Look What You Made Me Do

At the beginning of March I perked up a bit. The accumulating burden of worry, responsibility and stress seemed to have dissipated as soon as I handed over the keys to the house that was never a home. I didn’t have to worry about my girls or the pets, and I had Franc all to myself; this perhaps sounds shallow but the reverse also applied and they didn’t have to worry about me. As Franc said, everyone was better off for a bit of clarity.

We had the ‘money talk’ everyone has when they start living together. I wanted to pay my way as I always had but as Franc pointed out, the company paid for his accommodation and living expenses so there was no need for me to concern myself with it. I said, ‘All right then but we’ll take it in turns to buy food,’ and that seemed to satisfy him.

1 March

Hello darling!

I think you slept well – but the snoring! Can I have some earplugs? No, I like hearing you sleeping well.

I’m very excited about going to the gym tonight – thank you for helping me with that. First day of a new month and a new week – lovely, no house = no stress (or not much anyway)!

Love Helen

xxx

PS It’s raining – for a change! And I do love you.

He replied that he would miss me while I was at the gym but that he was glad I was excited about going. It had been his idea so I suppose he would have been.

On the same page there is an arrow pointing to a blank space, next to which I have written, ‘£20 for food.’ It was his turn to shop.

The next day there were more notes. Even when we were apart we had a compulsive need to speak to each other somehow. It felt as though the two of us were an exclusive club and created a powerful bond.

Hope you are not too excited about the gym.

Be back around 8.00 tonight.

Non faire l’oie, je te recommande [Don’t be a goose.]

Darling Franc

Maybe a little excited about the gym . . . but not too much! Worried about not being home when you come back from work.

I will be home to cook your dinner, don’t worry.

French instructions duly noted.

Love

xxx

I used to go to the gym a lot, so I was fine with getting back into it at Franc’s suggestion. He wanted me to look good. I wanted to look good.

When I think back now I see a woman living twenty miles away from her family, throwing all she’d got into an overpowering relationship with a man she had met just four months earlier. The proverb ‘marry in haste, repent at leisure’ springs to mind, without the marriage part. In that short space of time I had severed all ties to everything I had known and placed myself entirely in the hands of someone mercurial and possessive, whom I barely knew.

Eating properly, going to the gym, not drinking, not smoking, having dinner ready when Franc came home from work. Who was this woman and what had she done with Helen?

3 March

Darling Franc

Gym tonight. Please take care driving to and from Sheffield today. I’ll be thinking of you, as usual, all day. Every moment of every day my love for you grows stronger and deeper.

All my love

Helen

xxx

At work, the consultant I had been working for and had known for some years was about to leave. On the first Friday in March his immediate team, including me, were all going out for lunch, which meant car sharing to get to and from the restaurant. I was placed with the specialist registrar (married with children) who also had the best car – a two-seater sports convertible. I love fast cars, and this was a great treat. I was excited when I told Franc, thinking he would be happy for me. He left me a long letter telling me exactly what he thought about it:

5 March

Dear Helen

I do believe you love me, but could you explain me why, then, out of all the people going to the lunch you are going with a male in a sport car??? Could you please explain me that??? Between all the people and the cars that was the only place available, and it happened you were just talking to that man at that moment. Not with someone else, not another time. Just when it was right to be there. You knew it would have hurted me. You knew that. Don’t tell me it was not your intention to arrange for that.

The rest of what he’s written is contradictory and hard to follow: he needs me to understand him and I should understand him because I tell him I love him all the time but I keep leaving him on his own, ‘biting’ his thoughts. I don’t say anything to explain myself, and that makes him sad. He told me I arranged that lift with a man to hurt him but he knows I love him so he believes I didn’t really do that. He doesn’t take me for granted but he thinks there’s something wrong. He needs me. He is ‘storing’ these feelings. I should forget it. He can’t wait to see me. He will be back at 7.30 p.m. . . . ‘Love Franc’.

Franc was right. I didn’t – and still don’t – understand how he could see a lunchtime lift to a restaurant in a party of a dozen people as a betrayal, an infidelity. I had expected to see one of his slightly sarcastic notes but what I got was this rant, with his name underlined several times. His pen had gone right through the paper.

Et regardez-moi et pas dire un mot. [Look at me and do not say a word.]

This was different from the night he smashed my glass . . . I’d had five days without worry. Not even a week.

There was change in the air at the hospital too. The departure of my boss and the arrival of a locum consultant was a catalyst that changed the dynamics of the small office where I worked. Doreen Milson was promoted to department head and it was as though she’d been let off the leash.

One day I walked back into the office to find her sitting at my desk. She hadn’t seen me come in so she carried on with what she was doing – an impression of someone I quickly grasped was meant to be me. She tossed her hair about, pretended to have long nails, mimicked my accent and my lisp and the way I said, ‘Gosh’, and ‘Crumbs’. Then she pretended to light a cigarette, announcing to the room, ‘And I’m Franc’s bird.’ No one laughed because they’d seen me but Doreen carried on. She only saw me when she swung the chair round. An appalled silence descended. I did what I normally do with embarrassing things I don’t know how to cope with – I ignored it. I went quietly to my desk, sat down in my still-warm, recently vacated chair and got on with my work.

I can take a joke. Living with three strong-minded daughters I’d had the piss ripped out of me on a daily basis. My departing boss sometimes affected not to understand my occasional lisp, but it was all done in good heart with no offence meant or taken. It was part of our daily banter, like calling me the ‘bag lady’ when I was a freelance because of my preferred method for picking up and dropping off completed work. But Doreen’s performance had been spiteful.

Shortly afterwards a large leather bullwhip appeared, mounted prominently on the wall of her office. We all remarked on the interesting choice of decor and the message it sent, which was of course why it was there, despite the offence it might cause. After that whenever Doreen was in the staff common room the conversation swiftly deteriorated to graphic discussions about vibrators, periods, the shape and size of people’s genitalia and insinuations about everybody’s sex life (except her own). It was so awful I stopped going in there and started having lunch in the cafeteria or at my desk. I didn’t tell Franc – but then I’d grown careful about telling him anything I didn’t think he’d understand or that might provoke an argument.

Morning Franc

I feel very out of sorts this morning.

Anyway – gym tonight and I’ll try to remember everything we went through on Sunday.

Long day without you – again.

Love and kisses

Helen xxx

You don’t need to be ‘out of sorts’.

You are so lovely anyway.

Love

Franc

Darling Franc

Can you kill me soon please? I can’t stand these long lonely days at work without you!

Drive safely to Derby, and back, and I’ll see you this evening.

All my love

Helen xxx

Dear Helen

It will be a pleasure for me to kill you (as soon as possible).

Franc had photocopied a cartoon and left it next to this last note. It shows a woman bending over a sink, washing her hair. With her head down and her hair dripping wet she can’t see and is reaching out to a man standing behind her. He holds out a gun by the barrel as she says, ‘Pass me the hairdryer.’ Franc has drawn on the man’s face so that he looks like him. The woman’s head is a flurry of red scribbles. I wonder if perhaps he meant to show my red hair . . .

But I was more anxious about something else. Occasionally Franc referred to something he’d written but which I didn’t remember having seen. I asked Jeannie if she still got her daily faxes from Dave and she said she did. Other colleagues who regularly received personal faxes were getting theirs too.

My diary in March tells me that I was going to the gym a minimum of three times a week. I had a gym bag and I needed more kit so I bought some new stuff at one of our office sales. When I got back to my desk I showed it to Sarah, the typist who sat alongside me.

Doreen walked in and delivered her opinion: ‘Fuck. You must be a right skinny bitch to fit in that.’ She wasn’t wrong because, through diligent hard work, cardio and resistance, and following the exercise plan and diet Franc had devised for me, I had gone very quickly from a dress size 12 to a size 8. Doreen was somewhere north of both of those.

I smiled politely and turned back to my work. The ‘Skinny Bitch’ handle stuck. ‘Oh, hello – here’s the Skinny Bitch.’ ‘I don’t know – ask the Skinny Bitch.’

That weekend Franc and I drove to Manchester because he wanted to visit the Trafford Centre. While we were there he bought me a gorgeous grey wool shift dress, sleeveless and trimmed with duck-egg blue at the neck and arms. It was lined with the same colour and came with a matching silk cardigan. I didn’t think I’d ever owned anything so beautiful and I know I looked fabulous wearing it. All the way home I sat with the bag on my knee, holding it tight like a surf board. It had the name of the designer on the front and it fastened with Velcro. This was the bag that would become the receptacle for all the words Franc and I exchanged, the bag that would sit beneath my bed collecting dust, the bag that sits on my work table now. The dress is long gone but the cardigan survives, as do the words and memories.

For two weeks there were no notes on the kitchen table but my diary tells me I went to the gym, once with Franc so he could check my progress. I went to the hairdresser and I had a manicure and a pedicure. On 25 March I met Number 2 Daughter and her boyfriend for a quick lunch in the hospital canteen. It was a tense half-hour. She told me that my ex-husband had promised each of my girls a hefty sum of money if they never spoke to me again and that none of them liked Franc very much. It’s not surprising the lunch ‘did not go well’ as I recorded in my diary afterwards. But I can’t blame them for taking the money. I would have done.

My eldest daughter didn’t speak to me again for many years but I managed to stay (secretly) in touch with the younger two. At the time it felt as though everything that followed my separation from my husband was repeating itself. And, of course, my children’s dislike of Franc drove another wedge between us.

Franc was ill immediately after the quarrel with my daughters and lying on the sofa all day gave him time to think, which I had discovered was never a good thing. I began to notice that when he was angry what he wrote didn’t always make sense. When I got up for work on Monday morning, three freshly composed pages were waiting for me on the kitchen table:

Dear Helen

I hate being ill. I feel useless. And I have too much time free so my mind wanders around and around. Of course I have a lot to think about but I’m not going to bore you with work problems.

I have tried several times in the last few days to talk with you . . .

But he hadn’t because he didn’t know what to ask or say and because it seemed to him that I didn’t want to talk.

Then came a list of things he was worrying about. He said he thought I didn’t do things the way I normally did because I was afraid of upsetting him. He said I had upset him because he wanted me to be myself and not change. On the other hand, he said, he loved having someone in his life ‘who lives for me in every respect’.

He demanded to know why I wasn’t writing. He wanted me to write and that, he said, was why he kept asking me about it. If he was the love of my life (as I kept saying he was) why didn’t I write? Perhaps, he suggested, the reason was him – perhaps ‘I am not an inspiration for you at all. So what kind of love is this?’ He went on:

If this love is so big why don’t you feel the need to write? I feel bad about it because I know you have the talent to write and it seems I do nothing to inspire you. Your American friend, he does ‘motivate’ you.

He said he thought I must be bored with him because we’d stayed in all weekend, although ‘I am not questioning your love’. None of this, he said, was my fault but – and he was sorry to say it – I had done nothing to help him understand . . .

Don’t say anything about hopes and things like that please. At the end of the day you are here so . . .

He said he couldn’t spend five minutes of his life without thinking of me but that most of those thoughts were ‘the wrong ones’. He wanted to know why I didn’t talk to him about this. He said he didn’t know me.

I feel a lot of the time you would like to say something and you don’t do it because you think you will upset me. I can see it in your eyes . . .

At the moment I am really struggling to cope with your past. I want to know all about it. I do not want to know it at all. If I don’t know I cannot think about it. But I know there is something so I will think and create it anyway.

Franc didn’t encourage my writing – instead, he hectored me. He asked so many questions saying he didn’t want answers, but then – almost in the same breath – that he did. His reaction when I’d told him about my ex-husband made me careful not to mention my past again. But every now and again he would ask about the photograph he had seen of my ex-boyfriend. Every so often he would take a sharp dig at my American friend, Quinn. They’d met once and when they did Quinn had given Franc’s hand a firm shake, keeping hold of it slightly longer than was necessary while he gave him a beady look and said, ‘You make sure you take care of this girl.’ I don’t think Franc liked that. I don’t think he liked that I had turned to Quinn when Sally died. I was beginning to discover there was quite a lot that Franc didn’t like.

He was barking up the wrong tree with Quinn, though. There was never anything physical between us and our friendship was based on a meeting of minds. We were as thick as thieves, Quinn and I. We joked about it, once.

Quinn slapped his leg and roared with laughter. ‘Hell, honey . . . if I had any kind of sexual prowess I could understand it but I’m eighty years old, for chrissakes!’

When I lived nearby Quinn and I would often spend an afternoon at the weekend in his studio, smoking cheroots, eating big American pickles straight out of the jar and drinking vodka. He taught me almost everything I know about modern art and quite a lot about life, mostly the bits I’d missed when I was out buying shoes or was shacked up with unsuitable men. He had known Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (‘he was real mean to her’) and in the Second World War he had travelled through North Africa, across to Sicily and up the leg of Italy with General Patton’s army. He was a remarkable man, a great storyteller and very good company – a true friend. All three of my girls were immensely fond of him. Quinn once said to me, ‘Don’t let anyone clip your wings, honey.’ I think he must have had a premonition, or perhaps he just recognized the type when he clapped eyes on the man whose sense of ownership was evidenced in the arm draped proprietorially across my shoulders.

Perhaps I failed to see the danger because Franc was so different from my ex. Franc was meticulous about the way things should be done. My husband was laid back to the point of neglect, except when he had a bee in his bonnet about something, and I don’t think he really cared all that much about how I dressed or looked, whereas to Franc that was everything. One was a sledgehammer and the other a scalpel. With one, you could rub along quite nicely, having fun and being a family, for months; with the other the brooding could go on for days on end while I tiptoed around him being as quiet and unobtrusive as possible, hardly speaking.

The nicknames these men gave me are revealing: when I first met my husband he called me ‘Squeak’ – because I was quietly spoken – which later became ‘Mouse’. Franc christened me ‘Sock’ because, he said, I was always under his feet. But then that was where he seemed to want me to be.

In my purse there is a small square of paper I cut out of one of the notebooks. In Franc’s writing are four words: ‘I love you Sock.’ I carried it with me – and still do – as a reminder that I was loved, or believed that I was. While I long to make a bonfire of everything else Franc has ever written to me I would find it hard to part with that. But something has dawned on me as I write this: before Franc, ‘I love you’ was something I only ever heard from my daughters. A longing to hear the ‘three little words’ had propelled me into making some strange life choices long before I met Franc.

The letters, the faxes, notes, emails and diaries help me to see the progress of our relationship, and in a way of which Franc would most certainly approve: meticulous detail. Reading Franc’s letters now reminds me how I felt when I saw one: would it be nice or nasty, make sense or not? As a general rule, the longer the letter, the nastier it was. They had the same effect on me as that maths teacher at primary school – I wanted to hide. In the month after the rant there were quite a few long ones and when I read them they left me winded. Because his English slipped when he was wound up I would have to read them many times over to try and grasp the sense. But they still confused me. I couldn’t understand what it was he wanted, even as I groped desperately for the meaning – and for the love. He kept telling me that I was not showing my love for him when I thought I did that every day in so very many ways: when I trimmed his hair and beard, gave him manicures and pedicures, cooked delicious meals, went to the gym and followed his exercise programme to the letter; when I left him a note signed with kisses or by being there for him and doing things properly, the way he liked them. At first, I had been rewarded with a smile and an ‘I love you, Ellen’ but before long he seemed to expect me to do these things. They went from being a treat to a duty, and the duties multiplied while the smiles and ‘I love you’s tailed away.

Then Dave decided to sell his house, the one Franc and I were living in. We had to find somewhere else to live. The question of whether we would be moving together, as a couple, was never asked or, as far as I know, even considered. It was simply assumed.

There were some new-build two-bedroom flats that Franc was interested in. The fact that they were pristine and no one had lived in them appealed to his fastidious side. We arranged to go and look at one together. I had a hair appointment in the city centre after work so Franc was going to meet me at the hairdresser. The timing went slightly adrift and I was thirty minutes late coming out. Obviously it wasn’t my fault that the hairdresser was running behind. I could see Franc through the window and waved at him, mouthing, ‘Come in.’ I don’t know why he stayed outside, pacing the pavement, but I began to feel anxious and if I could have left I would but my hair was wet, waiting to be dried. When I finally emerged he smiled and told me my new, slightly shorter style made me look much younger. Then he rolled up the magazine he’d been reading and bounced it up and down on top of my head: ‘DO [thump] NOT [thump] EVER [thump] DO [thump] THAT [thump] TO [thump] ME [thump] AGAIN [thump] ELLEN [harder thump for emphasis].’ I carried on smiling because I didn’t know what else to do. People looked at us curiously and gave us a wide berth, but no one did or said anything. I fixed my smile, transmitting the ‘nothing to see here’ message, but if you looked – if you really looked – you would have seen that it wasn’t right. My eyes were spilling over and I had blushed scarlet. Then we went and saw the flat as though nothing had happened. Franc decided to take it and signed the agreement on the spot.

On 2 April, Good Friday, we went away to Bath as we had planned and then on to Salisbury and Stonehenge, returning home via the Cotswolds. We stopped off at Charlecote Park on the way back. It was chilly but sunny and I was relaxed, so relaxed I mentioned that this was one of my favourite places and I had a book about it somewhere. That was all it took for Franc to start picking away at me to find out who I’d been there with before. Eventually he dragged it out of me – I’d been with Stuart – and so we had to leave. On the drive home, every time I looked across at him he had his lips pressed tightly together. He wouldn’t take my hand in the car as he usually did so I rested my hand on his knee, in case he changed his mind. That evening I had to explain again about my husband and about Stuart. I didn’t want to. I knew it would cause trouble and we’d probably be up half the night going over this tired old ground. The next day I took my precious box of photographs to work and locked them away in my cupboard until I could take them somewhere safe.

The weekend of the 9th, we were away again, this time to London because he wanted to see a brands exhibition at the Business Design Centre in Islington. I’m not sure the fact that this coincided with one of my father’s occasional visits to the Midlands was entirely incidental.

We stayed at a hotel on Upper Street and Franc talked about how he would like to work in London. ‘You will come with me,’ he said, suggesting a long-term future together. We were standing looking in a shop window when Franc kicked my foot to straighten it and then he kept kicking my feet every time I turned my toes in. He did it all weekend. When we were on an escalator at Angel Tube station he whacked me between the shoulder blades because he said I wasn’t standing up straight. He did that all weekend too. I won’t say I accepted this from Franc but I could see why he was doing it because I’d grown up being told that I was pigeon-toed and round-shouldered. He bestowed a kiss after each reprimand to show it was for my own good.

On Saturday night, over dinner, we had our second disagreement about money. It wasn’t exactly a row, more a difference of opinion. He told me I should save money. It was sound advice but as I pointed out, I wasn’t yet in a position to do so, having just moved house again. He offered to help me to manage my money better but I, having been fleeced by my ex-husband, thanked him and declined. Predictably, he took offence, wanting to know why I didn’t trust him. Managing my own money was my line in the sand. I stuck to my guns. He was a bit frosty for a couple of hours, but it seemed quickly forgotten.

After we got back, Franc sent me a very long fax. It’s faded now and quite hard to read except in good light but it contains, if you like, the essence of the man. I’ve labelled it with a Post-it note. I call it the Shove.

You keep saying you love me so much and that I am the love of your life and that . . . and that. The problem is I do believe you and therefore I do expect something from you.

I knew he was complicated. That was very clear and he said so often enough. He was always telling me how he was used to dealing with problems on his own, that he was self-reliant because that way was more straightforward. He wrote (again) about how he was thinking about me all the time and repeated that ‘unfortunately’ these thoughts were almost always bad ones. He said he was living his life for me alone and wanted to help me.

And I am sorry if I talk about money but is just to explain what I think . . .

By the end of the first page I understood that he expected me to show my feelings all the time and especially when he did something for me. I thought I did that quite naturally but it seemed whatever I did, or had done, was not enough.

Yesterday I wrote on the book I bought for you something I thought would have made you very happy. Maybe I am wrong but I thought I would have seen some reaction from you showing me how happy you were. Your reaction . . . well, let’s forget it.

He told me I was an artist, romantic, so in love with him but I never showed him that side of myself and he had expected that from me. He felt cheated, thwarted, as though I should be Cathy to his Heathcliff. That was all he needed, he said, to make him feel better.

All I ask to someone who keeps saying how much she loves me is to show me that love when I need it. And in this respect to say ‘I love you’ does not count. If I am not even breathing because of a picture I have seen I cannot believe you not doing the easiest and simplest thing: get the picture (I did not like that movie with Demi Moore – The Scarlet Rose? – because one of the actors reminded me about the picture).

I couldn’t get the picture, which was safe under lock and key at work, and I panicked. I kept telling him there was nothing to hide, that I had told him everything, but he didn’t believe me.

What more did he want me to do? I thought we talked so much. Was it that I said the wrong things? Did not knowing what to do mean he was right, that I didn’t love him? I believed I did. To think that I was wrong, that I had somehow been dishonest and hurt him was hurting me, too.

Is it so bad just talking to me about your love for me? You say you love me and you do not want to stand in front of me and say just a few words to feed my needs. How do you expect me to believe you when you say I am the love of your life if I can’t get support from you?

Then he turned to my marriage. How, he wanted to know, had I been able to put up with that for so long and yet I wasn’t able to do ‘any simple thing’ for him?

Please do not leave me to destroy what there is between us. Please help me with your love. I need you to talk with me. And talk with me. And talk with me.

The feeling that I was about to lose him began to settle heavily in my chest, yet I still couldn’t understand why. He said he thought there were things I did not want to tell him, although he said he did not want to know everything ‘for the sake of knowing it’. But in the next breath he said that if I did not tell him ‘everything’ he did not believe we were ‘as close as we claim to be’. He did not think I felt I could tell him everything.

I need to see real love. In the simplest possible way. I know I am not asking anything impossible if you really love me (as I know you do). I do need to know you live for me and that you are prepared to support me.

Then he said he would have written another hundred pages about how he felt but that he couldn’t go on. The final sentence told me that when we went out for dinner the night before, and in spite of everything, he had been struck dumb by my beauty. I was so confused I didn’t know what to think.

When I got back from work, he kept me up half the night going over and over it. Eventually, at about 4 a.m., shattered, I went to bed and left him downstairs. Christ. What a mess.

The next morning, as Franc slept soundly, I found another long note waiting for me on the kitchen table.

I need to write again. I need to do it because I can’t bear all this anymore. I owe you an apology anyway. Please do not think I do all this to hurt you. It is for me. I need to get rid of all these awful feelings and sensations. I know I am selfish in this respect.

He knew my past was not my fault but he found it difficult to live with. Every time he saw something that reminded him of my ‘previous life’, he felt sick. He said when I didn’t say anything it meant I wasn’t thinking about him. This, he said, made him ‘very jealous’ and I must therefore always tell him my thoughts.

One of the things I’d said during the previous night’s interrogation was that I had no experience of a relationship as intense as ours. I asked him to be patient with me because he was so much more experienced than I was and I needed to learn. He said he didn’t believe me, and he wrote it again in his letter.

Wednesday the 14th is a sunny April morning but I can barely see it. I have read Franc’s note over and over and my eyes are swollen and red from crying. My voice is hoarse from the night before, saying the same words repeatedly until I can’t say them anymore because they don’t work. I cannot make Franc see how much I love him. I drink coffee but I cannot eat because I am brim full of pain for everything that has happened over the last few months – the loss of my home, the loss of my family, our pets, our things all packed into boxes and standing unloved in a cold corner of an anonymous trading estate, the job that I wanted so much but is beginning to look like another misjudgement, the deaths and tragedy, the failure and Franc . . . Every time Franc behaves like this it releases so much agony inside me I find it impossible to carry on doing normal things. I have Talking Heads on the Walkman. David Byrne is singing ‘Once in a Lifetime’. I feel as though I am no longer myself, as though the world has cut me loose. I am slipping into something unknown.

I walk out of the house I share with Franc, leaving a note asking him to call me in sick at work but I don’t say goodbye and I hope he won’t see me or find out where I’m going because I catch a bus out to the countryside village where one of my friends lives. I have called her and she’s in. Nina is a good listener, steady and wise, and she doesn’t ask difficult questions – a rock in this sea of catastrophe. There will be calm. I need calm because I feel as though I’m going mad.

It doesn’t last long though. I don’t know how he found me but very soon Franc is at the door and then we are in Nina’s back garden and he is standing over me, talking. Franc is always talking at me – except for when he’s not, of course, when he’s brooding silently over his disappointment in me. In all that talking he never asks how I’m coping with all those recent bad things; he never mentions Sally, or my poor cat, Byron. He has mentioned my children once, to tell me that they are a ‘reminder of another man’s fuck’. When he said this I say nothing about them being conceived in love and how hard I’d fought for them, how hollow and pointless my life had seemed without them, my adored babies. To add to everything else I am a craven, miserable coward. What is happening to me? I’ve always been so strong.

Franc thanks Nina and puts me into his car. I will not (he says) take you home because clearly you cannot be trusted. Instead I am to go with him to his meeting in Nottingham where I will sit in the car and wait patiently until he’s done, like the badly behaved child I am. Three hours later and we’re on our way back again. Franc talks the whole way about what he needs from me, about what I do wrong. Then he talks the entire evening about the same things. He doesn’t seem to notice that all the spirit has gone out of me; that I’ve been hammered flat and thin and that I’ve folded in on myself. Feeling as insubstantial as smoke I drift upstairs to go to the loo. My overriding wish is that Franc will shut up, press ‘pause’, leave me alone for a bit. I can think of nothing else so I take a fistful of pills, the antidepressants my doctor had prescribed. I don’t suppose this is quite what he had in mind when he said they’d help me and I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I’m a disaster, hopeless, helpless, useless . . .

The next thing I know is that Franc has his fingers down my throat and I’m fighting him hard to let me go but what I’m seeing jumps around in fits and starts and clouds over. Then I’m in the back of an ambulance. I can hear an irregular beep, which I recognize as a heart monitor and I know it doesn’t sound right. It’s frightening until I begin to sink down, fading into warmth and peace. Gratefully I let myself go while I keep repeating my mantra: I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry . . . I can’t do this anymore . . .

It turns out you need quite a lot of antidepressants to finish the job. When I wake up on a hospital trolley my stomach has been pumped and there’s a nasty taste in my mouth. I feel like shit and Franc is nowhere to be seen. He’s gone home. No one asks me why I did this desperate thing, although statistics estimate that almost thirty women a day attempt suicide and that three women a week kill themselves as a result of experiencing domestic abuse. My bruises are assumed to be a result of Franc’s heroic attempts to save me and they are, partly. I did make him do that, although perhaps he didn’t need to be quite so rough. Poor Franc. Heroic Franc. I am simply asked if I will do it again. I shake my head, ashamed. I am discharged in the very early morning with a taxi waiting and a follow-up appointment with my GP. I go home too. Where else can I go?

I crawl into bed and Franc brings me a cup of tea – black, with honey – and my Walkman. With one earpiece each we lie wrapped up together and listen to the song he has chosen, REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’. For me, this album is forever associated with Sally. ‘Nightswimming’ was played at her funeral. He knows this. I told him.

The next day Franc goes off to Milan on business and I keep my doctor’s appointment. We talk about what I did. Did I really mean to kill myself? No, not really. I just wanted it to stop and I felt desperate for some calm. What did I want to stop? God, I wish I could answer that. How long have you got?

I don’t say a thing about Franc. I just talk about how awful the last year has been. The doctor signs me off for a week – the note says ‘exhaustion’ and ‘nervous collapse’. When I get home there is a letter from Doreen at work telling me I will be docked two days’ pay because I didn’t notify them that I was ill. Franc read my note and didn’t bother to make the call. I don’t say anything about anything when I go back to the office – only that I wasn’t well. I tear up the doctor’s note because I’m fearful of Doreen too now. I can’t lose my job on top of everything else.

While Franc was away, I wrote a letter for him to read on his return. The language I used makes me cringe – but I knew that it was my best shot at pleasing Franc and not finding myself abandoned and on the street again.

18 April

Darling Franc

I’ve been thinking all weekend about how to express, or write down for you, the way I feel about you – how to describe for you my ‘big love’ so you can believe that, in spite of everything, it exists for us.

When I fell in love with you I began to live by a light that shone within me, shining into every corner of my life. This light, the beauty and truth of my feelings for you, became a well-spring bubbling up with affection, tenderness, sweetness, passion, longing, desire, love and an almost impossible yearning. It unites my heart, soul, mind and body in a common cause, to love you.

Thinking of you now, so far away from me, I feel the deep and penetrating pain of separation. The flow of feelings for you, blocked by your absence, could drown me. The misery I feel when I’m not with you could engulf me, suffocate me. This is my love for you; I could and would, die for you. This huge overwhelming big, big love gives me both torment and bliss.

I look the same when you’re not here, I do the same things but I’m only half a person, not complete. I am empty without you, part of me is torn away. You are in my thoughts every second of the day and night.

Darling Helen

I have read your letter. I do like it.

Then he immediately picked on what I said about my ‘big love’. This, he said, was the crucial point and although he said he believed me . . .

If I am with you now is because last Wednesday you showed to me how much you loved me. Despite the fact you loved me so much, despite the fact you knew I need you, despite I told you not to leave me on my own, despite the fact you knew how much I worried about you, despite all this and much more you just run away.

He wrote about how, when he took me with him to Nottingham, we had talked and I had told him how much I loved him. He said I had promised him everything.

And despite that again you did what you did to me. Despite the fact you loved me so much, despite the fact you knew how much I loved you too, you hurt me to death again. We will talk about this again and again.

The ‘again and again’ part torpedoed any hope I might have had that we could recover from this and be as we were when we first met. He told me not to use his anger over that photograph of me with my ex-boyfriend as an excuse. Yes, he said, it made him crazy to see me with another man and yes, it made him crazy that I had taken ‘that bloody picture’ away. He demanded to know why I hadn’t brought it back. If I’d told him I was afraid to he would have hit the roof. He would have seen it as further proof that my ‘big love’ didn’t exist.

It was not the picture. It was about lies or half truth as you like to describe it. Forgive me but I cannot forget it. And that is because I ‘see’ you thinking about someone else while you are telling me you don’t remember.

He said he loved me so much that he could not accept ‘normal things’ about me, like a photograph.

He finished by telling me that my behaviour had made everything much worse – for him.

How could I resolve this obsession with a photograph? I felt battered and hollow. What he wanted was impossible. It’s not as though I could un-take it. So I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Why didn’t I leave? That’s the question women like me are always asked. It was all over my Twitter timeline when Helen Archer was going through hell on the radio, as was the stock reply, ‘Why doesn’t he stop?’ In my experience the right answer is, ‘Because he can’t.’ Men like Franc don’t understand what they’re doing is wrong so why should they change? They might occasionally ask for help because they know that’s what they’re expected to do and they might even change their behaviour – for a while. But once an abuser of women, always an abuser of women. Abusers lack empathy; they don’t instinctively know that it’s wrong to torture another human being. And for many, if not all, it’s an addiction.

Like other addictions – once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic – it can lie dormant for a very long time but it’s always there, sweaty, volatile and dangerous. And women who are abused have their own addiction – that desperate search for ‘true love’, the love we were promised since we first read Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. We want the man we fell in love with back, the one who was so adoring and lovely, who couldn’t do enough for us, who made us feel so special and loved and cared for. We know that man is real because we see him often, in between the other stuff. We think we can change him and heal him, return him to his true self and make him a better man. We think we can banish the monster. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a twelve-step programme for that.

Now when I read these letters from Franc, asking me to help him, I still feel a stab of conscience. Whether he meant it or not is another matter but his words triggered a hardwired instinct in me to help, to do whatever I could to make it all better, to get the grateful smile. Franc knew he was throwing me a bone, something to keep me ‘under his feet’, his ‘Sock’. Women like me know our place.

And it seems to me that as long as misogyny, gender inequality and sexism remain ubiquitous, women will be forced to remember their place. And that is one of the reasons why men who practise coercive control are so successful at it. Take Franc’s little ‘rules’:

1. Dinner ready promptly at a time specified by him.

2. Always keep the house clean and tidy to a specified standard.

3. Provide personal grooming services as and when requested, to include but not limited to: manicures, pedicures, beard trimming, back waxing, hairline trimming.

4. No bare feet.

5. Do not leave the room when he’s angry.

6. Do not be late.

7. Answer the phone by the third or fourth ring.

8. Immediately you answer the phone go somewhere quiet where you can hear.

9. Eat only proteins and salad.

10. Stop smoking.

11. Do not drink more than one glass of wine (white).

12. Go to the gym at least three times a week for ninety minutes a visit and following the prescribed exercise schedule.

13. Do not speak to men.

14. Keep nothing back and tell everything about all previous relationships.

15. Do not ask questions about his previous relationships or family.

16. Have a schedule ready for the weekend by Thursday evening.

17. Wear clothes approved by Franc.

18. Always look nice, tidy and well groomed.

19. Smile.

20. Showers, not baths.

21. Shower before sex.

22. Shower after sex.

23. Be passive during sex.

24. Do not go to see, go out with or talk to family or friends.

25. Do nothing that might make him jealous or have ‘bad thoughts’.

26. Do not be better at anything than he is.

And that’s only part of it. The terrifying thing is that for generations of women it will sound all too familiar. Here’s the ‘Good Wife’s Guide’ from a 1950s women’s magazine:

1. Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready, on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs.

2. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favourite dish) is part of the warm welcome needed.

3. Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people.

4. Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.

5. Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Gather up schoolbooks, toys, paper, etc. and then run a dust cloth over the tables.

6. Over the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.

7. Prepare the children. Take a few minutes to wash the children’s hands and faces (if they are small), comb their hair and, if necessary, change their clothes.

8. Children are little treasures and he would like to see them playing the part. Minimize all noise. At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet.

9. Be happy to see him. Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him. Listen to him.

10. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.

11. Make the evening his. Never complain if he comes home late or goes out to dinner, or other places of entertainment without you. Instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure and his very real need to be at home and relax.

12. Your goal: Try to make sure your home is a place of peace, order and tranquillity where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit.

13. Don’t greet him with complaints and problems.

14. Don’t complain if he’s late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.

15. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.

16. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.

17. Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.

18. A good wife always knows her place.

It’s easy to laugh at something that seems so quaint and old-fashioned but sixty-something years later a large number of men will still believe this is how it should be. They might not say so – they believe it nonetheless.

But the real point I’m making is that this is mostly trivial stuff, which you would be doing anyway. So what if you need to make some minor changes because that’s the way he likes it done. Women are coached from an early age in the art of making things nice, of pleasing, of making people happy, keeping things running smoothly and taking pride in a home. Women have traditionally taken on, and still do, professional roles that require those same skills, as nurses, secretaries, clerks, receptionists, cooks, cleaners, hairdressers, beauticians – all the service industries. There’s nothing wrong with that, providing we can lift our eyes higher and not self-limit. Women in subservient roles are vulnerable to controlling men who merely take advantage of the status quo.

Coercive control is embedded in ordinary humdrum domestic tasks. And it is all too often overlooked by the way we, as a society, measure injury – by what we can see. We measure damage by bruises, black eyes, lost teeth, bald patches where hair has been pulled from a head, broken bones and, a troubling and more recent development, acid burns.

A woman who has been repeatedly shouted at for failing to answer the phone within set time parameters, or who has been the subject of a strict diet and exercise regime, who hasn’t seen her family or friends for months on end, who is sometimes absent from work with no explanation, is easily ignored if she doesn’t bear the outward signs of physical assault. Psychological injury is much harder to spot. A woman subjected to either form of abuse haemorrhages clues to what is going on but as a society we are still turning away, uncomfortable about asking questions which might be seen as intrusive.

In Liane Moriarty’s book, Big Little Lies, recently adapted for television, beautiful, wealthy and abused Celeste hits the nail on the head: ‘I was waiting for someone to ask the right question but they never did.’

For most victims of domestic abuse the ‘right question’ has to be asked not just once but on several occasions over a period of time and not only because abusers spend a long time enforcing their victims’ silence: it also takes courage to answer truthfully because to do so means admitting that you are a victim, that what you’ve sold to everyone as your very own fairy tale is nothing of the sort. Admitting to that means losing whatever shreds of pride and comfort you’ve managed to hold on to because it’s the last concession to your condition, the one that comes at the end of the road when you finally admit failure, and failure is so hard to admit because it is what you have been told you are for however long this has been going on. Your confidence, self-esteem, ability to make decisions, your whole sense of self has been lost in a mire of petty domestic tyranny. It’s an absurdity, too, that should a woman take the enormous step of asking for help she will probably ask several times before that help is forthcoming. And each time she goes through the same agonizing mental process.