The messages in our notebook don’t mention Franc’s attack. They skip along blithely. Tuesday 6 July reads:
Morning Franc
What a long day it will be today. And then, do I go to the gym or iron your shirts? Perhaps I could do both – oh, I don’t know! Take care, enjoy your golf and I’ll see you later.
Love and kisses
Sock
xxx
What do you think I would say??? Franc
Of course I did both.
On Tuesday 13 July:
Morning Franc
I’ll go straight to the gym tonight – are you coming too? See you later. I do love you – really!
Big wet kiss from
Sock
xxx
Then later the same day:
Hi
Been home (obviously). Gone to gym. Back 7.30–7.45 ish.
See you later.
Kissy, kissy
Sock
xxx
PS Don’t forget that programme I’d like to see on TV tonight?
We had a date night on the 14th, after I’d been to the hairdresser. He took me to a new restaurant. The note I left for him next morning suggests that I felt a little neglected:
Morning Franc
I know you look for your note – I always look for one too. Look back through this book and see who received the most and what they say.
Love (unrequited)
Sock
xxx
No note. I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing.
Worried sick of course.
H x
‘And is this the reason you are out and about??’ Franc wrote on the next line, when he returned from the golf lesson he had forgotten to mention and found his Sock wasn’t at home.
There was a note in my handwriting scrawled on the back of an old letter of mine, which lay discarded on the kitchen table. It said, ‘I need some air. I’ll be back.’ I don’t think he can have seen it.
In the notebook for Thursday 22 July:
I do appreciate that sometimes is difficult to describe feelings but why can’t you say something to me. You asked me to talk and I did it. I know I should not do it because what I have to say hurts you. And I do not want to make you think about that [Sophie].
Why didn’t I say anything that would help him, he wanted to know, when he too was ‘in torment’. I wrote back:
The last thing I want in the world is for you to be in torment – ask me anything, anything at all, and I will try as hard as I can to help you. It does hurt me, but (and I mean it) I would go through anything for you – because I do, truly, love you.
Hx
At the end of July it was time for the regular staff rotation at the hospital, when the team of doctors under a consultant moved on to further their training. As a rule this happened without any kind of fanfare but on this occasion, because the team had been such a good one and we’d weathered a fair few crises together, it had been decided that we would all go out together to a restaurant in town.
Franc didn’t want me to go. But I liked my colleagues, I saw them almost every day and I wanted to say thank you for their hard work, just as they wanted to say thank you for mine. I was as much a part of the team as any nurse, ward clerk or doctor. I promised to behave myself, though.
There were about twenty of us seated at a long table down the middle of the restaurant. I was halfway down, opposite the consultant and facing a long window that looked out onto the street. It was a terrific evening. I was going to miss this bunch of doctors, even Matt, who was so obviously not meant to be a doctor that he cried every time he had to stick a needle into someone. His family were all medics, but where he should have been was at art school, where his heart really lay. He confided this to me over the first course, leaning in so no one would hear. His family had pressured him into a career in medicine and he was thoroughly miserable. Why not give it up and do what you love? I asked, while we waited for the next course. Be happy, I said. Be free. I saw no incongruity in this.
A gust of laughter swept down the table and I looked up. Through the window I saw a tall man, wearing a white shirt collar and a dark suit jacket. He had his phone to his ear and his back to me. The jacket, a shade too tight, pulled slightly over his shoulders. I knew that back. It was Franc.
I rummaged about in my bag for my mobile. There were twenty-two missed calls, thirteen text messages and four voicemails. I began to shake, excused myself, and locked myself in the Ladies. The messages were all on a theme, rapid-fire variations of the same question.
WHERE ARE YOU?
But he knew where I was. And he was there, outside, on the pavement. Whatever I did now would be wrong. It was too soon to leave and it was too complicated to explain, not that I wanted to. If I didn’t leave, Franc would be furious. At the back of my mind was a memory of crashing into a white painted wall. How could this man I loved and who said he loved me make me feel so on edge? This man who told me he needed me over and over again?
When I returned to the room the main course had arrived so I decided I would stay for that, then leave. It would be a waste of money not to eat it, as well as rude. Franc hated wasting money. That was something he would understand. It was ridiculous to be afraid of him and yet as I sat down I could feel him watching me. When I looked up he waggled his phone. I hesitated, then shook my head. Suddenly I didn’t have anything to say, or, for that matter, much of an appetite.
Half an hour later I was being walked through the town centre with Franc’s hand gripping the back of my neck. Some of my hair was caught between his fingers. When I tried to turn and speak to him he wrenched me back to face the front. We were walking so fast that I was practically running. Running in heels. Thinking back, someone must have seen us. There is no way it could have looked right. Come to that, someone must have seen him reach out and grab my throat when I left the restaurant, walking towards him with a smile. I was early leaving, it was summer and it was still light. Someone must have seen.
It took twenty minutes to walk home and I don’t think I thought about anything during that time but keeping my feet moving fast enough to stop me from falling. I was shoved through the front door of the flat and lost my balance. Franc snatched a handful of my hair and I put a hand on each wrist, to stop him pulling. It hurt. He dragged me backwards the length of the hallway to the bedroom. My shoes were off and my skirt rucked up, my tights laddered. I kicked frantically, trying to find some purchase on the new carpet, but my feet kept slipping. He hoisted me onto the bed, straddling my hips, using his weight to hold me down while his hands circled my throat, squeezing, thumbs hard under my jaw. I can remember choking, burning pain and – once more – disbelief.
Strangling seems to take an age when you’re the one being strangled. I stopped fighting – it was getting me nowhere. If he was going to kill me, he was going to kill me. Then, abruptly, he relaxed his hands, got up and left the room. I don’t suppose it lasted for more than a minute.
At work the next day I was standing by the admissions desk, speaking to one of the doctors. I leaned over to get something and when I turned back she was staring at my throat. The scarf I was wearing had slipped.
‘You know, you shouldn’t put up with that.’
‘Put up with what?’ I pulled my scarf back up and tucked it into place.
‘I just thought you might need help?’
‘No. Really, I’m fine. Honestly.’
‘Well, you know where I am if you want to talk.’
‘I do . . . and thanks.’
When I got back to the flat there was a note for me in the message book:
I’m sorry for what happened. I’ve already told you it is not easy for me too. Apologies. You do know in your heart I love you. Do not spoil everything as if this was not true . . .
His name at the end had been written ‘with love’.
‘Do not spoil everything’ meant it was my fault.
I stayed up late, long after Franc had gone to bed, and tried to write a reply but I was angry and could only seem to write things that would make him angry too so I tore up my attempts and put them in the bin. I should have known that wouldn’t be enough.
The next day there was another letter for me – four tightly written pages.
When I woke up I wanted to read the letter you wanted me to read last night. With regret I noticed it was not on the table.
I did phone you to ask about it because I needed to know what you wrote in it. I needed to ‘hear’ something from you.
He said he had left work early because he was so preoccupied with me he couldn’t do anything. He said he’d come home and,
. . . like a child with a new toy I started to put together your letter. I need to talk with you, to know you, and what’s the best that you write? And here we are:
‘You have broken me.’ ‘This is your fault.’ ‘Do not ask anything.’
I am not sure I believe what I read. I was so keen to read this, to try to calm down reading some love words from you and . . .
He did everything for me, he said, so much that it ‘burned his brain’. Taking me out to restaurants and buying me things were all to build my confidence. I do not have to do this, he said.
This is not my mission. I want to live. I have still all my life in front of me. I can do everything. I do not have to use all my energy and all my efforts for someone who as a thank-you says, ‘you have broken me’.
He said everything he did was because he loved me. He didn’t expect anything back from me, ‘and what: you don’t have anything . . .’
He did not know what he had done wrong or what I wanted from him. He said he did not know who I was and he was certain he did not deserve to be treated this way.
If this is a punishment from God for my behaviour I think is too much.
You say I twist your words. I hear no words. I have been asking for your help for months and you let me [sic] (always) on my own.
I spend my time thinking about things to do with you and places to go with you. (Of course I have a long list of things and places deleted because . . .)
He said that if I could not find the words in my heart to help him when he needed me then I could not say I loved him.
For a writer saying she cannot find words to describe her love is quite . . . amusing, is it not?
He told me he felt ‘the most incredible and unbearable love’ and ‘the deepest affection’ he had ever felt for anyone.
This somebody is you. Whatever happens you will be that somebody.
Yours
Franc
Notebook, 29 July:
[Me:] I don’t know what to write except to tell you that I love you from the bottom of my heart and from the very heart of my soul. Please, please, believe me.
Hx
PS I have work to catch up after yesterday so I will be a little late – home just after 6 p.m.?
[Franc:] All I want is you to show me your love.
[Me] . . . and I do love you – really. I need your love, Franc. Pls love me. Sock xxx
PS And I really do think about you all day at work, and I miss you. Every moment spent away from you is a wasted moment.
[Franc:] I KNOW YOU LOVE ME. AND I LOVE YOU TOO. I’LL TRY MY BEST. PLEASE TRY TO UNDERSTAND ME. CANNOT WAIT TO HOLD YOU AGAIN.
And then he executed a perfect swallow dive into a deep pool of abject self-pity, where he wallowed for a week or so before going to France for a five-day visit to his head office. At first it was a relief having space to breathe and be myself. But after a couple of days, no matter how perverse it sounds, I felt pointless and lost without him. Adrift. Bereft.
But I had something to ward off any possibility of boredom while I waited at home for him to phone. He had asked me to arrange our summer holiday – a week in Scotland.
Notebook, Friday 13 August:
Not long now – and a whole week off (with you all to myself)! What bliss!!
Anyway, gym tonight?
Love and kisses
Sock
xxx
*
I wonder if there is a special pheromone we give off when we’re in an abusive relationship, an irresistible lure to other potential abusers.
Clearly there is a pattern – something that, if you don’t recognize it, can lead to a second, third or fourth abusive relationship. I’ve demonstrated that beautifully myself. Somehow I was able to carry two contradictory opinions in my head at the same time, each diametrically opposing the other. I knew that what Franc did and the way he behaved were wrong but at the same time I was able to tolerate the bad times for the good. I fancied Franc something rotten. I was utterly committed to him. I remained ridiculously, stupidly in love. I was a bubbling wellspring of devotion for someone who did awful things and behaved in ways that baffled me. I was so confused and so hopelessly muddled I stopped trying to make sense of it. What I felt for him overrode every grain of doubt I ever experienced. Each time I thought I saw things as they were, that insight, that clarity slipped away again, despite my spending an awful lot of time thinking about it. So I gave up and decided that if this was the way it was then this was the way it would have to be.
Now, of course, I know what was happening to me. It was ‘gaslighting’. The term comes from a 1938 stage play, Gas Light, but most people know the 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer rather better. The villain (Boyer) is an initially charming man who plays out all manner of psychological mischief on his wife (Bergman) in order to convince her she’s mad, leaving him free to follow his natural, murderous inclinations. It’s a form of psychological abuse and abuse does not make you more lucid. Its effect is to bring about a state of such anxiety and confusion that the victim no longer trusts their own judgement. They can’t see what’s in front of them, second-guess everything they do, question their own memory of events and eventually become totally dependent on their abuser as their only anchor to ‘reality’. It is the nastiest kind of manipulation. Women who have been abused often say that the violence wasn’t the worst part – that was the psychological abuse. The mind takes longer to heal than the body.
*
Understanding the psychology of controlling relationships is the means by which we can avoid them. It should be taught to everyone. Gaslighting is the basis for every kind of bullying, abuse, oppression and subjugation from the school playground right up to absolutist governments, totalitarian regimes and despotic rulers.
Typically it has three stages – idealization, devaluation and discarding.25
First, the abuser charms their victim, winning them over. Whenever a victim talks about an abuser the word ‘charming’ will be heard.
Charm is the bait on the abuser’s hook, along with being exciting, fun to be with and super-attentive to you – all the things that you might feel are missing from your life when you meet them. This is when, as I did, you fall so intensely in love that you can hardly breathe. You feel euphoric, overwhelmed, delirious. You can’t believe this wonderful thing has happened to you.
If it’s in the context of a romantic relationship you will feel that here at last is your soulmate, or if it’s a professional one then someone who at last recognizes your potential. They go out of their way to make you feel you have a lot in common, a shared experience or that you are special. For example, Maxim de Winter in Rebecca, telling his nameless wife, ‘We have something in common you and I,’ or the boss who said to me, ‘Promise me you’ll never leave.’ We all want to hear those things but this is a fishing expedition to gain your confidence and trust. They listen to you, encourage you to talk about yourself – fertile ground for discovering any inherent weakness, which can later be used against you – and give away very little about themselves. They give you the gift of hope. This is the idealization stage.
Once you’re hooked your abuser sets out to pull you apart. You feel you can’t do anything right, that everything you do is wrong or, as with Franc, that everything you do causes hurt and disappointment to the person you love, whom you love like you’ve never loved anyone before (or hopefully, since).
I was knocked sideways by the strength of my feelings for Franc and my obsessive need to please him. Not being able to work out just what he wanted from me and repeated failure to do so lowered my already fragile self-esteem. His constant references to my ‘bad’ past reinforced the message. Franc knew he could keep pushing me harder because every time I said, ‘But I love you so much,’ I effectively gave him permission to push me harder still. This is devaluation.
It’s not surprising that I failed time and time again. Perhaps if Franc had helped me, I might have worked it out, but instead his behaviour only compounded my confusion. I kept trying though. But the more I tried and failed the colder and more distant Franc became and the more depressed, anxious and fearful I became – and the more he despised me. Franc kept telling me that if I truly loved him I would know what he needed, what I had to do to make him happy. My repeated failure was ‘proof’ that I didn’t love him, although I was certain I did. Every so often he would tell me he knew I loved him – it’s there in his letters. I’d feel reassured and then round we’d go again. It was profoundly distressing. I was terrified that he would leave me. And of course he did, eventually.
This is where the ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ question comes in. First, it implies free will when by this point in a coercive relationship we have surrendered it. Second, it looks how it’s meant to look, as though we are complicit and willing collaborators, ignoring the reality that such men do not have to be in the same room, same house, same town or even the same country to exert control. That we willingly stay is a pernicious, persistent lie. The truth is that we’re trapped, but not quite at the point where we have to chew our own leg off to get free.
And then comes your reward: the end stage when you are discarded. When it happened to me it was as though I was, finally, going mad. You are emotionally battered, confused, anguished and suffering. Nothing you can do brings them back but that doesn’t stop you trying again and again, debasing yourself even further. You become, in effect, your own abuser and every day is as painful as walking barefoot over broken glass. Often there’s no obvious end to the relationship, no date that you can point to in a diary. Instead, you are left with your life on hold while your abuser occasionally toys with you, tells you he still loves you, gives you a shred of hope and then snatches it away. Franc and I went on for years like that.
The fact that you have been conditioned, groomed, primed over a considerable period of time leaves you with a series of behavioural tics that are easily spotted by other abusers and they do gravitate towards you. Despite outward appearances, when I met Franc I was a vulnerable woman susceptible to a certain type of man. He would have picked up on that, not necessarily consciously. For him my vulnerability was my attraction – you don’t have to take my word for it, he wrote it himself:
You are right to say that the fact you needed someone to help you in some way attracted me even more.
And when I first met Doreen at the hospital she seemed to be such a warm and friendly person, one of those people you can’t help but like.
These two unstable relationships fed off each other. The more dysfunctional I became as a result of Franc, the more my work suffered and the more Doreen picked on me. When, eventually, I came out the other side, I tried to analyse what I’d done wrong (which was when I embarked on those ill-fated therapy sessions) but I don’t think I did anything specific. I was just a victim of circumstance – wrong place, wrong time – a misalignment of the stars, fate or whatever.
Just as I can mark the turning point in my relationship with Franc, so I can with Doreen. One day I found her leafing through the patient notes on my desk.
‘Looking for anything in particular?’ I asked.
‘Well, you know Hazel was a patient on the ward last week? I wondered whether you had her notes.’
‘Yes. I do, for the discharge letter.’
‘Good. Have you typed it yet? Can I see it?’
‘Erm . . . no and no?’
‘And why not?’
‘Because Hazel is a member of staff.’
‘Yes. And I’m her boss.’
‘Look, I’m really sorry but patient confidentiality and all that. If you want to see Hazel’s notes you can request them from Records?’
‘Yes, but you could show me now and save time.’
‘I’m sorry, Doreen, you know I can’t.’
‘I could make things difficult for you . . .’
I gave her a long look. ‘It’s still a no, I’m afraid.’
Was I brave or stupid to stand up to her? Either way, it wouldn’t have mattered a bit if Doreen hadn’t been the way she was. I don’t like saying no – and I probably thought harder than most people before I said it. At some point in the conversation I also had the unwelcome insight that this might be a test (given what had happened over my daughter’s hospital records). Were people really that devious? I knew they could be and I no longer knew whom I could trust. Both Franc and Doreen had a problem with ‘no’. My job was to say ‘yes’ and keep everyone happy. As Franc said in another letter:
You are clever and you have a ‘bad’ temper but despite that you used to answer, always, with a lovely ‘yes, Franc’.
Keep ’em smiling. That was my job.