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Although Joe had already asked me to move in with him, I hadn’t yet done so, and I was terrified that if he found out I wasn’t as perfect as he seemed to believe I was, it would scare him off. But I knew he was right and that we needed to know we could trust each other implicitly, which meant I was going to have to tell him the one thing I didn’t want him to know.
‘There is one thing I haven’t told you,’ I said at last, ignoring the urgent voice in my head that was shouting, ‘Don’t do this.’ Joe stopped massaging my feet, and when I dared to look up at him I saw that the smile had frozen on his face and there were anxious lines around his eyes. But it was too late to change my mind: if I didn’t tell him now, he would only try to guess what the ‘one thing’ might be, and then, as the doubt grew inside him, it would eventually obliterate the love he felt for me.
‘There is something you should know about me, Joe,’ I persisted. ‘I … I don’t like talking about it. No one knows except my family and closest friends. I didn’t tell Jack until we’d be going out for more than a year. But I want to be honest and open with you, the way I know you’ve been with me. So here goes.’ I took a deep breath and pressed my hands against my stomach. ‘I suffer from depression. I have done since I was eighteen. I take antidepressants every day – which, as you can see, work pretty well.’ I made a small sound like a rueful laugh. ‘It’s stupid, I know,’ I said quickly, suddenly wanting to keep talking so that I didn’t have to hear whatever it was Joe was going to say. ‘It isn’t something anyone should feel ashamed of or be afraid to talk about. But I do worry about what people will think of me if they know, and about it scaring them away. About it scaring you away.’
I couldn’t look at Joe while I was speaking. I didn’t want to witness wary withdrawal replace the love that, until then, I’d seen in his eyes whenever he looked at me. So I thought the worst when he gently removed my feet from his lap. Then he edged along the sofa towards me, took my hands in his and said, ‘I know, Alice. Or, at least, I guessed that it was something like that. But you’re wrong to think it might scare me away. It doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, it just makes me love you more.’
I didn’t want to remove my hands from Joe’s, so I let the tears drip slowly down my cheeks as I whispered, ‘How did you know?’
‘I saw you taking your meds one night,’ he said. ‘I just guessed.’ His arms were around me now, pressing my body against his chest so that I could breathe in the warm smell of him I loved so much. ‘But thank you, Alice. Thank you for telling me and for trusting me. I know it was difficult for you. I hope you realise now that I mean it when I say that you can talk to me about anything.’
I felt like a child whose waning faith in fairies or Father Christmas had just been restored, but who could still barely believe the good news was true. I knew Joe really meant it, though: I could tell him anything and he would still look after me and protect me, because he loved me. But even then I ignored the voice in my head that asked, derisively, ‘And what about Anthony?’
Although I didn’t want people to know about the depression, I didn’t ever try to pretend to myself that it wasn’t real. I was just wary of telling people about it because I didn’t know what they’d think, or if they’d treat me differently when they knew. Having it didn’t make me feel guilty or ashamed, though, which is the way I’d always felt about my relationship with Anthony, even before I met Joe.
Sitting with Joe’s arms around me made me feel safe and loved. So should I tell him about Anthony, and that he was still in touch with me? The knowledge of my depression hadn’t fazed him at all. Would he respond in the same way to the news that I’d had an affair with a married man who I still hadn’t told, categorically, that I was in love with someone else and it was over? Or would that be testing his love for me by pushing my luck one huge step too far?
In the end, I decided not to tell Joe my shameful secret. Instead, I would tell Anthony, once and for all, that I didn’t want to see him or have any contact with him any more.
After I started seeing Joe, I had stopped contacting Anthony, who must have realised after a few days that something was going on and sent me an email asking, ‘Are you pulling away?’ I should have been honest with him then and said ‘Yes’. How difficult would it have been to answer his email with just that one word, and to draw a line under the most shameful thing I had ever done in my life? Instead, I denied it.
I don’t know if not breaking things off with Anthony was purely cowardice on my part, because I thought ours was the only extramarital affair he’d ever had and couldn’t bring myself to hurt him when I believed he’d risked everything by falling in love with me. It sounds stupid when I actually say it like that, and I don’t think I ever did think it through clearly in those terms. I just didn’t want to compound one mistake with another by hurting him. Perhaps, even more selfishly, I was also afraid of not having a safety net if things didn’t work out with Joe – although I certainly didn’t think that consciously at the time.
The fact is, though, that whatever reason I thought I had for not telling Anthony it was all over between us, there was no excuse for telling him I missed him. And now my cowardice and duplicity were coming back to haunt me. What was worse, though, was that one day, after I’d told Joe about my depression, I agreed to meet Anthony for lunch. I didn’t want to go. I felt anxious and slightly panicky just thinking about it. But I didn’t know what else to do when he asked me. And then there we were, sitting facing each other across a table in a café, Anthony crying and refusing to look at me, while I sat staring at my uneaten food and wondering why on earth I had come.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told him again, ‘but I love Joe. What do you expect me to do, Anthony? We haven’t seen each other for weeks. You’re married. You’ve got a family, people to go home to every day. And now I’ve got someone who cares about me too. Can’t you be happy for me?’
‘Just don’t say anything else.’ Anthony’s face was contorted by distress. ‘I can’t believe that you went away with this man. I don’t think I can cope with this. I don’t want to hear any more.’ His distress had turned to anger as he spoke and he almost spat the last words at me. But I was angry too. It wasn’t fair of him to make me feel so guilty, after all the lonely hours I’d spent during the last few months, waiting and wondering if he was going to call me, not being able to text him in case his daughter looked at his phone again and told his wife that he’d been seeing someone else. He had always said that our relationship couldn’t go anywhere, that he would never leave his wife and children. He’d been honest about that at least. And I’d accepted it, because having part of someone seemed better than having no one at all.
As we sat there, silently blaming each other for our pain, I suddenly knew that I didn’t love Anthony and hadn’t ever really loved him, whatever I might have told myself. So why had I sent him emails telling him that I did? Why, even after I started seeing Joe, had I typed the words, ‘Yes, I do love you, Anthony. No one could ever equal you.’
I was telling the truth now, though. Finally, I was facing the reality of what I’d done. I didn’t know why I’d done it. But I did know that nothing could ever remove the stain my amoral actions had imprinted so irrevocably on the story of my life. I already hated the fact that I’d been someone’s mistress and a cheat, and now I felt terrible because my happiness was hurting Anthony. What I had done had been an aberration: the real Alice Keale wasn’t an amoral person; she was the person who loved Joe, openly and honestly. But Anthony knew me well enough to know that I was weak too, and that by manipulating my emotions he would make it difficult for me to cut the tenuous bond that existed between us and walk away.
Suddenly, I felt suffocated, and when Anthony stood up, having barely touched his food, I stood up too, and followed him out of the café. I’d always liked the fact that he was much taller than me, but when he stopped on the pavement outside and I looked up into his face I wondered what else I’d ever really liked about him, and why I’d allowed myself to become involved with a man who didn’t even come close to Joe, and wouldn’t have done so even if he hadn’t had a wife and family. It was hard to believe I’d been so unhappy, and so desperate for someone to want me, that I’d compromised my own integrity, risked breaking up another woman’s marriage, and convinced myself I loved him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’ve got to get back to work.’ Then I turned and walked away.
As soon as I was back in the office, I wrote an email to Anthony, unequivocal this time, telling him it really was over, that I didn’t love him and that I was tired of feeling guilty. ‘I’m happy with Joe,’ I wrote. ‘It took finding someone I really love to make me realise that our affair always was a mistake. I’m tired of lying and hiding our relationship. I want my life to be simple and uncomplicated again.’
As I typed, I felt a sense of relief flood over me. Then, just as I was about to press ‘Send’, an email appeared in my Inbox and I made the huge mistake of opening it first. By the time I’d read just the first two sentences, relief had been replaced by guilt again, because I believed that I was to blame for the pain Anthony was suffering. The sense I’d had since walking away from Anthony outside the café, of being strong and empowered by Joe’s love, simply evaporated and I knew I was too weak to cut him out of my life completely. Not because I wanted to have any contact with him, but because I felt that, having disrupted his life the way I believed I had done, it was my duty not to be the cause of distress.
So instead of sending my sensible, honest email, I agreed to meet Anthony for a drink after work a few days later, to celebrate his birthday. Then I tried to forget about him, which wasn’t difficult when I was with Joe.
One of the many things I liked so much about Joe was the fact that he was never afraid to show his feelings. I had a friend at university who went out with a guy who became almost hysterical if she tried to hold his hand in public. She left him eventually – partly because she couldn’t understand his reluctance to make what she saw as a statement to other people that they were a couple – and I can remember how bemused she was when he was upset, and how someone explained to her that some people just find it difficult to express their feelings. Well, Joe was the complete opposite of my friend’s erstwhile boyfriend, and he would often stop in the street to kiss me or tell me he loved me.
Another thing I liked about Joe was being driven by him. It’s such a simple thing, but it made me feel safe and relaxed to know that I didn’t have to do anything at all except sit beside him while he got us from wherever we were to wherever we were going. He liked to play music, loudly, in his car, and we were driving back from a restaurant one evening, singing along to his favourite song, when he suddenly stopped in the middle of the road.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him, sliding my feet back into the shoes I’d kicked off as soon as I’d sunk into my seat. ‘What is it, Joe? Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ he told me, smiling as he always did. ‘In fact, I’m more than fine. I just wanted to tell you that I love you.’ Then he undid his seat belt, opened the car door and started to get out.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked him, laughing despite my bemusement. ‘Where are you going, Joe? What if a car comes up behind us?’
‘It’s a residential street and almost midnight,’ he said. ‘No one will come up behind us. And if they do, they’ll understand when I explain that I had to stop because I was so full of love for my perfect girlfriend that I wanted to run with her to the top of that hill and tell the world how wonderful she is.’ As he spoke, he pointed to a grassy slope in the park where we often sat and read newspapers at the weekends. Then he ran around the car, opened my door with a flourish, got down on one knee on the cold tarmac and said, in mock solemnity, ‘I adore you, Alice Keale. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’
We were both laughing as he took my hand and we ran together to the top of the hill, where he wrapped me in his coat, put his arms around me, whispered, ‘I love you so much, Alice,’ and kissed me.
It was just one of Joe’s many spontaneous and romantic gestures. There were several occasions while we were on holiday in Barcelona when we found ourselves in some particularly beautiful spot and he got down on one knee and declared his undying love for me. He did it in London too, suddenly shouting ‘I love you, Alice Keale’ while we were buying food in the supermarket – which amused the other shoppers and made me blush. He left notes for me on the door of the fridge, had flowers delivered to my desk while I was at work, and ran out of the house in the middle of the night to buy chocolates at the 24-hour off-licence because I’d said, jokingly, that I wanted some.
It probably all sounds ridiculously sentimental to anyone else, the sort of over-the-top behaviour that isn’t normally indulged in by anyone beyond their teens. But I can’t describe the effect it had on me at the time. No one had ever shown me love like that before. No one had ever made me feel so special or so wanted. And as well as being in love with Joe, I think I was in love with that feeling too. I suppose that’s why I didn’t stop to wonder if it might all be too good to be true.
Chapter 4
I was thirty years old, I had a well-paid job that I loved, I’d saved up enough money to put down a deposit on a flat in London and, for the first time in my life, I had someone who was both willing and able to share with me whatever the future would bring. Why would anyone in their right mind risk throwing all that away and hurting the man they loved? In my case, the answer seems to have been because I was too afraid to say ‘It’s over’ to a man whose daughter probably hadn’t found a text on his phone and threatened to tell her mother – his wife – about me, who turned out to have had a string of girlfriends before me, and who went on to have many more when I had gone.
I don’t know why I did any of it: why I got involved with Anthony in the first place, why I didn’t break things off with him as soon as I met Joe, or why I lied to the man I truly believed was the one person who could, and would, make me happy and give me the future I’d begun to think I would never have.
When I’d agreed to have a drink with Anthony on his birthday, I think I had some misguided idea that if I told Joe most of the truth – that it was a friend’s birthday (true) and that several of us (not true) were meeting at the bar I was actually going to – it wouldn’t be as bad as lying about all of it. It was a stupid idea and a banal delusion to think that lying to Joe about anything to avoid upsetting Anthony would end any other way than in tears.
Quite late one Friday evening, a few days before Anthony’s birthday, he sent me a text. Joe was already in bed, and I was in the bathroom when the phone I’d left on the bedside table must have pinged. Although Anthony’s name would have come up on the screen, Joe didn’t say anything about it until we were getting ready to go out for coffee the next morning, when he suddenly said, ‘I’m probably just being silly, but who’s Anthony?’
That’s the trouble with telling a lie: you think, ‘It’ll just be this one’ – but it never is. Because after you’ve told one lie, there comes a time when you have to decide whether to come clean and admit it, or whether to tell another to hide the first one. It’s hard to choose the first option, especially when it involves having to admit to someone whose opinion you value that you haven’t been honest with them. But if you choose the second, you become like an inept spider, spinning a web around yourself that will eventually tangle and trap you in its silken threads. What’s even worse about the second option, however, is that the more lies you tell, the more you end up despising yourself, and then you start to doubt whether the person you love could ever really love someone like you.
I didn’t know that then, of course. So I chose option two and told Joe, ‘Oh, he’s just a colleague. He’s going to be at this birthday thing next week.’ Then I laughed and added, ‘I’m not interested in him, if that’s what you were thinking. He’s a married man, with children.’
I hated myself for the glibness of my deceit. But at least I seemed to have allayed any latent suspicions Joe might have had – or so I thought, until I found out later that he’d been planning to come to the bar and witness the truth for himself.
A few days before Anthony sent me that text, Joe had asked me for the pass code for my phone. ‘I want us to be able to read each other’s emails and texts and to merge our contacts,’ he told me, which some people might not have wanted to do, but which seemed like a nice thing to me. I don’t know why I deluded myself into believing I had nothing to hide. Perhaps all my attention was focused on fulfilling my wish to become part of something. Maybe that was also the reason why I didn’t really register the fact that, although I gave Joe my pass code and contacts, he didn’t actually give me his.
It was a Tuesday morning a couple of days before Anthony’s birthday and I was making coffee in the kitchen before work when I thought I heard Joe calling me. ‘Do you want me?’ I called back. ‘Joe? I’m in the kitchen.’ When he didn’t answer, I flicked the switch on the espresso machine and then snatched the pan of spitting milk off the hob, turning my head away as the sickly smell filled my nostrils and inhaling the far more pleasant aroma of strong coffee.
At that moment, a drop of rain hit the skylight above my head and I looked up at the grey clouds that had been gathering slowly all morning. It was the time of year I liked least: late autumn, I suppose you’d call it, although it already felt like winter. I hated the short winter days, when the sun sometimes seemed barely to have climbed above the horizon before it started sinking again, sucking all the light and energy out of the afternoon until all I wanted to do was go home and close the door.
I knew I wasn’t the only one who found the winter a bit depressing, or whose footsteps lightened and quickened when the spring came again. But on that particular day the rain and darkness of the morning didn’t bother me at all. It was five weeks since Joe and I had sat together in a bar for the first time and, for once, I was looking forward to the impending winter, when we would start putting in motion the plans we had made, to sell Joe’s house and look for one to buy together, before we got married in the spring.
I took a spoon out of the drawer and scooped up the skin that had formed on the milk in the pan, then tried to rinse it off under the tap, which never worked, but was something I did every time before dropping the spoon into the sink. I’d just put a cup on the espresso machine when I thought I heard Joe call my name again. ‘Did you say something?’ I called back, then took a step towards the kitchen door and listened. But the house was silent.
‘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.
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