Millie seemed to realize that this was a very, very bad thing to say.
She scampered upstairs like a greyhound. Hope stepped over the ketchup cake blindly and switched on the kettle. Very strong coffee was the only answer. She had a husband who wanted to leave her and a delinquent four-year-old daughter who had apparently picked up the worst swear words in the world at the nursery which Hope had to shell out most of her salary to pay for. Wonderful.
Hi Sam, how’s the new job? Is everyone friendly? Stupid question, Hope decided, deleting it. People were friendly to newcomers in offices but not to new bosses.
We’re all great and looking forward to Matt’s birthday dinner. I did plan to buy a dress but decided against it. If only I could fit into your designer outfits. Next time you have a wardrobe clear out, send a plastic bin liner of stuff down to me and I’ll diet!
Talk soon,
Love Hope.
By the Thursday night of Matt’s birthday dinner, Hope had lost two pounds with the stress of it all. Normally, that would have thrilled her, but when her weight loss was connected with the fact that Matt had been almost monosyllabic since his birthday, it wasn’t a cause for celebration.
Over the last couple of days, Matt had been very quiet and had stayed very late at the office on two evenings, ostensibly to get some work done on an important campaign they were presenting on Monday.
Hope was convinced he was going to see her and had resisted the temptation to follow him in the Metro. But it was impossible to play private detective with two small children in tow. Hope could just picture Millie announcing loudly over breakfast the next day: ‘Daddy, we saw you and a strange lady and Mummy cried and said a rude word.’
Even more telling, he’d been looking over some papers in their bedroom and had quickly stuffed them back in his briefcase when Hope walked in unexpectedly. Distraught, Hope had walked out again. They had to have been divorce papers. What else would he want to hide?
She longed to confide in someone, but whom? Sam had never approved of Matt and would probably arrive in fury from London with a top lawyer in tow and order Hope to screw everything she could out of Matt in the divorce settlement. Betsey, her closest friend, was married to Matt’s friend and colleague, Dan, so there was no way she could tell Betsey of her fears. In fact, she was scared that if she said anything to Betsey, the other woman would take her hand pityingly and say yes, she’d been dying to tell Hope that Matt had someone else. She had other friends but they were mainly couples that she and Matt went out with, friends of both of them, in other words, so unsuitable for spilling the beans to.
How could she phone up Angelica and Simon and say that no, the Parkers wouldn’t be coming for dinner in three weeks’ time and had they heard anything about Matt and some bimbo?
So Hope did what she’d been doing all her life: she bottled it up inside herself and lay wide-eyed in bed at night, listening to Matt’s even breathing beside her and wondering what the hell she was going to do with the rest of her lonely life without him.
The restaurant was buzzing with a glam Thursday night crowd but even so, other diners looked up when the Judd’s Advertising crew were escorted to their table. Most of the eyes were on Jasmine Judd, new wife to the boss, a radiant, satin-skinned blonde who was spilling out of a dusky pink sequined dress and made Hope feel more than a little inadequate in the safe jersey number that had looked sophisticated and modern at home but had been transformed into several-seasons-out-of-fashion in this elegant setting. She never got clothes right, she sighed. But then, Hope was beginning to feel as if she never got anything right.
If the male diners were all open-mouthed at the sight of Jasmine swaying on her high heels, the female diners were able to feast their eyes on Matt, who was looking particularly good in a fawn-coloured suit that made him look even more matinee idol than ever. His hair suited him in the cropped style; it made his deep set eyes look darker than usual and showed up the firm, he-man jaw that made lots of the women in Maltings Lane wave at him too energetically when he was out cutting the grass in his shorts and T-shirt.
He certainly looked after himself, fitting in three nights a week in the gym come what may. Hope now knew he wasn’t keeping himself fit for her. But at least he was wearing his birthday tie.
‘George Clooney eat your heart out,’ Yvonne had joked the first time she’d clapped eyes on Matt at the annual building society barbecue.
Hope knew this was high praise indeed but hadn’t liked to tell her that Matt considered gorgeous George to be common and modelled himself more on Cary Grant. If his temples weren’t already greying in a distinguished manner à la Cary, Hope wondered if Matt might start bleaching them himself.
Many times in their marriage, she’d wondered how she’d ever managed to end up with Matt. Quite a few other women wondered that too, she felt, judging by the calculating gazes she got from them at parties. Hope never realized that the calculating gazes held plenty of envy for her. Convinced she was frumpy and dull, she had no idea of her own attractiveness. To her, beauty meant the glossy sophistication and superb bone structure of people like Jasmine. It couldn’t possibly mean a sweet, kind face or big anxious eyes or a soft mouth that constantly twitched up at the corners into the most bewitching smile.
Nor did Hope realize that while Matt might sometimes look briefly on the stunning creatures who flirted with him, he needed a yielding, gentle woman like Hope as his partner. The strong, glamorous women who eyed him up boldly, simply reminded him of his strong, glamorous mother, a woman who wore signature red lipstick, kept her dark hair in a sleek bob and flirted with all and sundry. Hope, who was scared of her mother-in-law and always felt deeply inadequate beside her, never realized that one of the reasons Matt loved her so dearly was because she was the direct opposite of his mother.
Hope walked behind Matt to the table, miserably thinking that maybe she should announce that her delectable husband was back on the market. She’d be flattened in the rush, that was for sure. Matt was a nine on a one-to-ten scale of attractiveness while she’d been maybe a five when they’d married. In her black dress with her hair refusing to behave and a pre-menstrual spot emerging like a beacon on her chin despite all the concealer plastered on it, Hope currently felt as if she was a two. Compared to Jasmine, she was in minus figures.
She stared at Jasmine jealously. Was she the one? No, Hope decided. Matt was a career man first and foremost. Having an affair with the boss’s wife was career suicide.
A long table against one wall was reserved for the party of ten. Dan had organized the dinner party and was now telling everyone where to sit. As the others obediently went to their seats, Hope’s prospects of a red-wine fuelled evening where her mind would be taken off her troubles vanished. Dan told her to sit in the centre with her back to the wall and she realized she was going to spend the evening hemmed in by people she didn’t like.
Lucky Matt had Betsey, the flamboyant journalist who was married to Dan, on one side. Betsey was one of Hope’s closest friends, although she was a teeny bit self-obsessed and tended to swing all conversations back to herself. Hope would have loved to have been able to sit beside Betsey and confide in her: she was almost desperate enough to do so.
On Matt’s other side, he had Jasmine. Both women were chattering away happily to the birthday boy. Hope, on the other hand, was stuck with the art director’s husband, an eternal student with a goatee and dirty finger nails, who could bore for Britain in the Olympics on the subject of the changing face of industrial architecture. Hope didn’t give a damn about industrial architecture and could see nothing interesting in Victorian glassworks.
On her other side was Adam Judd, the agency boss, who never had anything to say to her and who was now avidly watching his luscious wife, Jasmine, flirting with Matt.
Across the table, Dan smiled at Hope. She automatically smiled back, thinking ‘you pig, you’ve stuck me with the most difficult people at the table.’ Sam would have said something sarcastic to him: Hope knew she’d never dare.
Dan