by Jane Fallon
"Jesus," Helen found herself saying out loud.
"What? What is it?" Sandra strained to see what Helen was looking at.
Matthew and the woman—who, though attractive and with the requisite long brown hair tied back in a loose ponytail, was most definitely in her fifties, which was unusually appropriate for Matthew—stopped outside Global, where they kissed, on the lips, in full view of the world.
"Isn't that Matthew?" Sandra said, starting to wave. Helen grabbed her flailing arm.
"No…I don't want him to see me with you. He might be upset…you know…that you left Global and went with me," she said, knowing full well that Global had dropped Sandra weeks ago.
Matthew went up the steps and into the building, and the woman turned back the way she had come and walked straight past Helen and Sandra, who were still rooted to the spot. She smiled vaguely as she passed them in that way people sometimes do at strangers, and Helen thought she looked…nice. She didn't look like a home wrecker; she looked like someone's slightly glamorous aunt. Like someone who would look after you when you had the flu while still remembering to put on her lipstick at the same time.
It was unbelievable. No, wait, it was all too credible, given Matthew's history. Maybe a bit sooner than she'd expected, but inevitable just the same. Matthew was incapable of sticking with one woman at a time. He lived his whole life terrified that the grass was greener somewhere else, or that somewhere there was a party he ought to get himself an invite to. He'd conned Sophie into taking him back, and now he was doing this to her…and it was all Helen's fault.
Helen hugged Sandra good-bye and wished her luck for filming, which started in two days' time with a scene in which—it had already been decided—Sandra would make a spontaneous decision to throw out all her skimpy outfits, which weren't going to suit her new life and personality.
She walked back around to the office—the CARSON PR sign still gleaming bronze outside—and shut herself in her own small room. She had no idea what to do. This was none of her business. This was so none of her business, but she couldn't bear to sit back and let Sophie have her life ruined all over again. Shit, why did she have to see him? Why did she care? She was sitting with her head in her hands, staring at the top of her cluttered desk, when Laura came in and Helen found herself confiding the whole story to her.
"Don't get involved."
"I can't just let him get away with it."
"I mean it, don't get involved. What good can it do?"
"I can get her to see what he's really like before they get too serious again. I don't know."
"My guess is they're serious already. Leave it alone."
"Oh, God." Helen laid her head down on top of a pile of papers. "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God."
* * *
At six o'clock, she persuaded Rhona to go to the pub for a quick one, where she downed three large glasses of wine while she listened to the twenty-three-year-old assistant's sweet but inane ramblings about the merits of Usher versus Lee Ryan. By the time she got home, she knew she was pissed and she knew it was a bad idea, but she sat down with another glass anyway and punched Sophie's mobile number into her phone. If she answered, Helen would hang up—she couldn't face another fight, and besides, Matthew might be there listening in to the other end of the call—but if it went to answerphone, she would leave a message. Saying what, she hadn't quite decided, as she heard the ring tone change to indicate the call was going on to voice mail and then Sophie's voice telling her to leave a message.
"Erm…God…Sophie, it's, erm, Eleanor, well, Helen…You know…Me. Oh, shit, this is such a bad idea. Erm…I'm not calling to apologize again, because I know you don't want to hear it, and I know you hate me at the moment." At this point, she sniffed loudly and a drunken tear rolled down her cheek and landed on the sleeve of her sweater. She dabbed at it with her spare hand.
"Anyway. I have to tell you something and…please hear me out, don't hang up…I'm not doing this out of any kind of revenge or anything other than that I feel bad that I pushed you back towards Matthew and now he's screwing someone else behind your back. Again. Shit, that's what I've got to tell you—I saw him with another woman and I'm not imagining things, he was definitely with her, if you know what I mean. I don't know about the screwing bit, but I'm guessing…knowing Matthew. I want you to know what he's like—that he hasn't changed, and you shouldn't let yourself get dragged through all that again. You're too good for him. Way, way too good for him. And…I'm going now. Thanks for listening. If you did. Sorry. Bye."
She pressed the red button to cut the call off and then immediately dialed again.
"It's me again…If you get this call first, then don't listen to the other one. I can't remember what order they play them back to you in. But if you do, don't listen. Ignore it. Oh…and if you've already listened, then sorry. Bye."
Oh, fuck, she thought once she'd hung up, I didn't say who it was that time, which means she'll definitely listen to the other call just to find out. She considered ringing for a third time, but even in a slight alcoholic haze she could see that that would be stupid and would turn the whole thing into even more of a farce than it already was. It was fifty-fifty; Sophie would either hear the bad news or she wouldn't. It was out of Helen's hands.
She woke up in the early morning, clothes on, TV blaring, lying on the sofa still in her shoes. Her mobile phone lay on the floor beside her. Oh, shit, she thought. What the fuck did I do that for? She switched it off, half stumbled to the bedroom, took off her top layers, and crawled into bed, hoping to sleep some more. She found herself thinking about Leo, though, something she didn't allow herself to do very often. How had he felt when he heard the news that the woman he'd kissed was his father's girlfriend? His potential new stepmother. That must've been a good day, like walking onto the set of Jerry Springer, the only one who doesn't know why he's there, about to be humiliated. And how about the fact that she had talked to him about her disastrous relationship that she was trying to get herself out of? With his father. Oh, and the small fact of her lying to him about her name, her job, pretty much everything. Except the fact that she fancied him, Helen thought. That bit was true.
35
SPRING MOVED INTO EARLY SUMMER and Helen waited for a response from Sophie, jumping every time she heard her phone ring, but there was nothing. Either she never listened to the message or she had decided to ignore it. Helen didn't know what kind of response she was expecting—anger probably—but after she got over the relief that it was looking like she'd gotten away with it, she began to feel cheated. How could Sophie just turn a blind eye to a piece of news like that? What was wrong with her?
Helen knew that the gossip machine must have gone into motion, that everyone she knew must know that Matthew had gone back to his wife, but no one ever mentioned it directly to her, although the sympathetic looks she often got from mutual acquaintances made her think—gratefully—that Matthew must have kept the whole Helen/Eleanor saga to himself and was allowing her to play the victim, which suited her just fine. Helen-from-Accounts had mentioned tentatively one day that Geoff had a friend who might be a good match for Helen, and Helen had wondered (aloud as it happened, although she hadn't meant to) whether suicide might be a better option. Laura simply never brought the subject up.
One morning, Helen arrived for work and found Laura, Helen-from-Accounts, and Rhona standing around a large, messy-looking chocolate cake with HAPPY 40TH HELEN written on the top in squiggly writing. She was late, and they'd clearly given up waiting for her and were having a conversation about EastEnders, so she had to cough to let them know that she was there so that they could launch into a painful version of "Happy Birthday." Helen had been trying to forget about her big day, and she didn't know whether to laugh or cry for a moment, but when she then thought about the fact that these three women were the only people in the world who had remembered her birthday—not her mum and dad, not any of her other friends that she saw once a year, not even Rachel—she opted
for crying, which brought the singing to an abrupt end.
"I made the cake myself," Helen-from-Accounts said, which made Helen cry even more.
To make matters worse, they had bought her a gift—a very tasteful bracelet, which Helen guessed (rightly) Laura had chosen—and they went out for lunch to the local dim sum restaurant and drank Tiger beer and went back to the office late and slightly giggly. Helen felt both awkward and flattered about the fuss the others were making, and tried not to think about how depressing it was that the sum total of her forty years amounted to this random little bunch of people she had ended up working with. At the end of the day, they tried to persuade her to let them take her down to the pub, but she knew that they all had lives that they wanted to get home to, and besides, the beer from lunchtime had given her a headache, so she claimed other plans and went back to her flat.
* * *
She was putting some pasta into a saucepan when the doorbell rang. She had long since stopped expecting Matthew to come back for his things, but even so, the jarring croak of the bell made her stomach lurch and her heart start to pound. She felt sick with nerves as she half crept to the front door to peep through the spy-hole. A flickering light—a candle maybe—seemed to be burning outside her door against a white background, like a benign version of a Ku Klux Klan ritual. There didn't appear to be a face attached or at least none she could see. She could just tiptoe back down the hall and hide under her duvet until they went away, but curiosity and gratefulness that someone—even if it was someone who hated her and was likely to throw petrol over her and use the candle to light it—had remembered her birthday combined to overcome her nervousness, and she turned the key in the lock, putting the chain on first.
The white cardboard box—for she now saw that's what it was—contained a large cream and fresh fruit birthday cake with one lit candle sticking out of the center. As the door scraped open on the mat, the box was lowered, and Helen saw Sophie looking—rather blankly—over the top of it.
"Happy birthday," she said in a voice that was impossible to read. "It is your birthday, isn't it?"
Helen was thrown. She had often imagined a fraught and anger-filled meeting with Sophie one day and, in her lowest moments, had comforted herself with a deeply unlikely fantasy in which her former friend came around to say that she forgave her for everything, and they somehow picked up exactly where they had left off before it all went wrong (only with Helen being Helen and not Eleanor, of course). But this Sophie didn't seem to have read either of those scripts, and was now standing awkwardly on the doorstep, cake in hand, looking like she didn't know what to do next. The fact that she'd brought the cake, though—and lit the candle in quite a festive way—that surely had to be a good thing. Unless it was poisoned, of course.
"God. Thanks," Helen blustered. "I can't believe you remembered." And then realizing she had to do something to break the stalemate, "Do you want to come in?"
"OK. Just for a minute."
Helen led the way down the corridor, wishing she'd tidied up at any point in the past month.
"So…" Sophie was saying, looking around, "this is where Matthew was living."
"Erm…yes."
There was what seemed to both women like an endless silence. "Have you come to pick up his things?" Helen said eventually.
Sophie didn't answer her question. "I got your message."
"Oh…I was drunk. I'm sorry. I really wasn't trying to make trouble…" She ran out of steam.
"It's OK, I know all about her—Alexandra—I've known for a while."
"Right." Helen saw Sophie was still holding the box and took it from her. "It's a lovely cake."
"Isn't it?"
"I'll get us a drink. You will stay for a drink, won't you?"
She opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio and poured two large glasses, then went back through to the living room and sat on the chair opposite the sofa, where Sophie was now sitting. What the fuck was going on? She took a deep breath.
"Sophie. Don't get me wrong, it's great to see you, but I don't understand. Last time we saw each other, well…let's just say I wasn't expecting you to remember my birthday."
Sophie took a long sip of her wine. "To be honest, I don't really know what I'm doing here. I felt bad, knowing it was your birthday and knowing you might be sitting here on your own…"
"Because I have no friends…"
"…because you have no friends. Understandably." She half smiled. "And I wanted you to know something, just because…well, I just wanted you to know." She breathed in deeply, looking at Helen over her glass. "Matthew and I aren't together."
"Oh. Right…Alexandra."
"No, Alexandra came later. She's very recent, actually, they met at some kind of divorcée meeting. She's nice, I like her, but it's early days and it might be too much to hope he'll stick with someone who's his own age."
"She looked nice." Helen had no idea where this conversation was leading.
"I hated you that evening," Sophie carried on. "You have no idea how I felt having to take all that in—about you, about Matthew."
Helen was looking intently at a spot of dirt on the coffee table. "I'm sorry."
"But I knew you were telling the truth about the fact that he was still lying to me. I thought you were telling me because you wanted him back for yourself…"
Helen snorted despite herself.
"…and then I realized it didn't even matter if that was the reason, the fact was he hadn't changed, and he was probably never going to. So I told him I wasn't going to take him back."
"How did he take it?"
"Cried, shouted, blamed it all on you. At one point, he was definitely considering asking you if he could come back here, though—he hates being on his own."
"Shit, I really messed everything up. If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't even have got close to him again. I should've just told him that night when he turned up on my doorstep that it was wrong, that I didn't want him. Saved us all a lot of trouble."
"You should've never fucked my husband in the first place."
"That, too. I'm sorry."
"I haven't come here to try and give you a hard time. I just thought you deserved to know, that's all. How it all turned out." Her voice softened. "I know you were worried about me. At least, that's what I gathered from those drunken messages."
She put her glass on the table and stood up. Helen suddenly felt that, more than anything in the world, she wanted to keep Sophie there long enough for them to patch up their friendship properly.
"Don't go. Please. Have another glass of wine." But Sophie was putting her coat on.
"I don't think I should. It feels…weird. I don't even know what to call you."
"What about the cake? At least, help me eat it. You can't bring me a whole cake and then leave me to it."
"Oh," said Sophie, "I meant to say, the cake, it was Leo's idea."
"Leo's?"
"He made it."
"For me?"
"No, for someone else. Of course, for you."
Helen felt a lump rise in her throat. "How is he?"
Sophie looked at her tentatively and then lowered her voice to soften the blow. "He got married."
So that was it, the end of that particular fantasy that Helen had somehow allowed herself to indulge in, where Leo came knocking on her door, telling her he couldn't live without her and so what if she had been shagging his dad only a couple of months ago, he loved her. "He got married? Who to?"
Sophie laughed. "Oh, sorry, did I say he got married? I meant he got a new car. Of course he hasn't got married."
Helen managed a laugh. "How could you do that to me? I mean…obviously I've done much worse to you…" she added, feeling as though she had to keep apologizing for her behavior.
Sophie interrupted her, still smiling. "I'd rather we didn't keep bringing it up, to be honest."
"So, truthfully, how is he?"
"He's good. He said to say hello."
"He did? And he made
me a cake?"
"It's taken a while for him to get used to the idea that his father was Carlo—that he was the reason you didn't get together. There wasn't a real Carlo, as well, was there? I get so confused…"
"No!" Helen was indignant and then remembered she had no right to be. "Honestly."
"Because if you ever get involved with Leo, I for one would kill you if you messed him around."
If she ever got involved with Leo? Had Sophie really just said that?
"Erm…do you think that's possible, that we might ever…?" The question hung in the air between them.
"Elen…Helen, we have to take this one very small step at a time. Who knows what might happen further down the line, but we have to all agree that it's nothing but the truth from now on."