Getting Rid of Matthew (8 page)

11

M
OST 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?"

The relief that she'd not yet been rumbled was slightly dwarfed for Helen by her annoyance that her colleagues didn't even consider it at all likely that she'd be in the running, as far as Matthew was concerned. Half of her wanted to say, "Why is it a foregone conclusion that it's not me?" but she decided to quit while she was ahead. Attack them before they attacked her.

"I bet it is Helen-from-Accounts," Helen found herself saying. "She's always moaning on about her husband and she went on that company retreat that Matthew went on, do you remember? Plus, I'm sure I remember her saying she fancied him once."

Oh, God, she thought, I'm going to hell.

* * *

The rest of the day went by in a bit of a blur, but the Helen-from-Accounts rumor had taken on its own momentum, with considerable help from Annie, and by late afternoon it might as well have been gospel. Helen rang Rachel just before she left the office.

"You have to meet me for a drink. Now. And don't bring Neil."

Then she rang and left a message on Matthew's mobile, saying that she needed some girly time with her friend and she'd see him at home later.

On the way to the lift, she bumped into Jenny on her way back from a coffee run.

"Have you heard about Matthew and Helen-from-Accounts?" Jenny'd gotten the gossip glow.

"I know," Helen called back over her shoulder. "Gross, isn't it?"

* * *

Rachel could barely contain her laughter, even though Helen was clearly stressed out and in need of a bit of moral support.

"So tell me what she's like, Helen-from-Accounts."

"Mousy, married, probably loves her husband. Certainly doesn't deserve to have everyone gossiping about her behind her back."