Sophie Shallcross was sitting in her large raised-ground-floor kitchen-diner in her beautiful five-bedroom, two-reception semi-detached townhouse in an up-and-coming street in Kentish Town, watching Matthew tuck into his pasta putanesca and listening indulgently to the details of his stressful day, including the game of squash with colleague Alan which he had apparently just won. She loved hearing the minutiae of his working life, the characters and gossip and the interoffice dramas that she herself never had time for, cramming, as she did, a full day’s work into the hours between nine and three, so that she could get home in time for the children’s noisy and demanding return from school. She rested her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, and laughed when he told her how Alan had skidded and banged into the wall, then thrown his racquet across the court as if it were to blame. After the kids went to bed – nine-thirty, no later, no exceptions except for birthdays and Christmas and the odd trip to the theatre – they would curl up on the sofa and have a glass of wine, her favourite time of the day.
Matthew was able to keep his life with Sophie and the children – Suzanne, twelve, and ten-year-old Claudia – separated in his head from his affair with Helen. He felt no guilt. Indeed, when he was at home, he barely thought about Helen at all, which he thought made him a good husband and father. In fact, Matthew was pretty incapable of ever thinking about two things at once, as most men are, so he tended to go with whatever he was presented with – if Sophie was in front of him, he’d think about Sophie; if Helen was in front of him, he’d think about Helen; if it was an egg sandwich … well, you get the picture. Helen could distinctly remember the day when she’d told him she was pregnant just as she handed him a plate of stir-fried chicken. It was as though his brain was split down the middle; she could see him struggling to focus – Ooh, noodles/my life’s ruined – like a dog with schizophrenia. She’d had an abortion, of course. She was the mistress.
‘Why are you always home so late?’ Suzanne now asked inconveniently. ‘You’re never here in time to help Mum cook dinner, and she’s been at work all day, too.’
Suzanne had been learning about the suffragettes in Year 8 history, and she took her studies very seriously.
‘Don’t talk shit,’ said blissfully unemancipated Claudia – who by the way had also just learned about swearing in the playground of Kentish Town Juniors and liked to practice at every opportunity. ‘Mummies do the cooking.’
‘Don’t say “shit”, Claudia,’ Matthew jumped in.
Sophie picked up her cue. ‘You know I get home at three-thirty and Dad’s never here till after eight, he works much longer hours than me.’
‘That’s my point, exactly,’ triumphed Suzanne.
This was a pretty representative dinner-table conversation at the Shallcross household. Like most families, they could play their roles on autopilot.
Although Sophie had assumed the traditional role of care-giver to her family, she was anything but an average housewife. She’d got a first from Durham, for a start. In maths. She had a career in the city doing something unexplainable and earning a small fortune – more than Matthew, as it happened – and was so indispensable that she was able to arrange her hours to suit herself. If truth be told, it was because she wanted to, not because she felt she had to. However hard she’d worked or however high she’d gone, Sophie had always put family life first. Never mind that she got up at six, dressed in a suit, oversaw Suzanne and Claudia’s preparations for school, made their packed lunches, walked them to the end of the road, got on the tube, rarely took a proper lunch break, got back on the tube, helped the girls with their homework, made dinner from scratch (no ready meals in this household), loaded the dishwasher, sorted out everyone’s clothes for the next day and tried to stay awake long enough to offer Matthew some adult chat and a sympathetic ear for his problems at the office. There’d been little or no time for anything else for the past twelve years – no exercise classes or drinks with the girls. And it was true that she had been passed over for promotion recently because she was never in the office when the West Coast kicked in. But she had an absolute faith in the love and stability of her family and, for Sophie, that was worth a few sacrifices. Oh dear.
This evening panned out just like any other evening. It was two weeks to Christmas, and Matthew and Sophie had to decide what to get the girls while avoiding all the things they knew they wanted the most – make-up, high-heeled shoes, dogs, mini-skirts. Then there was the question of who was arriving when and who was sleeping where. Christmas at the Shallcross house was always a full-blown family affair with Matthew’s mother and sisters and the sisters’ husbands and children.
‘Gerbil for Claudia?’ Sophie asked, knowing what the answer would be.
‘No.’
‘Hamster? Guinea pig? Rat?’
‘No, no and no. No pets, we agreed.’
‘OK. I’ll think of something else. Oh, and we need to get the box of decorations down.’
‘I’ll do it at the weekend.’
‘And a tree.’
‘Weekend.’
‘And order the turkey.’
At about ten-thirty and a bottle of Sancerre down, Matthew felt an uncharacteristic twinge of sentiment about Helen and what, through the hue of his third glass, seemed to him to be the uncomplicated nature of his other life with her, uncluttered by family and duty. He sneaked off to the study – doubling up as a children’s bedroom for the Christmas period – and dialled her number. Helen, who was tucked up in bed asleep, feigned indifference, although a late-evening phone call was a real event. Matthew found himself promising to come over on Tuesday in lieu of Thursday, which was the day of Claudia’s nativity play. Helen tried to give the impression that she might not be free but couldn’t keep it up. It was all over in less than three minutes and everybody was happy.
In the tastefully deep-red living room with original coving and architraves at 155 Bartholomew Road, Sophie yawned and stretched and started to tidy away the lists she had made. She slipped her arms round Matthew’s broad back and kissed the base of his neck, her favourite place, where the grey wispy hairs curled flat against it like a baby’s.
‘Amanda and Edwin have invited us over for a pre-Christmas drink on Tuesday. Can you bear it?’ Amanda was the elder and slightly more annoying of Matthew’s two younger sisters.
‘If I must.’ Matthew turned round and kissed her back.
‘I’ve said we’ll be there at seven. Can you get away early?’
‘No problem,’ he said, entirely forgetting the promise he’d made to Helen only forty minutes ago. ‘I’ll come home first and pick you up.’