A pleasant little story of love and betrayal. Not for you if you like an uninterrupted list of sexual activities, but a tale, with a beginning and an end, and a twist or two.
*
I don't doubt that reading a bank statement has bought unhappiness to many people. It's almost certainly a common thing, probably caused disasters far worse than my own. But that didn't help -- not one bit.
I was just sorting through some papers on my wife's desk at home, trying to find whether she'd paid the phone bill or something similar, something quite ordinary and innocent. That's when I found it, lying there under a pile of bills and other things.
A bank statement, from Barclays as it happened, and I probably only noticed it because we do all our stuff with HSBC, and the blue colour on the heading just caught my attention. I guess she'd chosen another bank to keep it hidden, which was ironic really, as it was that difference that led me to taking note, and flipping through it.
First I checked the name at the top, and it read Jenny Mathews, so no surprise there, but the address I'd never heard of, somewhere in the West End of London, way south of Cambridge where we lived.
Next I checked the figure at the bottom, seventeen thousand five hundred and forty six pounds, a tidy balance, but where had it come from; I had no idea. Then I looked at the list of transactions over the last three months, and was staggered at the regular large sums of money that had been going into it. Six hundred pounds one day, over a thousand a week later, then eight hundred just six days later, and so it went on.
Now I make a good living from my business, and was used to largish sums of money, but Jenny only did a bit of part time work for some public relations company, an occasional afternoon, or more likely an evening, at the most a week end, standing in for someone at some function or other, and even then mainly only for the fun of it, as it didn't pay a fortune.
It was when I scanned the list of payouts that I was really thrown, as there; every month was the same sum of money taken out by standing order, five hundred and sixty seven pounds. The sum sounded worryingly familiar.
I walked over to her cabinet, a fancy old fashion rolled top affair from the late nineteenth century, opened it, and got out my wife's banking file. She was always very neat and precise Jenny, and I knew exactly where to look as we shared everything, no secrets between us. Or at least there hadn't been till then. I found the HSBC statements, and scanned through them quickly till I found what I wanted, having no compunctions about going through her bank details, as she showed them to me regularly.
There it was in black and white, her salary from the agency, five hundred and sixty seven pounds every month!
I was lost, absolutely lost. It seemed that Jenny was paying herself her own salary from her own bank account.
Why the hell would she do that?
Did she really have a job at all?
Where on earth did the money come from in the first place?
Was this something to worry about, and was it any of my business?
Like hell it was. What was Jenny up to?
I grabbed the Barclays statement again, and studied it in more detail, realising that virtually the only money ever withdrawn seemed to be the monthly payments, whereas the payments in, were sporadic, frequent, but with no pattern to them. It then occurred to me that there was an awful lot more money going in, than coming out, so I looked back at the balance at the bottom of the last page.
Bloody hell!
It wasn't seventeen thousand five hundred and forty six pounds. I'd missed a zero, and it was one hundred and seventy five thousand, four hundred and sixty.
Fucking hell!
----------------------------------------------------
My name is Jim Mathews, I'm thirty-eight, quite presentable, and run my own computor business, where I employ two other people. My wife Jenny is twenty eight, ten years to the week younger than me, and to my mind just about the right age difference. I give her my maturity, such as I have, my experience in life, and a very comfortable life style. She gives me her relative youth, her beauty, which she has in abundance, and all the fun in the world.
We both give one another our loving, both spiritually and physically, without reserve.
We are both, without doubt, after three years of marriage, still head over heels in love with one another, as I had been since our first date.
I'd been up in London for a meeting with a guy to discuss some deal with Google, and I was sitting in the Hotel bar afterwards, thinking about the possible advantages of going along with their idea. Then Jenny walked in, and my insides flipped. It's not that I didn't have a girl friend, in fact I probably had too many, but none of them were that special. Somehow I knew that she could be special, but only if I could get to know her.
Jenny was five foot six tall, slim, with nice shapely, tanned legs that seemed to go on forever, from the dainty high heels on her feet, till they disappeared under the very short cocktail dress that she wore. She had longish dark hair, and deep brown eyes with a cute little turned up nose. My dream girl wasn't a classic beauty, but she didn't need to be, and every man in the place must have been eyeing her up, all no doubt with similar thoughts to my own.
She simply oozed breeding, elegance, confidence, fun and sex, and not necessarily in that order.
I'm sure everyone watched her as she looked around, nodding to the receptionist who obviously knew her, no doubt a regular resident.
Then she looked straight at me and my insides did a somersault, as her soft brown eyes melted away any doubts that I wanted her.
I smiled back, and acknowledged her, wondering what the hell to do next, but didn't have to worry about it. A smile that would have lit up the street outside flashed across her face, and she walked towards me, her hips swinging lightly to emphasize her shapely body, her breasts, ample, but not too large, swaying in time with her steps, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, she didn't have an awful lot on underneath that dress.
" Hi, you must be James," she said to my surprise.
"Jim, not James," I replied, my voice perhaps a bit hoarse.
"James, Jim, what's the difference?" She laughed, and I wasn't about to argue with her.
"May I sit down?" she asked, in her rather clipped very British upper class, but very sweet accent.
"Of course, of course," came my urgent response, leaping up to pull the chair back for her.
Even the way she sat down showed class, as if she had been taught how to do it at some posh finishing school.
I wondered, why me? What had I done to earn the attention of this dream on legs of a woman? How on earth did she know my name?
"I'm Jenny," she said. "Sorry I'm late, but I got held up. Thanks for waiting."
She then looked at me, and asked, "Are you OK Jim?"
I was. I was fine, but she later laughed as she told me that I had looked totally shocked.
I recovered quickly however, and within moments we were engaged in gentle banter, delighted to discover that we shared so many interests, the same music, tennis, Indian food, and believe it or not even rugby. Jenny was an educated woman, and could speak about a whole range of subjects, unlike the semi bimbos that I had been with lately.
Then her mobile rang, she excused herself and answered it. I heard her say, "No I'm here............ No he's here as well......... Couldn't be, he's here with me.......... Oh dear, Oh Golly....hang on a mo."
She looked at me quizzically, the smile returning to her lovely features, and I stared back.
"Were you expecting me by any chance?" She asked.
"No. But I'm very pleased you arrived," I replied cheekily.
"You're not James Green at all, are you?"
"No, I'm Jim Mathews."
"Oh shit," she said as she giggled, and lifted her mobile " Cock-up!" She said into it. "I was late and I've got the wrong James...or Jim actually."
Her use of profanities with her posh accent was wonderful. Sounded so out of place, yet so natural. She turned her head and half covered her mouth so that I could not make out the next few exchanges between her and whoever was on the other end of the line. I just knew I was going to lose her in the next few minutes, and desperately tried to think of something witty to say the moment she ended the call.
Then Jenny looked back at me, still holding the phone, that smile, verging on a grin, spreading back across her face.
"No he's quite cute actually," she said into the phone, but staring straight at me, making sure that I could hear. "Rather good looking in a rugged sort of way."
I think I may have blushed.
"OK then. Give him my apologies. Next time he's in the UK maybe," and she finished her conversation, slipping her mobile back into her bag.
"Well then," she said. "Looks like I've missed my appointment.... Never mind it'll keep."
The smile never left her face. "Assuming you're free this evening, what do you fancy doing, and how about we do it together?"
I refrained from telling her what my first choice would have been, and suggested that we had dinner. She readily agreed and that's exactly what we did. The best meal of my life, and I hardly noticed what we eat. I was already under her spell.
Jenny told me about her job in PR, how she set up meetings, arranged discrete functions, helped her agency to put people together in the right place at the right time. She obviously loved it, and I was already hoping that she could love me as much.
After the meal I walked her back to the taxi rank, overjoyed to see that there was a small queue, and that I would have more time to chat, and this time to hold her.
I put my arm around her and she snuggled up, sliding her arm around my waist, and cuddling up to me. I kissed her lightly on the cheek, and she returned the favour, just the sweet smell of her sending my senses into overdrive.
Then she looked round, manoeuvred me between her and the others in the queue, put her arms up around my neck, and pulled me down till our lips met.
