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Chapter 2

A lot of people have to deal with bad situations in their lives, and the things that had gone wrong for me before I met Joe weren’t really that bad at all, in the greater scheme of things.

The first time there was any indication that something might be wrong was during my second year at university. I’d had glandular fever, so for a while I thought that was why I was tearful and felt so low. But when all the other symptoms finally cleared up and I was still miserable for no apparent reason, the doctor diagnosed depression.

Fortunately, the antidepressants I was given worked well. So well, in fact, that I eventually decided it had just been an isolated incident and I stopped taking them. And then, of course, the depression came back. It was disappointing to have to face the fact that it hadn’t been ‘cured’ after all, and it was frustrating every time it recurred over the next few years. I was lucky, though, because it wasn’t ever bad enough to interfere with my life to any significant extent and I never had to be hospitalised.

I was doing a degree in the history of art when I had the first episode of depression, and I was lucky again in that it didn’t disrupt my studies and I was able to go on to finish my course. After my BA, I did a Masters degree, then worked as a temp for a while, before doing an internship at an auction house and eventually getting a job in an art gallery. A couple of years later, I was promoted within the same company and started earning a reasonable salary, which enabled me to pay to see a psychiatrist privately every few months, for reassurance as much as anything else.

I had all the usual insecurities and doubts most young people have about being ‘good enough’, but I had a good social life, was doing a job I enjoyed and, thanks largely to the tablets and to some cognitive behavioural therapy – which I found really useful – rarely had to take a day off work because of depression. So, apart from my family and the close friends who knew about my experience at university, no one was aware that there had ever been anything wrong with me at all.

The company I was working for had galleries and offices in numerous cities around the UK and abroad, and I was moved around a bit for the first couple of years after I was promoted, although only ever to places in England. By the time I started working on a more permanent basis in London, I’d been going out with my boyfriend Jack for almost four years.

Jack worked in an advertising agency in the Midlands and came to London most weekends to stay with me at the flat I shared with a friend from university. He planned to move down permanently as soon as the right job came up, and we were saving to buy a flat together. In fact, we’d begun to talk about getting married, and then he came to London one Friday evening and told me it was over.

Looking back on it now, I think that if Jack had already got a job in London our relationship might have ended sooner. We’d been together for seven years when he broke it off, and although we were comfortable in each other’s company, people change in their twenties, and in reality we no longer had very much in common and had been drifting apart. It was only because we didn’t see each other every day that we hadn’t noticed that was the case – although I realise, in retrospect, that Jack must have been more aware of it than I was.

It’s much easier to rationalise things when you look back on them from the distance of a few years than it is when you’ve just been dumped, and when Jack dumped me I was completely heartbroken. ‘Can’t we try to make it work?’ I kept pleading with him that Friday evening. But he’d made up his mind and nothing I could say was going to change it. He did try to be kind, though, and because he knew the break-up would come as a complete bolt from the blue to me and I’d be very upset, he’d arranged for my mum to be in London that weekend. He must have texted her before he left my flat, a couple of hours after he’d broken the news to me, because she turned up just a few minutes later.

I know Mum was worried about me and that she really did want to help. But there was probably nothing she could have said that would have reduced the impact of what felt almost like a physical blow. I was in a state of shock and certainly didn’t believe her when she told me everything was going to be okay and that I’d feel better about it all in a few days. I was twenty-nine years old, had believed Jack and I would be together for the rest of our lives, and just wanted to be left alone with my grief. So Mum went home the next morning, and I spent the rest of the weekend on my own in the flat, crying until I ran out of tears.

I didn’t want to go into work on the Monday morning. I didn’t want anyone to see me looking tear-stained and hopeless, and I couldn’t bear the thought of having to talk to people or, even worse, of suddenly bursting into tears. But I didn’t have much choice. I’d recently started working on a project that involved organising an exhibition at an art gallery in a town some distance from London, where I had to stay in a hotel for a couple of nights during the week. I was due to go back there that Monday morning, and had arranged a couple of important meetings for later in the day. I would have called in sick if it hadn’t been for the fact that I knew the art specialist I was working with was on a tight schedule and was relying on me to help him get the job done on time.

So when the train pulled out of the station in London on Monday morning, I was on it, looking tired and strained, and trying not to think about everything I’d just lost or the fact that, in the space of just two very miserable days, almost every aspect of the life I thought I was going to have had changed.

The art specialist, Anthony, and I were staying at the same hotel and would often have something to eat together in the evenings. And although I tried to act normally that first Monday, he could obviously see that something was wrong. So eventually, when we got back to the hotel, I stopped saying, ‘Yes, fine, thanks,’ whenever he asked if I was all right, and told him that my boyfriend and I had split up. He was very nice, and seemed to understand that I didn’t want to talk about it. Which meant that, for the next couple of days, I was able to throw myself into my work and not think about Jack or the future – until I was alone in my hotel room at night, when there was nothing to distract me from the misery that threatened to overwhelm me.

Somehow, I got through one day, then the next, then the rest of the week, then the weekend, which I spent alone again in the flat in London, snatching up my phone every time it rang in case it was Jack, calling to say he’d changed his mind; then not answering it because it wasn’t ever him.

The first phase of the work I was doing with Anthony took a couple of months to complete, by which time I was getting better at pretending – to other people, at least – that everything was going to be all right, although I didn’t actually believe that for a moment. While I was with Jack, I hadn’t really thought about the future, except in general terms when we talked about getting married or about where we’d live and what sort of flat we’d buy when we had saved up enough money for a deposit. ‘After Jack’, I did try to imagine the future, but whenever I did I couldn’t see anything in it for me at all, which was something I found incredibly frightening.

Looking back on it now, I realise that being dumped by Jack after we’d been together for seven years had shattered my already shaky self-confidence. At the time, however, I simply thought there was something wrong with me, that he had dumped me because I wasn’t good enough, and that no other man would ever want me. So when Anthony and I got a bit drunk one evening at the hotel and ended up kissing, I was grateful to him for making me feel wanted again, even if it was only for a few minutes before embarrassment kicked in.

I went back to London the next day and didn’t see Anthony again for a couple of weeks, when we met in another town to set up another exhibition. It was awkward at first, trying to pretend that we were purely work colleagues and that neither of us had any memory of having kissed. Then, one night, after we’d eaten our dinner together at the hotel and I’d gone back to my room, he knocked on my door and we ended up making love.

Pathetic as it might sound, it felt amazing to think that someone liked me enough to want to have sex with me, and that perhaps I did have something to offer after all. Anthony hadn’t tried to hide the fact that he was married, so I had absolutely no excuse for getting involved with him. But when he told me that he hadn’t ever had an affair before, that he loved me and simply couldn’t help himself, the extraordinary thought began to form in my mind that maybe Jack didn’t leave me because I’m unlovable and maybe my mother had been right and everything was going to be okay.

On the days when I was working with Anthony we maintained the same polite professional relationship we’d always had, then spent the nights together at whatever hotel we were staying at. So I don’t think anyone guessed that there was something going on between us. If they did, they didn’t ever say anything.

I can’t remember what I thought at the time about what we were doing, or what I really felt about Anthony. Although he wasn’t particularly charismatic or good-looking, he was a nice guy – if a man who cheats on his wife can ever really be called ‘nice’. It’s so stupid when I think about it now, and so naïve of me to have believed him when he told me some clichéd nonsense about his wife not understanding him. I imagine the truth was that she understood him only too well; and maybe his teenage son and daughter did too.

As Anthony was the one that was married, it could be said that his ‘sin’ was greater than mine. But I know that, in reality, I was as culpable as he was, because I knew that what I was doing was dishonest, which is why I didn’t tell any of my friends about him, not even my flatmate Connie or my best friend, Sarah. All I can say in my defence – and I know it’s a weak argument – is that I was so desperate to be loved and to feel valued that, at that particular moment in my life, I probably would have become involved with almost anyone who’d paid me any loving attention.

Anthony and I worked together on a few more projects after the first two, and spent pretty much every night together while we were away. He came to my flat in London sometimes too, on evenings during the week when Connie wasn’t there, although he never stayed the night. He often told me he loved me, and I told myself that I’d fallen in love with him. Or maybe it wasn’t simply a case of ‘telling myself’; maybe I really did love him. I certainly thought I did at the time. But now I don’t really know what I felt about anything.

We’d been seeing each other for a few weeks when something happened that should have rung alarm bells in my mind, but that completely failed to register with me as being peculiar in any way. I’d just been introduced to a researcher at an auction house where Anthony and I had been having some meetings, and while it was obvious that he already knew her, she was very frosty with him. When we were alone at the hotel later that evening, he made a point of telling me she was married and that they had an awkward relationship ‘because I think she thought I once tried to make a move on her’. I didn’t think any more about it until some time later, when I discovered he’d actually had numerous affairs before me, and that it was quite likely he was seeing other women while we were ‘together’.

Sometimes, Anthony talked about his wife and about how things weren’t working out between them. He didn’t ever say he’d leave her, though, and I didn’t ever ask him if he would. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen in the long term. I can’t really remember thinking about it at all. I was just happy to have someone – if you can call stealing time with someone else’s husband ‘having someone’.

You might think that having an affair with a married man would be complicated, whereas it was actually quite the opposite. The fact that he wasn’t ‘available’ meant that we weren’t a couple in the normal sense of the word, and as long as I didn’t allow myself to feel too much, every aspect of our relationship was beyond my control – which meant that I didn’t have to make any decisions, about the present or the future.

I’m the sort of person who likes to have people around me and things to do, so the weekends were very lonely. For years, Jack had been there every weekend and we’d done all the normal, reassuring things couples do. It seems like a very shallow thing to say in the circumstances, but even when I was seeing Anthony I think I was still clinging to the faint hope that Jack and I would get back together. I doubt whether it was ever a realistic hope, but it was kept alive to some extent by the fact that I was getting mixed messages from Jack, for example when he called in for a chat while I was at work one day, and when he sent me a card and a present for my thirtieth birthday.

One thing I’ve learned during the last few years is that you never really know what you’ll do in a particular situation. So I can’t say for certain that I’d have dropped Anthony if Jack had told me he’d changed his mind and wanted us to try to make a go of it. But I think I probably would have done so. Because even though I was in denial about it, I think I knew that my relationship with Anthony wasn’t going anywhere. We didn’t have to discuss it for me to realise that he wasn’t going to leave his wife and children. In fact, I don’t think that’s what I wanted. Selfish as it sounds, the hours I spent with him were just a distraction from the loneliness and misery I felt when I was on my own.

By the time I was thirty years old I had a good job, money in the bank, and friends who were getting married, buying houses, having children and doing all the other things I’d thought I was going to do with Jack – which it now looked as though I might never do at all. It didn’t matter how sternly I told myself, ‘It’s just a break-up. People go through far worse things in their lives. You’ll get over it. You’ll move on and meet someone else.’ I didn’t really believe it.

It felt as though Anthony was holding my head above water and that even though our relationship was wrong and probably didn’t have any future, I might drown without him. So I told myself we were well suited and things would work out, and ignored what I suspected to be the truth – that we weren’t and they wouldn’t.

Then one Saturday morning, when I was alone in the flat, wondering what to do with myself for the rest of the weekend, Anthony phoned. His phone calls were usually to arrange our next meeting, or sometimes just to tell me he was missing me. On that occasion, however, he was at the airport, about to board a flight to Amsterdam, and the first thing he said was, ‘We can’t go on seeing each other.’ And there it was again, the same feeling I’d had when Jack started to tell me it was all over between us, of wanting to freeze time so that whatever was going to happen next, didn’t. But the clock kept ticking and Anthony kept talking.

It turned out that his daughter had found one of my texts on his phone, which said something like ‘I miss you’ or ‘When will I see you again?’ Apparently, she’d waited until her mother was out of the house before confronting him, and then had promised not to tell her as long as he swore never to see me again.

As I listened to what Anthony was telling me, I could feel my cheeks burning with distress for his daughter and, selfishly, for myself too. My family and friends had done everything they could think of to comfort and support me when Jack dumped me. So I knew they loved me and wanted me to be happy. But I was also aware that they would be appalled – my parents especially – if they knew I was having an affair with a married man. So I hadn’t told even my closest friend. And now that I was being dumped again, I had no one to talk to, which I suppose was only what I deserved in the circumstances.

In hindsight, knowing what I know now about Anthony’s many extramarital relationships, he might have been lying about the confrontation with his daughter and the promise he’d had to make to her. Perhaps it was what he told every woman he had an affair with when he was ready to move on. Saying ‘I’m tired of you’ or ‘I’ve found someone else’ would be likely to lead to tears and pleading, possibly even to acts of revenge. Whereas ‘I still love you, but my daughter found your text message and I’m being forced to break it off for her sake’ is rather more difficult to argue with. That didn’t even cross my mind at the time, though, and I felt very guilty about my role in her distress.

So Anthony went to Amsterdam, and I spent the next few days feeling miserable and hating myself for lying to my mother every time she phoned and asked me what was wrong.

In fact, Anthony and I did start seeing each other again when he came back from Amsterdam. I can’t remember exactly how it happened, just that, despite feeling ashamed and guilty, I did want to continue our relationship and was easily persuaded to sleep with him the next time we found ourselves staying at the same hotel. The only thing that really changed was that he insisted I mustn’t ever contact him, which meant I had to wait for him to text or email me asking if my flatmate was out whenever he wanted to come to my flat for a couple of hours.

We’d been having an affair for about a year when he got a job that would take him out of London for weeks at a time. Even though we’d been seeing each other far less often during the last couple of months, we’d at least had some contact during working hours. Now, though, that was going to come to an end, and I couldn’t imagine how our relationship could continue. If only I’d realised then that the best possible thing to do would be to draw a line under the mistake I’d made and end things with Anthony. By not doing so, I not only colluded with him in the lies he was telling his family, I also missed the opportunity to dispel the dark, destructive cloud that was about to cast its shadow over almost every aspect of my life.

And then I met Joe.