Every day, Helen was discovering things about Matthew she never knew before, and most of them weren’t good.
He dyed his hair. To be honest, she’d worked this out already, but seeing the bottle of Just For Men in the bathroom cabinet meant he had given up all pretence – at least to her.
He wore slippers. Not flip-flops, not an old pair of moccasins. Slippers. With a fur lining.
He made a roaring noise when he yawned. How had she not known this before? Had he never yawned in front of her in over four years, or was he just keeping a lid on the sound, knowing how mind-numbingly irritating it was?
He laid his clothes out for the next day at work before he went to sleep at night. Helen didn’t know why this was so annoying. In fact, it was probably quite sensible, but it just felt so … comfy … like something his wife used to do for him or something they taught him at boarding school. Helen had to resist the urge to rumple them or to swap them with something different to confuse him. Once he’d picked out his outfit, he wore it no matter what, so if he went to bed on a wintry night but woke up in the sunshine, he’d still put on the sweater that was hanging there waiting.
His car had a name. A name. His. Car. Had. A. Name. Helen knew this was probably down to his kids, the kind of cutesy thing that families did, but when one day he forgot where he was and said to her, ‘Let’s go in Delia,’ she stared at him open-mouthed for so long that it crossed his mind she might be having a stroke. She finally pulled herself together enough to ask him not to anthropomorphize inanimate objects in front of her ever again. Ever. Again.
‘Sorry, Helly,’ he’d said, slightly sheepishly.
‘And don’t call me Helly. I hate it when you call me that.’
‘I always call you Helly,’ he’d replied petulantly.
‘Exactly.’
It wasn’t going unnoticed that Matthew was a little distracted at work. His shirts looked a bit, well, crumpled, for starters. And, at Wednesday’s morning catch-up meeting, he’d looked panic-stricken when he’d realized that he had left a client’s strategy, which he had drawn up over the Christmas break, on his computer at home.
‘I’ll ring Sophie and get her to email it over,’ offered Jenny helpfully.
‘NO! No … she’s not there. No one’s there at the moment. I can remember the key points.’
His years of experience meant that he sailed through the meeting with the client without giving away that he was making it up as he went along, but he knew Jenny had noticed that something was up, and his efforts to overcompensate by being extra nice to her for the rest of the day simply convinced her that she was right.
That night, Helen looked round at the mess that used to be her living room.
She dug around in the nearest box. ‘You remembered a … toy car … but you forgot your computer?’
‘It’s vintage. A collectible.’
She rummaged about some more. ‘There’s hundreds of them in here. Are you eight years old?’
‘They’re worth a fortune.’
‘What are you going to do, open a shop? Jesus, Matthew.’
He looked hurt and she felt bad, but irritation got the better of her and she turned on her heels and left the room. She had a long bath and when she came back into the living room, Matthew’s stuff was tidied away neatly into a corner and he was in the kitchen rustling up something unspeakable-looking in a wok. He waved a spatula at her proudly when he saw her come in as if to say, ‘Look how clever I am.’
‘It’s nearly ready. Chinese, how does that sound?’
‘Fantastic.’
He had only been there a few days, but Helen was longing to be left on her own with a microwave curry. She wanted to loll about in her pyjamas with no make-up on, eating and watching the TV. She wanted to neck back glasses of wine at her own pace, not go through the tortured niceties of, ‘Do you want another glass?’, ‘I don’t know, do you?’, ‘Well, I will if you will.’ Her parents used to waste whole evenings that way. Politeness, that great substitute for passion.
She sat down to eat. The conversation was stilted. What did they ever used to talk about, for fuck’s sake? Helen was reduced to making appreciative noises about the (disgusting) food while Matthew valiantly tried to fill the silence with the kind of talk about work they had always successfully avoided.
Helen had had enough.
‘Why don’t I put the TV on?’
‘While we’re eating?’ he said, as if she’d just suggested having a dump on the table.
‘Just to help us unwind a bit. Something mindless so we can forget about work. But we don’t have to.’
‘No, if you want to, then put it on.’
‘No, no, it’s fine. Not if you don’t want it on.’ Oh, fuck, she thought, here we go: ‘You first’ – ‘No, you’ – ‘No, you’ – ‘No, really, you’ – for the next forty years.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with putting the TV on? It’s just Sophie and I never liked the kids watching…’ He trailed off, as if he’d said too much, then got up and switched on the television in the corner. They finished their meal in front of Emmerdale, in silence. Helen hadn’t got the heart to say, ‘Turn over – there’ll be something better on the other side.’
Over the next couple of days, Helen realized that however uneasy she was, Matthew was simply going to refuse to admit that he’d made the wrong decision. The only way for him to cope with the momentousness of what he’d done, not to mention the guilt, was for him to believe totally that it had all been for the sake of a great love he was powerless to ignore.
So, when she served up undercooked pink chicken with burnt fries for dinner, he smiled and said, ‘I’m going to have to teach you to cook,’ like she was eight years old.
When she told him she quite fancied the eighteen-year-old boy who served in the deli down the road, he laughed so much she was afraid she’d need to resuscitate him.
When she shaved her legs in the bath and left the tiny hairs clinging round the rim, she caught him whistling to himself as he cleaned it out.
And the more he worked to show how much he loved her, the more she found herself perversely trying to put him off. Maybe it was a test – like an adolescent pushing the boundaries to straining point, waiting to be rejected, waiting for the proof of what they’ve long suspected, that their parents have hated them all along – maybe she was subconsciously trying to make herself as unattractive as possible to test the limits of his devotion. Or maybe, she wondered, was she really just trying to push him away because she didn’t want him any more. It was a thought too harsh to indulge, she thought of herself as enough of a bitch already – this would push her over the edge even in her own eyes: to lure a man away from his loving family and then kick him back out again, as if the competition was all and the prize irrelevant. You love me the most, I win, now fuck off.
So she tried to play nice, but the stubborn child in her wasn’t having any of it.
She stopped shaving her armpits altogether. And her bikini line.
She told him she’d once caught Chlamydia from a man whose name she never got round to asking.
She told him she had a moustache she had to have waxed off every six weeks.
She told him she didn’t feel like sex and he just said, ‘Fine.’
She picked holes in the way he dressed.
She stopped brushing her teeth.
And combing her hair.
And plucking the stray hag-whisker that grew out of her chin.
She bought a packet of Tena incontinence pads for women and left them lying about in the bathroom.
And all the time Matthew just kept telling her he loved her and said, ‘Isn’t it great that we’re finally together?’ and ‘This is it now, you and me, for ever,’ and other such Mills and Boon classics.