by Alice Keale
Joe insisted on my telling my best friend Sarah too. She was abroad on holiday at the time, but she sent me a text as soon as she received mine, asking, ‘Are you okay? It’s not the end of the world, you know!’ Clearly, it wasn’t the response Joe had hoped for, and when he took the phone out of my hand and read Sarah’s text, he said it proved what he already suspected – that I’d surrounded myself with friends who were as morally depraved as I was and with whom it really would be better for me not to have any further contact.
I didn’t realise it then, of course, but having made me despise myself for what I’d done, Joe was moving on to the next step – isolating me from all the people who loved me and who I cared about.
Chapter 5
Within the space of just a few weeks Joe had become the centre of my emotional life. He played a pivotal role in my working life too, and I knew that if we broke up he would make things very difficult for me. After his phone conversation with my mother, I couldn’t bear the thought of going home to face her disapproval and disappointment. And as I was also too ashamed to face my friends, so didn’t feel that I had anywhere else to go, I was trapped.
It was the day after Joe phoned my mum that I suggested talking to a therapist. The vehemence of his reaction to the discovery frightened me, and I knew we weren’t going to be able to deal on our own with the can of vicious worms we’d inadvertently opened. I’d been seeing a counsellor called Paula fairly regularly for some time, for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and just to have someone to talk to, having been referred to her by my psychiatrist. I saw her privately every six months or so, as a failsafe – and I always felt better after the sessions I had with her. Now, I needed to talk to her more urgently than I’d ever done before.
I felt anxious about suggesting to Joe that we should see Paula together, and I was surprised when he agreed. I wouldn’t normally have rung her on a Sunday, but I was desperate, and almost cried with relief when she answered the phone. I was sitting on the bedroom floor in my underwear when I made the call, and Joe was watching me from the bed, his back resting against the headboard as he looked at me over the top of some glasses I hadn’t ever seen him wear before. He hated glasses, he’d once told me. ‘They make me look too serious.’ But maybe his tears had washed out the contact lenses he usually wore, or maybe his eyes were as tired as mine were and they were sore. As I glanced up at him, I suddenly remembered that just a few days earlier, when we were sitting together in his bed, he’d said to me, ‘Let’s promise never to have a cross word,’ and I’d laughed and promised, because anything had seemed possible with Joe then.
‘So, Alice,’ he said now, when I finished my phone call with Paula, ‘please tell me she can fit us in. I don’t think I can get through another day like this.’
‘She said she’d see us at three,’ I told him. ‘I’m sure she’ll be able to help us, Joe.’ I knew someone had to. We’d barely slept or eaten for the last five days. When Joe wasn’t screaming at me, he was sobbing or dry retching, bending almost double as he tried to expel the vomit that was either imaginary or got stuck in his throat. He looked terrible – as I know I did too – and it was all my fault. I knew, in some abstract way, that I deserved to be punished for what I’d done. But as each exhausting, horrible day merged into the next one, I couldn’t help wondering whether there was any useful purpose to be served for either of us by the punishment Joe was so relentlessly inflicting on me.
Since the moment of the discovery, he hadn’t once asked me to leave, although, long before that Sunday, I’d begun to wish he would. Surely it would be better for him to have some time on his own, I thought, so that he could sleep and eat while he tried to work things through in his mind. But despite the huge stress my presence caused him, he seemed to want me to stay.
Joe did most of the talking during our session with Paula on that Sunday afternoon. I was so worn down by all the questioning and lack of sleep, I couldn’t think clearly enough to be able to say anything constructive. So for more than three hours I sat beside him on the couch where I’d sat on my own many times before and, while he ranted and raved, I looked out of the high sash window at the steadily darkening buildings across the road, and cried.
Although Paula remained professional and impartial throughout, I could tell by the red blotches that appeared on her neck and chest, and by the set of her lower jaw when she clenched her teeth, that she was becoming increasingly frustrated and, eventually, wanted us to go.
‘I can see that you’re very upset,’ she said to Joe, interrupting him as he asked the same question he’d asked maybe twenty times since he’d sat down. ‘But do you think it’s possible that your reaction might be a bit extreme? I wonder if we could try and …’
Now it was Joe’s turn to interrupt, although I don’t know if he’d even heard what she said. ‘Why did she do it?’ he asked yet again. ‘Why did she lie? How could she have had an affair with a married man? What sort of amoral person does that?’
Suddenly, I knew what children who have tantrums must feel like and why they throw themselves down on the floor, kicking and screaming and drumming with their fists. I wanted to do that now, to launch myself on to the neat white rug and howl like a child. In fact, I was too preoccupied by the sensation of being unable to breathe to realise immediately that the sound I could hear – like an animal in pain – was coming from me. It even made Joe stop talking for a moment. Then I threw my arms around his neck, buried my face in the soft warmth of his jumper, and kept repeating, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what I did. But please stop. I love you, Joe. I don’t want to lose you. I’ll do anything to try to move past this. But I can’t take much more. Please, please, stop.’
‘You can see how sorry she is, Joe.’ Paula had to raise her voice to be heard above the sound of my sobs. ‘You’ve only been dating for about a month. I’ve known Alice for a year, and I know that she’s a good person. She made a mistake. She admits that and she’s genuinely sorry. She wants to stay with you, Joe, and you say that you love her and want to stay with her, too. So let’s try to work towards moving past this and rebuilding your relationship.’
Everything Paula said, in her calm, measured tones, was indisputably rational and logical. Joe would see that, I was sure, because he was normally rational and logical too. All he needed was enough time to clear his head and absorb the things she’d said. So I sat silently beside him in the car on the way back to his house, wishing I was the woman I could see walking her dog on the damp pavement, or the one holding hands with a man and laughing.
Suddenly, there was a sound of screeching brakes and my head jerked sideways, then slammed against the glass on which I’d been resting it. As I turned to look at Joe, I remember thinking that I was so tired I was barely aware of the pain.
‘She didn’t know what she was talking about,’ Joe snapped at me, his eyes almost glowing with indignation and resentment. ‘I don’t agree with a single thing she said. I think we should find a new therapist, one that deals with couples. Why did you do it, Alice? Why did you betray my trust? Why did you pretend to be an honest person when really you’re nothing more than an amoral whore? Why, Alice? You’ve done this to me, and now I need you to answer my questions.’
‘Four hours,’ I thought. ‘We sat in that room for almost four hours, and it hasn’t helped Joe at all. Four hours with a therapist bought me just five minutes without any questions.’ They were questions to which I had no answers. What I’d done couldn’t be explained or excused. So what could I say?
I thought Joe had agreed to see the therapist with me because he wanted to find a reason to forgive me, so that we could work things out and get back to the way we had been – two soul mates who’d had the immense good fortune to find each other. But it was almost as if he had no intention of trying to get past what had happened and that he’d only gone with me because he thought my therapist would listen to what he said and then tell me he was right, that what I’d done was unforgivable, and explic
able only as the act of someone who was not in their right mind.
A couple of days later I phoned my psychiatrist – the one who’d originally referred me to Paula – and asked her to recommend someone else. ‘Paula told me about the session you had with her on Sunday,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘Are you all right, Alice? It sounds as though your boyfriend’s reaction is very extreme.’ Even then I didn’t hear the voice of reason in my head that must have been saying, ‘Walk away from him. Protect yourself before it’s too late.’ So I told her I was fine and that, although I did realise that Joe’s reaction might seem a bit extreme, it was only because he was so upset.
My psychiatrist recommended a man called Theo, and a couple of days later Joe and I had a joint session with him. I don’t know whether it ever crossed Joe’s mind to wonder if the two therapists might be right and the intensity of his reaction wasn’t entirely normal. They didn’t say so in so many words, of course – Theo was just as careful and measured as Paula had been. But it was clear to me that they were both subtly implying that there might be a more constructive way of dealing with what had happened.
Joe had apparently convinced himself that I had a personality disorder, so when Theo didn’t condemn my behaviour either, he made an appointment for me to see a clinical psychologist in Harley Street. When we got there, he waited downstairs while I had the assessment. But he rejected that therapist, too, when it turned out that his professional opinion didn’t support Joe’s diagnosis.
After that, Joe decided to take matters into his own hands and find a therapist who was nearer his own ‘intellectual level’, which is when he found Stephen. At least when they were discussing obscure highbrow topics Joe wasn’t ranting about my deceitful immorality. Although later, when I had a session on my own with Stephen, he told me, ‘You need to be careful, Alice,’ and asked me if I was scared of Joe. But by that time I was too scared to tell the truth. So I just said what I always said in Joe’s defence – that he was really upset – and ignored yet another warning.
Because Joe kept me up almost all night every night bombarding me with questions and demanding explanations, it wasn’t long before I was so exhausted my work began to suffer. When I did go into the office, Joe texted me or sent me emails at regular intervals, asking more questions or telling me to meet him immediately in the small derelict courtyard at the back of the building – a place where people hardly ever went. If I didn’t answer, or if I dared to say that I was busy and couldn’t go, he phoned me – and kept on phoning me until I gave in.
Every morning he synchronised our watches so that I would have no excuse to be late when he told me to meet him in the courtyard at a particular time. When I got there first, which I almost always did, I would rest my head against the rough brick wall and think about the days before the discovery. About how we always took separate lifts when we arrived at work in the mornings, so as not to arouse the interest of our colleagues, and how I would step into one while Joe stood outside and mouthed ‘I love you’ just as the doors were closing. Then I would catch sight of my reflection in the mirrored walls, realise I was smiling, and wonder how, in just a few short weeks, I’d become happier than I had ever been in my life before. They were memories that would end abruptly when the door to the courtyard banged open and I’d feel my chest tighten as Joe walked towards me. Then we’d stand against the back wall of the office building, out of sight of the windows, while he questioned some detail or demanded an apology – for maybe the hundredth time – for something I’d done, which had to be said in exactly the right tone of voice, using exactly the right words.
‘I need to know, Alice,’ he’d say. ‘I need to know if there were tissues on the bedside table in the hotel you stayed at when you were working with Anthony.’
‘What? Tissues?’ I’d be genuinely bemused. ‘I … I don’t know. Does it matter?’
‘Of course it matters,’ he would snap at me.
‘But it was a year before we even met, Joe. I don’t understand what difference it would make to anything.’
If it wasn’t tissues on a bedside table, it was something else, equally trivial in the greater scheme of things, but apparently just as important, for whatever reason, to Joe. I often attempted to explain to him that I was trying to remember accurately, but that some of the things he wanted to know about hadn’t been significant to me at the time. And sometimes, when I felt totally shattered and couldn’t remember the detail he was questioning me about, I was tempted to lie – surely any answer was as likely to satisfy or enrage him as any other. But if I did lie, I might not remember later what I’d said, and then, when he asked me again, as he was bound to do, I might say something different, and he’d fly into a rage and keep me awake all night until panic and exhaustion made me unable to sort out fact from fiction.
‘And who is Clive?’ he asked me one day. ‘Why did you send him a text saying, “That’s amazing. Looking forward to catching up. X”?’
‘Clive?’ So far beyond exhaustion and so desperate for it all to stop, I couldn’t immediately put a face to anyone called Clive. And then I remembered. ‘He’s a friend,’ I said. ‘I worked with him at a gallery once. I haven’t texted him for months, since long before I met you.’
‘So why the kiss, Alice? You didn’t mention a Clive among your past boyfriends. But if he wasn’t a boyfriend, why would you have sent him such a flirty text? And why would you add a kiss?’
‘It isn’t a flirty text.’ I hadn’t ever really understood before I became the subject of Joe’s questioning what it meant to experience despair. I was sobbing as I sank to my knees on the broken tiles of the courtyard floor. But if Joe ever did have the capacity to feel pity for another human being, he didn’t have it then. ‘Clive is just a friend, Joe. I put kisses on the end of texts to all my friends. You do it too. I’ve seen it. Everyone does it. What’s wrong with it?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Joe’s voice was almost a snarl as he repeated my question. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, Alice. It’s highly inappropriate. But I don’t suppose that’s something that would be obvious to an amoral whore.’
As he ranted on and on, his rage expanded into a frenzy of furious resentment. And while he berated me, I thought about the throbbing in my head and wondered if it was going to develop into the fierce headache I had almost daily now, because of all the crying and lack of sleep.
On one occasion when we met in the courtyard and he was spitting obscenities at me – calling me an evil, amoral, abhorrent whore – the fire exit door suddenly opened and someone I didn’t know took a step outside. Without missing a beat, Joe switched from snarling in my face to talking in a calm, pleasant voice. I don’t know if the man realised anything was amiss, or if his intention was merely to give us some privacy, but he said something to Joe I couldn’t hear, then turned around and went back into the building.
Throughout those early days after the discovery, I kept thinking I’d eventually say something that would make Joe realise he was being unreasonable. It did sometimes cross my mind to wonder if this was the real Joe, and not the caring, loving, almost perfect man I’d known for the first five weeks of our relationship. But then I would remember that Joe had trusted me and I had broken his trust and that really I was the monster in the nightmare we were living in, not him.
In the meantime, it was impossible for me to do any work at all. Even during the brief periods when I was at my desk, I couldn’t focus or concentrate on what I was meant to be doing. And not only did I look terrible, but it was embarrassing to be leaping up and leaving my desk every time my phone buzzed – which it did constantly – and then to return with my face red from crying. The people who worked at the desks near mine must have thought I’d completely lost the plot. But no one ever asked me any questions, or said anything at all. They just focused more intently on their computer screens and pretended they hadn’t noticed that I had left my desk or returned to it.
It was all right for Joe: as head of a
department he worked to his own schedule, and if he wanted to leave his desk every few minutes no one was going to ask him why. But if I didn’t do the work I was supposed to be doing, or if word got round that I was acting in a very peculiar way, as it eventually must, I could lose my job. It was a Catch-22, though, because if I didn’t meet Joe in the courtyard every time he told me to I would lose my job anyway – he would make sure that I did.
It began to seem as though he was spiralling out of control, transforming from ‘the perfect boyfriend’ into a vindictive, emotionally abusive bully. I couldn’t see any way out of the nightmare I thought I’d created. And, even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have told anyone at work what he was doing, because I knew no one would take my word against his. I couldn’t escape by going home to my parents, because I knew my mother wouldn’t ever forgive me for having an affair with a married man. And I still believed – still had to believe – that if I tried long and hard enough, I would find a way of fixing what I’d broken with my lies, and of making Joe better.
Within about a month of the discovery I was rarely going to work at all, and on the days when I did go in I did precious little that was of any use to anyone. I think Joe must have said something to my boss – who was below him in the hierarchy at work – because I wasn’t ever questioned about my absences, although I knew it was a situation that couldn’t last for much longer. Then, one evening, Joe said he thought I should take sick leave. ‘Send an email to your boss,’ he told me, ‘explaining that you’re going to have to take some time off work because you’re suffering from depression.’
It was true that I was very upset by what was happening, but I don’t think I was clinically depressed at that time. And Joe’s insistence that I should give that as the reason seemed doubly cruel in view of the fact that no one at work knew that I’d ever suffered from it. But I sent the email to my boss, and he was as sympathetic and understanding as I knew he would be, telling me to take off as much time as I needed.