The Mistress's Revenge Read Online Free Page A

you’ve forgotten that little incident. You’d been having one of your periodic meltdowns where you angsted about where our relationship was going and you emailed me, terribly excited, to say you’d come up with some sort of a plan.
    When I squeezed into the pub to meet you—it’s always so very crowded, isn’t it?—you had a smile on your face as big as Brazil.
    “I know you’re going to think I’m being silly,” you said. How ridiculous that word “silly” always sounded coming from you with your ex-boxer’s physique, your angry curls, your flattened, much-broken nose. “But I’ve come up with an idea that might make both of us feel just a little bit secure.”
    I felt relieved then, I remember. Finally you’d come up with a solution that didn’t involve wrecking lives and destroying families. Slidinginto the seat opposite you, my cheeks still flushed from my walk through Soho Square, I gazed at you expectantly, waiting for you to provide me with whatever answer had been staring us in the face the whole time.
    “I want to ask you to marry me!”
    My expression must have been a picture, it really must, because your terribly-pleased-with-yourself smile was already fading when I blurted out the one basic fact that you seemed to have overlooked: “But you’re already married!”
    You looked a bit cross then and petulant, as if it was pedantic of me to have become hung up on a technicality at a moment of high romance such as this.
    “I know I’m married,” you told me, clearly hurt. “I just wanted you to know how serious I am about you. I wanted to give you some measure of commitment.”
    “How can you commit to me when you’re already committed to your wife?” I asked you, quite reasonably I thought.
    Again that shadow of irritation passed over your face.
    “I thought you’d be pleased,” you said, and your voice was small and bruised like an overripe plum.
    Ironic now to think that the one marriage proposal of my life (I don’t count Daniel’s “Weddings are a waste of money but we should look into whether it’s worth doing it for tax reasons”) should have come from a married man.
    I loved you I loved you I loved you I loved you.
    S usan was looking slightly older, I thought (although at forty-six she’s not far off my age), but more peaceful. Sorry, does that make her sound like a corpse? What I mean is she’d lost that gaunt look she wore for the last year of our affair. Not that I really got a chance to study her in those days, you understand. My guilt kept my gaze constantly averted, bouncing off the very corners of her so that I only ever took in small pieces—a blue eye sunk like a pebble into damp sandcreases, the corner of a mouth pulled down to the chin by invisible thread, the way sunlight brought the split ends of her straight white-blonde hair into sharp relief.
    Last night though, she was sleeker, shinier, plumper. Her smile had lost the weariness of old. She was wearing her trademark navy blue, but she had over her dress a white jacket with a sequined trim that sparkled where the lights in the pub hit it. She looked alive.
    “You look wonderful,” I told her, truthfully.
    “Thank you, love, and so do you.”
    It was nice of her to lie, but I could see she was a little bit shocked. You see, I haven’t exactly been looking after myself since we last saw one another (can it really be three months ago, that hunched figure weeping in the rain outside the restaurant on York Way?). Grief has hollowed me out with a blunt spoon, troweling grooves into flaccid flesh. My hair bears the telltale stripes of a bad home dye, the roots an alarming shade of blood-orange where the chemicals have been absorbed by greedy strands of gray, the rest a rusty brown, like corroded iron. I’ve lost weight (oh, the wonders of the Misery Diet) so now I wear my skin like an ill-fitting suit and the bones protrude, lumpen from my chest. Thank God she couldn’t see my legs where the hairs