If You Love Me

by Alice Keale

  ‘Damn,’ I said aloud, realising that I hadn’t positioned the cup correctly on the machine and some of the coffee had dripped down the outer surface of the white china and formed a small, dark pool on the worktop.

  ‘You lied to me!’ I was so startled by Joe’s voice that I yelped as I spun round and saw him standing in the open doorway of the kitchen. He was holding something in his hand, but it was the look on his face that made me gasp again. His lips formed a thin line – of pain or distress, I couldn’t tell which – and there was anger in his eyes where I had only ever seen love and warmth.

  My first thought was that he was in physical pain, and I took a step towards him as I asked, ‘What is it? What’s happened?’ Then I froze when he turned his head away from me as if in disgust.

  ‘I said, you lied to me.’ Joe repeated the words slowly. ‘About Anthony. So tell me, Alice, who is Anthony really, this married man who’s just a colleague?’

  And there it was – the lie, filling the space between us like something smashed and toxic.

  My heart was racing and all I could think was, ‘What have I done? How could I have been so stupid?’ Suddenly, I knew with absolute certainty that only a fool, or someone with nothing to lose, would have chosen option two. I should have told Joe about Anthony when I had the chance. I should have explained to him how ashamed I was of getting involved with a married man, but that, until the first magical evening we had spent together five weeks ago, I had truly believed I might never get over the break-up with Jack, that no one would ever want me again, and that crushing depression would eventually take over my life and destroy any chance I might have had of finding love and happiness.

  If I had done that – and if I’d had the courage to tell Anthony it was over – instead of compounding one lie with another, Joe might have understood and forgiven me. At least there would have been a chance, however slim, that he’d have valued my honesty in telling him more than he’d have despised me for having a deceitful affair with a married man. But now I risked losing him. And if I lost Joe, I’d lose everything that mattered to me. Worse still was the knowledge that I had hurt the one man I truly loved.

  Why hadn’t I thought about all that before, when there was still a chance to tell the truth voluntarily? Nothing good could come out of it now, and as the terrible permutations ran through my head, I found myself struggling to breathe. There was still one certainty, though: I couldn’t lose Joe. And as my mind began to clear, I realised that, having chosen option two, I was stuck with it, and I was going to have to lie to Joe again.

  ‘Joe …’ I reached out my hand and took another step towards him, but he turned and ran out of the kitchen and down the stairs. As I ran after him, stumbling and only just managing to grab the banister in time to save myself from falling, I saw him snatch up my iPhone from the hall table.

  ‘Give it to me,’ I pleaded with him. ‘Please, Joe, don’t …’ Grasping his hand, I tried to prise his fingers apart so that he would release the phone. But he was much stronger than me and so upset that he barely seemed to be aware that I was touching him. And while we stood there in the hallway of his house, facing what, for me, might be the worst disaster of my life, I was thinking about all the emails I’d sent Anthony, all the stupid, cowardly lies I’d told him during the last six weeks.

  I didn’t know what Joe had already seen, but I knew with desperate, gut-clenching certainty that he mustn’t read those emails. It didn’t matter that what I said in them wasn’t true. By lying to Anthony, I had betrayed Joe too. Like Judas. The two words were still echoing in my head when Joe suddenly pushed past me and ran back up the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming and bolting the door before I’d even turned and followed him.

  ‘Open the door, please, Joe.’ I pressed my forehead against it as I spoke. ‘Let me explain. Please, Joe. Just give me my phone and I can explain it all to you. It isn’t what it seems.’ I was crying now, but Joe didn’t answer. ‘If you don’t open the door, I’ll take all my pills and kill myself,’ I sobbed. I don’t know what made me say it. I don’t think I’d have done it. So perhaps, on some subconscious level, I just wanted proof that he still cared enough about me to want to stop me. And he did open the door. But when I reached out my hand and tried to grab his arm, he almost flung me against the wall as he ran past me into the kitchen, snatched an orange from the fruit bowl and threw it at me, while I stood in the doorway, shaking with anguish and despair.

  ‘I should never have trusted you,’ he shouted at me. ‘I haven’t ever told anyone some of the things I’ve told you. The first time in my life I trust someone and open up to them, and look what happens.’ His self-deprecating laugh was almost worse than his anger, which returned almost immediately as he pointed to the open door of the living room and shouted, ‘Right there on the sofa. We were sitting right there when we talked about trust for the first time. No secrets, that’s what we agreed. I asked you, Alice: is there anything else you want to tell me? And you said no. I was so happy. And now you’ve ruined everything. I don’t understand. Explain it to me, Alice. How could you do this to me?’

  Then, suddenly, his anger seemed to burst like a bubble, leaving him limp and depleted. Sinking into a chair, he put his head in his hands and began to cry. I was sobbing too, but I stayed where I was in the doorway, not daring to move towards him or try to touch him, because I knew that it was my lies and deceit that had broken him.

  When Joe eventually raised his head again, the expression on his face was like that of a vulnerable little boy who’s been overwhelmed by emotions he doesn’t understand and can’t control. I did take a step towards him then. I wanted to wrap my arms around him, to do something to smooth away the hurt and make him happy again. But I found that I couldn’t touch him, because I knew I had caused the pain he was suffering. I had taken the trust of a good man and snapped it with my bare hands. And for what? Perhaps it would have been understandable – although no less despicable – if I had loved Anthony, then or ever. But when faced with a choice between hurting a man I didn’t love and breaking the trust of a man I adored, I’d chosen – for some inexplicable, incomprehensible reason – to do the one thing that would hurt both of us more than we had ever been hurt in our lives before.

  I knew then that I couldn’t stop Joe from reading the emails I’d sent Anthony. And when he had read them he would know the truth – not that I loved Anthony, which I didn’t, but that I was a deceitful liar; and then he would leave me.

  ‘How did I become this person?’ I asked myself. I wasn’t brought up to tell lies. It was so out of character, so unlike the real me. Making the drunken decision to get involved with Anthony that first night in the hotel had been like crossing a line between honesty and deceit. Once I’d crossed it, lying seemed to have become easier – almost imperative, I’d allowed myself to believe. Now Joe hated me because I’d broken his heart; but not as much as I hated myself.

  I hadn’t seen Anthony since that miserable lunchtime we’d spent together, when I told him I loved Joe and broke things off with him, before later relenting and agreeing to meet him on his birthday. And although I’d deleted all the texts we’d exchanged, there were still emails for Joe to read, full of the false words I’d written to Anthony. So I begged him again to give me my phone and let me delete them, but he refused.

  Joe’s reaction to what I now think of as ‘the discovery’ was dramatic. He was very angry, distraught and heart-broken. But although he shouted and screamed at me, he wasn’t violent. He didn’t tell me to leave and then throw my clothes out on to the street after me, as he might have done. He didn’t even say he needed some time alone so he could think. In fact, he didn’t seem to want me to go. And as I was desperate to cling on to any part of what we’d had, in the hope of somehow being able to make amends, I called in sick at work that morning and stayed.

  For the rest of that day, Joe trawled through my emails and bombarded me with questions. I knew Joe despised me for being dishonest; I didn�
�t want him to hate me even more for being sexually amoral too. So I continued to deny that the relationship I’d had with Anthony had ever been sexual. Then Joe found the emails that proved otherwise and I realised, too late, that I’d made everything even worse than it might otherwise have been, because now he knew he couldn’t believe anything I said about anything.

  The questioning continued without a break throughout the entire day. Bizarrely, perhaps, we went to a local bistro for lunch, although we barely touched our food, in Joe’s case because the only time he stopped asking me questions was when he was dry retching.

  We hardly slept that night either. Joe wanted to know everything about my affair with Anthony, where and when we had slept, what I’d been wearing on each occasion, what I’d said to him and what he’d said to me, every tiny detail about the hotel room … Answering his endless stream of questions was exhausting and humiliating. But if that’s what it was going to take to make Joe understand why I’d lied, it was worth it.

  I still wonder sometimes what I would have done that day – the day of the discovery – if I’d known what lay ahead.

  I didn’t leave Joe’s flat that day because I was afraid that, if I did, everything would be over between us forever, and because Joe didn’t ask me to go. Instead, the barrage of questions continued, with Joe asking them in a voice that was sometimes angry, sometimes cold, and me answering them as best I could, first with more lies, then by telling him as much as I dared of the truth. I knew that, because of what he’d discovered, Joe had changed his opinion of me completely, and it felt as though everything that had been perfect was irrevocably spoiled and horrible.

  ‘How could you get involved with a married man?’ he kept asking me, and every time he said it I thought about what his dad had done when Joe was a little boy and how badly it had affected him at the time and – I realise now – ever since. ‘What you did is abhorrent,’ Joe said. And there really wasn’t anything I could do but agree.

  As well as being distraught about what I’d done to Joe, I was afraid of my mother finding out about my affair with Anthony, because I knew she would be equally appalled. And I was worried about the negative impact I knew the situation with Joe would have on our relationship at work too, although that was one of my lesser anxieties at the time.

  In the end, neither of us went to work for the rest of the week. I don’t know what excuse Joe gave. He was in quite a senior position, so I don’t suppose anyone would have questioned whatever he said. The thought of having to go in to work filled me with dread at the time, but in fact staying at home with Joe turned out to be even worse. For the rest of that week Joe never stopped questioning me except when we were asleep, between the hours of about 4 and maybe 7 or 8 a.m., when he started again, sometimes before my eyes were even open.

  When I finally admitted that my relationship with Anthony had been sexual, Joe demanded to know every tiny detail of every insignificant aspect of every single occasion when we had been together. ‘It was before you and I met,’ I told him. ‘I lied to you about Anthony because I didn’t want to lose you. He doesn’t matter to me, Joe. My affair with him was a terrible mistake. So how can it possibly make any difference, or help in any way, for you to know what colour top I was wearing the first night we had sex or what sort of cover there was on the bed in the hotel? Please, Joe. None of this is relevant to us.’

  ‘You made it relevant to us when you lied to me,’ was all he said, coldly. And I suppose he was right. But the same explanation surely didn’t apply to every other relationship I’d ever had, the details of which Joe now also wanted to know. ‘And did you cheat on them too?’ he asked me, when I told him about Jack – who he already knew about – and another boyfriend I’d had at university.

  ‘Of course I didn’t,’ I said. ‘And I didn’t cheat on you, Joe. I know I lied to you, but only because I was ashamed of what I’d done. But I didn’t sleep with Anthony after I met you. You know that’s true, Joe. I wouldn’t have wanted to, because I love you.’ And it was true. In fact, the only time I’d even seen Anthony since I’d met Joe had been that lunch we’d had together when I’d told him that our relationship was over.

  I was so weary by the end of the second day that I would have done almost anything to make the questioning stop. Anything except give up on my relationship with Joe and walk away. There had to be some way to fix what I’d broken, and if Joe thought the solution lay in the questions he was asking me, I had no alternative but to answer them, however many times he repeated them and however trivial or unrelated to anything that mattered they appeared to be.

  By the weekend, Joe was sometimes asking me the same questions over and over again for hours on end. Then he started making me write accounts of what had happened, and after he’d read them he asked me more questions.

  ‘What were you wearing the first time with him?’

  ‘What colour were your jeans?’

  ‘What top were you wearing?’

  ‘I thought you said the room was hot. If that’s true, why would you be wearing a top like that?’

  It was like a form of torture and I wanted to scream at him to stop. The first time I described an article of clothing I’d been wearing on a particular occasion, Joe made me fetch it from the wardrobe, cut it up and put it in the bin. But by the time I’d said the same thing over and over again, I became so exhausted and confused that I began to doubt myself. Was I really wearing the top I’d said I was wearing? I’d been certain about it a hundred questions earlier; but now I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps I had made a mistake. What top did I tell him it was? If I say something different the next time he asks me, he’ll think I’ve deliberately lied – for some reason I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  I knew that Joe was deeply wounded to discover that the woman he apparently thought was perfect had been sending emails to another man. But the more hours he kept me awake, the more questions he asked and then asked again, the less able I became to think logically.

  Because I felt guilty about having hurt him, I wrote the accounts he told me to write and answered his never-ending questions. Of course I had another option – I could have opened the front door and walked out of his house that first day, or the day after that, or on any of the days that followed. But I didn’t believe at the time that I had a choice. I thought that if I could manage to stick with it just a little bit longer, Joe would eventually say, ‘I understand now. I believe you. What you did has caused me enormous distress and has shaken my trust in you. But I think we’re going to be all right. I think we can get back to where we were, or at least somewhere close to it, now that I know the truth about your relationship with this married man and why you didn’t tell me about it.’

  I suppose I felt the same way gamblers must feel: if I stop now, everything I’ve already invested will be lost; whereas if I keep going, I can make it all right again, and have the man I love with all my heart back with me. So I sat there in Joe’s house for hour after miserable hour, answering and re-answering his questions, and writing and re-writing detailed accounts of irrelevant incidents.

  It was a couple of days after the discovery when Joe told me he was going to phone my mother, and although I begged him not to, he was determined. ‘She needs to know what you’ve done,’ he told me, and I felt so guilty about it that I couldn’t really argue with him. So he put the phone on speaker and I sat beside him on the bed, with my heart racing, as he said, in a calm, quiet voice, ‘Mrs Keale? Barbara? It’s Joe. I don’t know how you tell this, but your daughter has had an affair with a married man.’

  At first, Mum obviously didn’t understand what he was saying, which was reasonable enough in the circumstances. But Joe explained what had happened and told her, ‘I love Alice and I want our relationship to work. But she’s really betrayed and hurt me.’ And then my mother confirmed everything he’d already made me believe about myself by saying, ‘This is awful, Joe. I simply can’t believe it. I’m so sorry about my daughter.’

  My
mother isn’t particularly religious, but she is quite puritanical in many ways and I knew she’d be shocked by what Joe told her. To be fair, even the least censorious person would probably have shared her opinion about the amorality of having an affair with a married man – I would have done so myself a couple of years earlier. But the fact that she was so appalled by what I’d done and sided so unequivocally with Joe felt to me as though she was also endorsing his behaviour towards me and that he was right to be reacting the way he was.

  I didn’t say anything during that phone call and I don’t know if Mum could hear me crying. She didn’t speak to me, though, or even ask to do so, which was hurtful in one respect, because it didn’t even seem to cross her mind that what Joe was telling her might not be true, but was also a relief, because I didn’t want to talk to her. By the time Joe said goodbye to her I was convinced that what I’d done was on a par with the worst possible type of crime imaginable. And it was a bad thing, I know that. It’s certainly something I’m still ashamed of. But maybe it was more stupid and selfish than evil. I wouldn’t expect Anthony’s wife and children ever to forgive me if they knew. But my own mother …? Her disgust and reprobation simply reinforced what Joe was already telling me, which was that what I had done was terribly wrong.

  I don’t blame my mum for her reaction – I’m certainly not in any position to criticise her for it. It was just unfortunate that it made me feel as though I couldn’t go home, which meant that I wouldn’t have had anywhere to go if I had tried to walk away from Joe.

  My sisters were shocked too, when they found out. But they were more forgiving than my mother had been. Instead of condemning me out of hand, their attitude was that it was a stupid thing to have done, not good for anyone involved, but so out of character for me that I must have been even more upset than they’d realised about the split with Jack.