by Jane Fallon
There was one issue she had to resolve before they said good-bye and it all became too complicated.
"I'm moving, again, by the way," she said, thinking on her feet. "The flat I'm staying in, it belongs to a friend and, well, it's a long story but…she split up with her boyfriend over the weekend and she needs to move back in and it's just not big enough for two of us…"
"Oh. What a shame. Where'll you go?"
"A friend of mine in Camden's got a spare room. It's a much nicer flat, so…"
"I was looking forward to having a gym partner," said Sophie, and Helen thought that maybe she meant it.
"Sorry."
"Well, we'll just have to go out for a drink instead," Sophie heard herself saying. "How are you fixed on Thursday? My ex-husband can babysit. You know, I don't think I ever went out for an evening and left him looking after the kids on his own the whole time we were married. It'll do him good."
"Fucking hell." Helen laughed. "You really do need to get a life."
And before she knew what she was doing, she had agreed to be in the Coal Hole in the Strand at seven o'clock on Thursday evening.
* * *
Sophie had no idea what had made her blurt out the drinks invitation, except that she had quite liked this woman, and she'd enjoyed the last hour thinking about something other than the mess that her life was in. She knew she couldn't spend all her time with just her daughters, tempting though that seemed. She needed a friend.
* * *
Back at work Helen found Matthew hanging around the general office, going over some files with Jenny. She felt nauseous when she realized that the other girls were making kissy faces behind his back and putting their thumbs up to a bemused Helen-from-Accounts through the glass of the partitioned office. She felt even worse when Helen-from-Accounts finally cottoned on to what she thought was the joke and began to join in the laughing and face-pulling. That this caused the others to explode with laughter made Helen-from-Accounts beam with acceptance. Helen didn't know what she was most annoyed at, Helen-from-Accounts' stupidity or her desperation. Or maybe it was that this was the woman everyone in the office felt Matthew was most likely to be a good match with, or worse, that she would be the only one sad enough to reciprocate his advances. Matthew smiled at her and she scowled back at him without meaning to.
Laura called her into her office and shut the door.
"Is everything OK?"
Helen froze.
"Yes, why shouldn't it be?"
"It's just, you've only just got back from lunch and I know it's not the first long lunch break you've had in the past couple of weeks."
"I had to go to the dentist," said Helen defensively.
"Again?"
Helen stared at Laura defiantly.
"Yes, again. What, you don't trust me now? You think I'm skiving off?"
"Helen, I'm not accusing you. I just wanted to say, if you've got something going on or you need some time or whatever, just tell me."
"I'm fine."
And she'd turned on her heels and gone back to her desk without another word.
* * *
Evening.
Pasta. Sofa. Wine. Emmerdale.
"Sophie's asked me to babysit on Thursday," Matthew said huffily in the commercial break.
"What's wrong with that?"
"She's just doing it to irritate me."
"Matthew, they're your kids. How can being asked to look after them for a few hours be irritating?"
"That's not what I meant. I'm looking forward to it. I just mean…well…she never goes out."
"Maybe she's got a new boyfriend," said Helen, enjoying herself.
"What?" spluttered Matthew. "Of course she hasn't. At least, I should hope not. I mean, what would that be like for the girls, her going off with someone else so soon?"
"Not as bad as them finding out you've been with me all this time, I imagine."
He's jealous, she thought. He still has feelings for her. And she searched down deep inside herself to see if she minded and found she really didn't.
"Why shouldn't she meet someone new? You have."
"I hope she does. Eventually," Matthew said unconvincingly. "I'd just be very surprised if it'd happened this quickly, that's all."
"Then maybe she's going out on the pull. I'm sure a quickie with a stranger you've just met in a club is a great ego boost when your husband has left you for someone else."
"OK, that's enough."
She'd definitely touched a nerve.
"Matthew, stop being so fucking po-faced about it. Sophie's allowed to go out once in twelve years and it's none of your business anymore where she's going. Just look at it as an opportunity to spend more time with the girls, you keep saying you want to."
"You'll come with me, won't you? It'll be fun," Matthew was saying.
"Sorry, no. I'm going out on Thursday, actually. I was just about to tell you."
"Going out where?"
"Out with Rachel. Just for a few drinks, I won't be late. At least now I know you won't just be sat in front of the TV pining for me."
"I do love you, you know," he said, coming over all needy.
"I know you do," she answered, kissing the top of his head.
"And you love me, too, don't you?"
"What do you think? Let's have another bottle of wine," she said, standing up.
14
ONE WEEK LATER, Helen was starting to feel as though there would never be any light at the end of the tunnel, despite the fact that another Sunday with the girls had yielded these new words and phrases from Claudia:
Hi
Diet cola
Please
Thank you
And history in response to a direct question from Helen as to what her favorite subject was at school.
Hardly Dorothy Parker, but it was, Helen felt, a big improvement. What's more, she'd begun to look at Claudia and Suzanne in a slightly different way, following comments that Sophie had dropped about their relationship with their father. She could see that Suzanne's desperation to please him now bordered on obsessive and that Claudia's "couldn't give a shit" attitude was starting to look unconvincing.
* * *
This latest evening with Sophie had started off a bit awkwardly again and Helen couldn't really remember what she was doing there or why she had agreed to go, but a couple of vodka and tonics down and she'd begun to feel relaxed and was thinking that, maybe, she was even having a good time.
I mustn't get pissed, she'd kept saying to herself before she'd left the house. My name is Eleanor, I work from home, I'm not shagging your husband. She'd waved Matthew off on his babysitting duties and then gotten the tube down to Charing Cross and walked up the road to the pub where she'd arranged to meet Sophie. On the way, she tried to run through areas of conversation to steer well clear of:
divorce
adultery
work
living arrangements
anything personal
anything else
Fuck it, she thought, I'll play it by ear.
But well into her third large glass of wine, and obviously not used to drinking or to pub measures, which meant she had pretty much consumed a whole bottle, Sophie had brought the subject around to men.
"Have you got a boyfriend?" she asked.
Oh, God, thought Helen, has Eleanor got a boyfriend? I'm not sure. She thought about wheeling Carlo out again, but it all seemed too complicated a deception to keep up.
"Not at the moment, no. How about you? I mean…I know you're married and all that…"
"Was married," said Sophie with more than a hint of bitterness in her voice. "He walked out a few weeks ago."
"God, how awful." Helen couldn't resist digging. "Was it out of the blue?"
"I don't want to talk about it." Sophie looked pained. "He's got someone else."
She took another big gulp from her glass. "I mean, what are women like that thinking of? Making a pass at someone else's husband. There's ple
nty of men out there, for God's sake. You know what I think, it's a power thing. It's the power of knowing they've won some kind of contest that the poor unsuspecting wife doesn't even know she's been entered for. Or they're so desperate for a man, they don't even care if they have to steal one. I should feel sorry for her."
"Do you?" Helen was tentative.
"No! I hate her. I don't even know her and I hate her. That's what he's reduced me to."
"And what about him?" asked Helen. "What do you think he was thinking?"
"Oh, he'd have been flattered. He's a middle-aged man. Actually, he's a late-middle-aged man. Soon to be an old man. He'd have thought it was Christmas. To tell you the truth, I don't think he was thinking at all. At least not with his head. And he said that she threw herself at him, not that that's an excuse."
Helen stifled an exclamation. "He said that?"
"Yes, but then I don't know what to believe and let's face it, even if she did, he could have said no."
Helen couldn't contain herself. "Seems unlikely, a younger woman—you did say she was younger, didn't you? Well, anyway—throwing herself at an older man. I mean, unless he's incredibly attractive. Is he incredibly attractive, do you think?"
Sophie smiled weakly. "I have no idea, anymore, to be honest. Not objectively, I wouldn't have thought so, no. I don't think he's irresistible to women, if that's what you mean."
"Seems unlikely, then."
"Yes, seems unlikely."
Helen was finding it hard to move on from this particular topic. How fucking dare he? she thought. OK, so he was trying to soften the blow for his wife in some twisted logic kind of way, but to say that she, Helen, thirty-five years old and without a doubt in her physical prime, threw herself at fifty-five-year-old well-on-the-downward-slippery-slope Matthew was just too ridiculous. He'd pursued her. She'd resisted. He'd persevered. It had all come from him at the beginning. All of it.
"Are you OK?"
Sophie was looking at her quizzically. She took a deep breath and forced her concentration back to the task at hand.
"I was just wondering what it must be like for you. Do you miss him?"
"Do you know what? I really don't want to talk about him. Let's have another drink."
Helen stood up, slightly unsteady on her feet.
"I'll get it."
And she got herself a plain tonic water and Sophie another large wine.
* * *
"She was drunk!" Matthew was on his high horse when he eventually got home at just past midnight.
"So what? You get drunk sometimes." Helen had gone to bed as soon as she got in to mull over the evening and, if she were being honest with herself, to avoid Matthew. She had found the whole thing a bit unsettling, to say the least. She'd gotten on with Sophie well enough, but there was something about discussing yourself with the other woman without her knowing that left a bad taste in your mouth. It was just piling one deception on top of another. And hadn't her mother always said to her that if you listened in on conversations you weren't meant to, then you were bound to hear something bad about yourself?
"You know when we first got together," she said now to Matthew as he got undressed for bed. "Did you think I fancied you?"
"I couldn't believe my luck." Matthew snuggled up next to her under the duvet. "I thought you were going to scream and slap me round the face and then go running to Human Resources. I thought I'd won the lottery."
He started to move his right hand over Helen's stomach, thinking this line of conversation was some kind of romantic foreplay. Helen put her hand over his and stopped it from moving further down.
"You didn't think I was throwing myself at you, then?" She looked directly into his slightly bemused eyes in the half-light of the bedside lamp.
Matthew laughed. "No such luck. What's brought this on?"
"Nothing," said Helen, turning away from him over onto her side. "'Night."
* * *
Sophie had called Helen on her mobile next morning.
"OK, so I don't usually drink like a fourteen-year-old and throw up in the taxi on the way home, I'd just like you to know that."
"You didn't?"
"I did. And my husband went insane because he thinks I'm setting a bad example for the girls."
"Oh, and he's a great role model by the sound of it."
"Exactly."
When Sophie put the phone down, she smiled to herself, pleased that she'd managed the requisite "follow-up" phone call. Eleanor was easy to talk to—they had things in common, she was funny and good company, and chatting with her took Sophie's mind off…well…stuff…for a while—and she was enjoying forging a friendship, really, even if she did find it exhausting. And daunting. But she needed to get out of the house, she needed to start putting herself back together, she couldn't spend the rest of her life just being a mother.
* * *
Helen had been proofing a press pack for Laura when Sophie rang. Dull interviews with the dull cast of a dull new TV series which was about to be launched. It was taking her twice as long as it should because she was watching the daily Helen-from-Accounts-baiting session which was taking place in the general office. Helen-from-Accounts still had no idea of the crime which she was under suspicion for, let alone the hours of amusement that her new pixie haircut and plum-colored lipstick were giving the other girls. She had bought a red kaftan top to alternate with her pink hoodie. Because she was on the short side and a bit plump, it made her look a bit like a postbox.
Today Annie, always the ringleader, was asking Helen-from-Accounts about her husband. Was he good-looking ("Oh yes," said Helen-from-Accounts, blushing), was he good in bed ("Oh, I can't answer that," blush blush), was he the type to get jealous ("Gosh, yes, he said to me only this morning, 'Who are you getting all dressed up for?' she gushed, effectively signing her own death warrant).
"Can you keep it down over there, I'm trying to proofread this thing!" shouted Helen, hoping to break up the party and spare Helen-from-Accounts any more humiliation.
"Oh, don't be such a swot," Helen-from-Accounts shouted back, looking around at Annie and Jenny for approval, like the fat twelve-year-old who shoplifts a CD in Woolworth's to show the popular girls she knows how to join in.
She always gets caught.
Helen swallowed her dislike for the other women. Helen-from-Accounts was unbearable. But, thought Helen, turning back to her computer, she doesn't deserve to be in this situation. It's all my doing.
"Oh, you know me," she said, loathing herself for joining in with the witless office banter, "work work work. It's just, Laura'll kill me if I don't get this done by twelve and you know what she's like when she's in a mood." She rolled her eyes to add to the veracity of her performance.
"OK." Annie got up from the corner of the desk she was sitting on and started to move toward Reception just as Matthew breezed in in the opposite direction. Annie stopped by the door.
"Afternoon, ladies."
Helen cringed, willing him to walk straight through the office and out the other side, but he stopped to flick through a gray folder on Jenny's desk. She could almost feel the atmosphere thicken with anticipation, that feeling when the school bully is about to go in for the kill and everyone knows it. She decided to try a diversionary tactic.
"Annie," she called over, "Laura's waiting for an urgent call from Simon at Lotus. If he rings, will you put him straight through?"
But Annie had her prey in her sights.
"Matthew, don't you think Helen looks amazing today?"
Matthew looked momentarily shocked, then realized that Annie was talking not about his Helen but about dumpy little Helen-from-Accounts.
No, Matthew, Helen practically said aloud. Don't. Do. It.
Too late.
"Wow," Matthew was saying, "you do look incredible. That new haircut really suits you."
Annie and Jenny snorted and spluttered and coughed. Helen-from-Accounts blushed, of course, and giggled like a love-struck adolescent. Matthe
w, loving all the female attention and enjoying feeling like one of the gang, continued.
"If I wasn't a married man…"
There was a tidal wave of laughter. Helen thought both Matthew and Helen-from-Accounts looked a little bemused by the scale of the hysteria his comments were causing, but they were smiling along gamely, Matthew no doubt thinking how he'd never lost the old magic touch with the ladies. Helen stood up.
"OK everyone, you've really got to shut up now. I've got work to do. Go on. Fuck off."
Matthew raised an eyebrow at her as he swaggered out toward the corridor and a terrible realization hit her…
He thinks I'm jealous.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Helen had her coat on and her umbrella up and was steaming along Oxford Street trying to clear her head. It wasn't working. She knew now it was never going to work. There was no getting away from it, what she wanted was her life back and for the last four years not to have happened. Surely not too much to ask. OK, she'd settle for just a bit of it back, the bit that was Tuesday and Friday nights and the weekends when she could do whatever she liked. It wasn't Matthew's fault, but she was starting to realize it had all been a big mistake. She blew her nose, stopped off at Starbucks for a double espresso, and drank it on the way back to the office.
