The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel

by Tamar Cohen

  It wasn’t yet eleven when we said our good-byes at Leicester Square tube station. The night was still young and I had no real desire to go home, so instead of getting on the Northern Line south, I turned and followed the sparkle of Susan’s white jacket as she headed north. Gosh, I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a weirdo! It’s just I wasn’t in any hurry to get anywhere and I’d had such a lovely evening with Susan, I was strangely reluctant to see her go.

  I got into the car behind hers. I knew of course which stop she’d be getting off at. I’ve done that journey before, remember? There was a tricky moment as the doors opened and she suddenly turned her head to the right. But she wasn’t looking for anyone, and her gaze slid off me like baby oil. I didn’t really have a particular plan in mind. I just had a vague notion of following her home and watching to see if there was a light on upstairs, if you’d waited up for her to come home. Helen Bunion would have called that masochistic behavior, and I suppose she might have a point. But as you know very well sometimes when pain is just about as savage as it can get, it almost becomes pleasurable (“hurt me,” you used to urge me, your face distorted by sex. “I don’t want to,” I’d reply, and your cheek would twitch with disappointment).

  In the event though, I didn’t get a chance to follow Susan. I got as far as the top of the escalator. Just a few yards ahead, Susan was pressing her oyster card to the machine to open up the barrier. And just a few yards beyond that was you. I hadn’t seen you for so long it took a while for my brain to register that it really was you standing there. You were wearing that ridiculously expensive long coat that I used to call your “fashion coat” because it looked great but did a terrible job of keeping you warm, and your jeans with the frayed hems and a pair of battered cowboy boots. Your hair was slightly longer than when I’d last seen you and your face wore that delighted smile I remembered from so many past meetings, that dent appearing like a thumb imprint in your cheek. I have to admit that for a moment it all rushed over me again, those old feelings that Helen has been helping me file away in my mental filing cabinet (“hear the clanging noise as you firmly close it”). An answering smile erupted, quite unbidden, on my face and I even took an involuntary step forward until I realized—oh foolish, foolish woman—that you hadn’t even seen me. Your loving look, your dimple, your welcome that I’d been on the receiving end of so many, many times before were all for Susan. How touching that you didn’t even want her to risk walking the hundred or so yards home on her own down the brightly lit mean streets of genteel St. John’s Wood. But you always were over fussy like that. I remember all those texts I’d receive on the bus: “are you there yet?” “don’t let anyone follow you off,” “text me the minute you’re in your house.” They used to irritate me a bit then, when I accepted them as my due, but now I miss them.

  Before you turned to go, your arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders, Susan said something to you and your laugh echoed around the station. I imagine she was telling you something about our evening together. I wonder what it was that could have been so funny. Your laugh rang like tinnitus in my ears the whole of the way home.

  * * *

  Now please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve never really liked Emily. Is that a terrible thing to say about someone who almost became a stepdaughter? Maybe. But then I’m aiming for 100 percent transparency, let’s not forget, and the truth will set me free. So there it is.

  The first time I met her was at a launch for one of your artists. You were playing the jovial host, introducing all the disparate guests to one another. When I arrived with Daniel, you leaned in to peck me on the cheek and whispered “gorgeous” under your breath. Then you said, in a much louder voice: “I don’t think you’ve met my daughter Emily, have you?” and called her over. A painfully thin, overly made-up, over-groomed young woman, when she shook my hand, hers was as limp as canned asparagus and her smile looked like it had been painted on over her real mouth. Weighed down by several layers of thick mascara, her eyes were already flitting beyond me in search of anyone more interesting. It was like shaking hands with a hologram.

  I didn’t think much of her at the time, beyond wondering how two intelligent people like you and Susan could have produced someone so vapid, and so totally self-obsessed, but after my dinner with Susan, I couldn’t get Emily out of my thoughts. I knew just the type of pregnant woman she’d make. One of those who turn pregnancy into a competitive sport, and who have their doctor on speed-dial: “Are bananas safe for unborn babies?” “What about Paracetamol?” She’d ask people to stand up for her on the tube, even at four months, and start refusing to eat Brie and equating smokers with suicide bombers.

  Her bland barrister husband would insist she give up work (if you can call three days a week at a PR company work) at five months, as she’d be needing plenty of rest. And whenever he was away on business, she’d move back home with Mummy and Daddy because her “condition” would make her feel too vulnerable home alone in Notting Hill.

  You and Susan will love that, of course, feeling useful and needed again. I know exactly how vindicated you must be feeling. “Imagine,” you might tell yourself as you look down your dinner table at your smugly pregnant daughter, your glowingly expectant wife, “I almost gave all this up. What an idiot I’ve been.”

  You might even vow to yourself to spend the rest of your life making it up to them—you were always big on grand, empty promises.

  Thinking about Emily, that Sacred Vessel, and the wonderful future unfolding before you and Susan as doting grandparents started bringing up all those old sensations I experienced in the first awful weeks after York Way Friday. There was that same pain in my left side, just below my rib cage, that same gasping shortness of breath. I sat up in bed and fumbled in my bedside nightstand.

  Since my visit to the young blonde doctor who was interested only in addressing the underlying issues of my insomnia, I’ve been having to collect sleeping pills from other sources. Turns out they’re practically a currency of their own in our little part of South London, and I never even knew! All I had to do was mention my problems to a few friends, and the donations have been flooding in. A couple of Clonazepam here, a packet of Zopiclone there. I even got a delivery of Valium all the way from South America, where there are still some places you can buy such things over the counter in an enlightened sort of way. Funny to think that before three months ago I’d never even taken a sleeping pill, now I’ve got so many different varieties of tranquilizers, beta-blockers, and anti-anxiety medication, I could practically start up my own pharmacy.

  I tell you something, it’s made me look at my friends in a completely different way, a noble unsung army of middle-aged invisible women battling in stoical silence against our demons.

  I suppose I should tell you a bit about Daniel now. You might have been wondering where he’s been in all this. You always did go to such pains to say how much you liked Daniel. “Well, you couldn’t not like him, could you?” you’d ask me. “He’s so terribly harmless.”

  Was ever faint praise more damning?

  Of course I’d argue that “harmless” is relative anyway. Just because someone doesn’t set out to do you harm doesn’t mean they don’t end up harming you anyway, does it? You always claimed to be fascinated by how Daniel and I ever wound up together. But you have to understand that when I first met him sixteen years ago at a party thrown by one of the other minions at the publishing house where I worked, he was relentlessly, gloriously eager to please. Three years younger than me, with that thick blond hair that he was constantly brushing out of his eyes—(how perversely irritated you’ve always been by Daniel’s still long, foppish hair. “What’s he trying to prove?” you used to ask)—and his total lack of guile, he seemed the perfect antidote to my studied jadedness. (In those days I wore my ennui self-consciously and halfheartedly like an experimental fashion craze—like batwing sleeves or high-waisted flares.)

  Where did it go, I wonder, that active wish to see
me happy? When did the apathy set in, the dull sense that it was enough simply to refrain from doing me harm? In truth, I think I probably squished it out of him somewhere along the way, along with the guitar playing and the baggy boxers. I often worry that I have somehow made Daniel less than he was when I first met him, that I have reduced him, like over-simmered stock.

  I must say though, Daniel has been marvelous (well, in that un-showy Daniel sort of way) since York Way Friday, hovering nervously on the edge of my incipient insanity, suggesting useless remedies. “Perhaps we could take up a class together” was last week’s classic. Get this, swing dancing.

  In a weird way though, I think he’s quite enjoying the mini drama of it all. After so long being shut out and fenced off from my inner life, there must be a certain satisfaction in witnessing the walls breached, the defenses down, the infidel swarming through the gates.

  He fields telephone calls with hushed, self-important whispers when I am too numbed to speak. I’ve heard him hiss the word “breakdown” in an awed, reverential tone. It’s nonsense, of course. A convenient label to help him understand the incomprehensible.

  Lately though, I can tell he’s growing impatient and the novelty of my debility is starting to lose its shine. Several times he’s asked me rather sharply where I go in the evenings or what has precipitated my “decline.” After the last few years of leading increasingly separate lives, his curiosity comes as an unwelcome intrusion. Still, I’m tempted to tell him the truth, I really am. Do you remember what I wrote to you, in the agonizing aftermath of York Way Friday? How I assured you so loftily that I would now tell Daniel everything, how I owed him that, how I was sick of the lies and the deception? Of course you saw through that right away, even before I did. You knew it was just a ploy to get a reaction from you, a rather pathetic attempt to exert a power I no longer possessed. You already understood the fact that I had willfully ignored, that the secret of our affair is the last link that ties me to you, the last intimacy we share, now all other intimacy is gone. You know that for me to give that up means giving you up. All of you. No more emails, no more chats with Susan, no more dinner party crossovers, no more crumbs of information tossed out by unwitting mutual friends. Telling Daniel the truth would sever irretrievably my connection to you. You knew that and you took a chance on it, never bothering to reply to my scarcely veiled threats, my clumsy implication that if you didn’t come back to me I’d trumpet our truth from the rooftops. You knew I didn’t have it in me. How right you were.

  So Daniel continues to bumble along in his ignorance and I wonder if that ignorance is a blessing or a curse. “He doesn’t deserve this,” I used to declare periodically in that enjoyably melodramatic way, while we were going through one of our regular mea culpa, self-flagellation sessions. “He’s done nothing wrong.”

  Of course he hadn’t done anything wrong. He hadn’t done anything at all, not in years, which was of course somewhere at the heart of all our tangled problems. Can an absence of action be construed as a negative action? It’s an interesting conundrum, isn’t it?

  Shall we go back to the very first time we met, you and I? Why not? Of course, Helen Bunion would find a million reasons why not. “Don’t keep journeying to the past. Put up your mental stop sign!” she would urge me. And I know she’s probably right, but tonight, every time I put up my mental stop sign, I find myself wanting to drive a great big articulated truck straight over it, flattening it to the ground. So humor me a little by letting me pick at that particular, familiar old scab and go back to that first time. It will fill up a few moments while I sit up alone in the semi-darkness, journaling away and waiting for the Clonazepam to take effect.

  We’d gone for lunch at a pub-restaurant in Hampstead with a huge outside garden. It was the birthday of a woman I’d met through an antenatal class and remained tenuously in touch with, and a group of ten or twelve had gathered around a long table outside, enjoying the watery London sunshine. Cyd, the guest of honor, had saved two empty chairs at the end of the table “just in case Susan and Clive manage to make it.” She’d met Susan at a yoga class, she explained, and then gone to your house for dinner. “They’re fabulous.” She sighed. “So friendly and down to earth, you’d never guess they were so successful and so loaded.” Yes, can you believe that? That was how she described you—not some sad fuck in a box after all but one half of a “power couple”! I think she might even have called you charismatic! I expect you rather like that.

  Eventually you came strolling in wearing jeans and aviator shades and a bright Hawaiian shirt and apologizing that Susan had been called away to sort out a crisis at a wedding she was catering. Cyd could hardly contain her excitement at your arrival.

  “This is the famous Clive,” she said, scrambling to her feet, as proud as if she’d made you herself in pottery evening class.

  Cyd is one of those friends so of-the-moment that, looking back now, I can’t quite believe we ever knew each other. What on earth did we find to talk about, she and I? Still I’m grateful to her now I suppose, although to be honest, my initial reaction to her introduction was disappointment. I’ve never been a fan of short men, and you are, let’s be frank about it, on the short side for a man, although less stocky now than you were then (“being in love is the best slimming aid in the world,” you said later, as the cheek bones began to push through the skin on your face like tumors). Nor was I sure about the Chinese dragon tattoo on your forearm, or the sheen of product in your tangle of curls.

  You walked around the table introducing yourself to the group. Daniel shot up to shake your hand, but I remained seated on the far side, determinedly working my way through an artichoke, plucking its leaves like chicken feathers. I didn’t want to meet “the famous Clive,” didn’t want to get close enough for your secondhand glamour to brush off on me like peeling skin.

  “I hear you’re a journalist. Who have you written for?” you asked me, and I perceived your interest to be forced, although you later insisted your apparent indifference masked a sudden crippling shyness.

  Reluctantly, I picked some names out of the air and you nodded, pretending to be impressed.

  “You should email me sometime,” you told me. “I’ve got a mate who runs a property newspaper. He’ll give you some stuff to write that you might find amusing.”

  “Amusing.” I’d never before met anyone successful enough to consider work amusing.

  “He’s a bit pompous, isn’t he?” I asked Daniel on the way home, zigzagging up the hill toward our Victorian house with its dark rooms and uninspiring gardens.

  “Oh, I really liked him.” Daniel always likes everyone. So much less effort than having to form a real opinion.

  Then had come the invitation to lunch at your St. John’s Wood villa. I’d walked into the enormous square hallway with its sweeping staircase, past the gleaming, double-height kitchen and into the “family room” at the back with its curved wall of floor-to-ceiling French windows. I’d taken in the flamboyant rugs and the outsized abstract paintings by a sister of Susan’s who apparently had once been quite well known, and I’d tried to ignore the sickly feeling that swept over me, the knowledge that our own South London Victorian terrace with its knock-through lounge and understairs toilet would never again feel good enough, nice enough, special enough.

  A hard, ugly kernel of jealousy lodged in my gut like a gallstone.

  I never told you all that, did I? I expect you find it all a bit distasteful. When you come from money, there’s an unwritten law that you should pretend to find both the acquiring of it and the spending of it rather a tiresome chore, something you frankly don’t really pay much attention to. But when you come from a lackluster semi on the outskirts of a provincial southwestern town, you tend to notice these things.

  That lunch was the first time I met Susan. With her rancid dog under one arm and a Scotch in her hand, she meeted and greeted the disparate group she’d gathered with the ease of someone who genuinely likes people, and has fait
h that there’s a good chance they will probably like each other too.

  “Aren’t they just an amazing couple?” whispered Cyd, gazing at you and Susan as though in the throes of a celestial vision and taking a long drag on her long joint. “I just love these guys.”

  Of course, it would have been churlish to do anything but love you guys too. There you were with your urbane bonhomie, your table with the theatrical candelabra, groaning with fresh salads and interesting Lebanese meze, all cooked by Susan’s loyal catering team, your Smeg fridge stocked with wine and cava, your hilarious tales of being rollicking drunk at the Ivy with any number of has-been celebrities.

  “They’ve been married for more than twenty years! And they’re still so much in love!” Cyd confided in hushed, awed tones.

  The hard pellet of jealousy inside me shifted painfully as I thought about the decade of mismatchment Daniel and I had notched up, those one hundred and twenty months jammed uncomfortably together like an ill-fitting jigsaw.

  Of course, if I’d known then that the sour-faced divorcée neighbor who sat silently on the end of the table and surveyed each forkful of food mistrustfully before popping it into her mouth was sour only because she’d been once been your lover, leaving her front door open at night for you to slip out of your house in the first-dawn light, and still couldn’t understand why you never came anymore—(“one time I got up to go and she started to cry. That’s when I knew it was over”)—my jealousy might have been tempered slightly and interfered less with my enjoyment of the gorgeous food and entertaining company.

  But then, you always hid all that stuff so well.

  * * *

  The compartmentalizing is something I never could manage to get right. You were, naturally, a black belt in it. How many times did you make the journey straight from Premier Inn to marital bed without even stopping to pass go? I did admire that, I really did. It probably came from all those years trying to break into the music business, oiling your way into record company offices, turning yourself into whoever the bosses wanted you to be. What’s that they call it nowadays in recruitment terms? A transferable skill. That’s what it is, being able to parcel up all the separate bits of your life into distinct sections and keep them from touching one another like a TV dinner. There’s a lot to be said for a talent like that.