What She Wants

She took in the bottle of special birthday wine, eager for praise. ‘Will you open it?’ she asked, producing the madly expensive corkscrew that Matt had seen in a restaurant and had insisted on sending off for.

‘Yeah,’ he said absently, still watching the TV. He opened the bottle and handed it back to her. When she’d poured two glasses and assured herself that the steak was getting along fine without her, she returned, gave Matt his glass and curled up beside him on the sofa.

‘Nice day?’ she asked.

Matt grunted in return.

Hope tried again. She was absolutely determined they were going to have a lovely coupley evening in for his birthday. She adored nights like this. She and Matt having a companionable dinner together and their beloved children asleep upstairs – that was what happy families were all about. She knew it, she insisted on it.

But Matt was having none of it. He watched the television intently, his lean body sunk back against the sofa cushions, his handsome face in profile with his eyes hooded as he concentrated.

After a few more of Hope’s attempts at conversation, he sighed and asked when dinner was.

‘Now, soon,’ Hope said, jumping off the sofa and heading back into the kitchen.

She lit the candles on the kitchen table, repositioned the burgundy linen napkins someone had given them when they’d got married and dished up the second dinner of the day.

Instinctively, Matt appeared as soon as his plate landed on the matching burgundy linen mat. He dug in hungrily.

‘This is lovely, isn’t it?’ Hope said.

‘Mm,’ grunted Matt, one eye still on the television which was visible from his seat at the table. News had been replaced by the monotonous roar of motor racing.

He cut his steak into small pieces so he could fork it up without missing a bit of the action.

‘Is everything all right?’ Hope asked.

‘Yeah, it’s lovely. Nice bit of steak,’ he replied.

‘I didn’t mean the steak.’

Matt sighed and took his eye off the TV for a brief moment. ‘Hope, do we have to have one of these “is everything OK?” conversations tonight? I’m tired, I’ve had a hard day and I’d like to relax if that’s not too much to ask.’

Her eyes brimmed.

‘Sure, fine.’

The commentator’s voice droned on and Hope ate her meal mechanically, not tasting anything, worrying.

There was something wrong, she knew it. Had known it for weeks. Matt wasn’t happy and she was sure it was nothing to do with his job. It had to be personal, something about him and her, something terrible.

He’d been depressed since his favourite uncle had died in Ireland two months ago, and at first, Hope had thought Matt was feeling guilty because he hadn’t seen Gearóid for years. Matt’s family were terrible for keeping in touch and when they’d first been married, Hope, who’d expected to be welcomed into the bosom of a real family at long last, had been astonished to find that the Parker family had only one trait in common: apathy about family get-togethers. His parents were remarkably self-sufficient people who’d had Matt, their only child, late in life and clearly weren’t pleased at the intrusion of a small child into their busy lives. Now that he was an adult with a wife, they appeared to think they’d done their bit. Hope found it impossible to understand this, but was grateful that, despite his upbringing, Matt was so passionate about her and the children.

Sam wisely said it was clear that Matt was determined to live his life very differently from the way his austere and cold family lived. ‘He’s insecure about people loving him and he needs you. That’s why he’s so controlling,’ Sam had added, with a rare touch of harshness.

Hope just wished she was sure her husband needed her. If she was sure of that, she wouldn’t be so nervous about asking him what was wrong. Was it Gearóid’s death? He’d been incredibly fond of the eccentric uncle he used to spend summers with as a child.

But when she’d tried to comfort him about Gearóid, Matt had snapped at her, so perhaps it wasn’t that. What was it, then?

She knew she should be quiet, that it was fatal to probe at this unknown awfulness, because once she’d probed, she’d know and she wouldn’t be able to bury her head in the sand and pretend everything was OK. But she had to probe.

‘Don’t tell me it’s nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘I know you’re not happy, Matt.’

‘OK, you’re right, you’re right,’ he snapped, slamming down his fork. ‘I’m not happy. You win first prize for noticing.’

‘I just want to help,’ Hope said in a small voice.

‘I’m just…oh,’ he threw his hands in the air, ‘I don’t know. I’m a bit down, that’s all. Unfulfilled, pissed off, depressed, I don’t know what you call it.’

She stared at him mutely, not knowing what was coming next.

‘Don’t say it’s a mid-life crisis,’ he added harshly. ‘That’s what bloody Dan said. Said I’d be running off with a seventeen-year-old soon.’

Hope flinched.

‘He was only joking,’ Matt said, seeing her face. ‘Who’d want me?’ he added in a voice resonant with bitterness. ‘I mean, I’m forty and what have I done? Nothing. Worked my butt off for years for what? A decent car and the chance of a good pension. I haven’t done anything, not anything I’m proud of.’

‘You’ve got Millie and Toby,’ Hope said weakly, not wanting to add ‘…and me,’ in case Matt didn’t feel as if she was much of an asset.

‘I know, I know, it’s a…male thing.’ Matt seemed lost for words, possibly for the first time in his life. He couldn’t appear to say what he meant. Or perhaps he knew exactly what he wanted to say but wanted her to figure it out. He was leaving, that had to be it.

Hope waited, guts clenching in painful spasm. This was it: Matt was leaving. People left all the time. Her mother and father had left before she’d had a chance to know them, just when she needed them. All right, they’d died, so that was different. But Hope had been expecting Matt to leave almost from the moment she’d fallen in love with him. History repeating itself. There had to be a price for winning such a handsome man – you could never be sure of him, never keep him. All the fears Hope had successfully kept to herself over the years were coming to the surface.

Matt was watching her across the table. He knew her background, knew her horror of being abandoned. ‘It’s alright,’ he said sharply, almost harshly. ‘I’m not going to leave.’

The tears Hope had been successfully holding off now flowed unchecked. She knew he was lying: it was obvious. There was someone else, he wanted to leave her and it was just a matter of time. He’d merely decided not to dump her on his birthday.

‘I’m going through a bad time and I’m trying to deal with it,’ Matt said. ‘I’m better if you leave me to it.’

‘But I can’t,’ whispered Hope. ‘I love you so much, and I can’t bear it if you feel upset. I mean…’ she pushed aside her plate, her appetite gone, ‘I’d do anything to make it all right.’ She was too scared to ask him if there was someone else. Too afraid that he’d tell her the truth.

‘You can’t make it all right,’ Matt said bluntly. ‘I’m the one suffering the mid-life crisis, not you. You can’t magic it away so we can play happy families. Life isn’t like that. Now can we just have our dinner and try and have a relaxed evening? Please,’ he added more gently. ‘I don’t feel up to talking about it.’

Hope nodded. She poked her steak around the plate, trying to pretend she was hungry. Matt went back to eating and watching the television.

She watched him surreptitiously, her nerves in tatters, wishing she wasn’t so needy and pathetically hungry for love that she’d take any excuse. She didn’t believe a word of it. Matt was lying. If only she were stronger, she’d demand the truth. Someone like Sam would have sent the entire dinner flying and demanded an explanation. She’d have yelled that he wasn’t moving from his seat until he told her exactly what was wrong and cut all the crap about how he was better off dealing with it on his own. Hope knew how Sam would handle this situation, because Sam’s responses were programmed into her brain. You didn’t grow up practically joined at the hip to your older sister without knowing everything about her. But that didn’t mean you could apply her no-holds-barred type of reaction to your own life. Sadly no.

Hope, hating confrontation and loving Matt almost obsessively, was content to know nothing if that was what Matt wanted.

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.

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 immediately turned to his neighbour, the agency’s commercials director, a quiet woman named Elizabeth.

Soon, she was laughing too.

Hope sighed and took another big slug of wine. She wasn’t a heavy drinker but the thought flitted through her mind that perhaps tonight was the night to get plastered and confront Matt. She’d never have the nerve unless she was drunk…

Then again, Matt would go ballistic if she got drunk and made a fool of herself. These people were Matt’s colleagues, she must make an effort. But it wasn’t easy. Tortured by thoughts of Matt’s infidelity and watching all the women at their table like a hawk, in case she was one of them, Hope was not enjoying herself. The silence at her side of the table was deafening, made all the more obvious by the machine gun rattle of conversation on the other side. Adam ate like he was starving, only speaking when he wanted butter, pepper for his smoked salmon, or the bottle of wine passed down his end. Hope gave up trying when her third stab at conversation (‘Are you and Jasmine going anywhere nice on holiday?’) was deflected with a grunted ‘no’. Adam looked grim at the notion, as if he wasn’t letting Jasmine go anywhere she’d be able to stun passing men with the sight of her in a sliver of uplift bikini.

Peter, the student, was eager to discuss his thesis whenever Hope turned in his direction.

‘I’d really like to develop the idea into a book,’ he was saying grandly in between hoovering up goats’ cheese salad, ‘but bizarrely, I can’t get anyone interested.’

Hope had tuned out by now but nodded and said ‘Really? How interesting.’ She wished she was more like Sam who could invest the words ‘how interesting’ with an iciness that would freeze the Pacific Ocean and immediately make the other person realize they were the exact opposite of interesting.

‘Funding is the problem, control of funding,’ Peter said, tapping his bony nose mysteriously. ‘It’s impossible to get funding for the really worthwhile projects like mine,’ he added pompously.

‘It is outrageous that so many commercial books get published when worthy, unsaleable books like yours don’t,’ Hope said gravely.

Peter blinked at her, unsure whether she was serious or not. But Hope’s face was the picture of earnestness.

‘Well, yes,’ he drivelled on, satisfied that Matt Parker’s quiet little wife couldn’t possibly have been mocking him. ‘You see, if you let me explain my theories…’

In desperation, Hope turned to find that Adam was now talking business to Sadie, the art director. Sadie’s eyes caught Hope’s briefly but as Adam was talking, Hope couldn’t interrupt. Adam ignored Hope completely. Just like Matt, she thought bitterly. He’d barely looked at her during the first course, concentrating on making everyone else laugh and have a great time.

‘You can see the problem,’ Peter continued as she turned back to him.

‘Of course,’ Hope said, wondering why the hell she’d been looking forward to an evening out when it was proving as thrilling as having her blackheads squeezed. She’d thought it might be more enjoyable than enduring another silent evening of telly-watching at home. But at least at home, her mind was taken off its problems thanks to prime time viewing.

‘More wine, Hope?’ asked her husband from the other side of the table, seeing no-one else had bothered to refill her glass.

She nodded glumly.

Matt’s long fingers reached across the table and touched hers. He winked at her and mouthed ‘thank you’. Thank you for being bored senseless on my behalf, she hoped he meant. She smiled weakly back with relief. He did love her, he did. She knew Matt well enough to know he was trying to make up. Even if there was somebody else, she could weather it as long as Matt loved her. Hope gave his fingers a final squeeze.