The Mistress's Revenge (37 page)

W
ell, you can’t imagine how strange it felt after all that time to find a part of your life that I felt no connection with, no ownership of. And that was it. Twang! The steel cord of my obsession was snapped, as if with bolt cutters. All those months of angst, the hundreds of pounds worth of therapy, and all it took in the end was a scrap of purple flesh.

I must have fled the hospital after that, but I have no idea where I went or how. I’m told I was found wandering in Victoria Station and spent the next few weeks in some kind of psychiatric facility before being delivered into my father’s care, but I have very little memory of that either. The mind is a marvelous guardian, don’t you think. A minder one could almost say, if one was in the mood to make jokes.

I’m sure most people imagine writing the novel was the therapy that helped me out of where I had gotten to (a dark, horrible place, a Warsaw of the psyche). Those months closeted away in my tiny old bedroom in my father’s house, my own private self-imposed prison, turning my journals into the unimaginatively titled The Mistress’s Revenge, are fast becoming the stuff of book group legend. No one ever found out about that hospital visit. I never told a soul until now, but I know you understand what it’s like to hit rock bottom, Clive. And I hope you might find this some help.

*  *  *

H
old on a minute, I’m just shifting my weight to the other elbow. It’s hard to get comfortable. These hotel beds look so inviting, don’t they, and yet they so rarely live up to their promise. Don’t worry, it’s not one of “our” hotels. They all merge, don’t they, when one tries to think about those five years of illicit assignations, into one beige-carpeted, long-headboarded, mirrored blur? The publisher’s PR department booked the room for me. I wouldn’t have chosen this hotel myself. Too full of German tourists, and with those double-glazed windows that one can’t fully open.

God, here I am complaining about my hotel room, when you’re spending the night and the next, oh 550 nights (give or take a few) in a prison cell. I do apologize. Sometimes, I can be so insensitive. But I’m working on it. Really I am. And I want you to know that though it’s true I’ve never technically spent a night in prison, I did have that stint in the loony bin followed by the long months in my father’s tiny back bedroom, so I know what it’s like to feel incarcerated. My empathizing skills are not entirely forgotten.

L
ook, I don’t want you to think it was intentional on my part—the timing of things. I know it might seem that way, organizing the first book signing for today, the day after you were sentenced. Believe me, I did raise it with the publisher. I didn’t want you to think I was capitalizing on your misfortune. But the publicist assured me they couldn’t possibly have known when your case would end. It was pure coincidence.

As to whether they could have guessed, well that’s something I couldn’t tell you. I don’t deal with that side of things. And in the end what difference does it make? Our lives are separate now. Just as you always wanted. Whatever I do happens in isolation of whatever you do. That’s progress as well, one could say.

And anyway, I had no idea there’d be that sort of a turnout at today’s signing. Obviously the book’s done very well over the weeks since publication. And believe me, no one is more surprised about that than
me. You’ll say the publicity over your court case didn’t hurt, but you know, Clive, you have to remember, your court case is real. The novel is fantasy.

“It’s fiction,” I explain whenever anyone asks. “Fiction informed by experience.”

T
hat’s better. I’ve turned to face completely the other way. Now I can see the fat cuttings book the publicist has been keeping that is lying on the desk against the far wall. Do you know she actually cuts out every print media reference to the book? There are several interviews in there, awkward occasions where journalists have tried to probe and then pretended to be sporting and said things like: “Oh well, you knew I had to ask anyway.” But a couple of accounts of your court case have also crept in and I read one last night when I couldn’t sleep.

I must say it seemed to me the reporter was taking a certain relish in the whole thing. She certainly made a big deal of describing, what was her name again, Anna. That’s it. I mean, I wouldn’t have thought it had the least relevance to the case that Anna is “striking,” or that she wore a “figure-hugging Victoria Beckham dress,” or that she had once modeled in her underwear for a men’s magazine. Neither is it here nor there that you weren’t wearing your wedding ring as the two of you arrived at court hand in hand, or that your family was “conspicuous by its absence.” You always claimed never to read the stories that periodically appeared about you in the press (“It’s boring enough just being me, let alone having to read about me as well,” you used to proclaim). Of course, like so many things, that wasn’t entirely true and you were forever googling yourself, then calling me to rant about some hack who had it in for you. Mind you, after reading that biased report last night, perhaps you had a point.

Apparently, you have lost the “confident swagger of old.” That’s what the reporter said. I’ve tried to imagine you swaggerless, and admit I’m having trouble with it. Your swagger is so much a part of what makes you, you.

There’s a brief description in the piece of the first witness in your case. The reporter doesn’t say whether he turned up in the witness stand wearing a black leather jacket with stripes down the arm, but naturally I know who it is anyway. He even has a name: Gary Wilder. Funny, I never would have put him down as a “Gary.” As I’d thought, he turned out to be a distant relative of Tony’s (I don’t expect you’ll be getting your hair cut by him anymore!). He admitted to the court that you had asked him to “deliver a couple of messages” for him, and that yes, it’s not inconceivable that these messages could have been misinterpreted as intimidating. When asked why he would have done such a thing, Gary replied that it had been “a favor, for a friend.”

Well, I couldn’t help chuckling a little when I read that, knowing how deeply that would have wounded your pride. This Gary, with his whiter-than-white shoes and his gelled hair and his total lack of self-awareness, claiming friendship with you.

The next witness was the most destructive by far. This was the one I never met (fortunately for me, some might say!), the contact you warned me had taken such exception to the harassment of your family, the one you’d called for help when your good friend Gary Wilder’s scare tactics didn’t work. His name it turns out is Damian, Damian Vaughan. Well, obviously I had a little smile at that, wondering if you’d chosen him deliberately. You always did love to hammer home a bit of symbolism. Damian, it turns out, isn’t actually related to Tony, but is an “affiliate” of the family. That’s the very word the paper used. I rather like it. An affiliate. He was apparently drafted in at the last minute when the usual affiliate let them down. Damian came highly recommended for his discretion and professionalism—how unfortunate for you that his wife didn’t live up to the same standards. When she realized who you were, well, the pound signs obviously flashed in front of her eyes. I like to imagine this Damian felt a little pang of remorse when he secretly taped the award-winning Clive Gooding offering to pay him £40,000 to have someone driven out of his life for good (incidentally, I want you to know I completely believe your account that you only wanted me “scared off” and not seriously harmed. I’m just sorry that the jury didn’t see it that way. But then, they don’t
know you like I do. They don’t know you had only my best interests at heart). The wife, of course, took the tape straight to the biggest PR person in the country, and four weeks later the story was all over the News of the World.

That was the day it all came out. All of it. You, me, the grubby hotels, the five long years of lies, the phone calls, the threats, my bunny boiling obsession, your strong-arm intimidation.

I lost a lot of friends that day and, finally, I lost Daniel. Because of losing Daniel, I lost my children (although of course I’d lost them anyway. My daughter who’d lost her way).

You might have been the one who ended up in the dock after the authorities decided to press charges based on that story (not at my behest, I repeat), but you’re not the only one who lost things.

I hope you know that.

J
udging by the report in the paper, the prosecutor wasn’t impressed by your performance in the witness box, which surprised me. I’d have thought you’d have choreographed and rehearsed it to within an inch of its life. There was a picture drawn by a courtroom artist showing the prosecutor wearing those frameless steel-sided glasses beloved of Scandinavians of a certain age. I can almost hear the disdain in his voice as he outlined your credentials to the court—your past achievements, your position of trust as an employer and a father and a husband, explaining that you led such a charmed life that you came to see yourself as beyond the rules of normal society.

“It seems to me that you, Clive Gooding,” the paper reported him saying, “are a man who considered yourself outside of the prevailing moral context of the times.”

Well, let’s be frank, he sort of had a point, didn’t he?

And what was the example he gave of the “living proof of your reckless self-delusion”? That’d be me! Sally Islip! The woman who, as the prosecutor put it, refused to fade out quietly after you called time on our five-year affair.

“Like Frankenstein you found you’d created a monster that you then had no idea how to stop.”

I admit, it stung a bit, that word “monster,” although I tried not to take it to heart.

According to the paper, the prosecutor saved most of his vitriol for your ill-thought-out plan to scare me into silence, the so-called Damian Solution. “In your mind it was a case of survival of the fittest. And you were in no doubt that the fittest was you. You thought you would get away with it because of your elevated public and private profile.

“But no matter who you are, Mr. Gooding,” he apparently told you then, and I imagine him peering at you over the top of his rimless glasses as he spoke, “there are always consequences.”

D
aniel came to see me three days after the News of the World story broke. By that time I had already moved in with my father, who knew something momentous had happened, but couldn’t quite get a grip on what. (“It’s lovely to have you back here, dear. But are you quite sure there isn’t anywhere else you ought to be?”)

Daniel didn’t look at me as he pushed brusquely past into the hall.

“This isn’t a social call, Sally. I need some answers.”

I didn’t tell him that answers are the very things I was looking for too.

Of course he wanted to know everything ... except the things he didn’t want to know. He wanted to know where and when we’d fucked, but when I started to tell him he screwed up his face as if he was about to be sick and put his hands over his ears and said, “I just can’t listen to this.”

He wanted to know if the two of us had been laughing at him.

“It wasn’t like that,” I told him. “We didn’t even think of you and Susan at all.”

Well, you can imagine how that went down.

To be honest, I was taken aback by how very affected Daniel was by it all. I had thought him almost indifferent but now hurt flaked off him like dead skin. I know reading in a national newspaper that your
partner has been having an affair for five years with a man you considered a friend, who then paid money to have her, oh what was the term the paper used—“physically intimidated”—must have come as a shock, but it was the betrayal of “us”—him and me—that Daniel kept focusing on. In my naïveté, I had thought he’d want to talk about you and me, yet that wasn’t really what he was interested in at all.

“How could you do that to us?” he said over and over. “How could you do that to our family?”

“It wasn’t about ‘us,’ or our family,” I tried to explain. “It was something separate, something that was just about me.”

He looked at me then as if he was seeing me completely afresh. I’m not going to lie to you, it didn’t feel good.

“You really are a selfish bitch.”

But it was said almost completely without rancor, as if it were an objective fact that he had only just learned.

Just like that I knew he was lost to me. And belatedly I realized what else was lost—the “we” that, to my surprise, turned out to lie at the very center of who I was.

And you know something, Clive? For the very first time, I didn’t hurl the blame like shit against your windows.

I’d lost my family, and it was no one else’s fault but mine.

T
hat was well over a year ago, and I have to say that since then Daniel has been very decent. Much more so than I deserve. He brings Jamie to Dad’s house every month, and Tilly whenever she will agree to come. Or I come to London and stay in a hotel like this one (remember how we used to joke that there couldn’t be a hotel left in London we hadn’t shagged in? I have to tell you, Clive, we were so wrong, our concept of ourselves wildly overinflated as usual) and take the kids for dinners or walks in the park. My daughter is fifteen now and out of that gawky in-between age. She is beautiful, in fact. Men look sideways at her in the street. I long to push them aside and hiss: “Don’t you know she’s just a child?” But of course it’s too late to play
the protective mother now. Not when the very person she most needed protection from was me. I know I damaged my kids, and because of that I’m resigned to the loss of my right to them (although never to the loss of them. Never to that). Daniel says I must earn that right back (sometimes now he even talks to me in teacher-speak. It’s one of the things I focus on if ever I start regretting that we’re no longer together which, I have to say, doesn’t happen too often anymore).

Getting the advance money for the book helped. It was enough for a deposit on a flat for Daniel and the kids, and now that Daniel is fully qualified, he can just about cover the mortgage that his parents reluctantly guaranteed. It makes me happy to think of Tilly and Jamie having their own rooms again, after having to share a bedroom at Darren’s. I imagine them surrounded by their things, well, the things they managed to salvage anyway. The money keeps coming in bit by bit and hopefully I’ll soon have enough to get a little place of my own near my children—somewhere they can come and stay whenever they like—though for the moment I’m quite happy in my little cell at Dad’s. Cell! There I go again! Such an insensitive idiot! Please forgive me, it wasn’t intentional.