Free The Mistress's Revenge by Tamar Cohen Page A

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 visible only 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 onto 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 fêted, 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 yourthigh 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’d gone to an exhibition at the Royal Gallery that 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 in a painting. Incidentally, please forgive the overblown Jacobeanmelodrama of all that. I’m honestly embarrassed about some of the things I said. I was overwrought. I really was).
    After I’d looked around the exhibition I remembered you telling me your son worked in a swanky brasserie a street or two away so I decided to go there for 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 weekday 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