by Jane Fallon
Helen had guessed, wrongly it turned out, that Sophie was in her early fifties. She knew she worked and liked to think that, like herself, Sophie had a job rather than a career. Something homely, she imagined. Maybe volunteering in the Oxfam shop, sorting through other people's old underpants for a living.
Sophie, as it happened, was forty-five. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, she looked a lot like Helen, but had committed the cardinal sin of being a few years older.
Over the years, Helen's friends had begun to embrace more grown-up lives. They'd replaced the pub with quiet nights in and dinners for two, and vodka shots with bottles of Pinot Grigio. Once a year, maybe, Helen would throw a dinner party and invite four or six of her girlfriends (well, two or three of her girlfriends and their partners because, whether she liked it or not, they came in pairs now). She'd listen to the conversations about children and kitchen-appliance buying and try to pretend she was interested ("He can use the toilet on his own now. How amazing! Wearing pull-ups already? Wow!"), but usually she was quietly suffocating with boredom. Lately she'd begun to feel that her friends were starting to judge her, looking at their (mostly hideously unattractive) husbands and worrying that they might be thinking of getting a Helen on the side.
So, on the nights when Helen did go out these days, she went out with Rachel and they drank and danced and bitched about men just as they did when they were in their twenties. Only they were both about to be forty and it was starting to look a little like desperation.
* * *
She settled down with a glass of wine in one hand, looking forward to sharing her good news with Rachel. She hit the number-three shortcut button on the cordless phone (number one, Matthew's mobile; number two, Mum and Dad; number three, Rachel; number four, Rachel's mobile; number five, Mum's mobile; number six, work. Maybe she was sad.). Rachel's phone rang. And rang. Eventually, just as Helen was about to give up, Rachel answered. She sounded distracted.
"Hi."
"Rach, it's me. Guess what…"
"Helen. Hi. It's…erm…Can I call you back tomorrow? It's not a very good time right now…Neil's here."
OK. Neil was the man Rachel had met at a club a couple of weeks ago. Nice enough, worked in IT. Good-looking. Helen knew they'd seen each other a few times since; she'd heard most of the details. Dinner once. A few drinks in the pub. Sex on date three. He'd stayed over on date four. Rachel's usual pattern. In a week, she'd be bored of him. In two, he'd be history.
Since Helen had known Rachel, there'd been many Neils. While Helen had held out hopelessly for Simon, and then Matthew, Rachel's relationships rarely lasted more than a couple of weeks. In the last few months alone there'd been Martin the fireman (too unreconstructed), Ian the bookshop owner (dull), and Nick the twenty-three-year-old hairdresser, who had left her for a nineteen-year-old boy. There had been nothing, so far, to indicate that Neil would be any different.
She pressed Rachel further.
"He won't mind if you chat for a bit."
"I can't. I'll call you tomorrow, OK?"
"But Matthew just called me. At half ten at night. He's putting in a Tuesday. Tell Neil to go and put the kettle on or make a cocktail or something and you can help me decide what's happened to him at home to make him want to do that."
"I told you, I can't. Look, we're having a really good time and I don't want to break the mood, OK? I'm not going to leave him twiddling his thumbs while I chat to you. If it was life or death, then maybe, but it's not. It can wait till the morning. Love you. Bye."
Rachel clicked the phone down. Helen sat, handset in one hand, glass of wine in the other, confused. In their ten-year friendship, never once had Rachel not had time for her. Never once had a man taken precedence over indulging Helen in the traumas of her personal life. That could only mean one thing. Neil was special. Neil, to Helen's knowledge, didn't have a wife and kids tucked away anywhere. Neil was going to be the man to rescue Rachel from the stigma of being single.
It was the end of an era and Helen knew it.
When Helen and Matthew saw each other briefly at work the next day, she was feeling warm and indulgent toward him because he'd changed his plans in order to see her, while he felt loving toward her because he'd forgotten all about next week's clash of dates and she was being nice to him for, it seemed to him, no particular reason. They both went off for the weekend happy.
Helen managed to pry Rachel away from Neil for a bit of Saturday afternoon shopping and, despite the fact that she had to listen to a blow-by-blow account of true love blossoming, they had fun. Saturday night and Sunday she had to spend on her own, but she filled her time browsing the shops and the Internet to find the perfect Christmas gift for the man who had everything, including a wife who might wonder where he got a new cashmere sweater from, anyway. It was a skill finding something that he plausibly might have bought for himself, but which she was fairly confident he wouldn't actually buy for himself between now and Christmas. She'd settled on a Paul Smith briefcase.
On Monday, Matthew was out at meetings all day, but so was Laura, so Helen had a good day of interspersing typing the odd document with reading magazines and listening to the radio. She considered calling Rachel for a gossip, but decided against it.
Six thirty on the dot her front doorbell rang and there was Matthew, as usual, a bottle of wine and a tub of ice cream in hand. They went through their usual routine—quick catch-up about the goings-on at work, drink, then bed, half-hearted fumble, then both gratefully drifting off to sleep.
At five to eight, Matthew looked at his watch on the bedside table and started to get up.
"See you in the morning," she said, switching off the alarm before it rang.
He leaned down to kiss her and she circled his neck with her arms, holding him there.
"Maybe you can get away a bit early tomorrow night, I could cook you dinner. Or will you have to eat at home?"
A momentary look of puzzlement crossed Matthew's face, and then as he said…"Tomorrow…?"…there was a slowly dawning realization.
"Did we say tomorrow?" he asked, clutching at straws. "I can't tomorrow, something's come up."
And then all hell broke loose.
"What do you mean, 'something's come up'?"
"Just…family stuff. You know."
"You forgot about me, didn't you? You forgot you'd promised to see me and you made some fucking arrangement with your wife."
"Calm down," he said patronizingly.
"Calm down? You never think about me sitting on my own here night after night."
"Go out, then, I'm not stopping you."
"I can't, I have no one to go out with anymore. No one wants to be friends with someone who's screwing a married man."
"Oh, so that's my fault, is it? I have to lie constantly to be with you. Have you any idea how hard that is?"
"I'm not asking you to lie."
"Yes, you do. Continually. You ask me to come over, you want to see me for lunch. Christ, I've lost count of the times you've tried to persuade me to tell Sophie I'm going on a conference so that I could take you away for a weekend."
"You'd never do it, though, would you?"
"Because I don't want to get caught. We both agreed…"
"Fuck what we agreed. I'm sick of being second best, of always having to be the one who gets let down…"
"I'm sorry about tomorrow. Really. But you've always known this was how it had to be."
"Well, not anymore," Helen said defiantly. "I mean it."
"So, what, you think I should just tell my wife and children that I'm hardly ever home early because I'm with my girlfriend?"
"Why not?"
"Are you fucking mad?"
"No, I'm not fucking mad, I just don't see what would be so fucking awful about telling the fucking truth to your perfect fucking wife after all these years."
Silence.
There was a subject Helen and Matthew always avoided, except when they were having a blazing row—the subject of "Why won't
you leave your wife for me?" Now it was out there and it couldn't be taken back.
"Leave Sophie out of this. This has fuck-all to do with her."
"Why are you always defending her?"
"Because she's my wife and none of this is her fault. And you knew I was married when we got into this."
Matthew put on his coat. "I'm late. I have to go or she'll wonder where I've been."
Helen couldn't back down this time:
"Then tell her, for God's sake. I've had enough, honestly. Just tell Sophie about me or that's it. I mean it this time. It's over."
"Fine."
Matthew closed the front door behind him.
4
SOPHIE NEVER WOULD HAVE ADMITTED IT, but she dreaded Christmas.
She couldn't quite remember how the tradition had started that the whole family came to them and she became everyone's slave for a few days. She had a dim recollection that they had all discussed an arrangement once whereby she and Matthew would do Christmas at their house one year, then his two sisters would take a turn each, thereby sharing the burden evenly.
Sophie and Matthew had happily offered to play hosts the first year and really went to town with food and decorations, and made-up games and quizzes. Suzanne and Claudia were nine and seven at the time, and so full of the joys of Christmas. Matthew's sisters, Amanda and Louisa, sighed disingenuously over the domestic bliss and Sophie's homemaking skills. Matthew's sisters' husbands, Edwin and Jason, cooed over her gravy and homemade orange-short-crust-with-Grand-Marnier mince pies and Amanda's children, Jocasta and Benji, ran riot and wrecked the place, safe in the knowledge that no one was going to tell them not to, as their parents had clearly abdicated any kind of grown-up responsibility for a few days. Sophie and Matthew fetched drinks and nibbles and cleaned up spills and washed towels and nearly killed themselves in the process, confident that this would only happen once every three years.
Wrong.
The following year Amanda, whose turn it was meant to be, announced in October that she was pregnant and that she couldn't possibly cope with playing host. Louisa declared that her house was in disarray because of the new extension which was currently under construction, so Sophie stepped in and offered that she and Matthew would willingly repeat the previous year's invitation and even extended it to Matthew's now-widowed mother, Sheila. This time Sophie's parents, Bill and Alice, came for the day, as well. Luckily, her older brother, her only sibling, had the sense to spend Christmas in Spain every year with his own children and, recently, grandchildren. Things were only marred by Amanda's constant throwing up, which seemed to get worse whenever there were potatoes that needed peeling.
The year after, Amanda's young baby, India, and Louisa's own pregnancy provided the excuses.
Last year no one even bothered to keep up the pretense, they just asked when they should turn up and put in their requests for en suite bathrooms (essential when you have a toddler) and downstairs rooms (vital when pregnant, Amanda again), followed by their demands for cups of tea and rounds of sandwiches. A fight broke out over the remote control and Suzanne declared it the worst Christmas ever.
So that was five adults and four children in addition to the two adults and two children who actually lived in the house, and the two additional guests for Christmas day. One vegan, two vegetarians, a dairy allergy, a gluten intolerant, a drunk, and a recovering alcoholic. Fifteen people in all.
This year, Amanda had a six-month-old baby, Molly, so that would make sixteen. But it was odds on that Louisa and Jason's marriage might not last till Christmas, so maybe it'd be fifteen after all.
"Perhaps we should just tell them all we're going away," Matthew had said a couple of days before, feeling especially constrained by the inevitability of it all, the arguments, the drinking, the tears. "Do something spontaneous for once, go to a hotel and leave them all to fend for themselves."
Sophie laughed, wishing they could do exactly that. "You know we can't."
"Yes," Matthew had replied glumly, "I know we can't."
* * *
Following their argument, Helen and Matthew had pretty much avoided each other, except for when their paths had crossed at work. The day after, Matthew went for the drinks at Amanda and Edwin's and made slightly strained conversation about the hunting ban (Matthew and Sophie pro, Edwin and Amanda against) and golfing holidays in Portugal (Edwin pro, Matthew, Sophie, and Amanda against). Edwin drank too much as usual and tried to pick a fight with Amanda about her decision to get Jocasta—aged nine—a Prada handbag. Three-year-old India drew a felt pen scribble on Matthew's Ted Baker coat and was sent to her room and baby Molly knocked over a glass of Merlot on the white couch. Helen, meanwhile, sat at home, convinced that Matthew would turn up repentant, flowers in hand, at any second. He didn't.
On Wednesday, Matthew was away visiting one of Global's more important clients all day, his phone switched off. Helen went home from work as usual, watched the clock move past seven and then eight o'clock, took her makeup off, got into her pajamas, and cried herself to sleep.
Thursday night was, of course, Claudia's Nativity. Claudia was playing a Wise Man wearing a beard and a long, striped outfit with open-toed sandals. When she went to present the Virgin Mary with her gift of myrrh, she stubbed her toe on the baby's crib and said "Bollocks!" very loudly.
Helen had thought about sending Matthew an e-mail to see if he had changed his mind and was coming over as usual, but she knew that his bitch of a twenty-six-year-old assistant, Jenny, opened all his e-mails as a matter of course. Jenny also answered all of his telephone calls, and anyway, Helen and Matthew had long ago agreed to phone each other at work only in an emergency. That evening, she waited and waited, candles burning, white wine chilling, but he didn't show. She decided that he was sulking and just wanted to make her feel bad.
Friday was the last day in the office before the two-week Christmas shut-down. Helen had convinced herself that Matthew would be happy that he'd taught her a lesson and would, any moment now, make an excuse to pop into her office in order to make it up to her. She had been intending to give him the briefcase last night, but now it sat wrapped up in silver paper and ribbon, under her desk.
She went to the secretaries' annual Christmas lunch and got a bit drunk and tearful. For a split second she considered hooking up with Jamie, the company's only male assistant, but he was barely twenty-seven and not even that good-looking, so she decided against it. She tried to bring the conversation around to Matthew as much as she could without giving herself away, but only managed to find out that he'd bought Sophie a pair of Tiffany earrings for Christmas, that he'd once asked Jenny to buy him some new underwear when he was going on a conference and had forgotten to pack any (Calvin Klein, black, large), and that Laura often rang up to invite him out to lunch and he sometimes went. None of this made Helen very happy.
At about four o'clock, she decided to use an emergency phone call and got an out of office message—Matthew Shallcross has left for the Christmas break and will be back at work on January fourth. She tried his mobile—switched off.
That night, Helen, Rachel, and Neil went to the pub together, and Helen had to concede that he was actually really nice and funny and clearly adored Rachel. What's more, when Rachel talked to him about a band or a cool club, he didn't think it was hilarious and cute to say, "Is that a new brand of cereal?" When Rachel told a story involving break dancing and a rah-rah skirt, he didn't say, "I had a mortgage and a child to support by then, so I missed out on all that eighties stuff." (Sophie was, in fact, Matthew's second wife and he already had a son when he met her, Leo, who was now thirty-eight, by his first wife, Hannah. Leo was old enough to be Suzanne and Claudia's father, just as Matthew could have been Helen's, although she didn't like to think about that, for obvious reasons.)
What's more, Rachel's evening didn't end abruptly at eight o'clock because her boyfriend had a wife to get home to.
Helen stayed out far too late and had far too much to dri
nk and went home and cried. A lot.
* * *
For the past few years, Helen had spent Christmas Day alone in her flat. She could have gone home to her parents, but it was too shaming at nearly forty years old to be turning up single. So she told them she was spending the day with her boyfriend. Not Matthew, her parents would have practically disowned her if they'd thought she was seeing another woman's husband—oh no, this was the imaginary boyfriend, Carlo, that Helen had been telling them about for as long as she could remember. It was a tricky call but, on balance, it was worth having to deal with the offense her mother had taken because Carlo had never deigned to visit rather than face her pity and disappointment that her only daughter was a middle-aged spinster.
One year, dreading the miserable day of bad TV and turkey nuggets, she'd decided to go home anyway, telling her mum and dad that Carlo had gone to his own parents in Spain for a change. She couldn't remember why or when he'd become Spanish, but over the years she'd found that she had a tendency to elaborate the lie to fill in silences. He was now not only foreign but wealthy and, she thought she could remember once saying, famous in his own country—for what, she couldn't recall. By lunchtime, her mum was making sad eyes at her about the fact that he hadn't yet called to wish Helen a Happy Christmas. By midafternoon, it had progressed to "Have you had a fight?" She'd chosen never to repeat the experience.