The Mistress's Revenge (9 page)

Where did that Clive go, I wonder? Is there a parallel universe somewhere populated entirely by those people we believe we know inside out—until they suddenly turn into other people entirely? A place for the people they were until their personalities were abducted and the aliens took over their bodies?

“Are you threatening me, Clive?” I asked you, smiling at the very ridiculousness of the notion.

But your voice when you replied contained no trace of a smile.

“I’m just warning you to stay out of my life, that’s all.”

That’s all. Just stay out of your life.

A few short months ago, I was your life.

How does that happen then?

T
he truth is the End of the Affair Diary was Helen’s idea. She thought it would be cathartic for me to write my feelings down. “Look on it as a purging,” she told me. Of course, I don’t think she really intended for me to get my purgings published in a national newspaper, but I liked the idea of my feelings being recognized, as if being read by thousands of strangers would somehow add authenticity to them. And obviously I rather liked the fact that you might read them too (how you loved to scoff at the Mail’s policy of, as you put it, picking the butt fluff out of people’s relationships and masquerading it as news, yet it didn’t stop you devouring it avidly). With that in mind, I tried not to over-exaggerate your faults. Well, not too much anyway. But then, it was all anonymous, so a little bit of over-egging wasn’t out of the question. So maybe, yes, you didn’t come out of the piece as well as you might have hoped to.

I wrote about the lead-up to York Way Friday. It’s become something of a leitmotif with me. Sometimes when I’m lying awake at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, those dead, dread hours when loneliness presses around me like a goose down pillow, I’ll go through it all again, like a litany, as if by repeating it enough times I might be able to alter the ending, take a different path, head you off before you reach that inevitable finale. It never works, of course, but still I revisit it all repeatedly like an unexorcised spirit who can’t break away.

So when Helen told me to write about it, it wasn’t exactly a difficult task. It practically wrote itself, to be honest. The stuff about how we’d been planning to set up home together, and then, how over the course of just a week, had come your sudden perplexing, slow withdrawal. Then that agonizing lunch in that restaurant on York Way, my arm in my sleeve as you told me it had to stop, we had to stop—“Susan deserves another chance,” you said, describing how she’d fallen apart when you told her that thing about “needing some space over dinner
in a Mayfair restaurant—how she’d wept hysterically at the table to the consternation of the waiters,” how awful it had been to witness someone so strong, so resourceful unraveling in front of your eyes. The stress had triggered your first-ever migraine. The doctor had been alarmed. “I have to think of my health,” you’d said as you perused the Australian Reds. I wrote about the artichoke soup that sat untouched in front of me, clammy and coagulating, and how you’d pronounced your pasta “dreadful,” but eaten it anyway, and how, once we got out of the door, I told you to go, never expecting you to, and turned around to see your laptop bag bobbing against your thigh as you scurried away. Then that email that came the next day saying: “I realize how horrible this must be for you, but I don’t really think all those messages you sent last night are helpful, do you? I understand you must be feeling dreadful but I know I’m doing the right thing for all of us. Susan and I are going to be helping our daughter decorate her house for the next couple of days, so I won’t be online.”

And once I’d written the article, well, it seemed silly not to try to make some money out of it. I mean, it’s not as if the commissioning editors have been beating a path to my door recently, is it?

Remember how you so sweetly assured me that just because you were dumping me, it didn’t mean you couldn’t stay a kind of mentor to me professionally? Well, it was a lovely thought, but of course it hasn’t happened. And gradually Douggie’s commissions have stopped coming in and the editors no longer return my emails, and there has turned out to be a gaping hole at the center of my “career.” So, yes the money from the affair diary did come in handy (I even dropped Helen a line to tell her what I’d done and thank her—she knows how hard things have been financially). I’ve got the newspaper here, as it happens. And guess what I used as my pseudonym? Oh, silleeeee Salleeeee, you don’t need to guess as you’ve clearly read it already. I thought it was quite inspired: Susan Ferndown. The Ferndown came from the road I lived on as a child, and the Susan. Well, it was just the first thing that popped into my head.

So you see, Clive, it’s completely anonymous. I don’t know why you got so cross about it. I think that when you’ve had a chance to digest
it, you’ll see it’s not nearly as heinous as you might have thought. You know I’d never deliberately set out to do you harm, don’t you?

And you know, I’ve already had loads of comments on the online version of the paper. Of course most of them call me a marriage-wrecking trollop and say I only got what I deserved, but some have been surprisingly sympathetic. One of them was from a Betrayed Wife (did you know that term is part of the official terminology of infidelity? BW for short, while the betrayer is a Wayward Spouse/Husband/Wife—WS, WH, WW or else MM, married man. And I, of course, would be an OW, Other Woman. Interesting isn’t it? How we use these pithy little acronyms to cover up our bottomless wells of tortured emotion?). She said that there was no point on the infidelity triangle that wasn’t sharp enough to skewer a person (don’t you just love that turn of phrase? Sharp enough to skewer). She said she could tell my suffering was acute and that really she and I had much in common, despite being, as she put it, “at opposite ends of the infidelity continuum.” I was thinking we might actually bond, Mrs. BW and I, until I read her last sentence. “We are not one another’s enemies, you and I. It’s the men who have betrayed us both who need to be stabbed.”

Stabbed? Well. Obviously at first I thought the woman was a weirdo. I mean it’s creepy, isn’t it? Stabbed. But you know as the day has gone on, I’ve found myself thinking about it more and more. I mean, clearly stabbed is going too far but put yourself in the position of this poor woman, this poor BW. She trusted someone, some man, some husband, with her life. Gave herself to him body and soul only to discover he had two long-term mistresses, and one of them had had his child! Imagine that?

Of course that got me thinking about that time I thought I was pregnant. Do you remember? We both knew it was ridiculous. I mean, we’d always been so careful—and me already the wrong side of forty. But then I did feel so very pregnant. It couldn’t have been Daniel’s, of course. Well not unless it was the immaculate conception. Helen Bunion would have a field day if I told her about how you and I fussed and planned and angsted and declared our mutual undying support “no matter what” only to discover, after two months of waiting, that
it wasn’t a baby after all but the start of the perimenopause! Silleeeee Salleeeee. Of course, Helen would insist it was my subconscious willing myself to have your baby, but then Helen wasn’t the one loitering agonizingly in Boots by the “home diagnostic” kits, dreading bumping into someone I knew and knowing that every other customer was looking at me and thinking “At your age? Disgusting.”

I
’ll stand by you no matter what,” you’d said in a rather Victorian fashion, just before I did the test.

Well, of course it was negative. Whatever could we have been thinking of? After I’d emailed you the happy news, then and only then came your outpourings of emotion. Deep down, you’d wanted it to be true, you assured me. Then all these secrets would be out in the open, and we could be together properly. Oh yes, you were very unequivocal. After the event. That baby would have been two years old now. I think of it sometimes. Our nonexistent spawn that might have brought us together. Your back wouldn’t have stood it, probably. Nor would my children. And as for yours.... Just think of the Sacred Vessel, how she’d have hated being pipped to the post by her own father! Just as well it turned out to be nothing. My reproductive system’s final practical joke, its one last pitiful hurrah.

You were very nice about it, I have to say. You didn’t say anything about how ridiculous I’d been. And only once did you use that phrase, the one that turned my still-smarting insides to stone: “May be for the best...” You never did get any further. I think you realized instantly what you’d said. But that was enough. Just those five words that said it all.

S
o anyway, I felt a certain amount of empathy with my new pen pal, this hurting vengeful BW. Now that Helen and I have role-played it all to death, empathy has become practically second nature
to me. I find myself empathizing willy-nilly all over the shop—vacant young men on the bus with cheap suits and lardy complexions, brisk dog-walking women oozing barely repressed frustration who inhabit their space like a punch. I feel for them all. It’s actually quite exhausting. In fact, the only one I’m still having problems empathizing with, ironically enough, is Daniel.

Of course I used to empathize with Daniel automatically, without even thinking. Well, at least I think I did (feelings are a bit like childbirth aren’t they; once they’ve passed, they’re so hard to re-imagine). It’s so difficult to know when that changed. In the early days, we were naturally more disposed to be kind to each other and to see each other’s differences as enriching rather than irritating. Helen likes to talk about the Relationship Bank where you start with a healthy account and have to work to keep the deposits and expenditures balanced. I tell her Daniel and I have been operating at the limit of our overdraft for years, the goodwill and willingness to make excuses and compromises draining out drop by drop (“watch those careless metaphors, Sally,” I hear you say) without us really noticing, leaving behind just debts and recriminations. “We both seem to have mislaid our emotional paying-in books,” I told Helen once, warming to my theme. But I thought her smile was rather forced.

Of course, before the Mail article appeared, it had crossed my mind fleetingly to think about what would happen if Daniel somehow underwent a fundamental personality transplant and turned into the kind of person who might voluntarily read a feature in the paper with “Affair” in the title, but even in that remote event, I knew he’d never recognize his “partner” of sixteen years from what appeared in the piece. The truth is that even if I stood right in front of Daniel and opened up my soul like a wheeler-dealer opening his coat to reveal row upon row of gleaming contraband watches, he still wouldn’t recognize me. If I took off my face, I doubt Daniel could pick me out from a roomful of people.

*  *  *

A
fter you’d hung up on me, I saw I’d had a missed call while we’d been chatting—Helen Bunion. I’d been rather regretting that thank-you email I sent her, alerting her to the newspaper piece, and I knew it wasn’t going to be good news. Intuition I guess you’d call it. (Incidentally, that’s another thing Helen and I have been working on—honing my intuition skills so that I’m more able to anticipate outcomes and know when people are genuine. Intuition and empathy—Helen calls it the “two-pronged attack” in my ongoing battle to become a better, more rounded, more self-aware person.)

Sure enough, when I finally got to speak to her, Helen was wearing the slightly higher pitched, staccato voice she sometimes clips on to her normal one when something doesn’t please her.

“The affair diary was intended as a private exercise, not as a slightly underhand way of outing your former lover. How are you ever going to be able to move on when techniques that I’m teaching you for your own personal self-development, and nothing else, are being turned into weapons in your futile, one-sided war against your ex? A war that, as we’ve been through a million times, you stand no chance of winning?”

It’s truly pathetic how much I hate it when Helen is disappointed in me and how I’ll squirm and self-justify to try to win her over again.

“It was so cathartic,” I whined.

“That was the idea. But ‘cathartic’ isn’t the same as ‘public.’”

“But I changed all the details, and I really, really needed the money.” I bit back the urge to quip “Therapy isn’t cheap.” Helen doesn’t really do humor.

“If his wife had read that diary, she could easily have spotted the similarities. Don’t kid yourself, Sally, that wasn’t your underlying intention. You want her to find out, but in such a way that if it all blows up in your face, you can pretend not to know what anyone is talking about. Even after all the work we’ve done you’re still refusing to own your actions.”

Does your Harley Street therapist say that to you, I wonder? All that stuff about owning your actions? It’s one of Helen’s bêtes noires, my refusal to take ownership of the things I do and have done. It
makes me sound like a bit like a squatter, doesn’t it? Taking ownership of my life. Mind you, if I was a squatter, I could maybe open the door to my life just a crack, take a quick look round, decide it wasn’t quite what I was after, and go and find someone else’s to take ownership of. Someone better.

Before Helen rang off, reminding me coolly that she did have other clients who required her attention, she set me yet another exercise.

“Anything,” I said, gratefully, eager to redeem myself.

She told me to get a blank sheet of paper and a black felt tip pen, “the thickest, blackest pen you can find,” and to write out “in big capital letters the stark, brutal facts of the situation.” Then to force myself to sit and study them until they actually sink in.

Obediently, once I’d put the phone down, I fetched a sheet of paper. I was sitting at what I laughingly call my desk—a glorified table, in a partitioned-off corner of the dining room where I work, sandwiched between the kitchen and the laundry room, so that important work phone calls have to be made in between spin cycles—so I cleared a space and laid the paper almost reverentially in front of me. Then I dug around in the top drawer of the filing cabinet where I keep the carcasses of pens that in a previous life were once fit for purpose until I found a black marker still worthy of the name.