by Jane Fallon
* * *
"What the fuck are you doing?" Helen hissed at Rachel as soon as Matthew and Neil were out of earshot.
"Trying to help you out. I figured that even if he still thinks he wants you, he'll decide he can't stand the thought of having to deal with your best friend for the rest of his life."
"Well, stop. He loves me. I'm obviously irresistible."
"He's an old man, Helen. He'd find the fact you still have all your own teeth irresistible."
"We're going to make it work," Helen said, not entirely convincingly, "so you need to get used to the idea."
"Just as well, because he's never going to leave—at least not until he's got somewhere else to go. I've worked it out—he's a relay relationshipper, he never ends one relationship until he's got another one on the go. He's terrified of being alone."
Rachel had a lot of theories about relationships which, considering none of her own liaisons had ever lasted more than a few weeks, was a bit of a joke. She broke men down into:
Serial monogamists
Mummy replacers
Commitmentphobes
Darren Days
Nice boys
New men (possibly the most loathsome group of all)
Too-lazy-to-moves
Bit-on-the-siders
Normal, grown-up, well-balanced men (few and far between)
Relayers
Women she tended to be slightly less generous with, putting them into only three categories:
Women like me (i.e., nice, loyal, faithful, reliable)
Husband-stealers
Bunny-boilers
Up to now, she had had Matthew down as a bit-on-the-sider, a man with a wife, who'll have affairs, but who has no intention of going anywhere because he has it too good at home. Helen, of course, had moved from a woman-like-me to a husband-stealer many years earlier.
"I have to try and make it work," Helen was saying, beginning to sound like a looped sample on a rap record.
"Well, I guess you'd better, because I'm telling you, he's there to stay unless you find some other woman willing to take him on."
"Just be nice to him when they come back," Helen pleaded.
So when Matthew and Neil returned from their game, Rachel made a real effort to be friendly, which left Matthew wondering whether she might be schizophrenic.
"I like him," said Neil to Rachel on their way home.
"Don't get too attached," said Rachel.
* * *
Sophie was redecorating the bedroom, in an effort to remove any traces of Matthew. Next door had a skip outside, and she was filling it up with golf clubs and boxes of books and tennis racquets, all things which she assumed he would at some point want to come back and collect. Looking out the window, she could see a couple of the students who lived in the hall of residence up the road rummaging through and helping themselves, and she smiled for the first time today. She donated his clothes to a charity, because she liked the idea of seeing one of the local homeless men asleep in a doorway, wearing Matthew's favorite Armani sweater.
When Suzanne and Claudia had returned from their visit to Matthew's new home, Sophie had stuck to the promise she had made herself and didn't ask them any probing questions, but over the last week or so things had slipped out, and she now knew that:
Helen lived in a basement.
It was about a ten-minute drive away, but she didn't know in which direction.
It had a wooden floor.
Helen had long, dark hair.
She was very pretty.
This last was forced out of Suzanne by Sophie, whose curiosity had finally gotten the better of her. Suzanne then tried to soften the blow by adding "But nowhere near as pretty as you, Mum," but it was too late.
"Looks aren't important, you know," Sophie had said, not even managing to sound half-convincing.
Knowing this, of course, made Sophie feel worse, although there was a case for thinking it should have made her feel better. If your husband leaves you for someone who looks like a gorgon, that's when you should really get depressed, because it obviously means that he's now so out of love with you that looks don't even enter the equation. That his new love's personality is so stunning compared to yours that he's prepared to have sex with the lights off for the rest of his life, because at least he'll be having it with someone who's not you. At least if he leaves you for someone better looking, you can tell yourself he's just having a midlife crisis—or, in Matthew's case, another midlife crisis.
Anyway, since that conversation, Sophie had tried to avoid broaching the subject of Helen with the girls for fear she'd hear something else as depressing. But she'd taken to going to the gym, and got her nails painted, and had her lowlights done, in fear that all her friends would gang up behind her back when they—inevitably—met Helen to say things like, "It was only a matter of time, Sophie's lovely, but Helen's so…pretty." She thought about asking Suzanne how old she thought Helen was, but knowing how children saw adults, she knew the answer she'd get would be either seventeen or sixty and she'd be none the wiser, so she talked herself out of it.
She wondered if he was going to file for divorce or if that was something she was meant to do, and made a mental note to get a solicitor.
She came across a photo of the two of them on their wedding day and drew glasses and a mustache and a large hairy wart on Matthew, then felt bad about it and tried to rub it off, but she couldn't.
She cleared out the drawer in his desk in the study and found a drawing Claudia had done for him when she was four years old. It was of a family—mother, father, and two small girls, and a dog they had never had. They stood in a row, next to a tree, and the sun beamed with a big smiling face above them. Under the people she'd labeled them and she'd underlined the word Daddy three times, as if to imply that he was really important. Matthew must have kept hold of it through four different houses and at least three changes of desk. Sophie refused to cry again. She smoothed out the sheet of paper and put it back in the drawer.
11
MOST DAYS, HELEN FOUND herself flicking through the photo album that Matthew had hastily thrown in with his cricket pads and his Homer Simpson hip flask when he moved in. The pictures, she had discovered, had notes written on the back in handwriting that she didn't recognize, and which could only be Sophie's. "Matt and the girls. Braunton 2003," said one which showed the three of them, windswept on a rainy beach. Did Sophie call him "Matt"? That seemed so wrong; he was a Matthew through and through. Did he call her "Soph"? she wondered. Another, a picture of a smiling couple, arms around each other, Sophie's dark head resting on Matthew's shoulder, had "Second Honeymoon!!!!" scrawled on the reverse. Had they gone on a second honeymoon? When? She turned the picture over again, looking for clues. Sophie's dark, nut-brown eyes were screwed up against the sun. Her hair was longer than it was now, curling past her shoulders, sunglasses pushing it back off her face, freckles still visible through the tan. Matthew's arm rested proprietarily around her shoulders. Helen knew they went away every year—usually to Italy, a villa in Tuscany, in a stroke of great originality among the English upper-middle classes—but what year did they deem the break deserved to be called a second honeymoon? She hid the album back in its box again before Matthew could catch her looking.
* * *
Claudia and Suzanne were due over at three. In an effort to win them around at least to a point of civility, Helen had bought cakes and made sandwiches and sausage rolls. Matthew, touched that she was trying so hard to get along with his children, hugged her, with tears in his eyes.
"I'm a vegan."
Claudia turned her nose up at the table full of food and threw herself into the armchair.
"Since when?" asked Matthew, trying to hide the exasperation in his voice. It wasn't going well.
"I just am, that's all."
Suzanne was making an effort in order to please her father. She'd piled her plate high with food and was slowly working her way through it, while eyeing Helen warily.
"Don't eat too much," said her father. "You'll make yourself sick."
"So, how's school?" Helen asked, stunned by her own lack of imagination.
"OK," said Suzanne. Claudia said nothing. That's that, then, Helen thought.
"Tell Helen what you were telling me in the car on the way over," said Matthew to Claudia. "About the play."
"No." Claudia turned her face to look out the window at the small backyard.
"Claudia's playing the main part," offered up Suzanne helpfully. "She's going to be a fairy princess."
Helen passed up the chance to say, "She'd better be a good actress, then." At least one of them's speaking to me, she thought. I'll just concentrate on her.
"How about you?" she said to Suzanne. "Are you an actress, too?"
"No, I'm no good," Suzanne said, betraying more than a bit of envy, and Helen felt a moment of pity for her. How awful to be the plainer, less talented older sister and to know without a doubt that that's what you were.
"Well, everyone's good at different things. Your dad told me you did really well in your exams last term." (Please let it be the right sister. Truthfully, she couldn't remember which one of the girls Matthew had been banging on about at the time, because she wasn't listening.)
"Did he?" Suzanne came to life all at once and beamed at her father.
"I did," said Matthew indulgently. "She did brilliantly. In fact, they both did brilliantly, didn't you girls?"
Nice one, Matthew, thought Helen. Way to go to deny Suzanne her moment.
* * *
By four o'clock, Helen was desperate for the girls to go home, exhausted with the sullen one-way street that was substituting for a conversation. Matthew, sensing the atmosphere deteriorating, took Claudia out the back so they could plant a few bulbs together in the tiny dark patio that passed for a garden. Once out from under her sister's disapproving gaze, Suzanne had become quite chatty and, having no guile herself, had not been suspicious when Helen's curiosity got the better of her and she found herself firing off a series of Sophie-related questions. Helen now knew that Sophie:
Worked in the city
Traveled to work by tube
Used her maiden name, "Marcombe," at work
Sometimes went to the gym on her lunch hour
Never went out in the evenings (never??)
Didn't seem to have any friends, at least none Suzanne knew the names of
Currently spent quite a lot of time crying
Fucking hell, thought Helen, what a life.
* * *
Once she was safely at her desk on Monday morning, Helen looked up Sophie Marcombe on Yahoo! and found what she was looking for. Sophie was senior accounts director at May and Co. Financial Services in Finsbury Square. Curious, she looked her up on Friends Reunited and found three Sophie Marcombes of various ages. One at a school in Iver in Buckinghamshire had notes which read, "I'm married to Matthew and have two daughters. Work in the City." She checked the year—Sophie was forty-five or forty-six, depending on when her birthday was. She looked up Finsbury Square in the A to Z, Iver Heath Junior School, May and Co., and Bartholomew Road, the street where she knew Matthew and Sophie's family home was, on Up My Street. She looked at her watch.
* * *
Helen, in fact, didn't just know where Sophie lived, she had seen the house. Once, early on in her relationship with Matthew and overwhelmed with curiosity about her rival, she had checked through Matthew's personal records at work—a favor granted her by a friend who worked in Human Resources—and found his address. She had taken the tube to Kentish Town instead of Camden after work on a non-Matthew night and walked around the corner to Bartholomew Road, a road of majestic houses mostly divided into flats but gradually being reclaimed as family homes by wealthy owners. She had followed the street around as it doubled back on itself and she'd found number 155, four stories plus a basement of sandy-colored brick with a small, tidy front garden containing a couple of rosebushes and space for two cars. Matthew's car was absent—she had obviously beaten him to it—but another, a small Peugeot, presumably Sophie's, was parked up neatly.
It was winter and the lights were on in the raised ground and first floors, but from her vantage point across and slightly up the street there was precious little to see. She'd paced up and down a bit, feeling rather foolish. She'd thought about ringing the doorbell—"Hello, madam, I'm just doing a survey"—but she knew Matthew would be home any minute and anyway, could she really pull it off? And even if she did, to what end? She'd decided to call it a day and to maybe come back on a weekend when she might stand a chance of seeing Sophie getting in or out of her car or walking around the corner to the shops. She was traipsing back toward the tube station when a familiar car drove past her, then stopped and reversed, and Matthew got out. He was beside himself with rage and, she could see, panic. What did she think she was doing? What if Sophie had seen her? How dare she play games with his life like this? She had felt embarrassed and stupid and angry all at the same time, but mostly she had felt fear that she would lose him, that he'd never feel he could trust her to be discreet again. It was days before he'd calmed down and she'd had to do some serious pleading. She'd never attempted anything like it again.
Now, years later, the same compulsion had engulfed her again. Today, luckily for Helen, Laura was having a long lunch with a client and wasn't there to notice that she slipped out herself at twelve thirty. By ten to one, she was sitting on a bench in the square opposite the entrance to May and Co., watching as people left and walked to local cafés and restaurants. She didn't know why, but she just wanted to get another look at Sophie, one where she wasn't on the back foot, where she was in a relaxed and familiar environment. She felt like Jeff Corwin camped out by a crocodile's watery home. She just wanted to study the subject in her own habitat.
* * *
She was getting bored and starting to freeze when, at four minutes past one, she saw Sophie coming out the front door of May and Co. White coat, brown boots, umbrella. She stood up, then sat down again, then stood and followed from a distance. She could see that Sophie had gone into Eat, so she went in, too, and poked around halfheartedly in the sandwich section. Sophie was already at the counter, ordering soup, so Helen grabbed a chicken wrap and got into the queue behind her. She suddenly saw what it must be like to be a bloke, always expected to make the first move on a girl. She had an overwhelming urge to speak to her and tried to think of an opening line.
"Nice day"—too banal.
"Is the soup here good?"—only required a one-word answer and anyway, what kind of a freak had never tried the soup at Eat before?
"Do you work round here?"—too creepy, lesbian stalker not being the image she was going for.
"Do you know the way to the nearest tube station?" Perfect. Not exactly a conversation launcher, but it'd have to do.
Sophie was collecting her change, turning around to go toward the door.
"Excuse me, do you know the way to the nearest tube station?" Helen was saying, but Sophie had already moved out of earshot and was heading out into the street. Helen thought of running after her and tapping her on the shoulder, but the man behind the counter had started to answer her question and she was obliged to stay and listen to directions that she had no need of, in order not to be rude. When she finally got outside, Sophie had long gone.
Thank God.
What was she thinking? Now that the moment was over, she went pale thinking of what might have happened. "Where's the underground?" and then what? "Oh, by the way, I thought I'd just mention it, I'm the woman your husband has left you for. Must rush. Nice to meet you. Bye." What was the best that could have happened? That Sophie would have given her directions that she didn't want? She made her way back to the office dejected, trying to figure out what was going on. She was trying to decide whether to call Rachel and confess her weird stalking trip when she was intercepted by Annie.
"Guess what," she was saying, eyes blazing with the excitement of
having a hot piece of gossip to impart. "Amelia from Human Resources spoke to Matthew's wife this morning and she told her that Matthew has gone off with someone else and not only that—it's someone he met through work. And…"—there was a big dramatic pause while Helen held her breath and waited for the worst—"…her name's Helen."
Annie lived to be the imparter of stories. That wasn't to say she was a wit who loved to entertain. There was no art in her tale-telling; she just wanted to be the center of attention. It was a miracle that she had never even caught the scent of Helen and Matthew, but she was one of those blond-haired, big-breasted women who, Helen knew—despite having a face that looked like Play-Doh, a squashy baby's face that probably looked cute when she was twenty but now was more puffy Pound Puppy—believed she possessed the only two qualities of interest to a man. It had never occurred to her that anybody could find a brunette or a redhead attractive, and if they were smaller than a 36C, forget it. Helen realized it was a defense mechanism, of course. Annie knew that Helen was pretty—way prettier now, even as she was approaching forty, than she herself had ever been—but she comforted herself that it was a prettiness no man would ever be excited by.
Helen decided the best defense was to laugh in a "What a ludicrous coincidence" sort of a way. Annie wasn't finished.
"So, we all know it's not you. It's not, is it?" she said, laughing. "You're not that desperate. And you've got Carlo." (Oh, yes, fictitious Carlo existed in Helen's life story to her work colleagues, too.) "That leaves Helen from Accounts, but I think she's married, not that that counts for much. She's pig ugly, though, but then I suppose he's old, he'd be grateful for whatever he could get…Then there's Helen from Simpson's—Matthew handled that account, do you remember, and he did spend an awful lot of time on it. Plus, she's blond. There's a Helen works at Barker and Co., and they went out to dinner once when we first got the account. Oh, and then that woman at the travel agents who organizes all his trips, she's called Helen or Helena or something like that. God, who knew there were so many Helens?"