The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,1
eaten for weeks – and my hands, clenched into fists at my sides, shook. The tablets the doctor had given me to help with anxiety – we both knew she meant depression – gave me mood swings. Weepy one moment, enraged the next. I wasn’t myself. At school, people were starting to notice.
I swallowed, took a deep breath, then raised my hand and tapped with bare knuckles on the wood. The gentlest tap, for fear of waking Anna. Just as he’d taught me.
Two
We bumped against each other as he shut the door behind me and we were crammed, for a moment, in the narrow hall. Awkward. He was so close, I could feel the heat of his body, radiating outwards towards me. His lifeforce. I reached out and put my hand on his lower arm, feeling the warmth of his skin through his cotton shirt sleeve.
He jumped as if I’d given him an electric shock and pulled his arm away. My insides contracted. It was still there, the bond between us. Why else would it affect him so powerfully? But he looked haunted, his face closed as he turned from me.
My legs shook. I realised too how much I’d pinned my hopes on the possibility he’d changed his mind, that he realised what a fool he’d been to let me go and wanted me back.
He said, ‘Drink?’
He led me through the hallway – past the narrow table with its neatly stacked mail and framed photos and the cellar door tucked under the stairs – and into the kitchen. My heels clip-clopped across the floor tiles and I tiptoed, trying instinctively not to make a sound. In the kitchen, I leaned against the counter, her kitchen counter, and watched him, learning him all over again. The way he ran his fingers through his hair when he was nervous, the breadth of the shoulders beneath his shirt, shoulders I’d so often clung to when we made love, his particular smell of male sweat and fresh laundry and shower gel. Ralph. I bit my lip.
He poured us both a glass of red wine and handed me mine. Shiraz, his favourite. He’d had it ready, there on the counter with two glasses. I wondered if Helen had bought it in her weekly internet shop.
I turned, nervous, and made a show of looking over the two neat shelves of recipe books there. They were ordered by region: Chinese, French, Italian, Middle Eastern. Each small section was arranged alphabetically, by writer. Helen, ever the librarian. How did he stand it?
I turned back. The kitchen clock on the wall behind him said nearly quarter past eight. They kept it five minutes fast, always. All the little things I knew about them and their life together. My insides tightened and coiled and I drank the wine, more quickly than I should.
‘Where is she?’
He looked at the floor. ‘Some school thing. A talk. About happiness, actually.’ He gave a dry laugh.
We’d once had sex right there on that neatly scrubbed kitchen table where they sat each morning for breakfast. It turned him on, the thought of how much she’d disapprove, not only of the infidelity but of how unhygienic it was.
‘So…’ I tried to sound nonchalant – just another ploy to make him want me again. ‘Where do we start?’
He answered without looking at me. ‘We need to talk.’
‘We do.’ My fingers gripped the stem of the wine glass. For weeks now, some of the most painful weeks of my life, he’d ignored my texts, refused to answer my calls, avoided me in the school corridors, however desperately I’d tried to stalk him, trailing him from class to class. I knew his timetable by heart.
He drank a gulp of wine. ‘I know you’re hurt. I’m sorry, really. I never meant—’
Something inside me clenched. ‘You never meant what?’
He paused and finally slid his eyes round to mine. They were wary and perhaps sheepish.
‘I’m sorry, that’s all. About what happened. But you’ve got to stop.’
I couldn’t answer. That was it, was it? After all he’d said. How much he loved me. How right we were together. I was so sure he’d leave her, in the end, leave her for me. I bit down on my bottom lip.
He couldn’t look me in the eye. ‘I know you’re angry. I get it. But you’re just making things worse.’
‘For you, maybe.’ I had nothing more to lose.
He shrugged. ‘Please. It’s over. I’m sorry but it is.’ He shifted his weight, his eyes looking across