website that not only told me the day, but also what the temperature was in London, New York, and Tokyo.

  I immediately clicked onto Facebook to see if I’d missed anything.

  I could see from the entries on Susan’s page that you were back. There was something from Liam about picking you up from the airport, and something else from one of Susan’s workmates commiserating about you having to cut short your Maui trip.

  Emily’s page had seen a lot of action. Clearly sitting around in a hospital room, even one equipped with its own iPod docking station, left a lot of time for brooding (and I mean that in the existential rather than the “Iwannacutebaby” way, although that is probably also true).

  Emily Gooding-Brown wants to thank all her lovely friends for being so lovely.

  Emily Gooding-Brown Amazing how a brush with death helps focus one’s priorities.

  Emily Gooding-Brown can’t wait to meet her little one. Hold on sweetie. Just two more days!

  Emily Gooding-Brown Bored now.

  There was also message after message from friends and well-wishers, including one from Susan, obviously sent from an airport somewhere.

  Susan Gooding on way back. will bring grapes. don’t have baby before we arrive.

  Looking at Emily’s profile picture, which had been recently updated to show her in full pregnant pose, I remembered how she’d looked at me when I stood in the doorway of her hospital room and how she’d turned her head away and said “make her leave.”

  Make her leave.

  Once I might have been her stepmother, part of her family. “Emily might be a little hostile at first, but she’ll come round to it once she sees how happy you make me,” you’d told me.

  At the time I’d believed you. I’d even fantasized about how Emily would be like an older sister to Tilly, taking her on shopping trips and out for lunch. But now I know it to be a lie. All of it. Emily would never have accepted me. I would never have been good enough. Instead she whispers “make her leave” and her friends smirk and can’t meet my eyes.

  I keep feeling sick and rushing to the loo, but when I throw myself down on the floor, nothing comes up. The brain zaps are getting worse, and now there’s another feeling as well, prickling at the back of my throat. At first I couldn’t place it. In fact it took me ages to work it out. Do you want to know what it is, Clive, that new feeling churning up my insides and rising up my gorge?

  It’s hatred.

  And, do you want to know something else?

  It’s making me feel alive.

  The sun is up, but I’ve drawn all the curtains and pulled down all the blinds. It makes the pain in my head slightly easier.

  The knocking on the door started at 7:30 this morning. I didn’t look to see who it was, but I heard male voices shouting through the letterbox.

  “Mrs. Islip? We need to talk to you, Mrs. Islip.”

  I don’t know who she is, this Mrs. Islip they’re addressing.

 
I think they have the wrong door.

  And still the knocking goes on. I haven’t looked to see if that contact of yours has come to see me. I’m sure he’ll find me if he wants to, bearing gifts from you and love notes tied around bricks.

  Earlier Sian came again, shouting up from the doorstep.

  “Sally, for fuck’s sake, let me in.”

  I could tell she had her high black work shoes on; they made a satisfying clicking noise on the pavement when she finally walked away.

  The mobile has been ringing, of course, but I rarely answer it, only once this morning when it was Tilly.

  “Dad won’t let me go to the 14–16 club night in Brixton. Every-one’s going. It’s so unfair.”

  Do you ever have that thing where someone’s talking to you and the words are making sense, but you just can’t work out what they mean?

  “You’re not fourteen,” I said. Then immediately I had doubts. “Are you?”

  Tilly’s voice rose dangerously as she replied.

  “You don’t even know how old I am. You don’t know what is going on in my life. Why did we have to come to Uncle Darren’s? Why can’t we come home? What kind of a fucking mother are you anyway?”

  The “fucking” reverberated shockingly down the telephone line, silencing us both.

  Then there was a noise, and she was gone.

  Under the duvet, I’ve been clicking obsessively between Emily and Susan’s Facebook pages and your company’s website. I see there’s another visitor comment, this one commending you as a “fearless producer.” You’ll like that, I know. That word “fearless” standing out proudly on the screen.