The Mistress's Revenge (34 page)

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.

T
he 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.

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.

*  *  *

I
t 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. There 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.

*  *  *

I
t 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...