What if he promised to love you for ever?
What if he told you he’d never leave you?
What if he lied and lied and lied again?
Shouldn’t he be held to account for that?
For five years, Sally and Clive have been lost in a passionate affair. Now he has dumped her, to devote himself to his wife and family, and Sally is left in freefall.
It starts with a casual stroll past his house, and popping into the brasserie where his son works. Then Sally starts following Clive’s wife and daughter on Facebook. But that’s all right, isn’t it? I mean they are perfectly normal things to do. Aren’t they?
Not since Fatal Attraction has the fallout from an illicit affair been exposed in such a sharp, darkly funny and disturbing way: The Mistress’s Revenge is a truly exciting fiction début. After all, who doesn’t know a normal, perfectly sane woman who has gone a little crazy when her heart was broken?
Cover
About the Book
Title page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Read on for a preview of First One Missing
Also by Tammy Cohen
Copyright
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Tamar Cohen 2011
Extract from First One Missing © Tammy Cohen 2015
Tamar Cohen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446437698
ISBNs 9780857520326 (hb)
9780857520319 (tpb)
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Never have an affair with anyone who has less to lose than you.
You should have told me you had been nominated for an award! I’m so pleased for you, really I am. Nobody deserves it more. Well, apart maybe from the researchers on your programme who do all the boring tracking down and chasing up and weeding out, ready for you to come on and take centre stage, but really, of course, as you always say, it’s your name that brings in the viewers and the funding. Without it, they’d be out of a job, all those scuttling, muttering researchers. So I’m delighted to hear about your nomination. Best Factual Programme. What an honour! Not that facts have always been exactly your forte.
‘I’ve never had a problem telling lies,’ you once told me, more than a little proud. ‘It’s something that’s always come very naturally to me. I don’t even think about it.’ Once you think about it, you’d explained, you’re done for.
And you were absolutely right – no false modesty there! Do you remember the time we booked into a cheap hotel in a business park just off the A1. It was only 10 a.m., way before normal checking-in time (although terribly convenient for the school drop-off).
‘My wife and I have just flown in to Luton from Panama City,’ you informed the pimply clerk. ‘We’ve got a six-hour stopover before we’ve got to go back to the airport to fly on to Paris, where we live. We’re incredibly tired. Can you make sure we’re not disturbed?’
The lies flowed out of you as easy as muzak. ‘Do flights from Panama City even go to Luton?’ I hissed as we crammed into the tiny lift, the sweaty champagne bottles clinking in their M&S carrier bags. ‘Who cares?’ Your hand inside my coat, your tongue inside my mouth.
So there’s a certain rather satisfying irony in you being nominated for Best Factual Programme. Even if it is only satellite telly.
How you’ll enjoy adding that little fact to your website. (Incidentally, I love the new photo you have on there – still five years out of date, of course, but five years is a big improvement on fifteen. Did you get it professionally done? I thought I could detect a hint of airbrush, although to be sure I’m no expert in these things.)
Guess where I read about the award? On Facebook! Isn’t that hysterical? I’m now Facebook friends with Susan so I get all the updates about what’s going on in your lives. Quite amusing really, considering how much you always loathed the whole social-networking thing. Susan’s ‘status’ (I bet you didn’t even know they were called that – those little pithy sentences we use to sell our lives to hundreds of our closest friends) read:
Susan Gooding Clive nominated for telly award. About bloody time!
About bloody time. So typical of Susan not to gush, but clearly so proud too. And after it, 24 comments from some of her 456 friends. (Yes, I’ve scrolled through them all, pondering relationships, trying to fit together some of the pieces of the life you kept so well hidden. ‘My friends are all so dull,’ you’d complain, and I’d think it was some kind of a compliment with its unspoken inference that I was somehow some benchmark of wit. I blush now to think what a high opinion of myself I must have had.)
Lots of the comments were ringing endorsements of Susan herself.
‘He couldn’t have done it without you, hun.’ ‘Behind every successful man is an awesomely successful woman,’ and so on.
Have you read the comments? You really should take a look. I think you’d find it quite enlightening to see how people view you and Susan from the outside, as it were – presuming to guess at the unknowable dynamic of other people’s relationships.
I watched the awards ceremony. Well, of course I did! Obviously I guessed that you wouldn’t feature very prominently in the television coverage. After all, you’re not exactly A-list, are you? And at very nearly fifty (oh, how you’d hate me reminding you of that), the camera doesn’t altogether love you any more. Plus I knew Susan would be wearing something navy and sensible, not split to the navel and held together with safety pins, so it was a fair bet that she wouldn’t help you get a starring role on the red carpet.
But funnily enough I did spot you arriving. I know you’ll have watched the footage back already about a million times, so it won’t be news to you that you and Susan appeared briefly in the background while that woman from EastEnders with the black hair was being interviewed.
‘There they are!’ shouted Jamie, who, at nine, still believes there’s a certain magic attached to appearing on the television, and indeed to knowing anyone who appears on the television. Remember how you always worried so much about my children – ‘I’d hate for them to be damaged because of me,’ you’d say mournfully. Well, there they both were, sprawled out on the sofa, already texting their friends to tell them someone they know – actually really quite well and has been to their house – is on telly right now. You made their night! I know you’ll be pleased. (‘I only care about the welfare of the children in all of this,’ you’d say during our angst-ridden conversations about ‘the future’.)
And there indeed you were, making your way self-consciously down the red carpet, trying to look as if you weren’t aware of the flashes and the reporters and the crowds of Japanese tourists and mothers-and-daughters in matching rainwear, all wondering if you were anyone important.
I must say, you suit a dinner jacket very well. It lends you a natural authority that the usual jeans and T-shirts sometimes lack. And I liked the way you kept one hand firmly interlinked with Susan’s, even when you rather awkwardly waved in the direction of the film crew; reassuring and faintly proprietorial.
‘Susan looks lovely, doesn’t she?’ Daniel remarked, as I think he felt duty-bound to do.
Tilly sniffed, unconvinced. ‘Why does she always have to wear blue? It’s sooooo boring.’
But in truth Susan did look very well. I think she’d done something different with her hair – maybe it was a slightly more honey-coloured shade of blonde. It was piled up on her head in big round curls, like a vanilla ice-cream sundae, and her long midnight-blue dress was cleverly cut to disguise her less flattering curves. It was touching to see what a big effort she’d gone to not to let you down. You must have been very proud. It reminded me of how you used to love planning my outfits for me, emailing me in the morning to ask what I was intending to wear that day, or to beg me to put on a particular item of clothing if we were due to meet up. A couple of times you even appeared to weep when I walked into the pub or restaurant or wherever we’d arranged to meet. ‘You just look so beautiful,’ you’d explain, your eyes travelling over me, sucking me up like a hand-held Hoover. ‘I’m jealous of your clothes for touching your skin. I’m jealous of this –’ and you’d run a finger down whatever top I was wearing. ‘And these –’ and you’d stroke the inside leg of my jeans. ‘And I’m particularly jealous of these –’ Your hand creeping inside the waistband to feel what knickers I had on.
When you and Susan strolled hand in hand out of the camera-shot, I thought that was the last we’d see of you. Daniel, of course, remained constantly on the alert for glimpses as the ceremony got under way. ‘Is that them?’ he’d ask whenever the television camera panned around the audience. ‘I thought I saw Clive up there, top right of the screen.’
But just as I’d resigned myself to the probability that you and Susan wouldn’t be making a return appearance, you were announced as a winner! What a fantastic surprise!
I hadn’t even expected them to televise the Best Factual Programme award, to be quite honest. I mean, the glamour quota isn’t exactly through the roof in that sector, is it? I have to admit I sat up a bit in my seat then, while Daniel positively whooped and hollered. I wasn’t too impressed with their choice of presenter for that award, though. I mean, if they’re going to choose someone from a reality-TV show, they could at least have gone for one of the bigger names, but I suppose they had to take what they could get. Competition for that particular honour couldn’t have been that high, I should imagine. And I guess one could say she added a telegenic touch to what might otherwise have been a bit of a drab segment, although it was a little distracting the way her breasts seemed constantly on the verge of popping out of that dress. It would all have to be done with tape, don’t you suppose? I imagined her boobs covered with little sticky strips like a child’s wrapping-up. Well, you were the one who was closest to her. Maybe you noticed something?
When she started to read the list of nominees, slowly and carefully as if reading were a skill she’d only recently mastered, I sat up a little straighter in my chair, realizing you were about to come on-screen again. Sure enough, there you were, your head filling the television like God. Just before the camera swung round to the next on the list, it panned out a little to show Susan sitting next to you, your hands still adorably intertwined. Such a comfort it must have been during those nail-biting minutes of waiting before the result was announced, to have her sitting next to you, that reassuring squeeze of the fingers.
And then all of a sudden the envelope was being opened, and there was your name, sounding so strange on the puffy, pink-glossed lips of the reality-TV star. Thank goodness she didn’t throw in a little extra line as they sometimes do: ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy’ or ‘Justice has been done.’
Daniel broke into spontaneous applause as the camera focused on your face, for a split second frozen in uncomprehending shock, then creasing into smiles as you turned to Susan and kissed her long and hard on the lips before springing to your feet and making your triumphant way down the aisle, pausing every few rows to shake a hand, or receive a congratulatory pat on the arm. Then up on to the stage, taking the steps two at a time with youthful vigour, quite as if you weren’t someone whose back was inclined to go into spasm at the slightest overexertion.
When you bent to kiss the reality star, her prodigious breasts were momentarily pressed flat against your dinner jacket and her lip gloss left a faint pink sheen on your cheek.
Moving in front of the microphone, you did that thing one often sees award-winners do, where they gaze silently at the award, as though struggling to find the words to express how they feel. Knowing you, I’m sure you had your acceptance speech written and committed to memory the very day the nominations were announced, but I have to admit you did a wonderful job of appearing modestly unprepared.
When the audience was completely quiet, you looked up again to the camera, and I wasn’t surprised to see tears in your eyes. You always did have that capacity to cry on command. It was one of your many enviable skills.
‘Wow,’ you said, and for a second I was completely nonplussed, wondering when you’d started using expressions like that. ‘I really can’t believe this is real. What an honour for a bloke who left school with no qualifications at the age of fourteen.’ (I couldn’t help smiling then, at the way your ignominious departure from academia has been getting progressively younger as you’ve got progressively older. It was sixteen when we first met, as I recall, then hovered on fifteen for a while, before arriving at this last all-time low. How long before you’d be leaving school before you actually started, I wondered?) ‘So much of what I’ve achieved over the years has been done on a wing and a prayer, and it wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t had the luck to be surrounded by some amazing people. My team at Trip Productions, who have smoothed over my rough edges more times than I can count and talked me out of some of my more foolhardy schemes.’ (Typical of you to be self-deprecating while simultaneously bigging yourself up. That word ‘foolhardy’, with its connotations of youthful rashness and cavalier self-disregard.)
‘The fantastic John Peterson, whose dedication to truth and professionalism has given the show its reputation for integrity.’ (How clever of you to compliment your loathed co-presenter in such a way as to make him sound impossibly dull and worthy in comparison to the dazzling, devil-may-care foolhardiness of you.)
‘My wonderful children, Liam and Emily, who, despite their often-professed wish to have a father who was a lawyer or a banker or something nice and safe like that, have nevertheless loved me anyway.’ (A great touch that, the humble gratitude of an errant father.)
‘And finally, my wife Susan.’ Immediately the camera was close up on Susan’s face, as if it had been hovering all the while in anxious anticipation in the wings.
And guess what? Well, of course you don’t need to guess because you were there, and as I say you must have watched the footage so many times since then it’ll be imprinted into your brain. Susan was crying! Actual real tears, trickling down her cheeks, which she wiped away with an angry hand. It felt weirdly voyeuristic, seeing her like that, moist-eyed and shyly quivering.
‘We’ve been married now for over a quarter of a century.’ (Cue a spontaneous smattering of applause from the audience.) ‘And not a day goes past when I don’t learn something new about her, something that makes me realize afresh just how incredibly fortunate I’ve been and how little I deserve her. Everything I am, I am because of her. Everything I’ve achieved, I’ve achieved because of her. All I can say is I must have done something pretty special in a past life to have been rewarded with all this. I thank you all.’
By the end of your speech, which I must say was very well received, being neither too long nor too dry (unlike the winner who preceded you, who made that classic mistake of going for a note of jaunty comedy, which always makes the audience feel short-changed, as if they’d like to snatch the award back and give it to someone who really appreciates it), the tears were sparkling in your eyes like cheap caster sugar. Meanwhile poor Susan, to whom the camera kept cutting back and forth until I felt quite nauseous with the movement of it, had mascara snaking like spilled oil down her left cheek. You’ve got to hand it to Susan, she’s never been a terribly vain person, which, I reflected, seeing her black-streaked face magnified on our widescreen television, was just as well.
‘I really should send Clive a message of congratulation,’ Daniel said absently. ‘I’ll definitely do it tomorrow.’
Sometimes I don’t know why Daniel even bothers saying half the things he says. Both of us know he won’t really text you a message of congratulation, even though the intention is there and he’ll probably end up convincing himself that he actually has done it, so genuinely does he mean to carry it out. Daniel has what Helen Bunion calls Delivery Issues. He can come up with no end of plans and ideas, but it’s in the enactment of them where he falls down.
‘Daddy, if you won an award, would you thank me and Tilly?’ Jamie asked.
I must say I had to bite back a bit of a smirk at that one. The idea of Daniel stepping up to the podium to receive some kind of recognition from his peers. What would it be, I wonder, the award for Best Sunday Cyclist? Or perhaps the Lifetime Non-Achievement Award? Mean, mean, mean Sally. After all, Daniel can’t really help being a ‘serial careerist’ (I read that in a magazine the other day, about people who change career so often they never quite get off the first rung). I have high hopes for the teacher training he’s halfway through, though – after all, it’s already lasted longer than his last ‘career’ (if you can call selling ‘stuff’ on eBay a career) – and he hasn’t even got into a classroom yet! Some of the time I’m just as sure as Daniel is that there’s something really amazing waiting around the corner for him. It’s just I’m not quite sure how he would find it without actually getting up off the sofa and at least looking around that corner to see what’s there.
‘If Dad won an award he’d thank the neighbours and the woman in Londis and that man who helped him fix his bike, and everyone who knows him, and everyone in the world.’ Tilly can be merciless sometimes, but in the case of Daniel’s fabled long-windedness I think she probably has a fair point. ‘And then he’d probably tell them the story of how he had his first job at the age of eleven helping in his uncle’s hardware shop and didn’t even expect to get paid for it. In those days you just did it because you were expected to help out.’
Jamie laughed momentarily before remembering that Tilly had said it, so he was honour-bound to find it unfunny. Daniel, meanwhile, had no such reservations and was smiling good-naturedly. I know I probably shouldn’t say it, particularly not to you, but occasionally I do wonder if Daniel is all there, or if some tiny little bit of him, the bit that deals with, say, self-awareness, has somehow become dislodged and sneezed out somewhere along the way.
‘What about Mum?’ he asked, leaning his head back and running his hands through the overly-long blond hair of which he remains justifiably proud. ‘What would Mum say in her acceptance speech?’
Tilly glanced over at me, her green eyes sharp like broken bottles.
‘Oh, Mum,’ she said. ‘Mum wouldn’t even remember to mention us at all.’
Later, when all the others had gone to bed (when did Daniel start going to bed at the same time as the children, I wonder? It seems to have happened without me even noticing it. We used to watch late films together long after the children were asleep, lying at opposite ends of the sofa, stroking each other’s feet through our socks, but nowadays I look up from the News at Ten and find myself sitting on my own, the rest of the house shallow-breathing in the darkness), I got out my laptop and watched the replay of the award ceremony all over again. Amazing, isn’t it, this instant repeat facility we all have now, this ability to endlessly relive our lives again and again on YouTube or Catch Up? I wish it had been around when I was younger, I really do. There’s so much I seem to have forgotten.
When it got to the section with your speech, I kept my fingers poised over the ‘pause’ and ‘rewind’ buttons. I know it’s silly, but I wanted to be in complete control.
I freeze-framed through the minute and a half, watching the way your face evolved seamlessly from jokey to tearfully sincere, and how your oh-so-familiar hands played with the rather garish award, your bitten nails pink against the shiny gold-coloured metal. Zooming in again and again until the picture started to blur at the edges, I gazed at your eyes, dark-lashed and puddle-coloured. It was the closest I’d been to you in fourteen weeks. (Not that I’m counting, you understand. Well, no more than I might count the number of weeks after, say, the death of a second-division friend.) I noticed that your hair looked slightly darker, although still flecked through with the occasional dashing streak of silver. Have you had a little bit of salon work done, Clive? If so I must congratulate you, they’ve been terribly subtle. I know how secretly vain you are about your hair, even while proclaiming that you’d ‘just as soon shave the whole lot off and have done with it’. I remember lying in hotel beds in a tangle of boil-washed sheets, watching through the open bathroom door as you reached into your ever-present backpack and withdrew a nylon-bristled hairbrush and a travel-sized bottle of ‘taming serum’.
‘I’ve never known a man take quite so much trouble over his hair,’ I told you, amused.
‘It’s only because it’s so dreadful,’ you’d tell me, anxious that I shouldn’t believe you vain. ‘My hair is totally unmanageable.’
There was a trace of pride when you said that, as if your intransigent hair was somehow an indication of an ungovernable personality, someone who chose to live outside the rules.
I miss running my fingers through your hair, feeling the two slightly raised scars on your scalp, evidence of childhood misadventures. I miss the way you’d suddenly turn and, with your back now against the bathroom mirror, pull me towards you so that I was gazing up into your eyes, the same distance from you as I am now from my laptop screen. I miss the sudden change in atmosphere, the imperceptible intake of breath, the sexual charge that made the hairs on my arms stand up. I miss it all. I miss it all. I miss it all.
After a while, when I’d stared at your magnified face on the screen for so long I felt my eyeballs must surely carry a negative imprint of your features, I forwarded on until I came to a close-up of Susan. Then, again, I froze the frame. Leaning back on the sofa, I held the computer on my lap at arm’s length just looking at Susan, trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be her during those particular heady minutes. I summoned up the disbelief, the elation, the sheer soaring pride. And, of course, the total vindication. Susan’s not stupid, she knows people over the years have questioned whether you were just a little too ambitious, too flirty, too self-obsessed to be a Good Enough Husband. Now here was full justification of the compromises she had made. No wonder she looked as if her happiness might smother her!
As the camera panned out to show her sitting in the crowd, flanked by well-wishers, all sneaking looks of ill-concealed envy, I froze the frame again and, leaning forward, placed my thumb squarely over Susan’s face, so that she was only visible from the cleavage down. Then, and I know you’ll think this rather – what was that word you always used? – twisted, I imagined my own face superimposed on to her body, so it was me sitting there in my finery, soaking up the attention, the praise, the adulation. It was me you kept glancing over to as you made your word-perfect off-the-cuff acceptance speech, it was me who was feted, it was me who was the cat who got the cream and who, following the after-show party, would lean into you in the back of the taxi home, with one hand on your prized award and the other on your thigh, and whisper of the other rewards that would be yours once we got home.
I pressed my thumb harder over Susan’s face, twisting it roughly against the hard screen of the laptop, not caring what smudges I left behind. Harder and harder, as if through sheer force of my will I could rub Susan completely out. But when I took my hand away, there she was still, the big lacquered curls already drooping like five-day-old lilies, the black line of smudged mascara scarring her cheek.
Good old Susan. She always did dig herself firmly into place, embedding herself like a splinter into the very flesh of your life until your skin grew fresh over the top of her and it would have needed something needle-sharp to pick pick pick her out.
I met Liam yesterday! Isn’t that the most bizarre thing? Remember how you always said you’d love me to meet your son one day because you thought we’d get on so well? You were so, so right.
I knew he worked in the swanky brasserie next to the Royal Gallery, which happens to be staging an exhibition I’d been meaning to see for ages. Blood and Rage, is how the critics styled it. I couldn’t really think of anything more apt. So I thought, ‘Why not?’ Helen Bunion has told me I need to forge new habits that don’t include you, break the patterns and set different ones. So why not an exhibition? Why not a bit of blood and rage? New patterns are a great survival strategy, Helen says.
I don’t mind telling you, Clive, I need all the survival strategies I can get!
So I went to the exhibition, and it was remarkable. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Swollen globs of purple paint, as if the artist had dissected some once living thing over a canvas and then hung it up to admire. (Remember how, when you told me it was over, I said rather rabidly that I felt like a part of me had been ripped off and my insides were leaking out over the floor? Well, now imagine that, except on a painting. Incidentally, please forgive the overblown Jacobean melodrama of all that. I’m honestly embarrassed about some of the things I said. I was overwrought. I really was.)
So, after I’d looked around the exhibition, I went next door to the brasserie to have some tea. Well, there’s nothing odd about that, is there? There were lots of middle-aged women there queuing for tea on their own, and they can’t all be stalkers, can they? Nope, just women with nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon than look around an exhibition of paintings that look like slashed, bleeding livers, before enjoying a nice pot of tea. You can’t blame them, can you?
I knew he was your son right away. And it didn’t hurt that the bill had his name in the corner. Liam. He had a lovely smile, just as I imagined, and your eyes looking down on me. As tall as you, I think, but not as broad, and no sign of the slight paunch that you wear so self-consciously under your clothes like an extra thermal layer.
The tea that he brought me came in a silky bag and smelt of patchouli. I asked if they didn’t have any plain PG Tips and he smiled in a way that made it obvious I wasn’t the first person ever to ask him that. When he smiled, a little dent appeared halfway down his cheek, just like yours. I looked at it a lot. I hope he didn’t notice. You’re right. He’s nice. I think in other circumstances we’d have been friends. I gave him a ridiculously big tip, wondering if it might make me more memorable. Perhaps the next time he saw you he might say, ‘A woman came in today for a cup of tea. She was really nice. You’d have liked her.’
Silly hey? Silleeeee Salleeeee.
I do think you need to calm down a bit.
Have you tried any breathing techniques? Helen Bunion swears by them, she really does. Apparently the idea is that you focus so intently on your breathing that you forget about all the other stuff that’s causing you stress. Well, like I say, that’s the idea. I have to confess I’ve struggled a little with the whole concept. Helen says I have to take air in while pushing out my stomach so that there’s a maximum amount of internal space to fill with wonderful life-giving oxygen. Breathe in, stomach out; breathe out, stomach in. That’s the bit I struggle with, coordinating the breathing with the stomach. I’ll start off fine, but then realize that I’m either breathing out and pushing my stomach out too, or breathing in and pulling it in. Then I’ll panic and try to remember what the right combination should be, and my breathing will be getting shallower and shallower, and my stress levels higher and higher. I don’t tell Helen that, though. She’s very proud of her breathing techniques and I’d feel a bit like I’d failed her if I admitted I couldn’t actually do them.
Anyway, I don’t mind telling you that that phone call this morning left me a little bit shaken. After all, it was the first time I’d heard your voice in person, as opposed to on the television, for nearly four months. Of course, you didn’t sound remotely like you’d sounded on that awards programme the other night. Your voice had that hard, ugly tone you’d used on the ferret-faced Romanian squeegee man, the same gravelly menace. If I didn’t know you so well, I’d almost have been scared.
‘What the fuck were you thinking of?’
I did know, of course, what you were talking about, but I was so surprised at hearing your voice again that I played rather lamely for time.
‘Clive! How lovely. What exactly can I do for you?’
Could you hear my heart hammering down the telephone line? That wild thumping rhythm drowning out my stupid, lying voice.
‘Don’t fucking patronize me, Sally. You know exactly what I’m talking about. That fucking piece of shit you wrote in the Mail.’
How to play this, I wondered . . . Of course, when the commissioning editor had replied to say they loved the piece, I’d had a feeling there might be, well, repercussions, although I’d assumed they’d take the form of another email tirade. But then, hey, any reaction is better than no reaction – isn’t that what you’ve always told me?
‘Oh, you read it, did you?’ Of course you’d read it, especially after I emailed you last week on impulse, telling you to look out for it. Could I really have thought the sheer force of my words might win you back? Sometimes my own self-delusion leaves me breathless, it really does. Still, I tried to keep my voice level. ‘So you’ll have seen then that all names were changed, so there can be absolutely no comeback for either of us.’
There came a sort of mini-explosion then from your end of the phone. I really thought there might have been some kind of electrical malfunction, but it was just you getting ready to roar.
‘No comeback? Are you fucking insane? You write a basically blow-by-blow diary account of our fucking five-year affair without bothering to disguise any of the fucking details, and you really think that changing the fucking names is going to fool anybody?’
‘I did change the details. I made you ten years older, for a start.’
Of course, I knew that was one of the things that would have wounded you most, that cruel extra decade arbitrarily yoked around your neck.
‘Thank fuck Susan’s out of the country. One of her clients is shooting a commercial in Spain so with any luck she won’t get to see it; and I don’t know how many of my friends would actually recognize me from the gross misrepresentation you managed to get across.’
‘So that’s all right then, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s not fucking all right. You could have fucking ruined me. You still could. If Susan reads that, she could easily put all those details together, that timeline – the deposit on the flat (and don’t forget I told her it was just somewhere I could go to get some space, she never knew I was actually planning to leave her), the visit to the doctor – and I’ll be out on my fucking ear. And don’t think making me a playwright instead of a documentary-maker (Documentaries! Those twenty-minute snippets shot on hand-held cameras or filming out of car windows. How that award has gone to your head!) is going to fucking fool anyone.’
‘I had to give you a job that meant you were at your computer all day,’ I explained reasonably. ‘To explain all those hundreds of emails. And anyway, you always did impress on me that it would be madness not to plunder my private life for professional inspiration.’
Your rage then went up a notch, a certain timbre setting something in the phone receiver vibrating whenever it reached that particular pitch.
‘Your life maybe. But not my fucking life. You have no right to take liberties with my life, my wife, my family.’
‘You’re overreacting,’ I told you, but my voice was already wavering, going squeaky round the edges. It was that term ‘wife’, of course. That filthy four-letter word.
‘No one knows about us. No one ever knew about us. There’s no way anyone could put two and two together.’
But, of course, you weren’t taken in, and neither did I really expect you to be. We both knew full well that the threat of exposure was the very thing that had motivated me to chart the diary of my fall from grace in print, the predictable, brutal arc of a failed affair. But after all, Susan was abroad, so it all had been really for nothing. Well, apart from the fee, which of course didn’t go amiss.
‘Aren’t you worried about Daniel reading it? Surely you can’t want him to find out his partner’ (the slight emphasis on the word ‘partner’, as if it wasn’t really a proper word) ‘was sleeping with his mate for the past five years.’
Funny to think of you as Daniel’s ‘mate’. I’m not sure you would always have seen yourself that way. In fact I seem to remember you describing him several times as ‘spineless’ and more than a few times as ‘passive aggressive’, a favourite term of yours.
‘Daniel doesn’t read that sort of thing,’ I told you, trying to keep my tone chatty and upbeat, although the black pen I had in my hand was busy tearing violent gashes through the paper on my desk. ‘And anyway, I’m not sure I even care any more if Daniel finds out.’
You weren’t buying it, and who can blame you?
‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous. Of course you care. If Daniel ever leaves you he’ll take your kids with him, and make no mistake about it.’
Make no mistake about it. Did you always talk like that? Or has success made you more pompous?
‘I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing, Sally. But I have to warn you, you’re about to get in completely out of your depth.’
Well, once you’d said that, there was a bit of a silence, wasn’t there? You see, I was still trying to reconcile the snarling voice on the phone with the man who’d once driven all the way to Dorset with me, when I had to pay a duty visit to my father, only to promptly catch the train straight back to London again as soon as we reached the other end. ‘I can’t bear to think of you sitting in the car on your own all that way,’ you’d told me when I’d protested that it was too much to ask. ‘Anyway, it gives me the chance to have four whole hours with you to myself.’
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?
The 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 bum 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, and besides I had to make sure your identity was disguised. 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 three or four 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 unexorcized 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, your excitement when you told me you’d put down a deposit on a flat and told Susan you needed some time alone (though not about me, of course. Never about me), and then, over the course of just a week, the 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, how awful it had been to witness someone so strong, so resourceful, unravelling 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 still be a mentor to me in a work capacity, and that you would continue helping me professionally, just as you always had done? Well, it was a lovely thought, but of course it hasn’t happened. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been relying on the researching jobs for you until the journalism commissions stopped coming in and the features editors stopped returning my emails, and there turned out to be a gaping hole at the centre 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 in as a child, and the Susan. Well, it was just the first thing that popped into my head.
Of course, I disguised all the details, so I don’t know why you got so cross about it. Did you like the way I implied I lived in Queen’s Park? I don’t believe I’ve ever even been to Queen’s Park. And Susan wasn’t really Susan, after all, but a nice, anonymous, perfectly ordinary Sarah. I even changed the variety of red wine you chose. 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 calling me a marriage-wrecking trollop and saying 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 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 nutter. 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 peri-menopause! 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 non-existent 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: ‘When it happened to Susan . . .’ 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.
So 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, I had wondered fleetingly what would happen if Daniel somehow underwent a fundamental personality transplant and turned into the kind of person who might read a feature in the paper with ‘Affair’ in the title, but even in that unlikely event, I knew he’d never recognize his ‘partner’ of sixteen years from what appeared in the piece. And not because of the cunning insertion of Queen’s Park either. 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.
After 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.