Getting Rid of Matthew

by Jane Fallon

  "Have you heard?"

  For a moment, Helen considered standing up and shouting, "Yes and it's all because of me. I'm the reason his wife was crying and his shirts aren't ironed and his kids are going to grow up without a father." But she settled on "Heard what?"

  "Matthew and his wife have split up. He's moved out—no one knows where."

  She took a dramatic pause for a reaction. Helen contorted her face into something she hoped would pass off as surprise.

  "How sad."

  "I knew there was something up with him. Oh, my God!" Jenny's stage whisper reached a squeakier pitch. "You don't think he's gone off with someone else, do you?"

  "How the fuck would I know?" said Helen, a touch too defensively.

  "Imagine. I mean he's so…old. Hey," she shouted across at Reception, "what if Matthew's been shagging around?"

  Annie gave a visceral shudder. "Grim."

  Great, thought Helen, who for some reason had always believed that her female colleagues found Matthew rather attractive. Absolutely fucking great.

  * * *

  "They can never find out it's me."

  Helen and Matthew were eating dinner at the kitchen table again. This time she'd cooked; fish fingers, oven chips, and frozen peas, a meal she was secretly hoping might make him yearn for Sophie's grown-up dinners.

  "I mean it, Matthew, we can't ever tell anyone at work."

  He'd gotten his puppy-dog look back, the one which made Helen want to kick him.

  "Are you ashamed of me?"

  "Of course I'm not, I just don't think it'll do either of us any good."

  "But I want to show you off. I want everyone to know how much in love we are."

  She felt sick.

  "Tell you what, why don't we just wait a bit and then we can tell them we got together after you left Sophie. It'll be cleaner like that. Otherwise, everyone's going to think I'm a rampaging bitch."

  "OK," he agreed reluctantly. "I suppose we could wait a month."

  "Let's make it two." She put her hand over his and smiled at him, thinking, OK, I have two months to work out what I'm going to do.

  * * *

  It was nearly two weeks since Matthew had moved in and Sophie's only contact with him had been the excruciating laptop moment. She knew enough about Annie to know that the news would be all around Global by now if it wasn't already, and her stomach turned over as she imagined the mock concern for her that would be peppering Matthew's colleagues' conversations. She was in the anger phase now—how dare he allow her to be humiliated like that, and more to the point, what was wrong with her, worrying about whether he needed his computer? It was none of her concern now—so when he called to say he needed to get more of his stuff, she thought about telling him where to shove it. But that wasn't her. He asked if he could come when the girls were going to be there and Sophie gave him a time on Saturday afternoon when she could go off to the supermarket and they need only have the bare minimum of contact.

  He arrived promptly at two and hesitated on the doorstep, unsure whether to ring the bell or just let himself in. Sophie could see him through the venetian blinds on the kitchen window, hands in his coat pockets, the slight stoop he always affected when he was feeling uneasy. He looked tired. She called Suzanne to let him in and take him up to the living room, then she slipped out the front door. She didn't even want to say hello.

  * * *

  To Helen, it felt like she had gotten her old life back for a couple of hours. She lay on the sofa reading a book, reveling in the silence. She knew she should be trying to clear more space to make room for Matthew's things, but she couldn't be bothered to move. She wondered idly how he was getting on, then dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come.

  At about five o'clock, she heard his car pulling up outside and started to drag herself toward the front door. She stopped as she heard Matthew's voice talking to…who? She pulled back the curtain a fraction and dropped it back again when she saw Matthew, flanked by two small pre-teenage girls, each carrying a box. Fuck! He'd brought Claudia and what's-her-name. Helen rushed to the mirror and started tweaking at her frizzy Saturday afternoon hair and wiping away at yesterday's smudged mascara which was encrusted underneath her eyes.

  How could he do this to me? she thought. Without so much as a phone call. Had he no idea that adolescent girls valued appearances above all else? She had already planned what she would wear on their first meeting—FCUK jeans, high brown boots from Aldo, and the baby-blue Paul Frank hoodie which, she knew, was way too young for her, but which she was hoping would make her look "cool." Labels that adolescent girls had heard of and would admire. She had decided to go for the big sister approach—admittedly a scarily old big sister (it was all a bit Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) but anyway. Now the only clean item of clothing to hand was an age-appropriate fitted light-gray sweater which she wore to work, but it would have to do. She was pulling the clean top on over her head when she heard his key turning in the front door. Affecting an air of what she thought looked like sophisticated nonchalance, she managed to arrive in the hall seemingly unruffled as he led the girls in.

  Matthew was in overcompensatingly jolly father mode.

  "Look who I've brought to meet you," he said.

  "What a lovely surprise," said Helen, almost convincingly.

  "They've been dying to see you for themselves, haven't you girls?" From the looks on his daughters' faces, any idiot could tell that this was a lie.

  "This is Suzanne." He indicated the taller, slightly less sullen-looking of the two.

  "And this is Claudia."

  Claudia looked Helen up and down as though she were sizing up a rival.

  Helen smiled in what she believed was a youthful, pally manner. "It's so great to meet you. Your dad talks about you both all the time, so I feel like I, kind of, know you already. And I'm really hoping we can be, like, friends."

  The girls looked at her blankly.

  "Do you know you've got your sweater on inside out?" Claudia said, and then immediately turned back to her father. "Can we go home now?"

  "No, Claudia. Don't be rude, say hello to Helen."

  Suzanne muttered an almost inaudible hello while Claudia fixed Helen with a blank stare.

  "It'll take them a bit of time to get used to you," said Matthew apologetically. "Come into the living room, girls, and you can chat to Helen while I get you a drink."

  "This is a dump," Helen thought she heard Claudia say as he ushered them on through.

  * * *

  When Sophie first brought Suzanne home from the hospital, Matthew had told her that he saw it as his second chance to prove himself as a father. His relationship with his son, then twenty-six, had always been fairly formal—Matthew had not taken easily to parenthood first time around and had always been slightly afraid of the judgmental gaze of his eldest child—but it had deteriorated to almost nonexistent following Matthew's abandonment of Leo's mother. Bizarrely, Leo had always gotten on well with Sophie, whom he saw—quite rightly, it now seemed—as another potential victim of his father's selfishness. He placed the blame for Matthew's disloyalty squarely on Matthew's shoulders and, although he never mentioned it, it sat between them like a glass partition, preventing them from ever getting too close. So Matthew mostly kept in touch with his only son via his second wife, a situation which he knew was flawed at the best of times, but about to become impossible.

  Suzanne, forced into the role of "the clever one" by the arrival of much prettier sister Claudia, had been struggling to live up to her reputation ever since, but the amount of praise and attention she received from Matthew when she did well in an exam made the hours of secret studying worthwhile. She was a placid, easygoing child on the surface, but she was hiding some frantic paddling underneath.

  Claudia, on the other hand, seethed with resentment at her pigeonholing as "the pretty one" because she believed, quite rightly as it happened, that the reality was that she was also the cleverest. She knew all about
Suzanne's clandestine cramming, but she never let on, and the harder Suzanne worked, the more Claudia assumed an attitude that said she couldn't care less about school. Her bad behavior, optimistically described by her teachers as "a phase," was so clearly a reaction to her boredom in a class full of children whom she overtook academically years before, that any amateur psychologist could have spotted it, but sadly there was never an amateur psychologist around when you needed one.

  * * *

  While Matthew was fetching tea and Diet Cokes, Helen decided to try talking to the less scary looking of the two, Suzanne.

  "This must be really hard for you. I'm sorry."

  Claudia made a noise that was a cross between a snort and a sigh, and rolled her eyes at the same time which, thought Helen, must have taken some doing. Suzanne was teary eyed. She twirled her fingers around and around in her sandy-blond curly hair, and Helen could see the effort it was taking to hold back from crying.

  "I want him to come home."

  "I know. Perhaps he will"—Helen laughed in what she thought was an endearingly self-effacing manner—"once he gets fed up of me." Oh, great, she thought, now I'm making bad jokes. Not only that, bad jokes about their father being an unreliable old philanderer.

  "What I mean is, when he realizes how much he misses you all."

  "Do you mean that?" Suzanne's naïve straw-clutching was actually making Helen feel even more like shit, if that was possible, but before she could step in with something else equally comforting, Claudia jumped in, all bravado.

  "Don't be so stupid, of course she doesn't. And anyway, I wouldn't want him to come home now."

  Suzanne started all-out crying, just as Matthew, cheery dad smile plastered across his face, came in with the drinks. His expression dropped and he looked accusingly at Helen, as if she'd been hitting his kids with a ruler the minute he'd left the room. She shrugged at him.

  "Can we go yet, Dad?" asked Claudia.

  "Yes," said Matthew, "I think we'd better."

  Helen could've sworn Claudia muttered "Bitch" at her, under her breath, as they left.

  10

  AT FOUR O'CLOCK ON SUNDAY, the doorbell rang. Helen opened it to find an elderly, well-groomed woman with a vaguely familiar air on the doorstep.

  "Is Matthew in?" the woman asked.

  "He's not. He'll be back in about an hour."

  Matthew had, in fact, gone to the local supermarket to do the weekly shopping in an effort to be useful, something which he'd never in his life done before. At this moment, he was paralyzed with fear in front of the vegetable counter, trying to work out what the difference was between a cherry and a plum tomato and whether or not it mattered.

  "Good. It's you I came to see. I'm Sheila." She had a voice that could grate cheese and Helen took an instant dislike to her, Posh Women having been one of the first to feature on Helen and Rachel's list of Women We Hate.

  The woman swept past Helen into the hall and through to the living room. She was incredibly well dressed for a Sunday, thought Helen, who was in sweatpants and a T-shirt that might as well have been pajamas. Sheila, on the other hand, was wearing a neat white blouse under a pale-blue cashmere sweater, pale-tan trousers, and heels. Women like that had the ability to make Helen feel like one of the Beverly Hillbillies, and Sheila was no exception. She even smelled expensive. She clicked across the wooden floor and with a flick of her blow-dried-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life hair she looked around, taking in the dirty plates with toast crusts still left on them, the piles of magazines and newspapers lying on every surface, and Matthew's boxes still in the corner. Helen dredged her memory for a Sheila. Wasn't wife number one called something like that? she was thinking when Sheila put her out of her misery.

  "I'm Matthew's mother."

  Of course. He might be old, but he had surely never been married to a woman who was now in her eighties.

  "Right. Nice to meet you," said Helen unconvincingly. "Shall I make some tea?"

  "It's completely unforgivable what you've done, breaking up a family, leaving those girls without a father. I hope you're ashamed of yourself."

  "Milk and sugar?" Helen stormed off to the kitchen to try to compose herself. No such luck; Sheila followed her.

  "I suppose it's his money is it?"

  Helen took a deep breath. "I don't know, does he have any?"

  Sheila ignored her. "I bet you never even gave his family a second thought, did you?"

  Helen resisted the urge to say, "What, and Sophie did, when she stole him away from his first wife?" and said instead, "I've told him he should go back to them if that's what he wants to do."

  "It's too late for that, though, isn't it? Sophie would never take him back."

  "Then why are you here?" asked Helen, all pretense of making tea having been forgotten.

  "My daughters and I are very concerned about the effect that this will have on the girls."

  "Is that the daughter who came on to the other daughter's husband at Christmas? Or the one who's married to an alcoholic? Or is that the same one? I can never remember," asked Helen, who had decided to give up on politeness.

  Sheila ignored her. "If you're going to become part of this family—and I don't see what I can do to prevent that happening—then we would like to know that you're intending to take your responsibilities as a stepmother seriously."

  "Or what?" Helen was gradually reverting to being fourteen years of age.

  "Or I'd ask you not to try and ingratiate yourself into their lives. They were very upset after their visit here yesterday."

  Oh, go fuck yourself, thought Helen, but what she said was, "Shall I show you out?"

  * * *

  "She's a fucking stupid interfering fucking bitch," Helen was shouting at Matthew later that afternoon.

  "She's my mother."

  "Well, she's a fucking stupid interfering fucking bitch of a mother. And tell her not to come round here again."

  * * *

  A week ago, when Helen was feeling at a particularly low ebb, she'd found herself agreeing to a night out to introduce her boyfriend to her best friend. At the time, it had felt like she'd have all the time in the world to get out of it. Now it was tomorrow night and she had to take desperate measures. She called Rachel.

  "OK, so I'm just going to tell him you've cried off. I'll say you're busy at work."

  "No way! You've been whining on about this man for four years. I am not going to miss my chance to get a look at him."

  "I'll say I'm ill, then we'll have to stay home. You can sit in the pub all night waiting for us if you want, but we won't be there."

  "If you don't show up, I'm coming round to your house," said Rachel, laughing. "There's no getting out of it."

  * * *

  Matthew was irritatingly twittery as they got ready, changing his outfit twice—suit versus jeans and a shirt; the jeans won, to Helen's dismay—and primping about in front of the mirror like an adolescent girl. He looked more rumpled these days, Helen thought, older. It was as if he'd left his confident, powerful self on the bedroom floor every evening, along with his suit, and slipped into slightly shambolic dad mode. Even his walk was different, more apologetic, less authoritative. Helen resisted the urge to tell him to trim his nose hairs and suck his stomach in. She could practically smell his nervousness as they got into a cab, and it brought out all her worst qualities.

  "Just don't say anything to embarrass me," she said.

  At the pub, Rachel was all smiles as she said hello to Matthew and introduced him to Neil, but Helen knew that what she really wanted to say was "God, you really are old." They filled a few minutes hanging up coats and ordering drinks, and everyone struggled for a way to start the conversation. Rachel was first:

  "So, Matthew, any more wives we should know about or is it just the two?"

  Matthew started to stammer out an answer. Helen stopped him.

  "She's joking, Matthew." She glared at Rachel. "That's Rachel's idea of a joke."

  "I knew th
at," he said, in a quite endearingly self-deprecating way.

  "Actually, I was just curious," persisted Rachel. "I mean, I know you were married to your first wife when you started going out with Sophie."

  "Rachel!" This time it was Neil who came to Matthew's aid. "I'm sorry, Matthew."

  "It's fine. Rachel, I can understand your concern for Helen. You wouldn't be a good friend if you didn't want to make sure that she was making the right choices. And yes, I'm afraid I was still married to Hannah when I met Sophie, and no, it's not something I'm proud of. But I want to reassure you that I love Helen and I intend to make her truly happy for the rest of her life."

  He was trying his best, but he sounded like a vicar giving a sermon. Helen was mortified.

  "Can we talk about something else?"

  But Rachel wasn't giving up.

  "You've got kids, haven't you? You must be missing them terribly."

  "I am," said Matthew, looking to see where the next poison dart was coming from.

  "It's awful for them really, losing their dad at such a young age…"

  Neil stood up, cutting her off.

  "Pool, Matthew? I'm a bit shit but it's got to be better than sitting here getting interrogated."

  Helen touched his arm. "That's a great idea. Go and play. Rachel and I have got lots to catch up on."