by Alice Keale
When the police officers let us go and we were walking back to the hotel, Joe asked me, ‘What name did you give them?’
‘My name,’ I said, bemused by the question. ‘Why? What name did you give them?’
‘A fake one, you fool! I don’t believe it, Alice.’ Joe was instantly furious again. ‘Are you trying to get me into trouble? Is that what you want to do? Why would you do that to me when it’s all your fault? When everything is your fault?’
Why hadn’t I thought to give a fake name too, I wondered. It was a mistake I paid the price for that night when we were alone in our room at the hotel and Joe punctuated each question and accusation he spat at me by banging my head on the floor.
We went on other holidays and trips abroad after Greece, while my savings lasted – to Paris for just one night to see a ballet at the Palais Garnier, to Capri for a few days, and to Rome for a week. I don’t know how long it was, and how many holidays we’d been on, before I allowed myself to wonder if there was ever going to be anything I could do to convince Joe that I loved him as much as he’d believed I did during the first few weeks of our relationship, before the discovery. I hadn’t completely lost faith in the possibility by the time we went to Rome, although I came close to it on the second evening we were there. We were sitting outside a café near the Piazza Navona when Joe suddenly said that he wanted me to buy him ten unique and original gifts.
‘You don’t mean now?’ I asked him. But of course he did.
‘You’ve got more than an hour before the shops shut,’ he said. ‘That’s plenty of time.’
‘I’m not doing it.’ There was a finality in my voice that belied the sick feeling of anxiety I always had when I knew that, however much I argued and tried to reason with Joe, I would end up doing whatever pointless, stressful new task he’d thought up for me to do. ‘I’ve done everything you’ve asked,’ I told him, ‘including things I never thought I’d ever do, for any reason. I did them to prove I love you, Joe. But I’ve done enough now.’
An hour later, as the shops were closing, I was still running around Rome looking for the last three ‘meaningful’ presents, without which I knew the seven I’d already bought would be negated, and Joe would go crazy. I can’t remember them all now; I know one was a beautiful hand-cut crystal whisky glass, another a notebook bound in soft Italian leather, and another a very expensive bottle of wine. By the time I returned to the café, where Joe was sitting reading his book and drinking a glass of chilled beer, I still only had eight – and, as expected, he was cruelly scathing.
‘You disappoint me once again, Alice,’ he told me, after he’d unwrapped all the gifts I’d bought him. ‘You have absolutely no originality. Even someone who didn’t know me at all could have done better than this.’
At our hotel that night his criticism turned to violence, and by the following morning I’d had enough. Smashing a glass against the side of the bath, I screamed at Joe that I was going to slash my wrists and kill myself. But he just shrugged and turned away, and I didn’t do it, of course, although I spent the rest of the day wishing I had.
That evening we went to a bar in a narrow cobbled street a short walk from the centre of the city, which was full of local people, many of them clustered around the bar itself and all apparently talking at the same time. It was quite a small room, decorated with old photographs that seemed to have been hung at random angles on walls that had once been white but were now stained yellow by all the cigarettes that had been smoked there over the years.
Joe and I sat at an old wooden table covered with a white paper tablecloth and ate our meal in relative peace, with remarkably few references to the past. Until that evening, every moment we’d spent in Rome had been miserable. But as I glanced across the table at Joe that evening, I was struck by how relaxed he looked and how different his eyes were in the absence of the dark anger that normally suffused them.
I was still watching him when he turned and took a pen out of the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of his chair, then reached across the table and started writing something on the tablecloth. When I asked him what he was doing, he paused for a moment, looked at me and smiled – and, suddenly, there he was, the Joe I had fallen in love with.
‘Shhh,’ he said gently, writing another upside-down letter on the tablecloth, so that it was legible from my side of the table. ‘Just watch and read.’
As the letters slowly took shape, I was able to make out the words, ‘WILL YOU M’.
When I looked up again, I noticed that some of the people at the tables closest to ours were watching the words form too. Surely, after all the weeks of abuse and incrimination, he couldn’t be asking me the question they, also, clearly thought he was going to ask. But a few seconds later, there it was, written in bold capital letters: ‘WILL YOU MARRY ME? XX’
Had he done the same thing two or three months earlier, Joe’s proposal would have been as unequivocally perfect as everything else about our relationship seemed to be. I could hear the people around us murmuring their romantic approval and suddenly, despite everything that had happened during the last few weeks to turn the dream into a nightmare, I was completely caught up in the excitement of the moment. When I looked across the table at Joe’s smiling, handsome face, I knew with absolute certainty that this was the man I loved, the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, whose wife I wanted to be, and whose children I wanted to bear.
‘Oh, yes, Joe,’ I said. ‘Of course I’ll marry you. I adore you.’ And, for once, the tears I wiped from my cheeks were tears of happiness.
‘I adore you too, Alice.’ Joe smiled and took my hand. ‘You are the love of my life. I knew from the moment we met that you were the perfect woman for me. That’s why I reacted the way I did.’
‘I know. I’m so sorry, Joe. You know I am. And you know how much I love you.’
I hardly dared to believe it was over, and that I’d been wrong to begin to doubt whether the real Joe would ever return. After weeks of unremitting misery, I had managed to fix what I had broken, although the happiness I felt that evening was still tinged with guilt for having made him so ill.
When we left the bar around midnight that evening, full of drinks bought for us by other customers and by the beaming bar owner himself – ‘complimenti della casa!’ – and with the sound of good wishes for our future happiness ringing in our ears, the paper tablecloth was neatly folded under my arm and I knew that Joe had chosen the perfect place to propose. Three hours later I was sitting on the floor in our hotel room, clutching the tablecloth to my chest, while Joe towered above me, shouting questions about the past and accusing me of having smiled flirtatiously at some man in the bar I couldn’t even recognise from his description and wouldn’t have noticed anyway, on the night when the man I truly loved had asked me to marry him.
Chapter 9
Joe often said I didn’t know him at all, and I suppose he was right. In the early days of our relationship, when everything was still perfect – or, at least, appeared to be – he told me about a brief fling he’d had with a young student, not long before I met him. Then one day, five or six months after the discovery, he said she’d been in contact with him again and that, ‘If you love me, you’ll let me spend a night with her.’
For someone as moralistic as Joe was, it seemed to be a particularly bizarre request and, despite everything, I was as upset as I imagine he expected me to be. ‘I don’t know how you could even suggest it,’ I told him. To which he replied, simply, ‘If you know me, Alice, you’ll let me do this.’
I continued to refuse to agree to what he was suggesting, until he eventually wore me down, as he always did about everything, by harassing me for days, both verbally and physically, and by threatening to kill himself when I said I couldn’t take it any more and was going to leave.
The plan, as Joe explained it, was that I would spend the night in a hotel while the student was at the house, sleeping with him in what should have been ‘ou
r bed’, although the last bit was never mentioned in so many words.
When the evening arrived, I kept asking Joe, ‘Am I going to this hotel or not?’ But he wouldn’t say, until about ten o’clock, when he finally told me, ‘She never was coming, Alice. You should have known I wouldn’t do that. I suppose the fact that you were prepared to agree to it just goes to prove that you don’t know me at all.’
There were many reasons apart from the constant questioning and violence why the time I spent with Joe was miserable and exhausting. Except on the days when he went to work – which were increasingly few and far between as the weeks went by – I had very little time alone, to think my own thoughts. I couldn’t spend more than a minute or two in the shower without him becoming angry and impatient, and he was often in the bathroom anyway, shouting questions at me above the sound of the water.
We both lost a lot of weight during those months too, because neither of us had much of an appetite, and because Joe always stood in the kitchen while I was cooking, demanding clarification of the insignificant minutiae of my past life. Sometimes we managed to eat whatever it was I’d made, and sometimes the violence began before I’d finished cooking it, so that it ended up burned and unappetising. Eventually, when he started snatching sharp knives out of the knife block on the work surface and threatening to kill himself, I became afraid of doing anything in the kitchen at all, and would often slip knives surreptitiously into drawers or the dishwasher while he was talking.
And it wasn’t just me that was being worn down by it all. It must have been four or five months after the discovery when Joe sent me home to Devon for the first time – because I’d made him so ill he needed to be on his own for a while, he said. But I didn’t want to go home. One reason for my reluctance was that my mother, particularly, still made it clear, on the rare occasions when I spoke to her on the phone, that she disapproved very strongly of my affair with Anthony and that she was deeply disappointed in me. Another reason was that, despite my wretched, bullied existence with Joe, I still wanted to be with him, and I was afraid that if I did leave he might never let me go back or, even worse, might do what he so often threatened to do and kill himself.
I felt responsible for Joe, and, as deranged as it may sound, I did really love him. So the thought that he might kill himself made me incredibly anxious. I don’t know if he ever had any real intention of doing it; quite possibly not. But it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take, which was one of the main reasons why I didn’t ever do, or refuse to do, anything that might push him over the edge so that he carried out his threat. And why, when he told me, at nine o’clock one evening, that he wanted me to go home, I went with him to the station, where he stood on the platform until my train pulled out.
Although he’d said he needed a break from me, it can’t have been more than five minutes before my phone rang.
‘Tell the people in the seats around you what you are, Alice,’ he demanded. ‘Are there children in the carriage? How do you think their parents will feel when they know that they’re sharing the carriage with a whore? Tell them, Alice. Do it.’
‘No, Joe,’ I whispered. ‘I’m not going to tell them. I’m tired, and so are you. We can talk later. Just leave it, Joe. Please.’
But Joe could never ‘leave it’, however ill his self-imposed role as interrogator made him feel, and he kept on phoning me for the next hour or more, insisting that I did what he was telling me to do and humiliate myself in a carriage full of people. I suppose that’s what brainwashing is, being told something over and over again until eventually all you care about is that the telling stops. So, in the end, I did shout out that I was a whore, but I did it in the space between two carriages, where the toilet is, and out of an open window, so that my voice was snatched away by the wind.
I’d been on the train for about an hour and a half when Joe phoned again and told me he’d changed his mind. ‘I want you to come back,’ he said. ‘Get off at the next stop and catch the first train back to London.’ I didn’t argue; I didn’t even think about saying no. I just crossed the platform at the next station and waited for a train to London.
It must have been about four o’clock in the morning when a taxi dropped me outside Joe’s house. It wasn’t until days later, when the same thing had happened several times, that I realised he didn’t ever intend me to get all the way home. Making me get on the train and then get off it again – at not inconsiderable cost each time – was just another way of exerting his control. And on the rare occasions when he did let me get all the way home, I always had to go back to London the next day.
I knew my parents were worried about me, and that they’d also started having concerns about what was actually happening with Joe. But I lied when they asked me direct questions and I always insisted on going back to London when he told me to.
On one of the rare occasions when he did allow me to go all the way home to Devon on the train, he said it was because I’d made him so ill he needed a few days alone to rest. I dreaded the prospect of having to defend myself in the face of my mother’s disapproval. And the reality turned out to be every bit as bad as I’d thought it would be, with Mum taking over Joe’s role of inquisitor almost as soon as I walked through the front door, although in her case it was prompted by disappointment in me, rather than aggression.
‘Why did you do it, Alice?’ she kept asking me. ‘You weren’t brought up to behave like that. I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive you. Your father and I just want to know why, Alice.’ Which made me feel like an adolescent again, sitting on the sofa in the living room while my mother scolded me for something I’d done wrong. In the past, though, they had always been small things – even if they hadn’t seemed small to Mum at the time – because I was actually quite a ‘good’ child and teenager, working hard at school and never getting into any real trouble. I suppose that’s what made it even more bemusing to my mother to learn that I’d broken what she considered to be one of the most self-evident of the ten commandments. I told her repeatedly that I was sorry, but she was as impervious to my apologies as Joe was, and instead of saying something kind and understanding, as I longed for her to do, she kept asking me ‘Why?’ and telling me how disgusted she was with me.
No one else who knew about my heinous crime reacted the way my mother did – except for Joe, of course. My sister, my therapist, my best friend, even my best friend’s mother all said they thought Joe was overreacting and that, although what I’d done clearly hadn’t been a good idea on any level, we all make mistakes, which we need to learn from and then move on. If only my own mother could have felt the same way, or, if that wasn’t possible, at least have realised how desperately I needed her to forgive me. I don’t know whether it would have made me feel that I had an alternative to being with Joe, and I would have escaped and gone home. But it might have.
So, although I hated writing the accounts Joe made me write, the fact that I had to do one while I was staying with my parents at least gave me an excuse to shut myself away in my bedroom. I wrote it on my mother’s laptop, sitting for hours at a time on the bed I’d slept in as a child, until my eyes ached and I had pins and needles in my feet. By the time I’d finished it, it was thousands of words long – easily half the length of the thesis I’d written for my Masters degree. My mother knocked on the bedroom door several times to ask if I wanted cups of tea and to try to persuade me to stop writing – even she thought what Joe had asked me to do was unreasonable. In fact, she was so worried about it that, on the second day I was there, she phoned my psychiatrist and asked her to talk to me, to try to convince me not to write the account and to discuss with me the possibility that Joe might not be entirely rational.
At first, I said I wouldn’t talk to the psychiatrist. But when my mother brought the phone into my bedroom and said, ‘It’s Dr Warburg. Please speak to her. It’s not right what Joe’s asking you to do and the way he’s treating you, despite what you did. If you won’t listen to me, talk to her,
please, Alice.’
When I took the phone she was holding out to me, I heard a familiar voice say, ‘Hello, Alice. It’s Dr Warburg. Your mum has told me what’s happened. She’s very worried about you. And I am too. I spoke to Paula, after she’d seen you and Joe together a few weeks ago, and she said she hadn’t ever seen anything like Joe’s reaction. She was very concerned about it – for your sake – and about his constant questioning. And now this – writing accounts of every minute detail of your past. It isn’t normal behaviour, Alice. But I think you know that. On some level at least. It’s emotionally abusive and controlling. You don’t deserve what he’s doing to you and you have to say no to him. If you write this absurd account, my worry is that he won’t stop at that. There’ll soon be something else he wants you to do. Something even more bizarre and unreasonable. And when you’ve done that, there’ll be something else. You have to take a stand now and not let him control your life.’
I wonder what Dr Warburg would have said if she’d known then about some of the bizarre and unreasonable things Joe was already making me do.
I didn’t take her advice, of course – obviously Joe wasn’t the only one who had lost his sense of reason. I told her I’d think about what she’d said, and then I stayed up late into the night, long after my parents had gone to bed, tapping away on the laptop, so that I could meet the deadline Joe had set me of midnight on that second night.
‘My darling Joe,’ I wrote in the last paragraph of my mini-thesis, ‘I am so very sorry for what I have done to you.’ Then I pulled my cardigan more tightly around me and tried to block out the very frightening thought that perhaps everyone else was right and not even this would fix Joe. Maybe there was nothing I could do that would make him well again. But I had to try.