Of all the days you wouldn’t pick for a blind date, Halloween would surely be a no-brainer. Even if there wasn’t a superstitious bone in your body you would still be tempting fate. There was, as I recall, an element of fate-tempting about me at the time. Nothing I did, no prayer to the Almighty made the slightest bit of difference to anything so why bother with playing safe. I was stuck in a never-ending cycle of shit. Someone would ask, ‘How’s it going?’ and I would say, ‘Oh, y’know . . . fine,’ and all the time, inside my head, a small panicked voice was wailing, ‘Fuuuuuuuuuck!’ on a loop. I felt I was living on borrowed time with a sense that the next disaster was already coming. So when Jeannie at work said, ‘Let’s have a night out and I’ll introduce you to my Franc,’ that was exactly the kind of diversion I was up for. Franc was her boyfriend’s boss and she went on and on about him and his delicious sexy French-ness to the point where everyone rolled their eyes whenever he was mentioned. She wore him like a badge.
The hospital where we worked was holding a Halloween party (8 ’til late, £2 in advance, £3 on the night – I still have the ticket) so we made a plan to meet at Jeannie’s where I would also stay the night. We’d be a big group so inviting Franc wouldn’t look like a set-up, but when I arrived there was no sign of anyone else. There was just Jeannie, her boyfriend Dave, and the fabled Franc, lurking in the kitchen pretending to stir something.
After all the hype I was a little underwhelmed. He was perfectly nice – tall, slim and well dressed (a suit on a Saturday night!) with a neat goatee. (I don’t like goatees – they’re camouflage for a weak chin.) With his crisp dark curls and glasses he looked like a cross between a university professor and a surgeon. He was clean, though, always a plus, with a nice smell (Acqua di Parma?) and a nice voice. His English was slightly imperfect, conspicuously lacking the letter ‘H’. When he said he was pleased to meet me I became ‘Ellen’, not Helen. He was a company director and therefore intelligent (one would hope), and seemed polite and courteous. His precise way of placing his hands, his cutlery, napkin and wine glass suggested a reserved, fastidious man. Apart from his eyes which were a deep, delicious blue, he looked young and ordinary – the kind of man you’d probably pass in the street without a second glance. Definitely not a psychopath. He gave every impression of being nice and a gentleman . . . but I wasn’t looking for ‘nice’.
Perhaps I should explain about my birthday the week before. I got very drunk, won the pub quiz and was comprehensively snogged by a fabulous Russian half my age who sidled up to me and murmured, ‘Ellen, I give you buurrthday keess,’ breathily into my ear. Na zdorovie! I thought. For some reason (achieving the great age of forty-three?) I kept thinking about Brenda-behind-the-bar and her defence of random physical encounters that might otherwise raise eyebrows: ‘At my age, if a bus is passing I hop on.’ Amen to that.
Weaving an unsteady route home, I remember lying on the grass in the churchyard (as you do) looking up at the October stars and experiencing the early signs of a midlife crisis. ‘Is this the beginning of the end?’ I said out loud to nobody. I suppose churchyards are natural midwives to the birth of this kind of thing. In this one I conceived a sincere wish to avoid ‘dull’ or ‘nice’ for the foreseeable future, or until ‘dull’ and ‘nice’ became fatally unavoidable. I remember it very clearly. It was a pivotal moment.
Fate duly delivered ‘nice’ Franc and there must have been something about him (I think it was his eyes) because that Halloween night at Jeannie’s – based on no evidence of mutual attraction whatsoever – I decided to see where it might lead, which only goes to show that I don’t even listen to my own advice, never mind anyone else’s.
Later, at the party, we could have been forgiven for thinking we’d got the wrong night. It was dismal, depressing. The sparsely populated room echoed with ‘Love Potion No. 9’, ‘Monster Mash’, ‘Bat Out of Hell’, ‘Thriller’ – not loud enough to hide the half-hearted shuffle of feet but too loud for private conversation. There were two pumpkins, a ‘Happy Halloween’ banner and a handful of orange and black balloons. Disappointed, I thought I was owed this night out so when Franc suggested that the two of us might go on to a club I said yes, not too enthusiastically (I was aiming for ‘sophisticated’) but flattered that he’d shown any sort of interest in my company. I wanted other people to see that he liked me – at the time I was always looking for approval. When Jeannie’s crowd opted to stay I was pleased – it meant I had him all to myself.
Franc drove us. He held doors open for me, including the car door – this was unusual in the Midlands and I liked it. I don’t remember whether we danced or not. There was none of the lightning-bolt mutual attraction that I had been hoping for. Two recollections from the club have stuck. Franc could light a pair of cigarettes in exactly the same way Paul Henreid did as Jerry in the film Now, Voyager, which was super-sexy and romantic and then, when he came back from collecting our coats and I was chatting to another man, he leaned in and whispered, ‘Ellen! I cannot leave you alone for a second.’ Then he grinned, which made him look much more attractive. It was a flash of that other man – the one Jeannie talked about in the office.
Yes, of course we went back to his place. He intrigued me. That made the choice between Jeannie’s spare room and hanging out with him an easy one. Perhaps a bit reckless but that was my middle name back then. He made us coffee (proper coffee, so Brownie points) and put on the television to watch the Grand Prix (cancel the Brownie points). Not great but still better than a bunk bed and a single pillow. In any case, given that I’d been drinking all evening, had no money for a cab and my car was parked outside Jeannie’s house, how was I going to go anywhere but here? I could have asked Franc for a lift but aside from hoping Jeannie would think we’d spent the night together (shame on me), I knew about men and sport – if I really wanted him to like me, then being the reason he missed the last race of the season was not the way to go about it. This, I understood, was ‘give and take’ and I was fine with it.
Apart from holding my hand briefly when we were introduced, Franc hadn’t touched me, and he flirted more with Jeannie than with me. My prior experience of dating ran somewhat contrary to this. The Franc approach – or non-approach – was something new. It raised questions. If he didn’t like me he wouldn’t have asked me to go to the club or come back here with him, right? I found myself looking for signs that he at least fancied me but I found none. Franc was inscrutable.
To demonstrate my indifference to his indifference I curled up on the floor next to his feet, sat back against the sofa and rested my head on his knee, like a spaniel.
In Japan the Grand Prix ended. At about 4 a.m. in a rented suburban Midlands semi Franc leaned over and kissed me. It was lovely and definitely worth waiting all evening and half the night for. Then he told me that he had a fiancée at home in Paris, which explained his reticence. I couldn’t think of an appropriate response, and perhaps my lack of disapproval encouraged him because he took my hand and led me upstairs. He didn’t say another word except to ask my permission. I remember putting my hand over his to stop him switching on the light – I didn’t want him to see the marks of age and motherhood on my body – and saying that I didn’t want him to look at me naked. That says a lot about self-esteem. Nonetheless, we had good sex, but we didn’t ‘make love’. I thought we enjoyed a physical transaction between two adults who respected each other. We comforted each other with sex.
On Sunday morning I stayed in Franc’s bed longer than was strictly necessary although he wasn’t in it. There was none of that lying around in a lovely intimate tangle of sheets and limbs. I could hear him moving about downstairs and when he appeared round the bedroom door a few minutes later wearing a blue-and-red tracksuit I thought he looked like a complete prat – neat, matched, wrinkle-free and lined up is not how you wear a tracksuit. I looked again at the man I’d just spent the night with, taking in his serious face; the pronounced feminine curve to his upper lip; the intelligent dark-blue eyes (which I now found unexpectedly captivating); posture so upright he was almost leaning backwards; and a mug of tea – which was for me. I had a flash of something I might describe as intuition which said, this man will break your heart.
Why would I think that?
Even before we had been introduced, I’d decided I would sleep with him if the opportunity arose – a combination of the Brenda-behind-the-bar school of thought and Jeannie making him sound like Luc in French Kiss, a film that put having a Luc of my own at the top of my romantic wish list. I would be able to look back on this encounter with pleasure when I was eighty-five. At forty-three, you’re inclined to think this way and it prompts that feeling of I-haven’t-done-enough-of-anything. When we met, my intentions towards Franc were completely dishonourable. There would be no commitment. It would be a one-off, a fling, a gift to myself, one of Erica Jong’s ‘zipless fucks’. I was not looking for a life partner, nor was I hooked. He would not break my heart because I would not give him the opportunity.
Without anything being said, it became clear that Franc had plans for Sunday that did not include me, which was fine because I also had things to do. As soon as was decent he drove me back to Jeannie and Dave’s to fetch my car.
‘Do you have any French in you, Helen?’ asked a smirking Dave.
‘Erm, no. I don’t think so. English through and through.’
‘Are you sure?’ Exaggerated wink.
‘Oh, stop it.’
I felt curiously pleased.
I walked back with Franc to his car to say goodbye and thanks for the evening. I offered him my phone number but he refused to take it. Instead he said, ‘You will call me.’ And gave me his. A prickle of irritation. I would not call. I would not be told what to do.
Three days later I called.
In my diary there is a cursory note: ‘7 p.m. – Franc.’ If I was excited about meeting him I didn’t say so. I didn’t even make a note of where we went. I have a vague memory of a cold, wet retail park and something about him needing to buy office supplies so I went with him. I think he said he wanted my advice on something. So, definitely not a date then and a piss-poor effort. The implication seemed to be that it didn’t matter whether I was there or not – not very gentlemanly considering we’d already slept together – but I thought, OK then, I’ll play your games.
At the back of my mind and in spite of the unpromising start, a thin hope piped up that here might be my holding-out-for-a-hero hero, my port in a storm . . . my Maxim de Winter, my Jerry, my Luc, who would sweep me off my feet, rescue me and take me home to Manderley . . . Washington . . . Provence . . . to a better life. It’s not a very modern thought but then we daughters of the 1950s grew up with this guff. We were drilled in the art of sidestepping responsibility for ourselves. We were absolved from it, encouraged to occupy the same gender hierarchy as our mothers before us. Woman’s theatre of operations was the domestic one; man’s was to decide everything important. Woman deferred to man. In the rural Midlands I was not exposed to feminism until my teenage years and by then it was too late. I already contained a dangerous fault line.
I met Franc straight from work that evening, unhappy about my scuffed heels and seen-better-days black business suit. We stopped for something to eat in a chain restaurant – I don’t remember which one. There was nothing remarkable about any of it, although he did do the two-cigarettes trick again and took my hand briefly across the table, cradling it gently inside his own while he picked up his fork and ate one-handed. It was a tenderly casual gesture that could have meant something or nothing, but the thin hope grew fatter on it. He kissed me goodbye (properly) and I went home. He was courteous and kind – still the dreaded ‘nice’ – and somehow he lodged in my head.
At the weekend, he invited me to stay over at his house for a second time. He explained that things with his fiancée, Sophie, were not good, although he added that they had been together for twelve years. (Twelve years and not married – what’s wrong with her?) It felt too pushy to ask questions, and not my business. Franc was the one in a relationship; I was as free as a bird and I wasn’t being unfaithful to anyone. I felt no moral obligation to the absent Sophie, justifying my behaviour by choosing to believe that whatever-it-was with Franc was a temporary thing, despite simultaneously changing my mind. I wanted the hand-holding and laughter (we did a lot of both). I wanted to be understood and to belong to someone, with the intimacy of a proper, grown-up relationship. Most of all I wanted not to be on my own anymore. And then there was the whole French thing. I’d been married to a Scandinavian for fifteen years, divorced for seven. I did not find Franc intimidatingly foreign as some might, but comfortingly familiar. I don’t know exactly when I began wanting him to be more than just a distraction but it was very early on. And I can’t imagine for a minute he was unaware of that.
Only a week after our first meeting, Franc and I began a correspondence that would last almost a decade. I did not own a mobile phone (although he did) and email had scarcely begun. It’s easy to forget that twenty years ago communication was much slower and you had to think about it. It’s lucky for me there was no Twitter or Facebook, no Snapchat or WhatsApp, or the mess I made might have been far greater. And I wouldn’t have had Franc’s letters. He wrote what he didn’t say. He was softer, more open, romantic, funny and often filthy. He wrote the things he knew I wanted to hear. I hadn’t ever had a single love letter until then. When they started I looked forward to his letters and I kept them. Later, when the gilt had definitely worn off the gingerbread, I kept those too.
And that’s how it started. No pressure, no ownership, no responsibility. Just a grown-up thing, which, whether it worked out or not, I was sure I could handle.
*
I am a chronic hoarder, the Smaug of personal ephemera with a dragon’s hoard boxed beneath my bed. I sleep on memories, dusty parcels of baby shoes, school swimming certificates, cards I made for my own mother as a child and cards my children made for me, a kangaroo-skin handbag bought in Australia by my father for Nana when he was demobbed from the navy in 1945, my mother’s wedding veil. Given life’s calamitous course, it is a wonder that any of this survives at all.
Amongst all this are my diaries from the last thirty years. They tell me what I was doing and when I was doing it. They are factual and contain little emotional content, which makes coming across the line, ‘DM – Can’t do things for kids anymore’, unusual. It is a coded message from the past. I pause and think . . . before checking this recollection against two other caches of documents. DM was my line manager at the hospital where I worked, Doreen Milson. She was telling me where to draw the line with my family, as if it was any of her business. I made the note to remember what she said and when she said it. I felt it would be important later.
These papers and diaries are all bound by those odd little connecting threads that a personal history sometimes throws out: they are from a time when I found myself simultaneously trapped between two abusers, with a history that included a third. What are the odds? Well, actually, quite high – Crime Survey for England and Wales reports show that domestic violence ‘has a higher rate of repeat victimization than victims of any other crime’.8 Again, I am one of many.
You might call these people bullies but to me it’s not a word that accurately reflects what they did. ‘Bullies’ and ‘bullying’ are terms that belong in the school playground, not in the adult world of work and love affairs and marriage, although such people do exist in every walk of life. Nonetheless, I prefer to call them abusers and what I experienced, abuse. Having initially all seemed harmless, friendly, these three wreaked havoc, not just in my life, but in the lives of those I cared about most of all. Between them they nearly killed me although they would not have been called murderers in a court of law.
One stack of these under-the-bed papers concerns my relationship with Doreen and work. The other comprises all the notes, emails and faxes Franc and I exchanged over the course of our relationship. A relationship that extended – extends – far beyond its physical ending for reasons which will become clear with the telling.
Ask any woman who has experienced one of these relationships first-hand – and is prepared to talk about it – what happened to her and you will almost certainly find it hard to comprehend. You will most likely be left with feelings of confusion and anger. ‘Four years!’ you shout (it helps to punch something). ‘With that bastard! Unbelievable!’ It is, and actually you’ve hit the nail on the head. Suspension of disbelief is how it works.
In a nutshell, domestic abusers and workplace bullies are weak but they like to feel strong – to achieve which they need to be in control, to dominate. There is nothing new or original in this; it is the same method used in interrogation and brainwashing techniques the world over. Put very simply: I’m nice, I’m nasty, I’m nice again. You must love me when I’m nasty because then I’ll be nice but if you love me when I’m nice I can still be nasty. It’s highly manipulative and very successful. In this maze of contradictions it is very easy to lose sight not only of reality but also of yourself.
An abuser will project a beguiling charm and conceal themselves behind it while they confuse, undermine and foment doubt, not just in their target but in their target’s friends, family, anyone whose advice and support they are likely to listen to and draw strength from. This cannot happen overnight – it requires time and patience – so first they have to behave in a way that will make you want to spend time with them. They need you to like them so you won’t see, or can’t accept that you see, what they’re up to.
You’d think you would spot these people a mile off but they’re very good at knowing what you yourself hide behind. If you’re having a terrible time an abuser scouting for their next victim will offer you a shoulder to cry on; if you’re at a crossroads in your life they will offer kindly advice; if you’re miserable they will go out of their way to make you feel better. Perhaps things have been so bad for so long that you feel you can no longer impose your misery on your true friends, that they must be as fed up with it all as you are. Feeling like a burden to others makes you feel terrible. It lowers your self-esteem. Crucially, it isolates you. A stranger with a sympathetic face relieves you of that burden, provides you with an opportunity to go back over the whole story again – they don’t know it and they want to hear it. With your mind on your problems, you are unlikely to ask yourself why they are doing this, what’s in it for them. You are ‘what’s in it’ – that’s why they chose you. If they weren’t so accomplished at being lovely and making you feel good about yourself; if your life wasn’t giving you so much grief, if you didn’t feel quite so alone, if you didn’t need someone, anyone, to be nice to you just for a little while, you wouldn’t go anywhere near them.
*
Now that I’m in my sixties, and unintentionally but very contentedly on my own, I know my future happiness is not – nor was it then – dependent upon finding a man to ‘attach’ myself to. But in 1955, when I was born, that’s what a woman was expected to do – find a good man (or have one found for her) who would look after her, and in return she would fulfil her wifely duties: keep the house nice, cook his meals, look after him, provide (formal) sex, have his children and so on. Men, for their part, understood this was the deal but, I think it’s fair to assume, were a little cagey about the mysterious power of women to ‘capture’ them.
When I was growing up the generally accepted view was that a woman who chose to remain independent, single and childless, or be a single mother, or who divorced herself from an unpleasant husband, or attempted to provide for herself in a male-dominated world, was somehow incomplete, even an aberration. Women were urged to fulfil their ‘biological destiny’.
For young women in the 1950s, ’60s and beyond, the patriarchal message was presented as a kindly intention to protect us, the so-called weaker sex, from unspecified nastiness. The paradox is that the greater part of what we required protection from was perpetrated by the very people who wanted to protect us. It’s the kind of circular argument one often stumbles across in dealing with a ruling majority. Instead of being provided with the tools to look after ourselves, my generation was wrapped in an over-protective blanket of tutored helplessness. Ignorance is its own form of control.
The 1950s, in a reaction against the egalitarianism of the 1940s, saw the beginnings of a concept under which women continue to labour to this day: a constricting belief in ‘perfection’ – women were women and men were men, women served men, men looked after women. Except that it was, of course, a lie. It’s still a lie. Women and girls toil away striving to achieve perfection in ways that beggar belief. Everything about us must be flawless. Anything that reminds the world in general of the messier aspects of what it means to be a woman must be removed, obliterated, glossed over. A continual barrage of mixed messages emerges from the media but the main directive seems to be that we should, at all times, be sexy, feminine, available and above all, perfect.
Each age has its own definition of what constitutes the perfect woman and very occasionally that definition coincides happily with freedom – the 1920s, for example, when fashion became far less restrictive, or the 1940s when women found freedom in conscription to the war effort and a wage packet – but more often than not it involves some form of imprisonment, whether that’s fashion, lifestyle or politics and religion, and frequently a combination of them all.
For every step women take forward it feels as though we take two, if not three, backwards. The gender pay gap and the glass ceiling still exist, sexism still exists, misogyny definitely still does . . . Fighting for women’s right to simply be women feels more and more like battling the hydra – cut off one head and two more spring up in its place. The list of demands we are told to make on ourselves is endless and baffling and mostly to do with the way we look. We must not look old or even middle-aged but eternally youthful, smooth, hairless, prinked, stretched and uplifted with full lips, long lashes, white teeth, and we hand over countless billions to the (mostly male) cosmetic surgeons who will give us what nature hasn’t, even to the extent of ‘tidying up’ our labia or ‘rejuvenating’ our tired vaginas. Such unrealistic ideas about women, where you must have your bikini body back one month after giving birth to twins and skip through menstruation with no outward sign, surely have their origins in the rise and rise of pornography.
The exponential growth of computer technology has helped, of course. We have a society in which a woman who needs to be taken down a peg or two (mouthy, opinionated, not submissive) can be hunted through wi-fi to be bullied, harassed, trolled and revenge-porned into compliance. Witch-hunts these days happen through social media and the tabloid press. Women’s bodies are held up for ridicule – pictures of any of their constituent parts that fail to meet the standard are published to shame and control. Punishment threats of rape and death have become commonplace and are sometimes carried out. Women can more easily be stalked and tracked. Children learn about sex through watching porn, which gives them the wrongest of wrong ideas about what constitutes normal sexual relationships.
It is perhaps, then, unsurprising that we are now witnessing an increase in violence against women. Year on year the reported crime figures demonstrate that it is a constantly evolving threat. Despite decades of progress, an increase in the platforms which give women a voice, a real empowering through education and legislation – all of which have at least nominally given women some sort of parity with men – we are still seen as somehow inferior, subjects to control rather than genuine equals.