If You Love Me Read online

  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.

  Chapter 3

  Meeting Joe was like being offered the new beginning I didn’t think I would ever have – or deserved. Suddenly, all the hurt and disappointment of the past didn’t matter any more. Every day I spent with Joe seemed to be better than the day before. I had fallen head over heels in love with him, and what was even more extraordinary was that he seemed to feel the same way about me. We had only been seeing each other for about a week when he told me he loved me. ‘I want to spend every minute of every day with you,’ he said. And I wanted that too.

  It all happened so quickly and was so intense that it must have looked crazy from the outside. I know some of my friends were a bit anxious on my behalf, particularly the ones who’d seen how hard I’d fallen when Jack left me. ‘Do you think it might be a good idea to step back a bit?’ one of them asked me, tentatively. But it didn’t seem crazy at all from where I was standing. It felt completely right, and I was genuinely happy for the first time in years.

  I’d told my mum about Joe during a phone call not long after we started going out. She didn’t know about Anthony, of course, but she’d been worried about me ever since my bout of depression at university, and her concern had only been exacerbated by how upset I was after the split with Jack. So I thought she’d be really happy for me when I told her I’d found someone special. And she was – until she asked how old Joe was. ‘That’s a huge age gap,’ she said, when I told her he was forty-four. ‘It’s only fourteen years,’ I countered. ‘And I’m thirty, not eighteen. I know what I want, Mum. And Joe does too.’ But there seemed to be nothing I could say to ease her anxiety. So I didn’t tell her when I moved in to live with him.
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br />   Ironically, perhaps, in view of Mum’s reaction to the age difference between Joe and me, my dad is quite a bit older than she is, and of a generation of men who tend not to discuss personal matters and emotions. So I didn’t talk to him about Joe at all.

  I think it was because Mum was so concerned that she suddenly decided to come up to London for a flying visit. She said she just wanted to see me, but I knew that what she really wanted was an excuse to meet Joe and see for herself if her suspicions were correct and he really was the archetypal senior executive taking advantage of a younger colleague. Joe and I only met her briefly, for a coffee before she caught the train home again. But it was long enough for them to have a chat, and for Mum to decide that she liked him. Although she still had reservations about his age, she told me later, she no longer had any about his character.

  To me, the difference in our ages was totally irrelevant and everything about our relationship seemed perfect. We were like the proverbial two peas in a pod, constantly surprised and delighted as we discovered still more things we agreed upon, views we shared, places we wanted to visit, books we loved or wanted to read … The list of our similarities seemed endless.

  We drove to work together in the mornings, went out together in the evenings, slept together at night, and never once had an awkward moment or ran out of things to say to each other. I thought it was romantic when Joe told me, ‘I don’t ever want us to spend a single night apart.’ Although I didn’t think he meant it literally, it made me feel loved in a way I couldn’t remember ever having felt before. And when he asked me to marry him, I didn’t have to think about it for even a split second before I said yes, because spending the rest of my life with him seemed to be what I’d always been destined to do.

  All the major decisions that would normally be made quite a long way down the line in any normal relationship had been made within two or three weeks of our first date at the bar. One of those decisions was that I would abandon my search for a flat, Joe would sell his house, and we would buy somewhere together. I always like to pay my own way, but although I was earning a good salary and had saved up almost £50,000 as a deposit on the flat I’d been intending to buy, Joe earned significantly more than I did and would be contributing considerably more to our joint house purchase and living costs. But, somehow, he made it seem as though we would be equal partners in everything we did.

  I had a longstanding arrangement to go home to Devon for the weekend a couple of weeks after Mum’s flying visit to London, and although I’d planned to go on my own, Joe said he was going to come with me. I wouldn’t normally have taken a boyfriend home to meet my family in such a formal way so early in a new relationship, but I thought it was nice that Joe wanted to come. ‘Why go all that way on the train when I can drive us there?’ he said, when I told him I was quite happy to go on my own. ‘I don’t mind coming at all. And if we make a short detour on the way back on Sunday, we can have lunch with my mum. It’ll be a family weekend.’

  Even though I’d fallen for Joe and was happier with him than I’d ever been in my life before, I didn’t really want to do the whole parent thing so soon. But somehow I ended up feeling as though it was what I’d wanted to do all along, and hadn’t liked to suggest it because I thought it would be a pain for him.

  We arrived at my parents’ house late on the Friday evening, and the following morning Joe went out for a walk with my dad. Even when emotions aren’t being discussed, Dad is a man of few words, and he and Joe had very little in common. But Joe is very good at talking to people about the things they’re interested in, and when they came back from their walk together I could tell Dad liked him. In fact, everyone liked him. Joe’s good at reading people and responding to them appropriately, so as well as talking to my dad about the things that interested him, he joked with my mum, and was friendly but respectful to my sisters and their boyfriends when they came for dinner on the Saturday evening. I always enjoyed spending time with my family, but that was a particularly good weekend and I was proud of the man I’d fallen in love with.

  Joe and I left Devon on the Sunday morning and headed back towards London, stopping on the way to have lunch with his mother in a village near Bristol. That went well too, although Joe was very nervous about it beforehand. His relationship with his mother seemed ambivalent, and although the picture he painted of her was of a difficult woman, it was clear that she was also a very important figure in his life. So I was nervous too, especially after he told me she hadn’t really liked his wife. But she was lovely, and when she apparently gave me her seal of approval during a phone call Joe made to her the next day, he was as happy as I had ever seen him.

  A few days after our weekend in Devon, Joe suggested that we should go to Barcelona for a few days. I hadn’t had a holiday for at least eighteen months – the last one would have been while I was going out with Jack – and Barcelona was high on both our lists of places we wanted to visit. So I was really looking forward to it, and I wasn’t disappointed – by the city or by Joe.

  When the time came, we walked around Barcelona until our feet ached, visited parks with extraordinary sculptures and art galleries that would have taken weeks to explore properly, sat in cafés, bars and restaurants talking about what we’d seen, hired a car and spent the day at the incredible Dalí Museum at Figueres, a couple of hours’ drive north of the city, talked some more, walked some more, and had the most amazing sex I’d ever had.

  Every time I looked at Joe, he was smiling, and I know I was too. Then one evening, when we were having dinner in a bar, he leaned across the table, kissed me and said, ‘It’s so easy being on holiday with you. I’ve had the most incredible time. I feel as though I’ve known you for years, not weeks. I adore you, Alice Keale.’

  ‘I feel exactly the same,’ I said. ‘As though I’d known you all my life. In fact, I can’t really remember what I felt about anything before I knew you.’ And then we laughed about it later, when I pointed out to Joe that we’d become one of those nauseating, touchy-feely couples I used to roll my eyes at before I knew what it felt like to be in love and not to care what anyone else thinks.

  Work seemed like something that existed in a parallel universe and I didn’t want the holiday to end. I wanted to keep travelling with Joe, to visit all the places we’d always wanted to visit and do all the things we’d always wanted to do, safe inside our bubble of happiness. But although the holiday did have to end, we were still happy when we got home, because just being with Joe was an amazing experience.

  In contrast to my dad’s reticence when it came to talking about feelings and emotions, Joe was an open book. He told me about his relationship with his wife and how, towards the end of their marriage, the neighbours had phoned the police on several occasions when she lost her temper and started hurling furniture around their house. He mentioned another serious relationship too, which had lasted almost two years, until his girlfriend became pregnant and said she would only have the baby if he stayed with her, which he realised he no longer wanted to do. ‘We were sitting in the car,’ he told me, ‘arguing, as we often did by that time, when she suddenly hit the window with her fist with such force that the glass shattered. In fact, it cut her hand so badly she had to go to A&E.’

  He talked a bit about his family too, about how devastated his mother had been when his father left her for a younger woman, when Joe himself was just a little boy, and how he’d both pitied and despised her, because she was always crying and because, for reasons he didn’t understand, he blamed her for the fact that he felt like the poor kid at his posh boarding school. He talked about his father’s subsequent wives and girlfriends too, and about his half-sister, who was born when he was in his twenties and who he liked but rarely saw.

  But although Joe was open about the subjects he chose to talk about, whenever I asked him any specific questions about his relationships he would say, ‘This is about you, not me. I want to know everything about you, Alice Keale.’ So I told him about my life too,
which was uneventful by comparison. What I didn’t tell him about was Anthony, I think because I wanted to be the person I saw reflected in Joe’s eyes, and admitting that I’d had an affair with a married man with children – just like the woman who ‘stole’ his father – would have been like painting a jagged, ugly black line across a perfect picture.

  We were in the living room in Joe’s house one evening, sitting on the sofa, him at one end, me at the other, with my feet resting on his lap, when he said, ‘I don’t want us to have any secrets from each other. I want us to tell each other everything, to know that we can trust each other completely.’

  ‘I do too,’ I said, leaning forward as I spoke and putting my hand on his arm.

  ‘So is there anything you haven’t told me?’ he asked. ‘Any deep, dark secret you’ve been hiding from me that you want to make a clean breast of now?’ He laughed as he said it, and I tried to laugh too, although all I managed was a weak smile.

  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.