Getting Rid of Matthew Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrapped up in silver paper and ribbon, under her desk.
    She went to the secretaries' annual Christmas lunch and got a bit drunk and tearful. For a split second she considered hooking up with Jamie, the company's only male assistant, but he was barely twenty-seven and not even that good-looking, so she decided against it. She tried to bring the conversation around to Matthew as much as she could without giving herself away, but only managed to find out that he'd bought Sophie a pair of Tiffany earrings for Christmas, that he'd once asked Jenny to buy him some new underwear when he was going on a conference and had forgotten to pack any (Calvin Klein, black, large), and that Laura often rang up to invite him out to lunch and he sometimes went. None of this made Helen very happy.
    At about four o'clock, she decided to use an emergency phone call and got an out of office message—Matthew Shallcross has left for the Christmas break and will be back at work on January fourth. She tried his mobile—switched off.
    That night, Helen, Rachel, and Neil went to the pub together, and Helen had to concede that he was actually really nice and funny and clearly adored Rachel. What's more, when Rachel talked to him about a band or a cool club, he didn't think it was hilarious and cute to say, "Is that a new brand of cereal?" When Rachel told a story involving break dancing and a rah-rah skirt, he didn't say, "I had a mortgage and a child to support by then, so I missed out on all that eighties stuff." (Sophie was, in fact, Matthew's second wife and he already had a son when he met her, Leo, who was now thirty-eight, by his first wife, Hannah. Leo was old enough to be Suzanne and Claudia's father, just as Matthew could have been Helen's, although she didn't like to think about that, for obvious reasons.)
    What's more, Rachel's evening didn't end abruptly at eight o'clock because her boyfriend had a wife to get home to.
    Helen stayed out far too late and had far too much to drink and went home and cried. A lot.
    * * *
    For the past few years, Helen had spent Christmas Day alone in her flat. She could have gone home to her parents, but it was too shaming at nearly forty years old to be turning up single. So she told them she was spending the day with her boyfriend. Not Matthew, her parents would have practically disowned her if they'd thought she was seeing another woman's husband—oh no, this was the imaginary boyfriend, Carlo, that Helen had been telling them about for as long as she could remember. It was a tricky call but, on balance, it was worth having to deal with the offense her mother had taken because Carlo had never deigned to visit rather than face her pity and disappointment that her only daughter was a middle-aged spinster.
    One year, dreading the miserable day of bad TV and turkey nuggets, she'd decided to go home anyway, telling her mum and dad that Carlo had gone to his own parents in Spain for a change. She couldn't remember why or when he'd become Spanish, but over the years she'd found that she had a tendency to elaborate the lie to fill in silences. He was now not only foreign but wealthy and, she thought she could remember once saying, famous in his own country—for what, she couldn't recall. By lunchtime, her mum was making sad eyes at her about the fact that he hadn't yet called to wish Helen a Happy Christmas. By midafternoon, it had progressed to "Have you had a fight?" She'd chosen never to repeat the experience.
    Christmas for Helen had always been a bit of a trauma. She had always loved the buildup—the shop window displays and the fairy lights and the schmaltzy films on TV—but the actual day itself had always been a letdown, a long, dull, formal lunch with no TV allowed until her mum and dad woke up from their afternoon nap and they had turkey sandwiches in front of the game shows. As she got older, the prospect of the endless, dreary afternoon began to eclipse any enjoyment she'd experienced in the run-up.