If You Love Me

by Alice Keale

  The night before the polygraph test he’d asked me again, and again hadn’t believed me when I told him the truth – that I hadn’t enjoyed sex with Anthony and hadn’t ever had an orgasm with him. ‘What does it matter anyway?’ I wanted to shout at him. ‘How could it possibly help you to know about the sex I had with another man before I even knew you?’ But, for some reason, it did matter to Joe. So much so, in fact, that he was obsessed by it. Well, in a few minutes he’d have definitive answers to his questions. Then maybe he’d finally stop asking them.

  The first question Dave asked me was whether I was taking the test under any duress. If I hadn’t had to give only yes/no answers, I could have said, ‘Everything I do is under duress.’ Instead, I lied and answered ‘No’.

  ‘Is your name Alice Keale?’

  It was probably the simplest question I was going to be asked, but already my hands were sweating and I could hear the pulse of my heart beat in my head as I said ‘Yes’.

  ‘Are you thirty-two years old?’

  ‘Yes.’ Surely the light from the lamp on the table in front of me wasn’t usually that bright. ‘Breathe,’ I told myself. ‘In. Out. In …’

  He asked a few other mundane questions, and then, in exactly the same tone of voice, said, ‘Did you orgasm with Anthony?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, almost without thinking. And then, to myself, ‘Please let it show that I’m telling the truth. Please let something go my way, just this once.’

  Joe was still pacing backwards and forwards in the room above us, the sound of his footsteps like a deliberate reminder that he was there. Why couldn’t he just sit down for a few minutes and let me do this in peace, I wondered. Was he trying to put me off, to make me so nervous I failed the test? If that was what he was trying to do, he was coming close to succeeding. Dave must have realised that too, because he excused himself for a moment and left the room, after which I could hear muffled voices, his low and even, Joe’s louder and abrupt. He did stop pacing after that, though, which made it a bit easier for me to focus on the questions I was being asked.

  Dave asked them all in the same neutral tone.

  ‘Do you like chocolate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you and Anthony have sex outside?’

  ‘No.’

  Then eventually, after what seemed like an eternity of answering questions, he said, ‘Okay, we’re done.’

  ‘And …?’ My voice was barely a whisper.

  ‘You’ve passed. One hundred per cent. You told the truth on every count.’

  ‘I’ll get Joe,’ I said. But when Dave unstrapped the monitors and I tried to stand up, it felt as though every muscle in my body had turned to water and for a moment I thought I was going to fall.

  When I came back into the room with Joe a few seconds later, Dave told him the results. ‘I’ll print them out when I get back to the office,’ he said, ‘and send them to you in the post.’ I glanced at Joe while Dave was speaking and felt a sudden rush of love and sympathy for him, in part because the unguarded expression of relief I saw on his face made me him look like a vulnerable little boy.

  He was right, I thought: it had all been my fault. In those first few idyllic weeks we were together, he’d believed that he could trust me. And then he discovered that I’d been sending emails to another man. But it was the things I’d written to Anthony in those emails that were the real lies – telling him I missed him and that it wasn’t really over between us. I’d said them because I was a coward, and then I’d compounded my dishonesty by lying about them to Joe too, because I was afraid of losing him. Now, after all the violence and misery of the last few months, he finally knew I’d been telling him the truth.

  It was less than half an hour after Dave had left the house when Joe’s questions started again. Another half an hour later, he was shouting in my face as he banged my head repeatedly against the bedroom wall. By the time I went to bed, in the early hours of the morning, there were fresh bite marks on my arms and breasts. And, again, I blamed myself, for being so stupid as to believe that the lie-detector test had been anything other than a ridiculous charade and for not realising that there was no ‘truth’ that could ever make Joe better.

  Chapter 15

  I met most of Joe’s family during the first few months we were together. His mother was the only one I met before the discovery, when we had lunch with her in a restaurant on the way back from Devon to London after spending the weekend with my parents. And then she came to stay with us for a couple of days after Christmas.

  ‘She mustn’t know about your affair with a married man,’ Joe had told me. ‘If she knew, she’d make me leave you.’ I could never really be certain that he was telling the truth, either entirely or in part, and I didn’t know if he was on that occasion, or if the reason he wanted to hide my ‘sordid affair’ from his mother was that he thought it would remind her of what had been an incredibly distressing time in her life – as it had been in Joe’s young life too, from what he’d told me – when her own husband left her for another woman. In fact, though, his warning wasn’t necessary, as it wasn’t something I’d ever willingly have told anyone. It was Joe who insisted on revealing it to my family and friends and to anyone else we ever had any contact with.

  I didn’t tell Joe’s mother about the way he was behaving either. It isn’t a conversation I could imagine having with anyone’s parents, although after I’d met his father I did wonder if I should have said something to him. I had hoped that his mother’s presence would give me a break from the questioning and violence, and maybe calm him down long enough for him to realise that punishing me wasn’t going to make either of us happy again.

  In the event, of course, the visit by Joe’s mother didn’t change anything. His physical and verbal attacks continued throughout the entire time she was with us, but quietly, in the bedroom, and on the many ‘emergency errands’ he found we had to run during her stay. She must have thought we were quite mad, darting in and out of the living room every few minutes and suddenly remembering something we had to pop out and buy at the local shops. In fact, Joe told me afterwards that she’d said she thought I was very odd because of it.

  What was really hard to believe was that Joe’s mother didn’t hear anything, even when we were in the bedroom and Joe had his hands around my neck, squeezing the breath out of me. I prayed while she was staying with us that she’d pick up on the fact – which seemed blatantly obvious to me – that there was something wrong, because then she’d have to help us. I desperately wanted to tell her what her son was doing to me. I even imagined waking her up in the middle of the night when Joe had finally gone to sleep, showing her the marks his hands had made around my neck and begging her to help me. Or that Joe would lose it in front of her and start hitting me, so that she’d be forced to do something.

  Even if she hated me when she found out how badly I’d hurt her son emotionally, surely not even the most doting mother would fail to intervene if she knew her child was violently abusing someone. At the very least, she’d want to stop him running the risk of ruining the rest of his life by ending up in prison because he’d injured me, or worse. But although Joe often appeared to lose control when he was attacking me, he always seemed to be able to maintain it when he needed to – in front of his mother, for example.

  It was largely that ability to switch from vicious to charming in the blink of an eye that made me begin to wonder how much of what Joe did was due to mental illness and how much was simply cold calculation. I suppose a simplistic explanation for his behaviour would be that his childhood had been miserable because his father had left his mother for another woman, which had thrown his mother into the depths of despair, deprived Joe of a resident father and made him feel that he wasn’t as ‘good’ as the other boys at school. So now he was punishing me, as the epitome of the woman who stole his dad – and who, as things turned out, subsequently lost him to another woman, who lost him to another …

  Although no
one had any idea about the extent of Joe’s abuse, everyone who knew anything about it, including my psychiatrist, told me that his behaviour wasn’t normal. But although I wanted to believe that he was having a mental breakdown, because that would mean he wasn’t responsible for what was happening, it began to seem increasingly likely that he always knew exactly what he was doing. However frenzied and out of control he appeared to be, he always stopped within a hair’s breadth of going too far, and he always treated me quite differently in front of other people, although we rarely saw anyone else, because my family and friends had been judged to be ‘inappropriate’, and Joe didn’t seem to have any friends at all.

  A few weeks after the discovery, we went to stay with Joe’s dad for a weekend. He seemed like a nice man, and obviously loved his son. But Joe made me tell him about my affair with Anthony, and no visit was going to be anything but hugely uncomfortable after a conversation like that.

  I didn’t realise it at the time, but I’m sure the whole situation was planned and contrived by Joe. Just as he had reasons for not wanting his mother to know about my affair, I could see how, in his twisted, vindictive mind, he felt that his father should know, although I think he suspected, even before I told him, that something was going on.

  It was actually his dad talking about an exhibition he’d seen at a gallery Joe knew I’d worked in with Anthony that triggered the process leading to the revelation. We’d gone for a walk in the countryside – Joe and I, his dad and his dad’s current wife – and when his dad mentioned the name of the gallery Joe gagged, then turned his back on us and walked away. He was only gone for a couple of minutes, but although he said he was fine when he came back it must have been clear to both of them that something was wrong.

  The problem was, Joe had a lot of triggers, which had increased exponentially the more details he made me tell him about my affair with Anthony. It could be as simple as someone mentioning a town where he knew we’d stayed together; or hearing a forecast for rain on a weather report after I’d mentioned – in response to close questioning – that it had been raining on one of the nights we’d spent together; or just seeing a woman wearing a skirt or top in a particular colour. And it meant that every television programme and every interaction we ever had with anyone was incredibly tense, because I always knew that we were just one, apparently innocent, word away from Joe going into a decline.

  He got upset again that night and left the room while we were having dinner with his father and stepmother. I would have given anything to have been able to stay there, talking, as we had been doing until then, about the sort of normal, everyday things most people talk about around the dinner table. But I excused myself and followed Joe into the bedroom.

  ‘I need you to tell my dad what you’ve done,’ he said, when I asked him if he was all right. And although I did argue with him for a while, it was only half-heartedly, because I knew he’d win in the end, and that all I was doing was delaying what was, after all, just another in a whole catalogue of humiliating experiences.

  By the time I came out of the bedroom, Joe’s stepmother was clearing the dining table and his dad was in the living room, which is where I went to talk to him. I can’t remember exactly how I phrased it, something along the lines of ‘Joe wants me to tell you something. I don’t know how to say it. It’s something I’m very ashamed of …’

  I was too mortified on my own behalf to wonder how my confession would strike someone in Joe’s dad’s situation – a man who, some thirty years earlier, had had an affair with a woman that led to the break-up of his marriage and to what was, in effect, the abandonment of his young son. He was very nice about it, though, basically just saying, ‘Thank you for telling me.’ I suppose what he might have asked was, ‘Why are you telling me?’ But perhaps he already knew, because he did say, ‘You can stay here for a bit if you’d like to.’ And although he wasn’t a touchy-feely type of person, his wife came into the bedroom later, when I was there on my own, and gave me a hug. In fact, they both seemed to be lovely people.

  It seems impossible now to think that we struggled for more than a year. I suppose you can get used to anything after a while, particularly if you don’t think there’s any alternative. That’s something else I still don’t understand, the fact that, for all those months, I thought I had no choice when, in reality, there’s always a choice, as long you’re free physically to come and go, as I was. The problem for many people in many situations, however, is that a mental prison can be considerably more difficult to break out of than a physical one. It’s surprising how quickly and easily someone can become isolated and dependent on someone else, emotionally, financially and in every other way, so that they lose the ability to think for themselves or to be certain about what’s reasonable, and what isn’t. I know I would have found it difficult to believe that it could happen to someone like me, before I met Joe.

  One day, almost a year after I’d moved in with Joe, he told me he couldn’t bear to have me around any more. He had started drinking quite a bit by that time and was taking sleeping tablets too, to try to knock himself out at night, although they didn’t really work. It seemed that everything I said or did reminded him of the terrible thing I’d done all those months ago, to the point that just the sight of me made him ill, he said.

  I’d forgotten many of the details he’d made me go over and over during the months since we’d become locked together in what I was only just beginning to realise was a mutually destructive relationship. Joe remembered them all, however, and he talked incessantly about the past, like someone possessed. Sometimes, he’d suddenly stop what he was doing, bend almost double and start to dry retch, and sometimes he couldn’t get out of bed at all for entire days. Then, one day, he told me, ‘The company’s going to let me go in two months. I had a meeting with someone from HR earlier this week. I’m not getting the job done because of you, Alice. Because of what you did to me. And now I’m going to lose it.’ I don’t know if any part of what he was said was true. Maybe someone from HR did have a word with him. But he certainly didn’t lose his job.

  Whatever the real reason was, Joe sent me home to my parents, while he – apparently – spent the next few days alone in his house in London, in bed. I thought he’d do what he normally did and tell me to get off the train before I got there and go back. But he didn’t, and I stayed at my parents’ house for the next four months, returning to visit Joe for just occasional days. Then, one day, he phoned me and said, ‘It’s not working. My therapist says it’s not working. I think we have to accept that it’s never going to work. We’re too toxic for each other, Alice.’

  At first, I didn’t understand what he meant. Even when it dawned on me that what he was telling me was that our relationship was over, I couldn’t make any sense of what he was saying. Because Joe had promised me, sworn to me, that he’d never leave me, no matter what.

  ‘But I don’t want it to end,’ I told him. ‘I won’t leave you, Joe. I love you.’ Anyone who knew about the nightmare I’d been living for all those months would have thought that what I was saying sounded crazy. To me, though, it was perfectly logical, because there was a reason why I’d put up with the horrific violence and mental abuse, which was that, one day, I’d have paid the price for what I’d done and Joe would be all right again. That was the whole point of everything: to fix Joe. It was the end I’d kept in sight throughout all the miserable months when there had been no other apparent reason for my existence. I didn’t work, I didn’t see my family or friends, I didn’t have any money, or self-esteem. But none of that would matter when I had the real Joe back again.

  I wasn’t certain about many things any more. What I was certain about, however, was that everything I’d tolerated and sacrificed could not have been for nothing.

  As I listened to Joe’s voice on the phone, I was sitting on my bed in my parents’ house, staring at the shelves on the yellow-painted walls that held all the books I used to read and the CDs I used to play when I was
a teenager, with one arm clutching my knees to my chest like a shield and hot tears rolling down my cheeks, thinking, ‘This can’t be real. This can’t be my life, to be thirty-three years old and have nothing.’

  ‘We can’t be in contact now,’ Joe said. ‘I doubt that we ever can be again. We just don’t work together, Alice. You know that I love you, don’t you? You know that you’re the love of my life?’ Then the line went dead and he’d gone.

  Falling back on to the bed, I pulled the duvet over my head and closed my eyes. He didn’t mean it, I told myself. It was just another of his tests, another way of making me pay for what I’d done. Yes, that was it. Of course he hadn’t suddenly decided after all these months, after everything I’d done to try to make amends, that things weren’t going to work out after all.

  I dialled his number, then listened to it ring and ring, before eventually going to voicemail. Even then, I didn’t hear his voice, because he’d changed it to an automated message. How could he say what he’d just said to me and then not answer? How dare he? I always had to answer when he phoned, whatever time of the day or night it was. For me, there were no excuses. If Joe rang – as he did several times every day – I answered the phone. That was the way it had been for months. So how could this be fair? Hadn’t we written a list of rules, which I had adhered to religiously? Our rules, we’d called them, although they were Joe’s. Well, answering the phone when the other person rang was one of those rules, and it was only fair that it applied to him just as much as it did to me.

  I pushed the duvet off my head and examined the crappy little phone he’d made me buy, to replace my iPhone, which he said triggered painful thoughts for him about my past. ‘If you ever buy another iPhone,’ he’d said, ‘it will be over between us. I won’t even be able to remain your friend. But why would you want one anyway? Surely it would only make you feel sick to have such a reminder of your amoral past? Whereas this phone, simple and straightforward, will be a reminder to you of how you’ve changed, and of how you’re now a reformed woman with an intact, fully functioning moral code.’