Getting Rid of Matthew Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn't you? You forgot you'd promised to see me and you made some fucking arrangement with your wife."
    "Calm down," he said patronizingly.
    "Calm down? You never think about me sitting on my own here night after night."
    "Go out, then, I'm not stopping you."
    "I can't, I have no one to go out with anymore. No one wants to be friends with someone who's screwing a married man."
    "Oh, so that's my fault, is it? I have to lie constantly to be with you. Have you any idea how hard that is?"
    "I'm not asking you to lie."
    "Yes, you do. Continually. You ask me to come over, you want to see me for lunch. Christ, I've lost count of the times you've tried to persuade me to tell Sophie I'm going on a conference so that I could take you away for a weekend."
    "You'd never do it, though, would you?"
    "Because I don't want to get caught. We both agreed…"
    "Fuck what we agreed. I'm sick of being second best, of always having to be the one who gets let down…"
    "I'm sorry about tomorrow. Really. But you've always known this was how it had to be."
    "Well, not anymore," Helen said defiantly. "I mean it."
    "So, what, you think I should just tell my wife and children that I'm hardly ever home early because I'm with my girlfriend?"
    "Why not?"
    "Are you fucking mad?"
    "No, I'm not fucking mad, I just don't see what would be so fucking awful about telling the fucking truth to your perfect fucking wife after all these years."
    Silence.
    There was a subject Helen and Matthew always avoided, except when they were having a blazing row—the subject of "Why won't you leave your wife for me?" Now it was out there and it couldn't be taken back.
    "Leave Sophie out of this. This has fuck-all to do with her."
    "Why are you always defending her?"
    "Because she's my wife and none of this is her fault. And you knew I was married when we got into this."
    Matthew put on his coat. "I'm late. I have to go or she'll wonder where I've been."
    Helen couldn't back down this time:
    "Then tell her, for God's sake. I've had enough, honestly. Just tell Sophie about me or that's it. I mean it this time. It's over."
    "Fine."
    Matthew closed the front door behind him.

4
    S OPHIE NEVER WOULD HAVE ADMITTED IT, but she dreaded Christmas.
    She couldn't quite remember how the tradition had started that the whole family came to them and she became everyone's slave for a few days. She had a dim recollection that they had all discussed an arrangement once whereby she and Matthew would do Christmas at their house one year, then his two sisters would take a turn each, thereby sharing the burden evenly.
    Sophie and Matthew had happily offered to play hosts the first year and really went to town with food and decorations, and made-up games and quizzes. Suzanne and Claudia were nine and seven at the time, and so full of the joys of Christmas. Matthew's sisters, Amanda and Louisa, sighed disingenuously over the domestic bliss and Sophie's homemaking skills. Matthew's sisters' husbands, Edwin and Jason, cooed over her gravy and homemade orange-short-crust-with-Grand-Marnier mince pies and Amanda's children, Jocasta and Benji, ran riot and wrecked the place, safe in the knowledge that no one was going to tell them not to, as their parents had clearly abdicated any kind of grown-up responsibility for a few days. Sophie and Matthew fetched drinks and nibbles and cleaned up spills and washed towels and nearly killed themselves in the process, confident that this would only happen once every three years.
    Wrong.
    The following year Amanda, whose turn it was meant to be, announced in October that she was pregnant and that she couldn't possibly cope with playing host. Louisa declared that her house was in disarray because of the new extension which was currently under construction, so Sophie stepped in and offered that she and Matthew would willingly repeat the previous year's invitation and even extended it to Matthew's now-widowed mother, Sheila. This time Sophie's parents, Bill and Alice,