The Mistress's Revenge: A Novel

by Tamar Cohen

  But I know better. I know what you’re afraid of. I know the fear that trickles down from your armpits.

  You’re afraid of me.

  I don’t believe it.

  That’s not true. Of course I believe it. Why wouldn’t I believe it?

  I decided to look at our old email account, just now. Not the secret one we’ve always used, but the Hotmail one you set up last year that time the original one was out of action for a couple of days. I’d come across a reference to it when I was scrolling through all our old correspondence (do you ever do that, I wonder? Go through our old messages. I rather like the idea that we might both unknowingly be on there at the same time taking a synchronized trip down memory lane).

  It wasn’t hard to guess your password. After all I knew your password to “our” account (“I don’t want to have any secrets from you,” you told me. Well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?). It was your mother’s maiden name, Lyttleton, plus the dates of Liam’s birthday. When that didn’t work, I tried Lyttleton plus your own birthday. Then, after a quick Facebook consultation (isn’t it convenient the way people list their birthdays so prominently?), I tried Lyttleton plus Emily’s birthday. Bingo.

  The first surprise was that the Hotmail address still worked. The second surprise was that it had been active very recently. I scanned down your inbox. The emails were all from the same person. AnnaMillington1977.

  1977!

  Even before I clicked any open, I had to run to the toilet again. It was that whole list of AnnaMillingtons, and that taunting, damning 1977.

  How old would someone born in 1977 be? Shall we work it out? Thirty-three. Ten years older than your daughter. Ten years younger than me. The symmetry is pleasing, I’ll give you that.

  When I got back into bed, my brain was slamming against the inside of my skull. I tried to ignore it and instead counted the emails in your inbox from Anna Millington. Eleven. Then I decided to go through them chronologically from the bottom up, starting June 5, five weeks ago.

  Your new pen pal is obviously someone who has recently started working for the record company. The first email was a response to one you’d sent, which I immediately called up. It read:

  You probably think I’m a sad old fuck (sad fuck in a box!) and if that’s the case please tell me to sod off, but I kind of thought there was a spark between us the other night. Am I deluded? (it wouldn’t be the first time!).

  Typical Clive, self-deprecating but predatory. A spark between you, hey? That would have been three weeks before your renewal of vows party. Was she there? I wonder, Anna Millington? One of the young girls in the short shiny dresses I’d dismissed as Liam and Emily’s friends?

  To her credit, Anna Millington tried to mount a semblance of a moral defense.

  You’re not deluded, don’t worry. But you are MARRIED and MY BOSS—two pretty good reasons why that spark should probably stay unignited, don’t you think?

  Smart woman, that Anna Millington. But would you accept that? No, not you, Clive. In the emails that flew between the two of you over the next couple of days, lighthearted banter with a darker undercurrent of flirtation, you were constantly angling for more, stretching the boundaries of your remit, perhaps. But Anna didn’t seem to mind.

  Two weeks before the party it seems you went out on a date. Except, charmingly, you refused to call it a date.

  Think of it as a work meeting. The kind of work meeting where there’s candles and champagne and you arrive in a tight little dress and ridiculously high heels and laugh at all my jokes (read your message that same afternoon) I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. Why the fuck do I feel like such a teenager?

  The following day there was a message from you at 6:30 A.M.! Really, Clive, have you never heard of playing hard to get?

  I just wanted you to know I had the most magical time. I know you were right to push me out of the door. I know you’re right about everything, but I can’t stop thinking about you. Even if nothing ever happens between us, I just want you to know that when you walked into that restaurant, I felt like the luckiest man alive.

  When I read that last bit, this sound came from me as if it had been ripped right out of my guts—a horrible, tearing animal sound. It was that “luckiest man alive” that did it. I had a vivid flashback to three years ago when we’d actually managed to wangle three days together in the south of France, you adding extra time after filming a promo for a new band, and me under the guise of interviewing a horrible British woman living in Nice who’d written a blog about expat living which had become an unexpected internet sensation. You’d picked me up from the airport and when I walked through arrivals, self-consciously awkward in my unfamiliar heels, you were there waiting for me. After a long kiss, you drew back and, holding me at arm’s length gazed at me in silence.

  “I feel like the luckiest man alive,” you’d said at last.

  After that early morning email there were just two others in the long chain of messages. Later that day had come Anna Millington’s measured response.

  I enjoyed last night a lot. Way, way too much. But the fact remains, you are married and, not only that, about to go on holiday to Maui with your wife (ah, so you hadn’t after all mentioned the renewal of vows ceremony to your new young correspondent. Or whispered that nastily emotive word “honeymoon”). I want you to take the time from now until the end of your holiday to reflect on what you really want. I won’t be a married man’s mistress. I’m worth more than that.

  So Anna won’t be a mistress. She is worth more. She is worth more than me. Worth is relative. Hers is higher. I am a mistress (an ex-mistress), so mine is lower. The equations go round and round in my head.

  That was the last thing in your inbox. But when I went back to the sent folder, there was one more message, dated just three days ago.

  I think about you constantly (you wrote from your iPhone somewhere in Maui).

  So now I know.

  But really I’ve always known.

  Was I different, Clive? Or was I just the same? Did I just manage to last slightly longer than the others?

  It’s hot here under the duvet, but I daren’t come out. I don’t want to hear the door going, or feel my phone vibrating. I don’t want to know if it’s light outside of the blinds. I don’t want to see my own body and have to face that I’m real.

  I’ve googled you again and found a new image of you on a German music website. I don’t know what the text says, but I know your face. My God, I know your face.

  All the time, my head is pounding, pounding, and my heart rattling in my chest.

  I’ve just flicked back to Emily’s Facebook page. Nothing, just more “good lucks” from people with stupid names. I want to scratch the screen where their photos are, scoring ugly welts through their smug faces. Back to your website now, that “fearless” still leaping off the page, then onto Susan’s. I keep flicking and flicking until the sites just merge into one another, faces bleeding together, all of it ugly.

  * * *

  It has happened.

  While I was clicking on something on Susan’s page a short while ago, a new comment flashed up on her wall.

  Liam Gooding Congratulations Grandma!!

  So that’s it. You are grandparents now. Yet another bond in your unbreakable defense.

  I went back onto Emily’s page, and the congratulations were flooding in. Definitely a boy, it seems. You will love that so much, another male to spar with in your “fearless” way. Do you remember the baby that never was, Clive? I always imagined it as a girl, a tiny thing kicking in your arms, born of love.

  Where did this other thing come from? This usurper? Anna Millington would give you babies, make you a family. Perhaps she and Emily could be friends. And Grandma Susan would look after you all.

  The photos have already started being posted on Emily’s Facebook wall. A purple creature, with a wide greedy mouth, Emily, damply beaming. The bland barrister proudly smiling. ... And there, there, there, there, there. T
here is you.

  You are holding the thing that calls itself a baby up to your nose, as if you would snort it up like a maggot-fat line of coke. Susan is beside you, looking up, her face freshly tanned and shining in the bright lights of the delivery room.

  And then another. You and Susan are on either side of Emily, who holds the thing like it was made of origami. Susan and Emily have their heads bent in supplication, but you, Clive, you are gazing straight at the camera and your expression is one of total triumph.

  You think you’ve won, don’t you, Clive?

  But you haven’t won.

  You’re not going to win.

  You will pay, Clive.

  You all will pay.

  * * *

  It came to me earlier on, what I should do. I don’t know how long it is since I last wrote, but I know there have been many more vibrating calls and more feet crunching on the gravel. Emily’s Facebook page is full of “Congratulations” messages. Hundreds of them. (How many friends young people seem to have these days! How on earth do they keep track?) Quite a few of them mention the fact that she can kiss good-bye to sleep. I think it’s supposed to be funny.

  I tried to get up a while ago, but my head whooshed so badly that I sank straight back down. But I will do it. If not this minute, then next, and if not then, then later.

  I will go to the hospital. Well, I know my way now. I will remember to take my oyster card, and I will wash my feet, and I will make my way past the polite receptionist and up in the lift. Even if it’s not visiting hours I will tell the nurses that my niece has given birth and that I was told it would be all right. They won’t object. There are some plus points, after all, to the respectable invisibility of the middle-aged woman.

  I will take what is yours. The same way you took what was mine.

  And I will not look back.

  Fifteen months later...

  Hello. It’s been a while.

  Sorry, does that sound like a Tim Rice lyric? I rather fear it does.

  To be honest, I haven’t even been able to pick up this journal in all these months. Strange to think at one stage it was practically surgically welded to my hands. How quickly we ingrates outgrow our support systems, eh, Clive?

  I don’t need to look at the last entry to remember when it was and what it said. Nearly fifteen months ago but it remains scratched into my mind with a rusty nail. The bus, the hospital, the baby.

  I won’t think about the baby.

  Of course, there have been a lot of changes since then. I like to think that progress has been made, of a sort.

  For starters, I’m no longer the Invisible Woman in the Cubbyhole, half chair, half human. As, for that matter, you’re no longer the Sad Fuck in a Box. That’s a kind of progress wouldn’t you say, right there?

  The cubbyhole is no more, the house is no more. I don’t have to hide myself away from Daniel and the children in order to scribble in this notebook. I have all the time in the world now. Funny how I used to dream of having time to myself. Time to do my own thing free of other people’s expectations. Now it often seems as if I have nothing but time. And no one expects anything. Be careful what you wish for. Isn’t that right?

  I’m lying on my uncomfortable bed now (how many beds did we share over the years, Clive? I imagine them in a row like a Slumberland showroom, some queen-size, some swollen with pillows, many with those bolted on headboards-cum-bedside-cabinets you find in cheap chain hotels; all filled with ghosts). Looking up, I can just about see through the window where October is massing stolid in the gray sky. A room with a view. A room of my own.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  There’s a card from Jamie on the melamine bedside table. It has a picture of flowers on the front, and inside is written, in careful joined-up writing, “Good luck, Mum.” The letters, so conscientiously rounded, are painful for me to see; it’s like someone is sewing them straight onto my heart, so I try not to look at them too often.

  Nothing from Tilly of course.

  “She’ll forgive in her own time,” Daniel said the last time he brought Jamie to visit. “It has been very hard on her.”

  He didn’t have to add “and on all of us.” It was written in the hollow plains of his face, in the gray hair now threading through the blond.

  I remember Tilly’s face as she described to me, on one of her rare early visits, how she and Jamie gone back to the house with Daniel, just before it was repossessed, knowing that they had just a few hours to salvage from it whatever they could. Working against the clock, she’d stuffed her things—all the lovingly collected detritus of childhood, cards from friends, photos of girls in pink pajamas taken at various sleepovers, posters, festival wristbands—into black bin bags and carried them outside. She told me how the neighbors had pretended not to be staring and, as she spoke, hotly remembered shame oozed from every pore. These days I’ll grab at any branch to flay myself with and my mental birch filled in all the details her adolescent awkwardness refused to furnish. In my mind I saw the bags lined up on the pavement outside, Jamie’s ripped where he had overstuffed them with the broken train sets and remote control cars he was too big to play with now, but couldn’t bear to leave behind. I saw the stained mattresses leaning against the garden wall, and the grubby, misshapen cushions. I saw Tilly’s humiliation as she noticed one of her bags was open at the top, a teen bra spilling over the side. Each image was another lash of the birch.

  I deserve it, of course. I deserve it all.

  My poor, lost girl.

  Daniel told me about Sian without meeting my eyes, just a few weeks ago.

  “I’m delighted,” I lied.

  I’m not, of course. To tell you the truth, the idea of Daniel and Sian together sickens me to a degree I never could have imagined. At night, I torment myself imagining her sleeping on my side of the bed, slotting effortlessly into the life I thought I didn’t want. The surprise, I suppose, is that she should have wanted it, although the more I think about it, and about her face when she said: “A Birkin bag won’t care about me when I’m old,” the less of a surprise it turns out to be. To be quite frank though, I’m horrified at the idea of Sian being the mother to my children that I spectacularly failed to be, the image of her hairbrush in my kids’ bathroom, her high-heeled black work shoes next to Jamie’s muddy sneakers in the hall. Despite all those years of evangelical singledom, my fear is that she will slide into my family like melted butter. And Daniel will allow it, of course, just as he allows most things, convincing himself that the path of least resistance is the very path he would have chosen for himself anyway. Sometimes I force myself to picture it, enjoying the brutal stab of pain that comes from imagining her face next to Daniel’s on the sheets I bought, or how she might smooth back the damp hair from Jamie’s face when he has one of his nightmares. Those things I force myself to confront, yet when I picture her in the early-morning gloom, preparing the sandwiches for Tilly and Jamie’s lunch-boxes, my mind closes down. Funny the inconsequential things that prove too painful to be endured.

  The night after Daniel told me I bit a hole clear through my pillowcase. It was quite shocking to see it the next morning, jagged and ugly and soggy with grief. But I said, “I’m delighted,” because of that need I have to be punished and to suffer.

  Sian has yet to make the journey to see me. She wrote me a long letter though, saying things like: “If I’d thought for a minute you still had feelings for Daniel, I’d never...” and “You can never know how much I’ve agonized about this, how much we both have.” So now it’s Sian and Daniel who are “we both.” Now that Daniel is irrevocably lost to me, I can finally, as Helen Bunion had urged for so long, experience him as a separate entity, and I can see how far removed he is from the ineffectual man my warped obsession had made him out to be. Turns out he is stronger than I ever gave him credit for. He has had to be. More importantly, I see now he has something that I never really noticed before, certainly never valued. Integrity. Oh, don’t make that face
, Clive. I know how you’d scoff. “I haven’t an ounce of integrity,” you used to boast, adding “thank God,” for comic effect. Now, belatedly, I see how integrity might have its advantages.

  There is a folded, unread newspaper next to the bed. Today’s. I don’t have to open it to know it will carry a picture of your face—perhaps the same one as on your website. That’s the one the papers often seem to choose. How pleased you must be that you selected that so judiciously. Next to it might well be that photograph of me taken at your vow renewal party. The skeleton in pink is how I think of it. I think that must be the only one the media can get hold of. My friends and family have been very loyal. Much more so than I deserve.

  Rarely does a photo of one of us appear without the other. How ironic after you invested so much in trying to distance yourself from me that you and I should end up bound so inextricably together, our images forever twinned in the public imagination.

  The other day there was a new photograph of you. I don’t mean to offend you, Clive, but I was a little shocked. How old you seem to have gotten suddenly. And how gaunt. The last time we met I bemoaned that extra layer of fat you wore like a detachable coat lining. And yet now it’s gone I find I mourn it. Funny, but that’s about the only thing I miss these days. If it wasn’t for the associations with what happened, I don’t know that I’d feel anything now when I look at your picture. You’d be just another man. Sorry. Another Tim Rice moment. I do apologize. I don’t know what has come over me. Really I don’t.

  My eyelids feel weirdly heavy, probably a result of not sleeping last night. I do believe I saw every shade of night through the uncurtained window, while my thoughts raced chaotically on, and my heart hammered away inside me. The walls are so bare in here, there’s nothing to look at except the window. For the first time in ages, I longed for a sleeping pill—just one little white lozenge-shaped merciful Zopiclone. But I am free of all that now. Whether through accident or design, my body really has become a temple. I’ve put on weight too, gaining just as quickly as you seem to have lost. Why, it’s almost as if I’ve been sucking you dry, Clive!