The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel

by Tamar Cohen

  “Sorry I’m late,” she bustled, shaking out her hair and trying not to look at the black shadows around my eyes or the slight Citalopram tremor of my fingers.

  “Clive wanted me to go with him and look at some shoes he wants to buy. He’s such a terrible baby about things like that. So that threw my day out completely.”

  I imagined the two of you peering into the shop window. It would be that old-fashioned men’s shoe shop up near Hampstead—you’ve told me before that’s the only place you’ll ever go. I remember how excited you were when you bought that pair of brown suede brogues there, and how much you fussed about them getting muddy when we went for that walk around the old mental asylum at Shenley in Hertfordshire. All those days out in places expressly chosen because no one else in their right minds would want to go there. All those pub lunches in nameless villages up the A1 with floral cushions tied to the chair seats and midweek specials, three courses for £9.95.

  I remember all that while Susan tells me all about the business of being her, about how hard she’s been working and how much she’s looking forward to getting away with you next week to the manor house in Scotland owned by your old friend Gareth Powell, the historian.

  “It’s a wonderful place,” she tells me. “The full monty—flagstoned floors, big open fireplaces, a housekeeper who brings you cups of tea and homemade cakes.”

  Well, it was all I could do not to chime in then, adding to the list. “How about the faded Persian carpets or the four-poster beds with the white, extra-fine Egyptian cotton bed linen?”

  Don’t be silleeeee, I didn’t actually say all that. Nor did I tell her how many times you’d begged me to make up an elaborate excuse so I could have a “night off” and come to Scotland with you. How you’d already squared it with Gareth, who was excited by the thought of aiding and abetting a love affair (funny how, right at the end, in that agonizing endless lunch, you told me he’d advised you to give me up. “You’ll always love her, dear boy,” he’d apparently told you, this womanizing, two-faced, hypocritical old dandy. “But you know you have to give Susan another chance. It’s the right thing to do”). Wafting your open invitation at me, you’d built up a picture of how we’d spend our time in Scotland (“Make it two nights,” you’d wheedled. “Please”). We’d get up at six and take the path that threaded down from the gardens through the rocks and onto the little beach. “We’ll throw pebbles into the water,” you’d told me, “and sit on the big rock at the far end and take off our shoes and socks and dangle our feet in the water. And at night we’ll lie on the big old squishy tapestry sofa in front of the log fire and make love and then I’ll carry you up to bed and we’ll make love some more.” (I didn’t like to mention your bad back, not when you were so carried away by the Harlequin romance of your little fantasy.)

  So this is what was going through my head as Susan was describing how very much she was looking forward to the Scottish mini break. Of course I never had been able to engineer a whole night off to go with you, let alone two, but I’d pictured it in my head so many times. The house, the housekeeper, the fire, the sofa. Us, us, us. Except now it’s not to be us, after all. It’s to be you and Susan, walking to the beach in the early morning—you holding her hand to help her over the rocks, the two of you sitting side by side, feet dangling while you talk about where you can make changes in your marriage, how you can make it stronger.

  Oh yes, Susan told me all about how you two have been through a rough patch but are now talking more than you’ve ever done throughout your marriage. I was very touched that she opened up so much, really I was. I hadn’t been expecting such a level of intimacy as, goodness knows, we’ve never had it before, but as Susan herself said, all the talking and couple counseling you’ve been doing recently has obviously made her more “connected” to her emotions.

  Incidentally, don’t you think that’s a funny term? “Connected to my emotions.” It’s as if there was an option to choose to be unconnected to them, to somehow unbuckle them like a backpack and shrug them off onto the floor and leave them behind. I wish I could do that. Maybe it’s something I could ask Helen Bunion about, whether she can help me disconnect from my emotions. Maybe there’s a mental exercise one can do (Helen is very big on mental exercises). Or maybe we could role-play it. I could be me and she could be the backpack, or the other way around. Or there might be a visualization technique that could work. I could imagine packing those pesky emotions away into the back of a drawer or a box in the attic.

  It felt funny hearing Susan talk about being connected to her emotions, because she’s always been such a brisk, practical type of person. Before last night I’d have said she probably thought emotions were a bit like tonsils and could be extracted if they ever got troublesome. But I have to tell you, last night I saw a completely different side of her. It was very enlightening, it really was. For instance, she told me that the two of you have been hysterical bonding. That’s what she called it. Another bona fide counseling term, it seems. Of course she said it with a wry smile, drawing some exaggerated quote marks in the air. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about at first—I imagined it to be some kind of frenzied empathizing. But Susan explained—quite coyly for her—how after a marriage has been through a crisis point, a couple will often find themselves “going at it like rabbits,” even if they’ve been married, say, twenty-six years. Apparently your marriage counselor told you it was perfectly normal. “Enjoy it,” she said.

  Straight after York Way Friday, I used to have dreams of being ripped open by a knife. Slashed, slit, flesh torn. I’d thought at first it was because the ending had been like a physical assault, which I was subsequently reliving over and over inside my head. Belatedly though, I realized that I was the one wielding the knife. I even knew which one I’d use—the one from the kitchen with the exaggeratedly jagged, serrated edge. I’d plunge it into my chest and zigzag down, cutting myself open as with a rusty can opener. It was my heart I was after, of course. I’d rip it out, that hateful pulsating thing, and fling it down on the table in front of me. Then I’d grab a hammer and I’d smash it, still beating, to a pulp.

  The hysterical bonding chat really opened the floodgates. I’d always thought Susan was a bit—and please don’t take this the wrong way—two-dimensional. She was always so brusque and practical about everything it was as if she didn’t feel things terribly deeply. But last night I saw a completely different side of her. It seemed—and I know you’ll shoot me down in flames here for this corny image—as if someone had turned on a light inside her somewhere. She exuded this glow of contentment that was really quite warming to see. She told me all about the house-hunting trip you’re going on to “a wonderfully undiscovered part of Croatia” next month. As she talked I couldn’t help remembering how you’d ranted and railed against her persistent plans to buy a holiday home abroad. “We won’t know anybody there. What would we talk about, just me and her?” you’d agonized. “Every minute would be hell because I’d only want to be there with you.”

  Susan with her tremendous pragmatism had researched the whole idea and found a part of Croatia that had yet to become fashionable and where one could pick up a wonderful old house, full of character, right on the sea, for “virtually nothing.”

  “But you’ve got a wonderful house by the sea in Suffolk that you bought for virtually nothing,” I reminded her.

  Her face kind of clouded over a bit then and she wrinkled up her nose slightly as if picking up a bad smell.

  “The Suffolk house is great, of course,” she said, “within its limitations. But we don’t use it nearly as much as we used to. Remember all those weekend parties? There was a time when Clive was down there all the time, working on new material, but he’s much happier at home now he’s got his office all sorted out.”

  Sad fuck in a box.

  I remembered how thrilled Daniel and I were in those early years to get one of those treasured weekend invitations. “Just a few of us, nothing fancy,” you’d
say. We’d pile kids and pillows and bottles of midrange red wine into the Saab on a Friday afternoon, and Tilly and Jamie would be almost incoherent with excitement by the time we parked the car two and a half hours later. While your own children, then older teenagers away at boarding school, were absent from these gatherings, there were always enough others to hold their attention. As we walked along the waterside path from the road, toward the enormous old rambling house with its sloping floors and secret passageways and eccentric warren of bedrooms with windows looking straight out across the estuary, you’d step out onto the quayside to meet us, Jack Daniels in hand.

  “I love coming in to mix things up,” you’d say, casting an appraising eye over whichever disparate group of houseguests you’d gathered together that weekend, spilling out onto the gardens to the back and the side, “and then flying out again and leaving it all behind.”

  Of course that was before anything began, when you were still a mysterious distant figure with a separate life, before the frenzied years when you couldn’t even go to the loo without advising me first, the years of texts from service-station toilets and pre-iPhone emails sent from coin-operated public computers. “I’m delayed.” “I’m on my way.” “Nearly there.” “Got to go. Speak in two and a half hours. I love you.”

  “Think of me going through Essex,” I used to say if you were stuck down in Suffolk without me. It was our running joke whenever there was any kind of separation. “Did you think of me in Essex?” I’d ask you when you texted me the minute you arrived home. I wonder now if you ever think of me in Essex on one of your rare trips up? There are probably so many other things to think of.

  Susan confided in me (I think this was after her second rum and coke) how she’d felt Suffolk had become a bit “stale.” She couldn’t put her finger on why or when it had started, but it had reached the point where the house parties no longer seemed so much fun, and the weather clock seemed stuck permanently to “drizzle.”

  “We’ll always love that house because there are so many good memories, but it’s time for the next challenge. We want to go somewhere new. Start again. Meet a new set of people.”

  Will you be mixing things up now, I wondered? Flying in and out with your sunset cocktail hours and your lunch parties bleeding seamlessly into dinner, guests splayed out exhausted across the battered leather sofas (“they’re Danish from the 1970s,” you told me anxiously that first weekend we came. “I wouldn’t want you to think we picked them up in World of Leather”).

  Susan was very excited about the Croatia trip, I must say. She said that though you’ve both been before, you’ve always seemed a bit halfhearted about it in the past. Recently though, apparently you’ve become more enthusiastic than she is.

  She’s thinking in terms of maybe cutting down the amount she works, she told me. Taking on fewer clients. It’s not as if you need the money, and “as Clive can fly in and out for work” if you found the perfect place in Croatia, it would make sense for the two of you to spend more time abroad.

  I can see how that would work out quite well. Susan’s such a great homemaker and a real people person. She’ll soon assemble a new crowd of hangers-on, just as she did in Suffolk all those years ago. How canny you’ve both been really. But then Susan always was so astute with investments—that’s one of the things you both admired and resented about her.

  “Oh God I’m just useless about money,” you always professed. “I’ve never made a long-term strategy in my life, just stumbled from one immediate decision to another.”

  Funny that.

  You used to say we were two halves of the same whole. Now I wonder whether we weren’t just two halves of the same hole.

  Susan asked me all about Daniel. “Is it still awful?” she said, with typical bluntness.

  Sometimes, you know, I regret being so indiscreet about my disintegrating relationship. I should have taken a leaf out of your book. Even when you and Susan were at your most unraveled, you still gave off the impression of the ideal Sunday supplement couple, with your legendary Sunday lunches, your family picnics at Kenwood, your weekend-long house parties in the country. Me, I turned marital dysfunction into a spectator sport. I practically sold tickets. Available now, a ringside seat to watch two people dissect their relationship piece by microscopic piece.

  So strange now to think that for years our friends saw Daniel and me as the poster couple for a healthy relationship. “It’s so rare to see a couple who genuinely like each other,” my friend Jack once said. “Anyone can love their partner, but not many can manage ‘like.’” In the end I think it was the little things that did it for us—the relentless erosion of goodwill that comes with co-managing the demands of children, the secret conviction that the other person isn’t quite pulling their weight. It wasn’t so much, as women’s magazines always claim, that we started to see each other as parents instead of lovers, it was more that we saw each other as wanting parents, lacking somehow. We felt each of us unfairly burdened by the other’s shortcomings. I always think the downward slide started from there.

  “Oh, you know,” I replied evasively. “It is what it is.”

  If ever there was a phrase to sound the death knell of a romance that must surely be it. “It is what it is.” Oh dear.

  Susan gave me her sympathetic look, which, mercifully, didn’t entail cocking her head to one side but just fixing me with her very blue eyes.

  “Well, dear, if you want my advice, you’re better off sticking with the devil you know. All men are basically pretty much the same really so if you’ve already got one trained you might as well hang on to him.”

  Well, there didn’t seem much point in arguing that.

  After the Coach and Horses we made our way along Old Compton Street and into Wardour Street, where we found a nondescript French restaurant, part of a formulaic chain where the waiters did that passive aggressive Gallic thing of smiling at you as if they actually want to stab you.

  On our way in, Susan greeted two people she knew at separate tables. I wondered if they might be some of her dysfunctionals, but they looked pretty normal to me.

  Over dinner, which Susan insisted on ordering in a loud, exaggerated French accent—she does like to play everything for laughs, doesn’t she? You must really never stop giggling in your house—she told me the big news about Emily. You ought to have told me, you really should. A grandchild! Just what you’ve been hoping for. You must be absolutely thrilled. If there’s one thing you love it’s being needed and now Emily will need you desperately, and Susan too. It’ll be a whole new start for the two of you.

  I remember Sian saying, not long after she first met you, “Clive’s the type of man who can’t bear not having any children around to look after anymore.” Then she’d looked at me very pointedly and added: “The big danger is he’ll meet a woman who needs looking after instead.” I guess that would be me then.

  Halfway through the second bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé 2008, Susan’s iPhone rang. I must say I find it quite touching the way you both got those iPhones at the same time. I mean, I know there must have been some kind of special two-for-one type deal going on but there’s still something quite sweet about it, your joint embracing of technology. “Oh, I haven’t got the first clue how the bloody thing works,” you protested when you first got it (I didn’t know back then that it had been a two for one team venture you and Susan had embarked on. Ridiculously, I’d thought that iPhone of yours was all about me, a way for you to check for my emails even when you were away from your computer. Oh, the sheer arrogance of me).

  I could tell it was you straight away from how she turned slightly away, the low, familiar tone of her voice. I imagined how desperate you must have been to find out what we were talking about, and how subtly you must now be quizzing her, trying to gauge from her voice any newly acquired secrets. For a moment I even thought about texting you, just to put you out of your misery. But that wouldn’t have been very sensible, would it? (Incidentally, did I ever tell yo
u I had you listed in my contacts as Rentokil? It used to make me smile.)

  Susan apologized when she came off the phone. “Clive has gone so soppy recently,” she said, composing her features into a mock frown. “It’s intensely irritating. He’s always on the phone. I can’t get rid of him.”

  Ah, so that’s who you’re taking your minutiae to now, is it? Laying the details of your day at Susan’s feet like a cat offering up a dead bird to its owner, weaving your trivia together with hers to form a protective shroud around you both. It’s touching, it really is.

  “He’s even talking about renewing our vows,” Susan was speaking through a mouthful of tarte aux pommes, but pleasure wafted up from her like stale perfume. Is there anything quite as painful as someone else’s pleasure? I fought a momentary urge to pick up my own dish of crème brûlée and smash it violently into her face, pressing so hard that it filled up her nostrils and she choked on its slimy blandness. Or I could lean across and say, “Oh, here’s a photo you might want to use for the invitations,” and tap the buttons on my mobile phone to bring up the pictures in the hidden folder—perhaps the one of you standing behind me enfolding me in your arms and licking my neck while I giggled and the hand that held the phone shook, or the one you took in the hotel bathroom mirror of us standing entwined, forehead to forehead, each with a matching white towel around our waists? I wanted to take a wire wool scouring pad to that rosy glow on Susan’s cheeks and rub and rub until it was gone.

  Now don’t start getting all puffed up and protective. It was just a momentary impulse and of course I didn’t do any of those things. Instead I sat, and smiled nicely and, once I’d swallowed down the bile with a spoonful of crème brûlée, I told her how delighted I was for her and what a romantic thing it was to do after twenty-six years of marriage. Which of course it is.