by Jane Fallon
* * *
Getting Rid of Matthew
Jane Fallon
* * *
Contents
1
THE BEDROOM WAS DARK, lit only by a sliver of…
2
SOPHIE SHALLCROSS WAS SITTING in her large, raised, ground-floor kitchen…
3
LYING IN BED, Helen replayed the phone conversation in her…
4
SOPHIE NEVER WOULD HAVE ADMITTED IT, but she dreaded Christmas…
5
WHILE MATTHEW TEARFULLY TOLD HELEN that he'd spent the whole…
6
ON BARTHOLOMEW ROAD, Sophie was struggling to understand what the…
7
AT LUNCHTIME THE NEXT DAY, Helen went out to meet…
8
EVERY DAY HELEN WAS DISCOVERING things about Matthew she never…
9
IT WAS FRIDAY MORNING and Helen was typing up a…
10
AT FOUR O'CLOCK ON SUNDAY, the doorbell rang. Helen opened…
11
MOST DAYS, HELEN FOUND herself flicking through the photo album…
12
HELEN WAS LYING on the sofa in Sophie's office, taking…
13
MATTHEW'S GIRLS HAD GONE over to their father's as usual…
14
ONE WEEK LATER, Helen was starting to feel as though…
15
ON MONDAY, HELEN THOUGHT about phoning in sick. There was…
16
CHECK THIS OUT," Matthew said, producing a sheaf of papers…
17
THE DAYS DRAGGED ON through the wet darkness of February…
18
ON SATURDAY MORNING, Matthew and Helen picked out a large…
19
SOMETIMES WHEN HELEN COULDN'T SLEEP, she got up and wandered…
20
HELEN HAD STAYED at her desk, turning the small white…
21
SO…SANDRA HEPBURN," Laura was saying at the weekly ideas…
22
HELEN WAS DREADING meeting Sophie on Wednesday evening. She knew…
23
HELEN PEERED OUT from under the covers at nine o'clock…
24
MATTHEW HAD ARRANGED an evening out with Amanda and Edwin…
25
THE OPENING OF VERANO WAS HAPPENING on the following Friday…
26
HELEN SAT IN THE MUSEUM TAVERN across from the British…
27
BY THE TIME FRIDAY CAME AROUND Helen and Matthew had…
28
MATTHEW WAS FEELING UTTERLY AT HOME, drinking tea in Sophie's…
29
THE PROSPECT OF SHEILA'S FUNERAL was sending Helen into a…
30
HELEN WOKE AT SIX with a dry mouth. She felt…
31
HELEN HAD LEFT for her last day at work before…
32
SOPHIE WAS DRINKING Diet Coke, and though she'd offered Matthew…
33
MATTHEW HAD MOVED OUT by the end of Saturday, checking…
34
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS PASSED in a kind of haze…
35
SPRING MOVED INTO EARLY SUMMER and Helen waited for a…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Cover
Copyright
1
THE BEDROOM WAS DARK, lit only by a sliver of brightness from the wall light in the basement well outside, edging its way around the sides of the blind. Helen could just make out the clock as it clicked over to eight fifteen. She poked a finger gently in Matthew's ribs, and he turned over irritably and picked up his watch from the low table beside the bed.
"Fuck, I'm late."
Helen watched sleepily as he jolted out from under the duvet, smoothing down his dark gray hair at the sides, and started to pull on his clothes—his work uniform of a dark, tasteful, beautifully fitted bespoke suit, well-cut shirt, and soft black calf-leather shoes—not bothering to take a shower. He bent down to kiss her good-bye brusquely and pulled the bedroom door shut behind him.
She lay back on the pillow, which smelled faintly of the Armani Black Code she had given him on their anniversary, and stared at the crack in the ceiling. It was definitely getting bigger and she wondered if she should speak to her upstairs neighbors about it. Not that she knew them. She'd seen them only three or four times in the two years she'd lived here, a couple in their thirties: he was a bit stringy looking; she wore a fleece and had a mousy bob. They had an unexpectedly rampaging sex life, though, which Helen could hear through the ceiling about five nights a week and sometimes in the afternoons. It was all very shouty and theatrical. Lots of "Oh, babys" and "Yes, yeses" and banging on the headboard. One time they had been at it at the same time as Matthew and Helen and it had become a bit of a competition, a sort of groan-off. Helen had always had a competitive streak.
As she heard the click of the front door closing and Matthew's heavy footsteps going up the stairs to the street, she thought about getting up. Deciding against it, she pulled the covers over her head and settled back down, then stuck one arm out into the cold room, fumbled for the remote, and flicked on the TV. After all, what was the point? It was only a couple of hours before she'd have to go back to bed again anyway. Because Matthew wasn't heading off for work. It wasn't eight fifteen in the morning. It was eight fifteen in the evening and he was heading home to dinner in his own house. With his wife. Oh, and his two beautiful children. Because Matthew was married—and not to Helen, to a woman called Sophie. And Helen had spent every Monday night like this for the past four years. And most Wednesday and Thursday evenings, too.
And every Monday and every Wednesday and every Thursday when Matthew went home at eight o'clock, Helen was left alone to choose one of two exciting options: watch TV in bed on her own or get up and watch TV in the living room on her own.
Now she lay under the dark of the duvet and listened as another scene of marital discord played out on EastEnders. Somebody's husband was accusing his wife of playing around. Lots of shouting, everything out in the open, they'd either stay together or they wouldn't—that was the way it worked in soaps. But Helen knew the reality was far more complicated. The reality would make for terrible TV because nothing ever really got resolved. The reality was a man coming over three nights a week for a couple of hours and then going home to his wife as if nothing had happened. Over and over again. For years on end.
* * *
Helen had never expected to be someone's mistress. She had wanted three things in life: a highly paid job in public relations, a flat of her own, and a man, also belonging to her exclusively. Somehow, she'd ended up as a personal assistant, which was a secretary in anyone else's vocabulary. She rented a one bedroom apartment off Camden High Street with a small basement courtyard out the back and a crack in the bedroom ceiling. And as for the man, well, she believed in true love and commitment and till death do us part, it had just never happened to her.
She had grown up watching her parents' dogged devotion to one another, their "us against the world" united front that often excluded even her, their only child, and she'd been trying to find her own gang of two ever since. She'd just never imagined she would find it with someone who was already another woman's husband.
* * *
Somewhere, way back in her previous life, Helen had been engaged to another man, Simon, the last in a series of long-term boyfriends. Looking back now, she couldn't remember exactly what she'd seen in Simon. Well, she could because he was young and good-looking, and he had a reasonable job and just the right amount of ambition, but she now found it impossible to fathom why she had stayed with him for five
years. The one legacy of her parents that she couldn't shake off was the idea that relationships were for life. So she ignored the fact that she was the one making all the future plans and she tried not to notice how his eyes glazed over when she talked about saving up for a deposit on their first shared flat. She had invested years in this man, it had to pay off, there was no way she was going to admit defeat. That is, until Simon gave her no choice in the matter. They'd been cooking dinner together, their nightly ritual which, Helen thought, was a sure indication that their relationship was mature and serious.
"I'm being transferred," Simon had muttered into the colander full of potatoes he was peeling.
Helen had flung her arms around him.
"You got the promotion? Regional manager, wow. So, we're moving to Manchester?"
He'd kept his head down, seemingly engrossed in digging out a particularly stubborn eye.
"Erm…not exactly, no."
"Where, then?" He was making her nervous, standing there stiffly while she attempted to hug him. He'd put down the potato peeler and turned to look at her, taking a deep breath like a ham actor about to have his big soap-opera moment.
"I'm moving to Manchester. On my own."
He'd gone on to say that of course it wasn't Helen's fault. It was all him, he was afraid of the commitment. He felt too young, he said, to be settling down with one woman. It was all a matter of timing. If he'd met Helen a few years later, when he felt ready for such a big step…
"I love you so much, it's just me, I'm such a fuckup. I know I'll regret this but it's something I have to do," he'd whined, wallowing in his role. He'd insisted there was no one else involved and Helen had believed him, had, in fact, felt sorry for him, he seemed so pained by the choice he was having to make.
Two months later, the news had filtered back to her that he was getting married to another woman.
Helen was thirty-five at the time. Bruised and battered by the failure of the relationship more than the loss of Simon himself, she had taken the separation hard. She'd made a promise to herself that she would have some fun, take opportunities when they arose without stopping to endlessly analyze their potential. And right on cue, Matthew had come along—her boss, of course, and twenty years older than she was—but why avoid a perfectly good cliché when it's staring you in the face?
Matthew was handsome in the way that men in their fifties are allowed to be considered handsome despite (or maybe even because of ) the gray hair and the paunch. Tall and confident, he gave off the impression that he reveled in his alpha status. His hair was thinning, but he still wore it collar length and swept back, disguising the round hairless spot fairly successfully. When the time came for him to shave it all off and just be bald and proud, he would get away with it, as he seemed to get away with everything, because he had a way of striding around the world as if he owned it, that absolute self-belief that public schoolboys have, challenging anyone to dispute their place as high up in the social order. Physically, his most striking assets were his pale, icy-blue eyes, which stood out in a face that was fairly ordinary, but he carried himself like he was the most attractive man in the room and somehow that seemed to make it fact. His success at work seemed to function as an aphrodisiac, too, on some types of women, of which Helen was a prime example. He had the ability to make anyone feel as if they were the center of his world at any given moment. Mainly, though, he was good company, funny, a storyteller, a good listener. Loyal, unless you were his wife, of course.
* * *
Helen had arrived to work at Global PR, thirty-four years old, a bit of a late starter, having spent the best part of her twenties traveling and partying and trying to ignore the irritating voice in her head telling her to get on the career ladder before it was too late. She'd spent the time since she'd gotten back from her world tour drifting around from job to job: accountant's assistant, shop manager, theater administrator. Periodically, she'd applied for a position as account manager for one of the bigger, showier public relations companies, but she'd always gotten knocked back. Finally, she'd decided that a foothold on the bottom rung was better than no foothold at all, and she'd accepted a job as assistant to Matthew Shallcross, managing director of Global PR, a middling-sized but flourishing company.
Global was a slightly overblown name for a company whose clients were exclusively British, but they had cornered the market in a certain type of up-and-coming potential tabloid favorite. They weren't large enough to attract the rich and famous, but over the years they had become adept at forming relationships with those at the beginning of their fifteen minutes and blasting them into the papers with cleverly thought-up stunts. It was easy when you had clients who would do anything if it would put them in the newspapers. Every now and again one of these wannabes would fuck up, drive drunk, get someone who wasn't their wife pregnant, go into rehab, and the Global account managers would be out fighting fires and raking in the money. These occasional high-profile blips, if handled correctly, guaranteed an interest in the client which could be very lucrative. Truthfully it was a little tacky, encouraging young and not very bright people to lay their whole lives out for public examination, but Helen considered it the sharp end of PR and she loved it. And, after a while, she overcame the irritation of correcting her friends every time they called her a secretary:
"I'm his personal assistant."
"But what do you do?"
"I look after him…make his appointments, organize meetings."
"Filing?"
"A bit."
"Typing?"
"So?"
"That's exactly what I do, typing, filing, fixing meetings. You're a secretary, get over it."
She'd started to get off on the vicarious power that being the boss's assistant afforded her. She was the one who could say yes or no to meetings or telephone calls and, eventually, to press statements. Once he'd started to trust her, Matthew had had her read and later write all the releases that were sent out to the papers for several of his lower-profile clients. He'd encouraged her ambitions to have clients of her own, and the more he encouraged, the more those ambitions grew.
Helen believed that several of the other girls in the office envied her for her close proximity to the man generally considered the most powerful of the company directors, but she'd kept focused on her work until a fateful lunch changed all that. If you'd asked her at the time what she thought about women who had affairs with married men, she would have said they were sad, desperate, unfeeling betrayers of other women, told you they were at the top of her list of offenders. People to be looked down on and reviled…
Helen had considered whether Matthew was attractive during the time she'd been working for him, of course she had, and she'd thought that yes, he was, in an older man sort of a way, but that was it. So when he'd reached across the table at Quo Vadis and taken hold of her hand, she'd surprised herself by not pulling away.
"I've been wanting to do this for ages," he'd said, and Helen had felt her heart leap up to the back of her throat. She had no idea how to respond, so she'd just sat there dumbfounded.
Matthew had carried on. "The thing is, I think you're beautiful. And I've been trying not to acknowledge that that's what I think for months."
Helen had blushed. Not prettily, like the delicate heroine of a romantic novel, but a deep, slightly clammy, crimson.
"You know I'm married, of course."
She'd managed to grunt a "yes."
"We have young children. If it wasn't for them…I'm not going to give you that line, you know, that my wife no longer understands me but…it is true we've drifted apart. We share the care of the kids, that's pretty much it." He'd laughed. "Can you see where this is going yet?"
Helen was still incapable of speech. Her free hand fiddled with the stem of her glass.
"No pressure. I don't want you to think that if you say you're not interested then I'll make life hard for you at work or anything like that. Just think about it and, if you decide that, maybe, we could t
ake things a bit further, then you know where I am. That's all I wanted to say."
And in that moment she'd realized that she wanted to sleep with him. She'd gone back to the office in a haze and could barely look at him for the rest of the afternoon.
That night, she'd bored her best friend Rachel stupid, in the pub.
"Should I?"
"No," said Rachel.
"Maybe…"
"No," said Rachel.
"What if…"
"Are you even listening to me?" Rachel eventually said snappily. "He's married. Don't do it. Don't become one of those women we hate."
"Women We Hate" were a big part of the bond between Rachel and Helen. They had started a mental list soon after they'd met, backpacking in India, and when they got back to London and Helen was staying in Rachel's West Brompton flat while she looked for her own place, they had started to write it down. They kept a copy each and regularly, when they were drunk, they would check them through and update each other with the newest entries. "Women who steal other women's husbands" had been there from the beginning, but in Helen's mind, her case was different. For a start, she had never encouraged Matthew—he had done all the pursuing.
* * *
"You're right. But…I think he really likes me."
"Oh, for fuck's sake. Of course he likes you, you're twenty years younger than him and about to fall over into his bed just because he's asked you to. Plus, you do his typing and make him cups of tea. You're a middle-aged man's fantasy. What's not to like?"
