Franc still kept in touch, although we never got together again. He even moved back to the UK for a short time and reclaimed the few things left from the flat, which I think he felt made a point – or scored one. The business he set up with Dave ‘didn’t work out’ (he said; I say ‘failed’) so he returned to France. He would phone me on birthdays and at Christmas and we would have a short, stilted conversation. Occasionally he pitched up at places where I worked – just to see what I was up to. These visits made me uneasy, but I didn’t feel threatened. It was as though he was checking me out, casing my lifestyle to see if it would suit him better than the one he’d got. Bearing in mind that whenever we’d visited London he’d talked about how he’d like to live there I wonder if he was even a bit envious that I’d made this dream happen. Knowing (finally) the type of man he was, I think that’s probably exactly what he was doing. But had he decided to move to London, I wouldn’t have trusted myself to keep him at arm’s length. I was afraid Franc’s programming would override my common sense.
Whenever I asked him about his own life he was evasive. One thing was consistent, though. He always told me, without fail, that he was miserable in whatever job he was doing at the time. This was partly, I suspect, to push my ‘oh, poor Franc – I must help him’ button. On the other hand, he was convinced that his full potential went unrecognized; that everyone he worked for was an idiot and that if only they’d let him get on with it he would be brilliant. I’d never seen him at work and the only colleague I’d ever met was Dave but from the little I knew of it, he was wrong. Scratch beneath the surface and Franc was full of resentment at never being handed the Big Opportunity but he failed to see that few of us ever are. He didn’t recognize that most big opportunities are the result of sustained effort and hard work. He was unwilling to take a risk to see where it might lead and if he did, like his start-up with Dave, his own negativity killed the enterprise stone dead. I think he was afraid of being found out and of failing. I recognize those feelings in myself and I felt sorry for him. There was a palpable twinge in the region of my heart.
For all he told me about his qualifications and his general cleverness, I suspect Franc was a profoundly average man. He knew as much, too, but didn’t want anyone else to know so he hid it behind charm and arrogance.
Looking back, I realize that in truth I knew very little about him. In the four years we spent together I met his friends only a couple of times and I never met his family at all.
Once, when we were in France, he said he was taking me to his home so that I could meet his mother. I was so pleased he was making us ‘official’. Up until then I’d felt like a guilty secret. I was older, had children and was divorced – reasons, he said, for his mother not to like me and reasons I now think had more to do with him than her. I remember a big house with lots of beams and an enormous fireplace which I found quite intimidating. I sat alone on a sofa in a huge dark room for three hours while Franc watched TV from an armchair and never said a word. No one came so we left. I never did meet his mother. I still don’t understand why we went or why, if he had arranged this visit, he didn’t phone his mother to find out where she was. But he had also told me she had moved out of the family home and into a flat so I wonder whether he ever intended us to meet and if it was just another one of his games. I didn’t ask questions at the time (because it was safer not to) but I remember feeling slighted – although no slight had taken place. I felt scabbed with shame for being soiled goods.
Four years later, when I was working in Bedford Square, he rang to say that he was in London and wondered if I was free for lunch. He knew I’d say yes – I always did then. I came out of my office, caught a crisp breeze and folded my arms across my chest, hugging myself to keep warm. ‘Why so defensive?’ he asked before I’d said a word and kissed me lightly on each cheek. He just had to get me on the back foot. At lunch he produced a photograph and told me it was his wife and that she was my age (so much for the hoped-for babies then). The picture was of a woman I would never, in a million years, have thought was his type. Franc liked tidy, clean, chic, but this woman’s hair was a massive unkempt mop. Perhaps she was another Pygmalion project for him – a woman to take in hand and ‘educate’. I felt sorry for her.
A couple of weeks later he called and said he wanted to get married in London and could I help him arrange it. He said I must have misheard when I told him I thought they were already married. I didn’t bother to argue, but sent him some Home Office information and left him to it. He could have looked it up himself. The sheer brass neck of the man for even asking. Putting myself in her shoes I wondered how I’d feel if I found out that my fiancé had asked his ex-girlfriend to help organize our wedding.
He got married, allegedly, in France but I don’t know whether he remains so, or ever was. He never says. Four or five years ago he was still talking about coming back to the UK – to work in London. ‘What does your wife think about that?’ I asked. He changed the subject.
*
I buried my relationship with Franc, and the memories, putting all the letters and emails into that grey bag under my bed, together with the disciplinary correspondence. I kept them there, perversely, to remind me of things I didn’t want to be reminded of. Occasionally I would pull them out when I was looking for a pair of shoes or something and push them back in again, thinking, not yet. Over time Franc’s letters and emails became a memorial to having once been passionately loved, and the work letters a prompt to hold fast to what I believed in.
Occasionally I’d embark on a bit of humble bragging about my French former lover but I never told other people what he was like. If anyone asked I said he was ‘not very nice’, a convenient phrase to shut down any potentially awkward conversation and stop the feelings that inevitably bubbled to the surface whenever I was on the point of discussing or thinking about him.
The truth came out quite by accident. I needed treatment for a shoulder I’d damaged hauling too many archive boxes about. Work-wise it was a stressful (but exciting) time and when the consultant who was giving me steroid injections noticed my blood pressure was up I mentioned in passing that I’d had several ferocious headaches. It was probably nothing, he said, but sent me for a CT scan anyway, just to be on the safe side.
‘Well now, what have you been up to?’ he asked when we met to talk about the results.
‘How do you mean?’
He explained the good news: that there was nothing sinister about the headaches – just stress and raised blood pressure – but went on to tell me that my brain showed signs of the same kinds of injury seen in boxers, from repeated blows to the head. He went through my scans with me – all very clinical and matter-of-fact. Then I burst into tears. It was such a shock – a hot gust of forgotten humiliation. I was appalled. Angry.
I told him what I’d never told anyone before. Until then I’d taken the easy route: as long as I didn’t say the words it wasn’t real and I didn’t have to live with the shame and guilt of having allowed this to happen. To speak of it, even briefly, felt alien, as though the truth didn’t fit my mouth. On the way home I was so lost in thought and horrified astonishment I went three stops beyond where I should have got off my train.
Once I’d confronted this secret truth, I began to see things everywhere. The way I would sometimes duck on the Tube when a man reached for the overhead rail. The way I immediately backed down if anyone questioned anything I’d done – placating, smoothing things over, ‘No . . . no . . . yes . . . you’re right.’ The way I always did the same thing two ways, reversing the first action, usually back-to-back, because one way would be the right way. Write ‘e’, write ‘ε’; write ‘11.07.17’, write ‘11/07/17’. Always covering my back.
There were things that triggered sharp memories, more than I remember after the end of any other love affair – not being able to listen to certain songs or go to certain places. It was years before I could walk past the corner at the bottom of my road without thinking, this is where Franc threw up because he ate his lunch too quickly and got jiggled about on the DLR. The solitary crystal glass, the one bone-china teacup without its saucer, are reminders of their partners, the ones he smashed.
Every so often I came across something of him amongst my belongings – any stray notes I’d push into the carrier bag with all the others but I occasionally turned up a filthy comment scrawled on the back of a pack of tights, or a key-ring that was his, or a tester bottle of his cologne. These I destroyed. I did, however, sleep in his pyjamas for years, right up until they fell apart. I found them comforting.
There are photographs from our trip to Venice but only of me, in St Mark’s Square, wrapped warmly in cashmere and laughing. The photographs I gave him for Christmas turned up when I moved house, still in their grey suede wallet. I see an attractive redhead, laughing, always laughing. It was my way of saying, nothing to see here.
There are books in my bookcases bearing inscriptions from him: in the front of one on Casanova, I hope you don’t think I am a ‘Casanova’. (I do). In a battered and stained copy of Angela’s Ashes (it was in the bookcase he’d knocked over), Will you be the next writer to win the Pulitzer Prize? I am sure you will improve your chances if you write something about . . . me! They sit uncomfortably beside the books marking the progress of my life since he left it, including the first one I wrote myself.
But all these things are memorabilia, ephemera. More lasting are the physical signs of two destructive relationships, the ones I contrived not to notice or dismissed as relics of domestic accidents and evidence of my own clumsiness: scars on my hands, a burst blood vessel in my leg, toes that were stamped on and jump out of joint every so often to make walking painful, the jaw that does the same, my brain, my throat and neck, the slight deafness in one ear . . . It never occurred to me that what he, they, had done would leave lasting damage that at some future point would require an explanation from me. An honest one.
Any psychological kinks left over from Doreen’s prolonged campaign against me were ironed out over time in my newly adopted city. In many ways she did me a favour; I doubt I would have gone to London if it weren’t for her. But she changed me, gave me something to prove and the tools to spot others like her. Righteous anger can get you a long way in life. I suppose Franc did the same.
A couple of times I left a job because I witnessed behaviour that reminded me of Doreen. I knew where it could lead and I wasn’t prepared to tolerate it.
I climbed the career ladder to the very top, using my experience and skills to become impervious to panic. I might go into the lav for a few minutes from time to time and take deep breaths, or get a cup of coffee, sit in a corner and think about things for a bit, but I learned that there is a solution to almost every situation. Mistakes are all right as long as you own them. Occasionally people, even you, fuck up but it’s not the end of the world and it’s definitely not unforgivable. I learned to trust my own judgement and that if I didn’t agree with something it was OK to say so. Despite all my many imperfections and general mouthiness I never came close to being sacked – the hospital was unique in that respect. The best bit was looking out from the pinnacle of my long and distinguished career as a PA, smiling and saying to myself, See? You’re quite good at this lark after all. Fuck you, Doreen Milson. I’m not a PA anymore but I still do it from time to time because it feels good. I never did get rid of my wretched drive to please everyone, though. It sits oddly with a newly acquired ability to see through the crap.
If anyone calls and asks me to do something I still struggle not to say yes just because they will like me if I do. Who cares whether they like me or not? I have been infuriated with myself for writing long and elaborate emails giving good reasons for not doing something but jumping through an assortment of hoops to avoid giving offence. I press ‘send’ and immediately think, You idiot, all you had to do was say no.
It’s been much worse since I started writing this book – but then a lot of things have been worse since I started writing this book.
There were – as I expected there would be – flashbacks. The more I poked about inside my memories the faster they came at me. There was a point where it was like standing in the middle of a meteor shower as bright recollections of anger, catastrophe and violence whizzed past. At first, these memories were all unconnected to each other. I only joined the dots later as I traced the narrative emerging from my letters and diaries. With the exception of Franc’s ‘love letter’ when he came back that August, I hadn’t read them in over a decade.
As the story unfolded, I began to understand what had happened to me. With understanding and acknowledgement came the shakes. I’d sit at my laptop and tremble convulsively for about ten minutes before I could start. Once I was writing I calmed down, stoical and determined because I felt it was important, but often I’d go outside and walk up and down for a bit, jiggling my hands and talking to myself to try and get whatever it was back under control. I’d end a working day with my jaw set so tight my head would be throbbing. And once I had a full-blown panic attack because that was the day I was going to write about the Last Tango in Paris word. The one I still don’t want to say.
Before the idea of this book had become a reality, as a result of writing that New Statesman article about coercive control, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on domestic abuse at the Women of the World festival in London. I didn’t stop to think about whether it would cause me any personal difficulty and said yes, without hesitation.
But I discovered that day that remnants of what you’ve gone through hang around inside your head and that speaking about your experiences to a roomful of people is quite different from writing about it at the kitchen table. I began to shiver and spilt coffee down my frock. The microphone – slap bang in front of my face – was big and round and looked like a fist. I felt very exposed. Then I noticed someone at the back of the room, filming me on a mobile phone. That’s nothing unusual but I became convinced it was someone who meant me harm. I stared hard and tried to focus on the face but it remained blurred. I began to think I was going to be punished for going public, for saying what must not be said. I was sitting in front of a window and began planning an escape route in case someone tried to rush me and throw me out of it. It felt as though my brain had short-circuited.
Somehow I got through it and I managed to tell the audience about my experience of domestic abuse. The response was tremendous. There were so many questions from people who had experienced something similar. The atmosphere was warm and supportive. I had no need to be terrified.
Afterwards I apologized to one of my fellow panellists for having been so nervy. She said, ‘Have you heard of PTSD?’
Wasn’t that something that happened to military personnel returning from war zones, to members of the emergency services who’ve dealt with terrible accidents? It wasn’t something I had ever considered applying to survivors of domestic abuse – or myself.
When I got home I looked it up.
The classic precondition for PTSD is exposure to an event that ‘involves actual or threatened death or serious injury’ and that induces ‘intense fear, helplessness or horror’.61
Yes, I did (eventually) believe I would be killed and yes, I did feel intense fear and helplessness. Two ticks.
I learned that the memory of traumatic events can resurface from time to time so you feel as though you’re reliving it all over again; a flood of remembered feelings can overwhelm you when you’re least expecting it and destroy your composure. Two more ticks.
Additional reactions included under a PTSD framework include anger, inability to concentrate, re-enactment of the trauma in disguised form, sleep disturbances, a feeling of indifference, emotional detachment or attachment disorders, and profound passivity in which the person relinquishes all initiative and struggle . . .62
Tick, tick, tick, tick . . .
Then I read that the psychiatrist, Judith Herman, recognizing that the standing model for PTSD did not capture the ‘protean symptomatic manifestations of prolonged, repeated trauma’, had introduced a variation: ‘complex PTSD’.63 In his book Coercive Control, Evan Stark describes it as:
. . . [recasting] the original symptom categories as hyperarousal (chronic alertness), intrusion (flashbacks, floods of emotion, hidden re-enactments), and constriction, ‘a state of detached calm . . . when events continue to register in awareness but are disconnected from their ordinary meanings’.
I knew all about ‘chronic alertness’ – I was always ready to run. Furthermore these symptoms were linked to ‘protracted depression’. And there I was assuming I’d be stuck on antidepressants for the rest of my life.
Finally, and perhaps most significant of all:
The fear elicited by the traumatic events also intensifies the need for protective attachments, leading some women to unwittingly move from one abusive relationship to the next.64
At this point I ran out of ticks.
Here was the answer to a question that has always puzzled me – exactly why many women (myself included) become unwitting ‘serial offenders’.
It takes only two cycles of violence for a woman to succumb to ‘learned helplessness’:
a form of depression that gives her an exaggerated sense of her partner’s power and control. She concludes that escape is impossible and concentrates instead on survival, employing denial, numbing, or in extreme cases, proactive violence to cope.65
It takes the same number of cycles to establish PTSD.
Yes, I was married to one abusive man and lived with another; I think this is what my (sacked) therapist was driving at when she asked how it felt to have a violent father. I had jumped to the traditional stereotype of a man who daily took a strap to his wife and children or came home drunk on a Saturday night and abused them and I was, understandably, hugely offended. I didn’t equate her reference to my father, who was strong, kind and loving but disciplined his children in the generally accepted way at the time: spare the rod and spoil the child.
This upbringing contributed to my vulnerability and my passive acceptance of male authority. It wasn’t unique to my father. It was society. If I hadn’t stormed out perhaps she would have gone on to explain this.
When I married young I was simply following a time-honoured path. I thought I was marrying well – my husband was wealthy and our lifestyle would be comfortable. But although I had escaped my father, I had entered another family dominated by men. I had a husband my father grew to detest for his arrogance, who isolated me from my own family and friends and replaced them with his own. A man who refused to be present at the birth of any of his three daughters; who refused to take me to hospital to see our first child, born prematurely with a life-threatening condition, because it was Christmas and he wanted to be, as always, with his parents and siblings. Desperately ill myself, I hadn’t seen my baby since the day after her birth – the week that passed before I saw her again robbed me of the chance to breastfeed her and made it difficult for us to bond. This was a man whose house was full of women but who refused to allow tampons to be stored in the bathroom where they might be seen; who made me look so much like his mother that someone mistook me for her in the street. A man who, when our marriage ended, stalked and harassed me and lied about his income to avoid supporting his own children; who threatened to withdraw his promise to give away (oh, those words!) his own daughter at her wedding if I insisted on attending. A man who has forbidden me from entering the town I grew up in for the simple reason that he now lives there.
My reaction to being filmed at the Women of the World talk was startling and completely unexpected. However it reminded me that my ex-husband still tries to control me and uses his money and our daughters to do it. I was frightened because I thought I’d been found out in an act of non-compliance.
One thing only fell into place very recently. I don’t set very much store by the importance and interpretation of dreams except that ever since I can remember I’ve had a recurring one about a monster. It is always a massive, rampaging Godzilla-like beast and I am always running in terror and hiding from it. The setting is always ruined buildings, sometimes in a city, other times just an isolated building. Sometimes the monster finds me but I wake before I am killed and eaten. Sometimes I stay safely concealed while others are caught. There are times I experience what is known as a waking dream (hypnagogia) and as soon as it starts – the setting, the way the ‘action’ develops – I am able to think, I know this. It’s just a dream – but even so I am still terrified. When I am going through one of these dream cycles I can never sleep properly. I have this dream, I now know, when I’m anxious about something.
There is another night terror, which is different and far more troubling. I can never remember what comes before it but I wake up, unable to breathe and struggling. Sometimes I think I scream as I wake. When I open my eyes I can see a roiling mass, like a dense black cloud, always high up in the corner of the bedroom. It moves slowly towards me. I know it’s not real but the panic I feel is. I tell myself not to be stupid but I still have to put the light on, and sleep with it on all night. This doesn’t happen very often but when it does I am jumpy for days. Then just the other week I came across a passage in a book I was reading that described my dream exactly: the feeling of suffocation, of something covering me, the gasping for air and panic as I woke, and of seeing something dark, unknown and threatening moving, growing, in the corner of the room. Like me, the woman in the book is terrified.66
That’s my dream, I thought with astonishment and a prickling scalp. All of a sudden I knew exactly what it was. A whole sackful of pennies dropped. My dream was a re-enactment of the times Franc had tried to strangle me. But now I know what it is I don’t think it will bother me again.
I have tried to remember when it first started. Certainly I remember it in my old flat. Each time the dense black cloud was above the wardrobe, by the door. It happened so often I began to seriously consider inviting an exorcist round to check it out. I’m pretty sure it started after that day in August 2010 when the phone rang and a familiar voice said, ‘It’s me.’
He’d been to my flat once. He had my landline number because he used to call me almost every week. They were the sorts of things he would remember and keep, just in case.
He was on a cycling holiday. He said he’d just come off the ferry and planned to stay the night in London before making his way up to the Midlands to see Jeannie and Dave. He carried his bike up the stairs, padlocked it to the railings on my balcony and proceeded to take over the flat. He changed out of his cycling gear, rinsed it and hung it up in the bathroom. He complained that I still didn’t have a shower and grudgingly took a bath. Then he got dressed and suggested a trip to the supermarket to buy food for supper.
He waltzed in and occupied my life, just as he always used to. I suggested a couple of times that perhaps I should call one of the hotels in Greenwich or Blackheath and book him a room for the night. I thought that would send a clear signal about how inappropriate this was, but no.
I ended up cooking for him and then he settled comfortably onto my one sofa and turned on the television. I sat on the floor at his feet, still his Sock.
As the evening wore on and it became clear that he had no intention of leaving I went and fetched a spare duvet and pillow, put clean covers on them and left them pointedly on the table. Perhaps he was trying to save money, I thought, too kindly.
At eleven o’clock, I said goodnight and with my two cats (who soundly judged that they should have nothing to do with him) retreated to the bedroom. Just to be on the safe side, I wedged a chair under the door handle. I was very aware of him being there in my sitting room all night but I didn’t think I was afraid, although my subsequent night terrors seem to suggest otherwise: of course I was afraid of the door – that was how the ‘monsters’ got in.
In the morning, when I heard him moving about, I emerged fully dressed and made some coffee. I did nothing that might give him an excuse.
He didn’t say much before leaving and when he did get his stuff together and I went downstairs with him to say goodbye he looked sad. Again I felt that little twist in the heart, but this time I ignored it.
*
Franc got inside my head on the day I met him and he never left. Sometimes, when I experience the after-effects, I feel angry or scared or sick. But after all my efforts to understand how and why I got involved with him and stayed with him and took him back, I’ve arrived at a surprising decision – I shouldn’t eradicate him completely.
Why? Because he’s taught me how to protect myself. I can spot others like him through their camouflage now. I should, I suppose, thank him for that.
He would like the last word but he’s not going to get it.
Look, Franc. Look what you made me do.