On 28 January my diary says, ‘VENICE TO MY FRANC – YAHOO!!!’
We were lucky with the weather. In sheltered squares where we stopped for coffee, we could slip off our coats and sit in our shirtsleeves, faces turned up towards the January sun. We walked for miles, hand in hand, across a semi-deserted city. There were almost no other tourists. We went on a gondola – not the expensive tourist ones but standing up in a proper Venetian one. I held on tightly to Franc and he kissed me to take my mind off the possibility of drowning. We stood on the Rialto Bridge. We climbed to the top of St Mark’s basilica on Sunday morning and then stepped inside to listen to the service – the saturating beauty of it made me cry (quietly). I remember waking up in bed, Franc beside me, and listening to the sound of bells from the campanile, elated by the reckless abundance of Tintoretto and Titian, Giorgione, Bellini and Veronese. It is an astounding place and Franc was kind, caring and lovely – Jekyll rather than Hyde – perhaps because he knew I’d never been there before whereas he had. And so it was my turn to wonder who he’d been with then.
Coming home again was a cold hard dose of reality. It was almost midnight when my flight got in and too late to catch a train. I hadn’t booked a room because I couldn’t afford one so, when I kissed Franc goodbye at the airport, I knew I would be spending the night on a bench in the Stansted arrivals hall. I fibbed about that and crossed my fingers behind my back. I had put all my efforts into getting to Venice and didn’t care about getting back again. I don’t know what I thought might happen: perhaps something extraordinary and romantic, as if this was a novel instead of just life.
Waiting for me on the kitchen table when I got home was a letter I’d read the Friday before – a STRICTLY PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL – ADDRESSEE ONLY letter. I had to face work again and a meeting at 10 a.m. on my first day back, to discuss what Doreen called my ‘current level of sickness absence’. The last paragraph raised a flicker of alarm: ‘You are entitled to be accompanied, if you wish, at this meeting with a Trade Union Representative, friend or colleague not acting in a legal capacity.’
One of the human resources managers would also be there. I began to feel, for want of a better word, oppressed. I’d never in my life been in trouble at work. I was absolutely certain that she had been talking about me. Believing that others in my office knew what Doreen had said about me was shaming. I had a surfeit of shame already and no room for any more.
Following standard human resources procedure, a further letter from Doreen arrived after the meeting confirming what we had discussed: that before Christmas I had myself arranged a meeting with the occupational health team, told them I was finding my work stressful and that there was no cover when I was on holiday – and I blamed this for my backlog of work. Doreen wrote that we’d talked about this before and she would arrange for me to have ‘basic secretarial support’ when I was away.
The letter further informed me that in future Doreen would be managing my sick leave rather than the more sympathetic occupational health team. I’d gone over her head and she didn’t like it. I no longer felt I had anyone in whom I was able to confide.
Franc came back that weekend to collect more of his stuff. We went to the gym together so that he could check my progress (those stubborn unyielding thighs). While I was being put through my paces the man at the next bench leaned over and said, quite seriously, ‘Is this man bothering you?’ I laughed – well, it was funny – and said, no, it was absolutely fine; we were together. ‘Really?’ said my gym neighbour, raising an eyebrow. Franc’s gym coaching style was full on and in your face. I can see why someone might construe it differently. On the other hand, this was now the second or third time a complete stranger had questioned the way Franc treated me in public. What I now thought of as acceptable was clearly troubling to others.
When we went to the station to wait for his train on Monday morning Franc had a lot more in his suitcase than he had arrived with. He seemed to be leaving me by degrees. I hated it.
There was something else I hated too. Franc wrote about it in the letter he left for me:
I cannot get this phobia about the flat. After all I have done to give you a place where to stay you keep telling me you hate it etc. etc.
He said he would ask the building manager to see if it could be rented from March, which horrified me, or, he suggested, I could find someone to share the rent with me (female) – ‘£60 per week all included.’ He said he had paid all his outstanding bills and now it was my responsibility. He reminded me that I had to pay rent and council tax by the end of the week, which came to just over £500.
Money makes me nervous and it makes me nervous what you told me last night (never mind throwing at me remote controls) about what I know and what I don’t. I am not sure I know you anymore – only complaints. Never a thank-you, never . . .
What had I done to make him ‘nervous’? I’d told him that I wanted to leave my job and find another. I’d told him I was worried about what was going on at work. I thought he would understand. He told me to ‘fucking stay’ where I was because of the money. That was when I threw the TV remote at him. It missed him by a whisker.
The following weekend Quinn died.
It was a massive heart attack. Dead before he hit the floor, they said. I think he knew. He had written each of my daughters a letter a couple of weeks earlier and sent me a photograph of one of his paintings with a sweet note on the back. But for the first time anyone could remember there was nothing in his studio. No work in progress. Everything was neat and tidy and put away. He knew.
I hadn’t seen Quinn since the day of the dinner at Nina’s, although we’d spoken on the phone. I felt guilty. I didn’t ask for time off to go to the funeral, because I didn’t think Doreen would agree to it. I felt guilty about that too.
*
Doreen now began to apply more pressure. I tried not to be out of my office after her secret search before Christmas but it was, of course, impossible. The department outboard that I had to fill in whenever I left the area – to go to medical records, outpatients, another ward or the pathology lab – was located bang outside Doreen’s office so she knew when I wasn’t there. I learned from the ward sister that every time I left, Sarah – the part-time typist – would be seen hurrying through the ward on her way to have a quick rifle through my desk. The registrar I shared an office with told me the same thing. Sarah had a legitimate reason to be there because of the secretarial help she was giving me but she also worked for Doreen so it was hard to see it as pure coincidence.
Then, early in February, I got a message from Franc that I needed to move the contents of my old house from his warehouse by the weekend or they would be thrown away. I thought I had more time, that Franc wouldn’t have left telling me until the last minute. I had to ask Doreen if I could take the day off. The thought of it gave me the shakes. She said no, and it was short notice, but still I tried to explain that I hadn’t been given any warning myself, that there were things which were important to me and my children that I really needed to reclaim. That brought the response, ‘You’re insured, aren’t you?’ Well, no, actually I wasn’t and that wasn’t the point. These things weren’t valuable to anyone but me – walking sticks my father had carved, one for each of us; Mum’s tea service . . . the sentimental kind of stuff. She wouldn’t budge. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ was the last thing she said on the subject. I stuck up a picture of Miss Trunchbull in the kitchen at home, imagined Doreen’s face on it and used it for target practice.
I phoned around and managed to get an auction house to collect the furniture but they wouldn’t take anything else so there was no alternative but to try to put it out of my mind.
Franc came back again a week later to sign off the cleared warehouse. When he’d finished doing that he brought back one or two of the bits and pieces belonging to me that hadn’t gone into the skip . . . literally bits and pieces. My mother’s tea service was returned to me in a plastic carrier bag. I put it straight in the bin. I couldn’t even look at it. But then we talked about how and when I would move to Paris to live with him and that soothed away some of the hurt.
On the day he went back to France, I had another meeting with Doreen and Dr Bray. This made three meetings in three weeks, each one followed by a lengthy letter outlining what I’d done, what I hadn’t done and what I had to do next.
Every one of these meetings left me with the feeling that I’d been caught in a lie. There seemed to be a suggestion that I was letting everyone down. The only thing I’d ever deceived anyone about was what was going on at home, although was that really deception? My unwilling brain took its time to work out that I was being ‘got rid of’ but there was nothing I had done which merited dismissal. Evidence was therefore being gathered and that was what all these meetings were for.
That made me angry. I located my spine and kicked back:
Dear Doreen
Further to your letter dated 22 February, I wish to clarify a few points . . .
I was very thorough in my clarifications and after I’d done that I decided I might as well say the unsayable.
The situation I find myself in at present is extremely unpleasant and stressful. I feel I have been penalized for being off sick (I was in fact an in-patient here for part of that time) and I feel extra pressures have been brought to bear on me with regard to a backlog of work which is not entirely my fault.
As far as I was aware, before I fell ill there were no problems at all with my performance (as evidenced by my appraisal with yourself) but when I returned to work there seemed to be nothing but problems.
I feel it is necessary, given the situation, to set my thoughts down in writing and also to correct the inaccuracies in your letter to me. I do not wish there to be any further misunderstandings.
I copied the letter to HR. I had quite enough shit in my life, thank you, and I wasn’t going to put up with this as well.
Doreen was largely responsible for the pressure I was under at work but the root cause of it – of my absences, my lateness, my lack of concentration – was currently out of the country. I was caught between Doreen and Franc, in a peculiar double bind.
Franc came back in the middle of March. I’d been dying to see him and took both Friday and Monday off so that we could have a long weekend together. We walked about the city the way he liked to. We went to the gym and he gave me a new exercise regime. I cooked for him. Then, on the Monday morning while we were lying in bed, his arms around me, my head resting happily on his chest listening to his heartbeat, he dropped a grenade.
‘Ellen, I have something to tell you.’ There was a warning in his voice.
I stiffened. Oh God, what now . . .
‘What?’
His heart beat a little faster.
‘It is Sophie. I think . . . I don’t know whether I am still in love with her. I am seeing her again.’
I felt icy cold.
All these years later I can still call up the sensation. As though my body has written it on my bones.
My throat felt full, my forehead tender, my arms and legs weak, and my heart? My heart was in pieces.
Without saying a word I got out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and walked through to the kitchen. When Franc came in I was sitting on the countertop, eyes swimming, smoking a cigarette by the open window. For once he didn’t fire recriminations at me for walking away or rage about my smoking. He knew he had done a bad thing.
He spent the rest of the day consoling me, calming me and hugging me. He said he was proud of the way I had taken it, which only confused me more. Was he dumping me? It didn’t feel like it. It felt as though I was expected to take this pain and tuck it away somewhere until he had decided which of us he loved best.
In my diary the page for that day has one word on it: Bomb-shell.
As he was getting ready to leave again, Franc threw me a guilty bone: ‘Come out on Friday. Stay the weekend.’ So I did. It was entirely unremarkable and did nothing whatever to purge my fears. We carried on exactly as always. I remember wondering whether I could finish it myself but for some reason I found that impossible. Instead I condemned myself to months of bearing the knowledge of Sophie like Sisyphus, waking under the crushing weight of it, then rolling it before me all through the day until I fell back beneath it again in the dark hours. It was a daily struggle. I pounded the apparatus at the gym because it gave me something physical to hit and it punished me, too. I hated myself. I hated everything about me.
Walking back into work the next morning I found a jaunty note from Doreen on my desk, summarizing another search she’d made while I was away. It was timed and dated and she had been joined by Dr Bray. I had to ask myself why, given that he was a consultant doctor with far more important things to concern himself with than my week-old filing.
*
I wasn’t going to see Franc again until Easter, which fell at the end of April that year. He thought it best. That doesn’t mean we didn’t speak. He still called most evenings, usually at 8 p.m., 9 p.m. in France. I was not to call him. I thought I knew why. There were a lot of silences in these phone calls. I didn’t know what to say other than tell him about my day, which sounded like complaints because it was mostly about my situation at work or what I’d done at the gym, which was never enough. I didn’t ask him about Sophie because I didn’t want to know. In any case my imagination got to work on it nightly.
I still didn’t tell him it was over, though. I wonder why? My sixty-year-old self would have done that, given him the bum’s rush out of the door. But then my sixty-year-old self wouldn’t have got herself into this situation in the first place – although, given my track record, it’s hard to be sure about that. I think as long as he didn’t say anything I could convince myself it wasn’t true. He hadn’t told me he was actually sleeping with Sophie and I didn’t want to confront it. I didn’t want to know anything that might kill my dream stone dead. Is this what blinded by love means?
If we broke up, people would want to know why and I would have to tell them about how I’d been betrayed, but also that the betrayal had been mine in the first place for sleeping with Franc while he was still engaged to Sophie. My tower of lies about him would come crashing down.
The thought of Doreen’s triumphant face if she found out about what was going on with Franc was more than I could bear. It was bad enough that she knew he was living in France now. It was a gift – another raw nerve to tug at.
‘Still together?’
‘Of course.’ Avoiding eye contact.
‘No mademoiselles on the scene then?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t know why you don’t find yourself a nice English bloke to screw . . .’
Anyone hinting at Franc being unfaithful was painful enough. Talking about it would have been impossible. I’d have broken down. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe he could do this to me, which I suppose means I ranked infidelity as worse than him knocking seven shades of shit out of me for smoking, or for walking away during an argument or allowing another man to speak to me.
On the other hand, perhaps blind loyalty was the way to show I really did love him, although I can’t believe I actually thought that. Perhaps, having weathered everything, I was too invested in Franc to walk away. Before the Sophie bombshell, when he had talked about me relocating to Paris with him, it had been a tiny hopeful light winking in the distance. The idea of living and working in Paris . . . could you imagine Doreen’s face? ‘I’m off to Paris now because I have a job there and I’m going to live with Franc. Bye!’
Something in me, though, was realistic enough to have filed that thought under ‘fantasy’. The flat was a problem, too. I’d never been allowed to put my stamp on it but I’d made my mark in other ways: there was a dent in the wall where my head had hit it, and on another wall where I’d thrown the remote; a small sweaty handprint, left in a struggle by the bathroom door and which stubbornly resisted cleaning sprays. The dining table was taped together with duct tape where it had collapsed when I’d ended up on top of it. All these things were reminders that this life was a lie.
One night I heard a couple in a flat across the way having a pyrotechnic row and I watched as she threw all his clothes out of a third-floor window. A few minutes later he appeared outside and began scooping them up and shoving them into the back of his car. He was about to drive off when she ran out into the car park, half-dressed, barefooted, and threw herself onto the bonnet to stop him. Everything was glazed barley-sugar orange in the street lights. It was surreal. I could be that woman, I thought, and yet I’m standing here thinking, how ridiculous. Is that me? Am I ridiculous too?
Franc said he was tired at Easter and couldn’t spare much time so if I wanted to see him we’d have to meet halfway – he suggested Cambridge. He was going to fly to Stansted on Saturday morning and go back to Paris on Sunday afternoon. Yes, I said, of course. He told me to jump. I asked how high.
It was an awful thirty-six hours. Worse than if he hadn’t come back at all. I knew the weekend was doomed when I met him at the airport. He looked strained, tense, heavy-eyed, not as pleased to see me as I was to see him. His hello kiss was dutiful. I had expected him to be like the Franc of a month earlier, kind and thoughtful and apparently understanding how I felt.
We did what we usually did – pub lunch, mooch about. I didn’t know Cambridge, which lifted his mood slightly, but on the other hand I should have done some research, apparently, because I had no schedule for our time there. We sat on a bench behind King’s College chapel and although he held my hand and was physically there he wasn’t present in any other sense. I badly wanted to cry and eventually tears spilled over, dripping off my chin and dotting the front of my white shirt with mascara. I wore white shirts nearly all the time because Franc liked them. My nose began to run. I didn’t want to take my hand from the warmth of his to find a tissue.
‘Why are you crying, Ellen?’
‘Darling, you know why.’
An unfortunate slip of the tongue – he didn’t like me to call him ‘darling’. He said I called everyone ‘darling’.
‘You should be happy I am here.’
‘I am, Franc. I am. But it’s for such a short time and I miss you so much.’
‘Get a tissue, Ellen. Dry your eyes.’
At the pub where we had lunch, I rested my hand on the table in case he wanted to hold it but he left it lying there.
‘Look at those two,’ I said, flicking my eyes in the direction of a really unattractive but obviously loved-up couple in the corner. ‘If they can find each other why can’t . . .’ I stopped when I caught Franc’s eye. It was a horrible thing to say. I was a horrible person.
As we resumed our walk around Cambridge a wetly heavy mood settled on me. The sun was shining and it was a lovely day but I felt numb. Out of it. As dusk fell I began to think about the next day and the awfulness of saying goodbye to Franc. I doubted he’d ever come back.
We had supper, then went to bed. I snuggled up to Franc and he put his arm around me but didn’t pull me in close the way he usually did. I rested my head in the hollow between his shoulder and his neck. I was aching to be held and I kissed him lightly, hoping for a deeper kiss back. He didn’t move, didn’t touch me. He doesn’t want to be here, I thought. He doesn’t want me.
I think he was trying to be ‘faithful’ to Sophie. Lying in bed naked with the woman he had lived with for over a year was not a betrayal, as long as nothing happened. For me, however, this added a whole new layer of agony. Had he been like that with her when he was seeing me? I felt bad for her, and then, inevitably, guilty.
*
I’ve shied away from writing about sex with Franc because I haven’t quite been able to face it. It’s too personal, too intimate and exposing, and for the most part I’ve skirted the issue. But I have to talk about it because it’s such an integral part of how and why this happened to me.
When I met Franc I was both alone and lonely. Yes, I had friends around me but there was none of the close and loving intimacy you get from the right kind of partner, which strengthens and supports you. I craved this and, initially, it’s what Franc gave me. He was a little younger than me, sexy, passionate, with a good body; he was gentle and kind, and he took the initiative, which made me believe he loved me. He certainly told me he did, often, and I believed him. I needed to be loved and cared for so badly.
It’s a classic example of the triumph of hope over experience. There is nothing that can tell you whether what you think is love is the real deal. No magazine article or book can ever accurately describe it – it defies description. How we feel is unique to each of us. It’s also true that men and women have differing views about sex and love. But sex can be an addiction – it certainly was with Franc – and that perhaps explains why it is so often used as a weapon.
So many women of my generation were brought up to see sex as something wrong, but also essential. Marriage was for procreation. Sex was to make babies, a duty not to be enjoyed. It was explained to us as a mysterious spiritual thing, a communion of souls, sanctified by the Church and marriage. The first time would hurt and we would bleed but that was as it should be and demonstrated our all-important virginity; we might need to stay lying down for thirty minutes or so afterwards. You can imagine the relief we felt when we found out what sex could really be like.
My mother was a religious woman and took me to church and to Sunday school when I was a child. I was taught to take what the Bible said very seriously. Women who enjoyed and were proud of their sexuality were almost unheard of in my neck of the woods but in the cinema we saw Diana Dors, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield – all pneumatic of body and radiating sex appeal. Men went mad for them. It was all very confusing.
I was still prepubescent when I thought I’d finally found out what sex actually meant, and I was horrified. At the age of only eleven I watched the prelude to Soames Forsyte raping his wife, Irene, in the BBC adaptation of the Forsyte Saga – which I also found oddly exciting for reasons I could not fathom. A penny dropped. This, I understood, was what my father meant when he talked about being careful when I was out pedalling my bicycle around country lanes and not being out alone after dark because of ‘men’. He placed an emphasis on the word.
More of the puzzle fell into place later when my friend Claire, who at fourteen was a year older than me, took me along to a clandestine rendezvous with her new boyfriend. Claire was well brought up, a middle-class grammar-school girl like me, but her boyfriend was an occasional gardener/handyman in the local park, which was where he picked her up. He was very good-looking in a slightly sleazy way. I was there as lookout while they snogged each other in an empty house on the building site up the road. It’s only now that I realize he was quite some years older than us, and possibly a paedophile. Nonetheless, it was an education.
My ex-husband was the first man I ever slept with. We met in our final year at school, and it’s fair to say that my experience up to that point was both mixed and limited. When, a year after I was married and two months after my mother died, I found myself being put, painfully, into a taxi by the bastard who raped me, no wonder I didn’t tell anyone about it. Can you imagine explaining that to the 1970s police? When anal sex was playfully suggested as part of our marital lovemaking I recoiled in fear. Just the thought of it made me want to vomit.
Post-divorce and back on the market again, as it were, my experiences fed into my expectations: women are passive, men take control. When a man I went out with (twice) told me that my mouth ‘just asked to be fucked’, I smiled politely and changed the subject. Sex is never just sex. It’s much, much more than that. In the wrong hands it’s a weapon for subjugation, torture and control the world over. The ‘wrong hands’ explain female genital mutilation (FGM), the sexual grooming of young girls, mass abductions and rape, and why women using social media are intimidated with online rape threats.
When Franc came along, with his lovely smile, good manners and crinkly blue eyes, he gave me what he knew I needed. I didn’t have to spell it out. And when he was sure I was dementedly, violently in love, he gently started to mould me into what he wanted. By the time he was done he had coached me into believing that he was a generous lover, unselfish, concerned only with giving me pleasure. What he’d done, in fact, was turn me into an automaton. For the most part sex with Franc was something he did to me. I was not required to participate other than to demonstrate pleasure and have a pulse. He arranged my limbs. He turned me over. He dressed and undressed me. To remember it now makes me feel horrible. It puts me less in mind of the loving intimacy I thought I was enjoying and more in mind of the Ceremony from The Handmaid’s Tale, only with a smaller cast. But at the time it felt like love.
When Franc turned away from me in that hotel room in Cambridge, he was telling me that he neither needed me nor loved me.
*
I didn’t want to be there, in bed with a man who didn’t love me. The pain felt unbearable and I wanted to run away. The furthest I could go without causing a scene (Franc would surely come after me and I knew how that ended) was the bathroom. I locked the door, flicked on the extractor fan, sat on the floor and lit a cigarette. I couldn’t see properly because my eyes were swimming with tears. I wished the fan were a bit quieter. I wished I could stop crying.
A tap on the door.
‘Are you smoking, Ellen?’
‘Yes, Franc.’
‘Clean your teeth and come out.’
‘No, Franc.’ A pause . . . and I added, ‘Sorry.’
There. I’d said it. I’d said no. It would have been a start if Franc hadn’t taken it so badly. I couldn’t help it. I got so anxious now when I was with him and I couldn’t eat so I smoked. (Perversely my thighs still measured 20 inches and I’d gone back up to 60 kilos – I swear that man could spot 100 grams of misplaced fat.) The night passed distressingly slowly while I carried on weeping, sometimes noisily and sometimes not. I wanted him to feel my anguish. I went to the bathroom and smoked again and again, while Franc hissed and swore at me through the door, until the first blackbird started to sing in the tree outside the window.
I didn’t eat breakfast. As we walked to the station my body felt weighted, each step taking more strength than I felt I had.
‘Pick up your feet, Ellen, and breathe properly.’
‘I can’t. I’m tired.’
‘Pick . . . up . . . your . . . feet.’ He kicked my ankle, quite gently but on that bone that hurts if you catch it on furniture. Then a sharp tap between my shoulder blades.
‘Stand up straight.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can.’
‘Really, Franc. I can’t.’ Then I added, very quietly, ‘I wish I was dead.’
‘Well, why aren’t you?’
We walked on a bit further, along a busy road. I watched the traffic, waiting for a moment when there was a car coming fast enough, and then took a step to the kerb. One more step and . . .
Franc grabbed my arm and yanked me back.
‘I was joking.’ But he should have known by now that I would do whatever he asked me to.
At the station he caught his train and I caught mine. A text arrived, which bewilderingly said, I love you. I went straight to the gym when I got home and worked for two hours on my thighs.
A few days later a letter arrived, written on his company letterhead. At the end of almost every line I have scribbled the words I couldn’t say to his face.
Dear Helen
Just a few notes. THIS BARELY CONSTITUTES ONE NOTE.
He hadn’t forgotten me, he said. REALLY? I wrote.
He didn’t phone but he thought that was best ‘right now’. FOR WHO?
He said he would call me. WHEN, I wrote, NEXT YEAR?
He was going to be away for four days at the weekend, he said, on business. I BELIEVE YOU (NOT).
He said he thought of me. OH YES?
He told me he missed me. NOT FROM WHERE I’M STANDING.
Hold on, he said, and don’t let yourself go. NO INTENTION, DARLING.
He would speak to me soon. ANOTHER LIE.
Love AND ANOTHER.
Franc
*
On the day I received Franc’s letter, a Friday, Doreen called me in for a meeting that afternoon. To be fair she didn’t know what was going on in my private life, that I was a wreck. No one did.
Seven pages of notes duly followed in the internal post. My most recent misdemeanours were itemized and listed in date order under the headings of: filing backlog, lunch breaks (timing of), lateness and backlog of dictation tapes. Seven pages.
I was becoming inured to seeing myself described in the formal language of the line manager on a mission. I read that there had been many occasions where Helen had not adhered to her directive regarding lunch breaks. It was also noted that I had been late for work seven times in five months. It’s only now that I realize these coincided with times when Franc was in the flat. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want me to leave him and go to work (although he didn’t), it was more that he kept me awake half the night, arguing.
The notes also required me to start keeping a daily log of my activities so that Doreen could identify any tasks or areas of workload impacting on you unnecessarily. Every single job I did during the working day had to be written down in the log. Phone calls had to be timed and itemized. Conversations had to be recorded. I had to note the number of letters I typed and when I typed them, the number of tapes I cleared, the number and date of the clinics I cleared, the number of referrals made and when I made them, waiting lists updated with whom and when, the amount of filing done, when I took things to outpatient clinics or wards, what I took, why I took it and how long it took me to take it, when I went to the lavatory, when I made coffee, when I arrived, when I left, when I went to lunch and when I came back. Each day’s log had to be handed in to Doreen at close of play. I could have typed fifty letters in the time it took to do all this. It was middle management as taught by the Stasi.
The letter accompanying the meeting notes ended with a sinister phrase: Your failure to follow reasonable instructions from me could be interpreted as insubordination . . . So that was how she meant to get rid of me.
‘Insubordinate’? Fuck me. If there was one thing I knew how to be it was subordinate.
To his credit, Dr Bray excused himself from this meeting and never came to another. It was, he told me some weeks later, not what he had anticipated. No, a witch-hunt never is.
A couple of weeks later there was a further meeting. This time attended by the human resources manager who we all knew was also Doreen’s best friend and who now helpfully provided a further fourteen pages of meeting notes and the suggestion that I was putting patient safety at risk. I was asked to sign these notes to indicate that I accepted them as an accurate record. They weren’t, so I gave them four pages of my own amendments and only then did I sign.
Even now, I can admire the ruthless and meticulous way Doreen went about her pursuit of me. She was tireless in exposing even the smallest mistake – a dirty coffee mug left on my desk overnight, handwriting she couldn’t read (but everyone else could), stopping to answer a patient’s question on my way through the ward, five minutes late going to lunch, half an hour late leaving the office . . . on and on it went. Nothing I did was right. It must have taken her hours. I’m amazed she found time to run the department.
All of this made me long for the absent Franc, desperate for comfort. He’d made himself the entire focus of my world, the only person I could turn to, and then he’d gone away. He was always going away.
Unexpectedly, and just in time to save my sanity, some good news arrived. It turned out that some of the furniture I’d stored in Franc’s warehouse was actually quite good, good enough to go into an antiques auction. It was a complete surprise to me when it made a respectable four-figure sum. I kissed the cheque when it arrived and then did something completely impulsive – for the first time in my life I booked a holiday just for me. And for once Doreen didn’t argue about my request for annual leave.
I didn’t ask Franc, I told him I was going. He gave me strict instructions not to speak to strange men, not to drink anything but bottled water and not to go anywhere on my own. I’m surprised he didn’t tell me to sew my valuables into my corsets. He couldn’t tell me not to go, though. Perhaps it was a tacit acknowledgement of guilt for what he’d done.
As my flight passed over France on the way to Athens, there was a huge thunderstorm. It felt as though Franc was shaking his fist at me, and it made me laugh. I felt as though I could do anything. I think it was probably the best holiday I’ve ever had. Seven days on my own in a small self-catering apartment on the tiny green island of Poros and it was heaven. I walked, I basked in the sun, I swam and had picnics, I ate alone every night at the same table in the same restaurant giving my order myself to the (male) waiter, I read and, most important of all, I began to write again. I had to buy a phone card and call Franc as he had insisted but I didn’t tell him where I was, even when he said if I did he might come and join me. I didn’t want him to know so he couldn’t spoil it. It felt unfamiliar but strangely redemptive, and exciting. There was a chance my life still held possibilities. There was hope. On the ferry back from Poros to Piraeus, I wept gently all the way. I could have stayed there quite happily and never come back.
*
Vulnerable adj. not proof against wounds, susceptible of or liable to injury, attack, offering an opening to criticism etc. Exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally . . .42
‘Vulnerable’ is an awkward word when applied to women. Certain sections of the media (particularly the press) have taken to interpreting it as a defining factor in any case of abuse and assault. If a woman – young, old or middle-aged – seems vulnerable she deserves our utmost sympathy and understanding. If not, then she doesn’t.
Of more concern is that this interpretation has long been – and it seems still is – one of the criteria by which judges assess the severity of a case of domestic abuse. This has particular relevance for the successful prosecution of cases of coercive control and is perhaps one of the reasons why there have been relatively few convictions.
‘Would you mind being described as “vulnerable”?’ I asked Number 3 Daughter, who is now in her thirties.
‘Yes,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘You’d be saying I was weak. I don’t want to be weak.’
Smart girl. Yet women who are victims of domestic abuse, and especially of coercive control, are expected to fulfil this perceived criteria. Specifically, they are supposed to look and behave as a victim – a submissive woman. A woman in need of protection. A penitent woman.
The word ‘vulnerable’ crops up all over the place – especially once you’re aware of it. It’s used in cases of sexual abuse, assault and rape, often bringing with it more than a whiff of blaming the victim. It is applied to middle-aged women in cases of online dating gone wrong – most recently in the case of Jason Lawrance, the Match.com rapist, who specifically targeted older women because he saw them as easy prey. Lawrance is now serving a life sentence for a total of seven convictions (five rapes and two violent sexual assaults) in a career spanning several years. He was first reported quite early on but little action was taken, and was only arrested after his seventh victim went to the police. He rightly assumed that older women who had admitted to themselves (if not to anyone else) that they were lonely and decided to do something about it would be too ashamed of what he did to them to breathe a word. He no doubt also assumed, again correctly, that middle-aged women would appear less outwardly vulnerable and therefore less likely to be believed if they did say anything. The mishandling of the case bears that out.
The same is true of the case of John Warboys, the Black Cab Rapist. Not all the women came forward (rape is another under-reported crime) but he was finally convicted on one count of rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and twelve other charges. His first victim was a nineteen-year-old student passenger who did report him but he was released after telling police she had been drunk and kissed him, a fact apparently confirmed on CCTV footage. In effect the police took his word over hers because she had been drinking before she got into his cab. She had made herself vulnerable and was therefore to blame.
Then there are Judge Richard Mansell QC’s remarks as he decided on a suspended sentence rather than imprisonment for Mustafa Bashir, who had forced his wife, Fakhara Karim, to drink bleach, told her to kill herself, throttled her in public and hit her with a cricket bat. He was ‘not convinced she was a vulnerable person’ as she was ‘an intelligent woman with a network of friends’ who ‘did go on to graduate from university with a 2:1 and a master’s’.43
I understand that Judge Mansell was acting very much in his legal capacity when he said this. His judgement was based on the hierarchical scale set out in the Domestic Violence Guidelines for Sentencing. Nevertheless, his remarks were crass and insensitive and, worse, implied that domestic violence and its effects are less or more damaging according to the class, intelligence and perceived strength of the victim, which is to say, their perceived vulnerability. This is just plain wrong. Not only that but the Guidelines themselves were published in 2006 and are now some way behind the curve on the advances made in understanding domestic abuse over the intervening ten years.
Fakhara Karim’s degree of vulnerability becomes even more contentious when you consider that Judge Mansell himself seemed to have been drawn in by Bashir’s economy with the truth, behaviour all too typical of an abuser. Bashir’s lawyer told the court that his client would sign a contract with Leicestershire County Cricket Club if he were spared jail. This has echoes of recent cases involving professional footballers accused of rape.
Leicestershire County Cricket promptly blew the lie out of the water when a spokesman for the club said they were ‘bemused’ by the claim and that any suggestion Bashir had been offered a contract was ‘completely false’. The spokesman added, ‘The club have never spoken to Mustafa Bashir or an agent, nor offered a contract to the player.’ Once his lie was exposed Bashir was given a hefty prison sentence. I’m sure I’m not the only one to think that he was jailed more for the lie than for the violent abuse of his wife.
The mistaken belief that women who live with abusive men must look cowed, or have visible bruises, is something that has been enshrined in British law for decades. One notorious case illustrates the point better than any other. It is not by any means the only such case but it is the most documented, the subject of films, plays, endless articles and books. It is the case of the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom – Ruth Ellis.
In July 1955 Ruth Ellis was executed for the murder of David Blakely. The photographs we see of Ruth show a petite, glamorous woman, immaculately made up and well dressed. What they don’t show is a woman the Sentencing Guidelines Council might perceive as vulnerable. If you study her history you quickly come to understand that she was vulnerable to her core.44 What people saw on the outside was a protective carapace.
By the time she met Blakely in the summer of 1953, Ruth had spent the greater part of her twenty-six years as a victim of one kind of abuse or another. Her father was a bully and a serial adulterer who seemed to regularly lay about with his fists at the women in his family. Ruth left school at fourteen, fell in love with a Canadian serviceman (who she later discovered was married) and became pregnant. Their son was born in 1944 but by that time Ruth had ended the relationship. ‘I no longer felt any emotion about men,’ she said. ‘I was cold and spent.’ She worked to support her family while her mother helped care for the baby. She was ahead of her time in that she wanted to work and have a life outside the domestic sphere.
However, Ruth’s lack of a proper education meant that the options open to her were pretty limited. She did a little photographic modelling (sometimes nude), factory work, waitressing – anything to help make ends meet. Then one of the photographers she worked with took her out for a drink in Mayfair and she met Morris ‘Morrie’ Conley. Eighteen years later, the prison doctor at Holloway noted, ‘[She] came under the “influence” then of Conley . . . and graduated to the type of life she was leading.’ He further added, ‘Conley is one of the worst characters in the West End’.45 The crime reporter Duncan Webb described him as ‘the monster with the Mayfair touch’.46 Ruth herself pinpointed this as the beginning of her downward trajectory.
‘The type of life she was leading’ was in one of Conley’s clubs on Duke Street where she was paid a flat fee of £5 to sit and chat with a customer as long as he bought a £3 bottle of champagne. Part of the deal was that she also occasionally had to have sex with Conley – much older, portly, ‘ugly as a toad’.
She had an illegal abortion in 1950, having become pregnant by one of the club’s clients, and later that year she married another regular. George Ellis was a chronic alcoholic and violent with it. She gave birth to their daughter the following year but the marriage did not last. She was soon back in one of Conley’s clubs.
Ruth had survived a terrible couple of years but by the summer of 1953 she appeared to have turned a corner. Conley gave her a club to manage in Knightsbridge and it was here that she met David Blakely. Two weeks after their first meeting he moved in.
Their relationship was peppered with outbursts of violence and jealousy, abandonment, infidelity and reconciliation. Early in 1954 Ruth became pregnant but lost both her job and David’s baby. Her prison case notes state that she had been pregnant three times with David and each pregnancy was terminated. At her trial Ruth gave a different account, saying that David had become ‘very very violent . . . I do not know whether that caused the miscarriage or not, but he did thump me in the tummy’.47
On Easter Sunday 1954, Ruth Ellis shot David Blakely outside the Magdala Tavern in Hampstead. There is no doubt that she meant to kill him; she said so herself in her first police interview: ‘When I put the gun in my bag, I intended to find David and shoot him.’ That was the detail that everyone remembered at her trial. The first line of her statement says, ‘I understand what has been said. I am guilty. I am rather confused.’ But the statement was taken before she had been charged and there was no solicitor present. Today, it would be inadmissible.
Ruth made little mention of the physical and emotional abuse dished out by David before her trial, but there are some telling phrases in the witness statements of their friends:
Ruth: ‘You can’t walk on me for ever. I’m only human: I can’t stand it.’
David: ‘You’ll stand it because you love me.’48
‘“If you leave me, Ruth darling, I will kill you.” I heard him say it often.’49
‘He said, “One of these days I will kill you.” I said, “You have done that already.”’50
‘I don’t know whether I love him or I’m going mad.’51
The last evening the couple spent together ended when they were thrown out of the Steering Wheel Club after David punched Ruth full in the face. The manageress of the club, who saw this happen, was surprised not to be called as a witness at Ruth’s trial, especially given that it had been so close to the shooting.
Nor was much notice taken of another potential witness, Ruth’s French teacher, who said, ‘I thought that she looked like a person on the verge of a nervous breakdown and had stopped working just in time.’
Of the day she killed Blakely, Ruth said, ‘I felt somehow outside of myself. Although I seemed to be registering impressions quite clearly, it did not seem to be me. I was in a sort of daze.’52 This sounds like the sort of dissociative fugue state that can result from the cumulative effects of domestic and psychological abuse. It’s the brain’s way of coping when there is too much to cope with and one I have experienced myself.
Ruth’s trial lasted one and a half days and the jury (ten men and two women) took just fourteen minutes to find her guilty of murder – whereupon she was sentenced to death. Three weeks later, she was hanged.
There is little doubt that Ruth Ellis was condemned as much for her way of life as for shooting David Blakely. She was a sexually active divorcee. She had an illegitimate child and she was a nightclub hostess. Her peroxide hair, flawless appearance and her calm and measured speech were not the way a woman who had been subjected to two years of physical and psychological abuse was supposed to look and behave. She did not appear vulnerable.
Her defence counsel, Mr Melford Stevenson, showed a fatally poor grasp of what he was dealing with and portrayed Ruth as a jealous woman scorned.
The jury was informed that the defence would call an eminent psychiatrist who would tell them that ‘the effect of jealousy on the feminine mind, upon all feminine minds, can so work as to unseat the reason and can operate to a degree in which in a male mind it is quite incapable of operating’.53
That Ruth Ellis killed David Blakely is not in doubt. But her state of mind when she killed him is. Today she would not have been hanged, but she would almost certainly have been found guilty of manslaughter at the very least. And the tabloid press would probably still have had a field day over her failure to look suitably vulnerable.
I’ve often asked myself if, when I felt at my most desperate, I could have killed Franc. I don’t know the answer. But given that on the two occasions I experienced a similar ‘fugue’ state, any harm was directed against myself, probably not.
I am struck by a number of similarities between Blakely and Franc – they are of a type. Both upper-middle class, handsome, serially unfaithful, abusive, manipulative, charming, feckless and utterly unreliable. Mind you, you could say that about a lot of men.