Extract: The Good Mistress, by Anne Tiernan

Erica, Juliet and Maeve, linked but long-separated. Their lives are about to collide, old tensions raised and changed. They must reconcile the realities of love, betrayal and the limits of forgiveness - because what does it truly mean to be 'good', anyway? Kete is excited to feature this extract from the new novel by international bestseller Anne Tiernan, with her trademark wit, sharp observation, charming warmth and devastating honesty when it comes to mid-life.

Extract from The Good Mistress by Anne Tiernan, Moa Press, $37.99 RRP. Rory’s body is in the wooden box on the altar so of course that’s not him texting. He’s not both dead and alive, a kind  of Schrödinger’s Rory. Still, she grips the phone in her pocket and, as its vibrations pulse hope through her, remembers the report in the news a few weeks ago about a woman who knocked on the coffin at her own wake. It’s the type of story that would have amused him. Juliet had assigned a special tone to his message notifications, but since their last tryst in San Francisco in March, she’d changed it back again. (She prefers the word tryst – it suggests the old-fashioned brass bed of the hotel, their sweaty, entwined limbs. Affair evokes wills, solicitors.) The texts had been less frequent since then, but she needed to cling to that hopeful lurch between hearing the sound  and checking the screen. Though lately, this had often been followed by a bellyflop of disappointment. 

His way was to dazzle and disappear, a celestial body dipping away below the horizon. And now he’s ghosted her in the most literal way possible. It’s almost funny. Well, he’d think so anyway. 

After a pause for a hymn, the woman beside her resumes sniffing. Earlier, during the eulogy, her weeping peaked, and Juliet had leaned in to ask how she knew him. ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But the poor family, what a shock. God be good to them.’ And she blessed herself in such a sorrowful manner that Juliet turned away in disgust. She’d forgotten how funerals are community events here, not just by invitation, like some drab wedding. How dare you, she thought, snivelling like you loved him too. At least, she hopes this was merely a thought; the sleeping pills she downed on the plane with a glass of wine failed to knock her out and have instead placed her into a sort of disassociated fugue. She also hopes this woman’s tears aren’t contagious because if she starts to cry now she’ll never stop. Like when you go to the toilet for the first time on a night out. Breaking the seal, they used to call it.  

She tries to remember the last time she was in a church, a proper one like this, with light struggling through stained glass, the heady perfume of incense and arse-numbing pews.  Everywhere she looks, there are artefacts of pain: tortured sons, grieving mothers, treacherous friends. There’d be no mistaking this church for a community centre as you might do in Auckland; some Episcopalian place that teaches tolerance. (Tolerance! The nuns would be appalled.) From a distance, it’s been easy to be repelled by Catholicism, but here, immersed again, the ritual pulls at her seductively. Death feels so ordinary that she finds a strange comfort in it. Maybe this has been the  point all along. To make the suffering more bearable.  

The priest at the pulpit in his ornate robes is ancient and gnarled, just as he should be. You need someone who looks only a generation away from the Famine. (Almost twenty years gone, and Juliet can still only see this capitalised. There it sits in her head alongside the Church and the Troubles, a sort of holy trinity of misery.) He has a face you could imagine side eyeing you through the fly screen of the confessional box,  demanding a decade of the rosary for your impure thoughts. Impure: it makes them sound murky when they couldn’t be more explicit. Juliet could pray on skinned knees for a thousand years and still not do enough penance for the volume of filthy  thoughts she’s had about Rory. 

Bless me, Father, for I have etc.  And adored every minute of it . . . 

There are symbolic offerings on the table beside the coffin – a guitar and a golf club maybe? Something, anyway, that doesn’t align with her knowledge of him and reinforces her sense of exclusion. She is meaningless amongst this crowd. (You’re my  entire universe, Jules. He’d said that. She’d heard him.) What gift would she bring in the offertory procession? A naked selfie?  She imagines it, perched on the coffin, like a sassy Mary –  Magdalene obviously, not Virgin – sinful but subservient. Actually, she could just prostrate herself naked on the coffin, offer up her whole being, as she had done, over and over.  

The woman beside her joins in with the priest suddenly, whispering fiercely, Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.  Why only this line? It was a lonely walk into the clinic in Liverpool all those years ago, Rory both present and absent then too. The old people with their gabardine coats and their placards, kneeling outside, chanted this, like a Satanic incantation, increasing the volume as she made her way, weak-legged, to the door. The cruel piousness of them.  

She leans in and whispers back, ‘But are we not blessed too? The bearers of the fruit?’ The woman looks alarmed and turns away.  

Juliet’s own almost eighteen-year-old womb fruit (citrus maybe, definitely with an edge), Ruby, is at her mother’s house, sleeping off the gruelling flight, while Juliet’s mother, Denise,  is sleeping off the effects of another gruelling round of chemo. Juliet was surprised that Ruby wanted to come with her back ‘home’ – funny how she uses this word still, she supposes she’ll always feel cleaved in two, like a swallow’s tail. Ruby’s on her gap year, but instead of cutting loose (Juliet’s interpretation of it) she’s using the time to work and save for university. It’s unnecessary given Tāne, her father, has always been generous  with his maintenance. (He can afford to be magnanimous  because he’s loaded, but more importantly, he’s now ecstatically married to someone whose most appealing quality is that she’s not Juliet.) But that’s Ruby, intent on doing the honourable thing at the expense of pleasure. A sort of reversed mirror image of Juliet’s own life philosophy in fact. Juliet neglected to inform her own work she’s here. Simply gave a spare key to her neighbour in the building in Takapuna where she and Ruby share an apartment (at her daughter’s insistence, so he could water the plants) and here they are. She suspects she’ll find missed calls and texts on her phone from Peter, the owner of the interiors shop she works in. She also suspects after three  years he’ll be relieved to finally have a bona fide excuse to fire her. She was hired as ‘creative consultant’ to help customers  with decor, but it soon became apparent that while she may have the artistic aptitude, she doesn’t have the appetite to advise North Shore housewives in their distressed Golden Goose  trainers on how to achieve their Heritage Luxe design aspirations. So, she sits at the till now and simply takes their money.  If they want to spend three hundred dollars on one noxious candle and a plastic bottle of hand soap, then fine. Juliet is resigned to the collusion. 

If she leans, she can make out the back of Erica’s chic blonde head in the front pew. The grieving widow. Why is it that widows get their own special title? Not bereaved children, or parents. Or lovers. And widower just a derivative, lacking the same pathos. Once upon a time, they used to say relict, like you were the leftovers. Juliet shudders. The woman beside her sighs and tries to nudge her back into her own space but she holds firm. It strikes her now that there is no male equivalent for a mistress. She supposes it’s because women need to be put in some kind of box, categorised by their relationships to men.  So, there’s another thing she and Erica share.  

She watches Erica intently, sees no revealing shake of her shoulders, no raising of a hand to dab away tears. Rory called Erica cold once and it thrilled Juliet. She was always trying to provoke a negative comment about her and then prove herself to be the opposite. Though it was rare this happened, he was so reticent about his marriage. (‘But am I better than her?’ she’d push when they were making love. He’d never answer of course.) If there was a suggestion that Erica was uptight, Juliet would be loose; moody and she’d be sunshine itself; frigid and she’d be insatiable – not that she had to try with that. With Rory inside her, it was the only time in her life she felt full. But she would give anything now to switch places with Erica. To be her. To wallow in the warm centre of the grief. Not out here in the cold, the pain pushed down, mutating like some cancerous tumour invisible to the human eye. 

Someone in front shifts and blocks her view so Juliet swivels and scans the crowd for familiar faces. The woman beside her mutters. 

‘Oh, go and keen over the coffin like they used to do,’ Juliet says.  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’  

‘Where do I start?’   *

The Good Mistress (Moa Press) is available in bookstores now.