Getting Rid of Matthew (7 page)

* * *

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

A
T 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 that," 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."

* * *

"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.