If You Love Me

by Alice Keale

  Chapter 14

  Apart from my own psychotherapist and the one Joe found for himself, who we also saw together, there was only one other person I’d talked to about my affair. She wasn’t even someone of my own choosing, although I spoke to her just a few days after the discovery, at a time when I still had the capacity, if not the will, to make decisions for myself, theoretically at least. She was a neighbour of Joe’s, who he’d apparently known for about ten years but who I’d never previously met.

  Joe had insisted on my talking to her, although given his reaction to what he’d just discovered about my relationship with Anthony his explanation seemed paradoxical: ‘Helen cheated on her husband with the partner she’s with now, who’s the father of her child.’ He talked about her as though he hadn’t judged her at all, which didn’t make any sense, although who knows what tangled psychological web was involved in his relationship with her.

  ‘I’ve told her what you did,’ he said. ‘And she’s agreed to come over for a chat.’

  ‘A chat with me?’ I was appalled.

  ‘Well … yes.’ Joe seemed surprised by my reaction. ‘I think that would be a good thing. Don’t you?’

  I realised later that he didn’t actually care whether I thought it would be a good thing or not, but I already knew there was no point in arguing. Although he made it sound as though he’d arranged our bizarre tête-à-tête for my sake, so that I could unburden myself to another woman who would have every reason to understand, I think what he was really hoping for was that I would tell Helen things I hadn’t told him, and then he would be one step closer to knowing ‘the whole truth’. But even by that time there wasn’t really any more ‘truth’ to be told.

  When Helen came over one evening, Joe told me to stay in the bedroom while he talked to her first. I’d never met her before and would far rather not have spoken to her about the affair, or about any other aspect of my private life. But that clearly wasn’t an option. Everything about Joe’s idea was peculiar, including the fact that Helen didn’t seem to be surprised to have been asked to get involved. I imagine Joe had spun her a story that made it seem as though I was the one who wanted to talk to her, to unburden myself, perhaps, because I didn’t have any friends of my own to confide in.

  Eventually, Joe called me into the living room and left me alone with Helen, who was very polite. She was a nice woman, in fact, and she listened sympathetically as I related the few details I could bring myself to tell her. She must have known I didn’t want to talk to her. It would have been awkward enough talking to Sarah or any other close friend about my relationship with Anthony – had I wanted to talk about it at all. So I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to talk to a stranger, however pleasant she was. But then, nothing was my choice any more.

  ‘I’m not here to judge you,’ Helen had said. ‘I don’t know if Joe told you, but I cheated on my husband a few years ago. I know Joe wants to know what happened between you and … Anthony – was that his name? But I just want to help you both.’

  So I told her some basic details about what had happened and she made sympathetic noises. Then she went home and I never saw her again. I don’t know if Joe did.

  What I don’t understand is why Helen agreed to get involved at all. I think Joe was hoping I might confide in her and tell her some detail I hadn’t ever told him. Or perhaps he just saw it as another opportunity to humiliate me, by making me talk to a total stranger about something he knew I would never have chosen to discuss with anyone. But why had Helen gone along with it? It’s a question, like so many others about my relationship with Joe, that I don’t suppose will ever be answered.

  Another extraordinary thing that Joe had started doing – much sooner after the discovery than I originally realised – was contacting all my old boyfriends. At first I thought he was lying when he said he’d spoken on the phone to Jack, the man I went out with for several years and who I thought at the time I was going to marry. But some of the things he knew made me think that it was probably true. What was even more shocking than his quizzing of Jack was that he’d also phoned Anthony.

  I was mortified when Joe told me what he’d done, and very surprised, initially, that either of them had spoken to him at all. But, as I’ve said before, Joe can be very charming and persuasive, and usually gets what he wants eventually. And what he wanted on that occasion was to corroborate some of the things I’d told him, including some very intimate details of my past relationships – with people I’d been out with long before I ever met Anthony, let alone Joe himself.

  I hadn’t spoken to Jack at all since we’d broken up, and it was mortifying to hear Joe telling him, while I listened on speakerphone, that I was suffering from depression, had become so ill I was going to be sectioned, and that he was trying to help me. ‘Did you know she’d had an affair with a married man after you broke up?’ he asked Jack. ‘Was she faithful to you while you were together?’

  I was upset when Jack answered his questions and didn’t just tell him to go to hell. He did ask, ‘What’s going on, Alice? Are you all right?’ But I suppose he had no reason not to believe Joe’s claim that he was trying to help me, particularly when I could hear what was being said and didn’t contradict it myself. Perhaps he felt guilty too, and thought he was partly responsible for whatever was wrong with me, because he’d broken things off between us. Even so, to have answered questions like that, put to him by someone he didn’t know – even someone as plausible and convincing as Joe – was an odd thing to do, and I did resent it a bit, for a while.

  Joe also phoned a guy called Peter, who I’d been on three dates with eight years earlier. ‘Why did you go out with him at all?’ Joe had asked me one day. ‘It was obvious from the emails he sent you that he was sleazy and only after one thing. And you expect me to believe that you didn’t sleep with him? Oh come on, Alice. Really?’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I’d snapped. ‘I don’t need to defend my behaviour with Peter. I was single. I was twenty-two, for God’s sake. I’d have no reason to be ashamed about it if I had slept with him. But I didn’t.’

  ‘I know,’ Joe said at last. ‘That’s what he said, although it’s always possible that you told him to deny it.’

  I was horrified at the thought that Joe had rung a man I hadn’t seen in years, and who I would now dread seeing again if our paths ever crossed professionally – assuming I did, one day, go back to work. ‘How did you get his number? When did you speak to him? For God’s sake, Joe, are you going to check on every single relationship I’ve ever had, even the ones that weren’t really relationships at all? Are you doing this to find out if I’m telling you the truth about my past boyfriends, or if I ever cheated on any of them? Or do you suspect that Anthony isn’t the only married man I’ve had an affair with? Is that it, Joe? Despite everything I’ve told you, every tiny, embarrassing detail I’ve shared with you because you wanted to know, do you believe that I don’t actually have the capacity to be faithful? I’ve told you – I don’t know how many times – I didn’t ever sleep with Anthony after I met you, and I didn’t ever sleep with a married man before I met Anthony.’

  ‘It’s easy to get people’s phone numbers,’ Joe replied, answering the first question I’d asked him and ignoring everything else I’d said. ‘I told him you’d tried to commit suicide and that, to be able to help you, I needed to know about the dates you’d had with him.’

  ‘And he believed you?’

  ‘Of course he believed me!’ Joe sounded genuinely bemused by the question. ‘Why wouldn’t he? I’m very believable. You know that, Alice. And in answer to your other question: yes, I am going to contact all your past boyfriends. It’s what happens when you realise that the person you’re dealing with is an amoral whore. When you catch someone out in one lie, you can’t believe anything they’ve ever told you. So you need to check it all.’

  My friend Sarah was having none of it, though. ‘I am not getting involved in this,’ she told Joe when he phoned her. ‘It
’s ridiculous.’ Which made him more determined than ever that I wasn’t to have any contact with her at all.

  He used a different approach with Anthony, threatening to tell his wife if he didn’t co-operate and answer the questions Joe asked him about our affair. I was appalled when I found out he’d spoken to him, and even more upset when he made me listen to one of his calls on speakerphone. He told me later that he’d written to Anthony’s wife. And although I have no way of knowing if that’s true, I felt sorry for Anthony – until I discovered that I was just one of many young women he’d had affairs with. Maybe, if Joe really did write to her, Anthony’s wife learned something about her husband she needed to know.

  When I found out about all the other women who’d lured Anthony away from his family, temporarily at least, I did wonder whether the story about his teenage daughter finding my message on his phone was a lie too – perhaps it was the excuse he used whenever he felt that the time had come to move on. Maybe his reaction when I told him I’d found someone else was more of a control thing, rather than genuine hurt and distress.

  How did I get myself into these messes, I wondered. First compromising my own morality by getting involved with a married man who turned out to be the archetypal unfaithful husband whose wife doesn’t understand him but who has ‘never done this sort of thing before’. And then committing myself to the impossible, self-destructive task of trying to fix Joe.

  Sometimes I stayed up for hours after Joe had gone to bed, writing the accounts he continued to insist on. One night, despite having drunk numerous cups of coffee to keep myself awake, I sat at the table in the living room, watching the sky turn from red to gold as the sun began to rise, and then crawled on to the sofa and fell asleep. And that’s where Joe found me when he woke up, and he went ballistic because I hadn’t finished what I was supposed to be writing.

  One night, having drunk enough cups of coffee to be able to resist the temptation to close my eyes for a few minutes and get some rest, I stopped writing for a moment and read the words that were already scrawled across the page among many crossings-out.

  ‘I am so, so sorry for everything that has happened,’ I read. ‘For the three stages of betrayal: the cheating; maintaining contact with Anthony behind your back; and lying about what really happened. Here is the final, true account of those events. When you have read it, please, please, please forgive me. All I want is to be with you. I am trustworthy and I would do anything for you. The lying and cheating are not me. Please believe me.’

  On this occasion there were lists of questions Joe wanted me to answer about my relationship with Anthony. How many nights had I spent with him? On this particular night, in this particular hotel, were there tissues on the table beside the bed? Had I had orgasms with him? What was I wearing on this occasion or that one? And there were other questions too, about other people.

  As the sky grew lighter, I began to panic, knowing that as soon as Joe woke up he’d want to read the results of my night’s labours. The problem was, it didn’t matter how carefully I wrote each account or how many times I read it through to check it, there would always be something I’d missed, some tiny detail – insignificant to anyone except Joe – that was wrong, in that it didn’t quite tally with a previous version, and that he would focus in on immediately, with all the deadly accuracy of a Stealth Bomber.

  Forcing myself to calm down, I re-read the last paragraph one more time.

  ‘I love you for your character, your integrity, your honesty. I love you for being the most genuine person I know. I love you for helping everyone you can – for going out of your way to help friends and family. You are the most handsome man I have ever met. I love you for helping me to see my potential and for giving me the courage to change my career to one that I feel passionate about and that is worthwhile. I know that with you I will be happy. I worry that without you I will never be truly happy, I will never get better and I will remain lost. With you at my side, I know that anything is achievable. I have never felt such an affinity with anyone. We are identically matched physically and emotionally. I know that I could spend a lifetime searching and no one would come close to you. I adore you and I’m desperate not to lose you. You are the love of my life. I am terrified that I’ve lost you because of what I’ve done and the lying. I’m begging you to take a leap of faith and believe in me and trust me. I know that it is a huge ask, considering what has happened and how I have acted, but I will not let you down. I am not the risk you think I am. I know that I can make you unbelievably happy. I know that we can have an amazing life together. Yours always, Alice.’

  It wasn’t a great piece of literature, I know, but it was the last paragraph of a very long account I’d been writing for hours, and I was exhausted. What was ironic about it was that, although I said how sorry I was for lying and how I would never lie to him again, there were parts of the account I wrote that night that would have been very different if I had only told the truth.

  One of the most bizarre of the many bizarre experiences I had with Joe was taking a polygraph test. I’d answered and re-answered his questions for hour after hour, day after day, week after week. I’d written and re-written accounts and letters and lists of things I was going to do and buy for him. And he’d cross-examined my past boyfriends and, it seemed, any other man I’d ever had a drink or eaten a meal with. But he still didn’t believe I was telling the truth about some of the things he wanted to know, some of which really did seem to matter to him, and some of which couldn’t possibly have been important to anyone in their right mind. So I suppose, eventually, a lie-detector test was the inevitable next step.

  In fact, I was the one who put the idea into his head, although it was a rhetorical question born of frustration when I said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do – take a lie-detector test to prove I’m telling you the truth?’ It was a stupid thing to say in the circumstances, and I shouldn’t have been as taken aback as I was when Joe answered ‘Yes’.

  I didn’t even know it was possible for people to have ‘private’ polygraph tests. But after phoning some of the companies that came up on a Google search, I discovered that, for a few hundred pounds, someone will come to your house to do one. It turns out that it’s a service – like carpet cleaning or pest control, for example – and, although some of the companies offering it might not be wholly reputable, the one I found certainly was.

  ‘It’s our bread and butter,’ the man I spoke to on the phone told me, ‘one partner in a couple accusing the other of cheating.’ Which is very sad when you think about it. What may be less common, however, is the potential ‘liar’ paying for the test herself, as I did. But I had long ago passed the point of no return in my commitment to trying to make Joe better and I had so much invested in his recovery that, like a lost-cause gambler, I kept thinking, ‘Maybe this time.’

  The man who came to the house one early evening, not long after Joe had got back from work, was called Dave. I don’t know what I’d expected him to be like, but I was surprised by how ‘normal’ and nice he was, talking about his family and about his son who was eleven and just about to start secondary school.

  I’d had to submit a list of questions in advance, all of which Joe had written and almost all of which were related to sex – had I had orgasms with the married man, for example, or had we ever had sex outside? Joe was so convinced the test would prove that I’d been lying, he’d worked himself up into quite a state of choking and dry retching. He held it together when our visitor arrived, though, as he always did when there was anyone else there, but when Dave went to the bathroom Joe hissed at me, ‘Get this done as quickly as possible and get him out of here.’

  When Dave came back from the bathroom, he told Joe he’d have to wait in another room while I did the test. For a moment, I thought he was going to refuse. But he must have realised, as I did, that it was a condition, not an option, and that agreeing to it was the only way he was going to get the answers he wanted. So although he was very rud
e to Dave, he did go upstairs, where we could hear him pacing the floor above our heads, like a caged animal.

  I don’t know why, but I was surprised to find that a ‘real’ polygraph test is done using the same equipment and techniques as you see in films. I sat on a wooden dining chair with a couple of coiled straps stretched across my chest and things that looked like tiny blood-pressure cuffs around two of my fingers, with wires that linked them to a laptop on the table behind me, where I couldn’t see it.

  I could tell Dave was doing his best to make everything seem normal and mundane, but I was already stressed before the test began, and anxious in case my nervousness affected the results and made it look as though I was lying when I wasn’t. As he was strapping me to the machine, I’d asked Dave how reliable the results really were, and his answer had been ‘99-point-something’. But he would say that, wouldn’t he? And as I sat there, with the soles of my bare feet making damp patches on the wooden floor, I had to keep telling myself, ‘It’ll be okay. You’ve got nothing to hide.’

  Dave must have realised that I was working myself up into a state of panic – or maybe he was just used to people in my position being overly anxious – and he tried to put my mind at rest by saying, ‘Don’t worry. It’s natural to be apprehensive. That’s why we always start with some baseline questions, so that we can establish some parameters that will enable us to interpret the results specifically in relation to you.’ The problem was, there were some things I had lied to Joe about.

  About four months after the discovery, I’d decided that if Joe refused to believe me when I told him the truth about my sexual relationship with Anthony, I’d lie about it. It was stupid, but I thought it might shut him up if I told him I’d had orgasms with Anthony that had been almost as good as the ones I had with him. It didn’t, of course, because then he wanted to know how many times, when, where … After that, I sometimes alternated between telling the truth and lying, trying to second-guess the answers he wanted to hear on a particular day, but almost always failing, so that every answer to every question became punctuated by violence.