Free The Mistress's Revenge by Tamar Cohen Page B

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 he might, the next time he saw you, say: “A woman came in the other day 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 airin 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 gets 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 the television for nearly four months. Of course, you didn’t sound remotely like you’d sounded on that awards program 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 it might jolt you back to me? Sometimes my own self-delusion leaves me breathless, it really does. Still, I triedto keep my voice level. “So you’ll have seen then that it was all totally anonymous, so there can be absolutely no comeback for either of us.”
    There came a sort of mini explosion then