If You Love Me Read online

  That first evening I spent with Joe was quite possibly the best evening of my entire life. I don’t know whether I lacked self-confidence any more than anyone else, but I could hardly believe that someone like him could be so obviously attracted to someone like me. The hours just flew by, and when he leaned towards me, put his hands very gently on my cheeks and kissed me, it felt like coming home.

  ‘I don’t want this evening to end,’ he said, voicing the thought that had been going through my mind for the last couple of hours. ‘Will you come back to my place tonight? Let’s agree not to have sex. Just come home with me – for a sleep-over.’ Tiny lines radiated out from his eyes when he laughed. ‘I just want to go to sleep knowing you’ll be there when I wake up. I know it sounds crazy, but I think I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Alice. I’ve never felt this way before.’

  And maybe it would have sounded crazy to anyone who might have been listening in the bar that night. But it sounded perfectly sane to me, and it didn’t even cross my mind to say anything other than, ‘Yes, I will go home with you. I feel exactly the same way. I can’t explain it, but I feel as though I’ve known you for years, not just a few hours. I …’ I can’t remember now what I was going to say before Joe kissed me again and pushed every thought out of my head.

  Agreeing to go home with Joe that night was completely out of character for me. That might sound unlikely in view of the fact that, of the few things you already know about me, one is that I was having an affair with a married man. But it’s true. It was something I wouldn’t even have dreamed of doing in normal circumstances, or if it hadn’t felt as though everything in my life suddenly made sense.

  Sitting in the bar that night with a nice, uncomplicated, charismatic, interesting single man with a good job and a great sense of humour, it felt as though I might find love in my love life after all. Even more important, perhaps, was the fact that, by the end of the evening, I didn’t despise myself as much as I had done until then, because if someone like Joe could like me, there might be hope for me after all.

  Sitting there with Joe that evening just felt right somehow. I’d met a lot of sleazy execs over the previous few years, the sort of creepy guys who prey on junior colleagues – people like Anthony, in fact, although I didn’t realise that at the time. But it was clear that Joe wasn’t the sort of person to take advantage of anyone. I’d heard people at work talking about how he’d helped a colleague who was going through a difficult time in his personal life and how if it hadn’t been for Joe’s intervention the man would have lost his job. ‘He stuck his neck out for Barry when he didn’t have to,’ someone said. ‘It’s the sort of thing he does.’ Everyone seemed to like him. And now, apparently, this genuine, kind, intelligent person liked me.

  One of the many things Joe told me about himself that first evening was that he was married, although he and his wife had been separated for more years than they’d been together. ‘We got married too young,’ he told me. ‘We didn’t have any children and there wasn’t any property to be divided up – we both have jobs that enable us to support ourselves more than adequately financially. So although we haven’t seen each other for five or six years, we just never got around to divorcing.’

  Then I told him about Jack – the boyfriend I’d lived with for several years after I left university and who had broken my heart – but not about Anthony, because I didn’t want him to judge me or change his mind about liking me. In fact, by the end of that first evening Joe liking me was so important that I lied to him and said there hadn’t been anyone since Jack. That’s the trouble with doing something you know is wrong: you end up doing more wrong things – like lying, for example – because you don’t want people to find out about it.

  When we left the bar, we took a taxi back to Joe’s immaculate terraced house in a tree-lined street in an expensive part of south-west London. We didn’t have sex, as agreed. We just talked and talked into the early hours of the morning, more than I’d ever talked with anyone in my life before. And the more we talked, the more we found we had in common, and the more I felt as though I’d known Joe for years, which is the way he said he felt about me, too.

  I don’t believe the happy-ever-after love stories of Hollywood movies. But I did start to wonder that night if maybe sometimes they weren’t as far-fetched as I’d always thought they were.

  The next morning, Joe drove me to work, where I spent the rest of the day trying to concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing. And when sex was added to the agenda that evening, it was as perfect as every other aspect of our new relationship seemed to be.

  For the next two weeks, we spent almost every night together. I was supposed to be flat hunting, which was why I’d been staying in my friend Cara’s flat since the day of the riots, when I first spoke to Joe. So I didn’t have much more than a suitcase full of clothes to transport when I moved in with him a couple of weeks after our first date at the bar. It sounds crazy now, to have taken such a major step after knowing him for such a short period of time. But it just felt right. Whatever we tell ourselves, I think most of us do hope we’ve got a soul mate out there somewhere and that one day we’ll find each other and live happily ever after. So when you think you’ve actually met your soul mate, why would you wait?

  Although Jack and I had been together for years and I did love him, at no time during the course of our relationship did I ever feel what I felt with Joe almost from day one. When Jack and I split up, I’d got involved with Anthony almost by accident, because I was hurt and lonely and had begun to wonder if anyone would ever care about me again. For the last couple of years before I met Joe, and particularly after Jack dumped me, I hadn’t wanted to feel anything. Joe and I didn’t tell people at work that we were seeing each other. But that was our choice – at least, I think it was ours, rather than his, although I can’t really remember now. I did tell my friends, though, and was touched by how happy they were for me.

  When I met Joe, it felt as though I’d been swept up by a whirlwind and that, suddenly, I had a future again. When we were together in the evenings we talked almost incessantly, and about everything, including when and where we would get married – ‘I know the perfect place for our wedding,’ Joe told me – where we would live, and how many children we would have.

  The ‘perfect place for our wedding’ turned out to be a small town in France Joe had visited with his wife a couple of years after they’d got married. He described to me how he had stood on the steps of a church there one day during their holiday, looking out towards the mountains, and felt a sense of peace he’d never experienced before or since. ‘I can’t wait for you to see it,’ he said. And I told him I couldn’t wait either, while silently berating myself for wishing we could get married somewhere he hadn’t already visited with the wife he would first have to divorce.

  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 st
udies 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’.