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 got 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, 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.
One morning, Helen arrived for work and found Laura, Helen-from-Accounts and Rhona standing round 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 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 Rachel, not any of her other friends who she saw once a year – 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) that 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 the pub, but she knew they were only doing it because they felt they should, and that they all had lives 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 the fact that she felt pathetically grateful 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 centre. 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 well-crafted – and deeply unlikely – fantasy in which her former friend came round to say 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 round, ‘this is where Matthew was living.’
‘Erm … yes.’
There was what seemed to both women 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 realized 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 divorcee 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 more than anything in the world that 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 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 to say 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 if she had to keep apologizing for her behaviour. 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.
‘Elean … 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.’
Further down the line? That implied they were going to see each other again. That there might be a future for their friendship. And who knew what else.
‘Of course.’
‘To be honest, I don’t want to hear anything more about you and Matthew, but I do need to know who’s Helen and who’s Eleanor, if you know what I mean. I don’t even know if I know who you are. All I do know is that I miss whoever I thought was my friend and I’d like to see if I can get that back.’
‘Me too.’ Helen was near tears.
‘So I thought maybe we could go for a drink, start again, and see how we get on.’
‘Really? Yes. Please.’ Don’t beg, she thought. ‘That’d be great.’
‘But you have to promise me you won’t get in touch with Leo till I say it’s OK. Not a thing – not even to say thanks for the cake, because I know what he’s like … I don’t want you anywhere near him till I know I can really trust you. OK?’
To Helen, this felt like the most reasonable request she’d ever heard.
‘OK,’ she said, starting to smile. ‘I promise.’
They stood in the living room, slightly awkwardly, for a moment, neither quite knowing what the next step should be. Did they make a date to go out for a drink? Did they leave it and Helen be left like a lovesick teenager, waiting anxiously for Sophie to call her? There was a blast of cool evening air as the cat flap swung open and Norman breezed in from the small back yard, shaking the length of his body huffily to dry himself. It had started to rain outside.
‘Oh, is this Cushion?’ Sophie asked, and then looked as if she was about to sneeze. Helen grabbed him up and bundled him into the kitchen, shutting the door behind him.
Helen sighed. ‘Actually, his name is Norman.’
‘Right. Of course it is.’ Sophie’s tone betrayed a tiny streak of irritation. ‘Claudia’s cat.’
Helen grabbed a pile of photographs from a small table in the corner. ‘I’ve been keeping these for her, as a record of how he’s doing. Look,’ she said, brandishing one of the pictures in front of Sophie, ‘he caught his first mouse. I was going to send them to her … one day … but I didn’t know … well, you know …’ She ran out of steam. She knew that Norman coming in had just reminded Sophie that everything about her was a lie, that she couldn’t even assume the tiny, insignificant details she thought she knew were true.
‘Well, anyway …’
Sophie took the photographs from her and put them in her bag. ‘She’ll love them, thanks.’
Helen inhaled deeply. ‘And obviously, I’m not a successful PR either. Not yet, anyway.’
‘I gathered that,’ Sophie said. But she smiled when she said it.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she continued, starting to take off her coat again. Helen held her breath. ‘I will have another glass of wine. And you can start to tell me who you really are.’