Cathy Kelly - What She Wants

Matt finished his meal and smiled at his wife. ‘That was lovely,’ he said kindly. ‘Let’s forget about everything and watch a video. I stopped at the shop on the way home.’

‘I can give you your presents,’ Hope said, eager to leave the desolate place she was currently in. If they had a nice evening after all, it meant their marriage was OK. Didn’t it?

Matt was up early the next morning. An early meeting, he said as he threw back the duvet at half six instead of the usual seven. Hope, head heavy after a practically sleepless night of worrying, couldn’t move. She was exhausted, her head throbbed with tiredness and her eyes felt piggy, as if someone had injected them with some type of swelling agent. She knew she should get up and talk to Matt – anything to convince herself that it was all okay – but she was too tired. The speediest dresser in the world, Matt was showered, shaved and ready in twenty minutes. Wearing the black Armani suit with a white shirt and his new tie, an outfit that made him look like he was auditioning for an Italian James Bond, he stopped by the bed to pick up his watch from the bedside table. Hope sat up on the pillow and rubbed frantically at her sleep-filled eyes.

‘Bye darling,’ she bleated. ‘Love you.’ She hoped he’d kiss her goodbye but instead he smiled briefly and busied himself with his watch strap.

‘Bye, I’ll see you this evening,’ he said and he was gone, without kissing her.

Hope remembered a time when they’d been so in love that some mornings Matt had ripped off his suit and got back into bed with her to make mad passionate love, not caring that he’d be late for work. She bit her lip miserably. The seven year itch wasn’t just an itch: it was a damn outbreak of eczema.

Her only consolation was that he had looked tired too and clearly hadn’t slept well. Whether it was because he longed to make it up, or whether he’d been mentally going over the various ways of informing her their marriage was over, she couldn’t tell.

As usual, Millie was naughtier than usual because she sensed that Hope was tired and cross. Millie may have looked like an angelic child model from the Pears soap adverts, but there was definitely a vein of sheer mischief running through her body that belied her sweet face. Hope knew from experience that whenever Millie was looking particularly innocent, with her full bottom lip jutting out and her dark eyes round with naïveté, she’d undoubtedly done something very naughty. Like the time she put the plug in the upstairs bathroom sink and set the taps running full blast until water poured down the stairs. The carpet had been ruined.

This morning, she belted downstairs and started to make cakes out of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, broken up biscuits and breakfast cereal, squelching out an entire bottle of ketchup with the subsequent splodges getting all over the kitchen floor, while Hope was upstairs getting Toby ready.

‘Millie,’ was all Hope could say when she got downstairs with Toby to find an ocean of Millie’s ketchup cake covering the table, a good deal of the floor and most of Millie’s lime green fluffy jumper, clean on half an hour ago. Even worse, it was a jumper that had to be handwashed and spent much of its life at the bottom of the laundry basket with the other handwash items until Hope had the time to tackle them.

‘You’re a very naughty girl; you’re all messy and I’ll have to clean this up. Go upstairs immediately and take off that jumper. We’re going to be late.’

‘Shit,’ said Millie mutinously.

Hope’s jaw clanged so low she could hear the joint creak.

‘What?’ she gasped, appalled. Where could Millie have learned that?

Even 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.